Joe Crider delivers devotional to seminary’s board of trustees

Editor’s note: The following is the devotional given by Joe Crider, dean of the School of Church Music and Worship, at the Board of Trustees meeting, Oct. 18.

Would you pray with me? O God, this is the day that You have made by Your Spirit, help us to rejoice and be glad in it. May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer. May Your favor of the Lord be on us, and we humbly ask that You would establish for us the work of our hands. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

I’d like to thank Dr. Dockery for the opportunity to share with you as you begin this second day of meetings. Please know the faculty and our students and staff are lifting you up in prayer. 

Before we look at the words of Moses from Psalm 90, I’d like to share briefly what I mentioned to the Academic Administration Committee yesterday in my School of Church Music and Worship report, with the hope that it will be an encouragement to all of you. 

Although this institution has been through another very difficult time, at the “boots on the ground level,” the fundamental core of her mission and purpose to train men and women for Gospel ministry in SBC churches here and all over the world—that purpose has never wavered. 

The education in the classrooms, 

the work in field education, 

the worship in chapels, 

the prayer times in faculty offices, 

the intentional mentoring and discipleship of students, 

the meals in the cafeteria and 

in the homes of faculty members with students never stopped. 

If it weren’t for social media, I sincerely doubt that many of our students would have ever known there was a storm raging around them, that’s because we have an incredibly capable and dedicated and mature faculty who never wavered in their calling to train and equip the next generation of ministry leaders; they are to be commended. So, we praise God for our faculty, and we are so grateful to each of you for holding this institution in trust.

I know Dr. Yarnell spent some time yesterday in the verse that Dr. Dockery has asked us to meditate on as a theme for 40 days of prayer, Psalm 90:17: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us; establish for us the work of our hands – establish the work of our hands.” May I give you another encouraging word? 

In just a little over three weeks, we have already seen God begin to answer that prayer, in ways too numerable to articulate in the time that we have this morning. I will give you one evidence that the Lord is establishing the work of your hands (the Board of Trustees), and your efforts, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and that evidence is the morale of our faculty and the employee culture of everyone who has been called by the Lord our God to serve on this campus. 

It has been a refreshing joy to focus on the favor of the Lord our God through intentional campus prayer, and through the call for all of us to be humbly dependent on the Lord our God. And that posture has been modeled in a most Christ-like way by Drs. Dockery and Hawkins. As Dr. Dockery reminds us often, we can do nothing apart from the Spirit of God and the blessing of God. In over 30 years of life on a college or seminary campus, I’ve never seen a work-ministry culture shift so fast. We have prayed more, and intentionally sought the Lord and His favor more, and been encouraged more in the last 26 days, than I have experienced in any institution in which Amy and I have been a part. As the Psalmist proclaimed in Psalm 115, “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Your name give glory because of Your faithful love, because of Your truth.”  

As Dr. Yarnell encouraged you with a devotion based on the end of Psalm 90 yesterday morning, I’d like to spend just a few minutes looking at verses 1 and 2. Hear the Word of the Lord:  “Lord, you have been our refuge in every generation. Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, you are God.”

The last three words of verse 2, “you are God,” carry in them the weight of the universe He created on a macro level, and they carry in them the very reason and purpose for your existence and my existence on a micro level.  

The beloved pastor and author A.W. Tozer wrote in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us … man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God …. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason, the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.”

Several years later, Chip Ingram wrote an updated version of Tozer’s called, God as He Longs for You to See Him. This is the way that he updated the words of Tozer: “Nothing in all your life will impact your relationship with God, your relationship with people, your self-view, your decisions, and your purpose like the way you think of God. Everything in your life consciously or unconsciously comes back to one thing: whom do you visualize God to be in your heart? Who we are and what we become cannot be separated from our understanding of God.”   

And that is what we get to here on Seminary Hill every day, semester by semester, year by year, prayerfully until Jesus comes again, to help our students see and know and worship and live for the God who has been our refuge in every generation and who is our hope for years to come. To help them trust His inerrant Word so that they see God’s perfect character through Jesus Christ – the image of the invisible God – the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of His nature, so that they live by the power of the Holy Spirit under the loving hand of His authority. And, that’s what we all get to do, isn’t it? To remind ourselves, and proclaim to the world, and to encourage the church that, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were born, before you gave birth to the earth and the world, from eternity to eternity, you are God.” 

Thank you again, for your vital and strategic role in doing your job, and helping us more than you will ever know, raise up the next generation of those who are and will proclaim to the ends of the earth that the Lord is indeed, our refuge and our strength. 

May I invite you to stand, and let’s sing: “O God Help in Ages Past.”