The Call & The Drive

We can learn a lot from the attitude of John the Baptist. So let me ask you, are you called or driven? Confident in Christ or confident in yourself?

There's a difference. Here are four characteristics of a called man/woman of God. They:

1. Understand Stewardship: The crowds, followers, disciples and attention...they were not his to keep.'He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.' John 1:15. What are you holding to that isn't actually yours to keep?
2. Know their identity: 'I am not the Christ' John 1:20. Know who you aren't, namely the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, and you will begin to understand who you are, created and sustained by God. Reflect on this reality, it will impact you beyond compare.
3. Know their Purpose: He knew his role in being the forerunner to the Messiah, 'I am the voice of the one calling in the desert, "Make straight the way for the Lord."' John 1:23. Is your purpose to make your name great...or is it to make His Name Great?
4. Understand Commitment: John knew he was called by God. He knew his role, he knew his purpose, he knew who Jesus was and held fast to his own beheading. 'He must become greater, I must become less.' John 3:30. What or whom are you committed to? If it's anything or anyone other than Christ first and foremost...reflect once again on your role as a steward, your identity, your purpose in life.

Knowing that we are called (to follow Christ) fosters joy. Within this joy we find peace in our position in Christ as forgiven and sent on mission. Are you living a called life as a disciple of Christ or a driven life as a disciple of ________?

Read Johns Gospel chapters 1-3. Adapted from Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald. 

How's Your Community Group: Part 3

Fellowship. Sharing authentic life with a community of people. "He went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where the many people had gathered and were praying" (Acts 12:12).

When Peter escaped from prison, again (4:3, 5:17-42), where Herod had been keeping him to put him on murderous display as a Jewish rebel of this New Way simply because it pleased an audience, he went directly to the local oikos, household of believers. Why did he go there? How did he know he would be safe there? How did he know he could send a dispatch to James (Jesus' half-brother) at that hour of the night? Who would be up?

Fellowship is much more than time spent once a week discussing ancient biblical truths.

Fellowship, Christian fellowship, is that which goes on daily. Praying together, dining together, raising our kids together, studying the word deeply and intentionally, discipling one another, carrying burdens on every level, sharpening one another, sharing Jesus in your neighborhood together...as a body is together always, so is the church (1 Cor. 12).

Do you know if your oikos would so devoutly seek Jesus on your behalf? Are others in your group pondering the same questions about authentic commitment? You be this committed, you be focused and you be intentional about being in life together, being on mission together and inviting others into the Kingdom together.

Read Acts 2-12 and discover the explosion and dedication of the Jerusalem Church.

How's Your Community Group: Servanthood

Servanthood.

When we act like servants, people notice. A church had a "helping hands" ministry. Six men from the church were cleaning an elderly man's rain gutters. His curious and somewhat amazed neighbor asked, "who are these guys? Why are they doing this?" The neighbor was even more amazed when the six men proceeded to climb on his roof and clean his gutters. Servanthood matters, it opens hearts. Here are some suggestions:

1. Do menial tasks. This is one of the hardest things to teach in Western society. Even the well-educated and successful should learn to serve at a practical level.
2. Be available. A household servant must be available when the master calls. The Christian servant must also be available - to God, his/her family and others.
3. Be observant. A servant is alert to the needs of others and takes initiative to do whatever needs to be done.
4. Do more than you're asked. In our clock-watching society, people do just what they are asked to do, nothing more. A true servant does what he is supposed to do - and more. What is your 'more' in this season?

Adapted from a note by Pastor Jed Haas of Mercy Road Church - Appleton, WI. Find him on FaceBook

Hows Your Community Group: Part 2

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship...

Note that I am not separating teaching and fellowship here. Hearing the Gospel of Christ happened within the context of fellowship with other believers and the Apostles. If any of the 3,000 were interested in growing it meant community, it meant time with other disciples and time under the Apostles.

And there was a strong desire for and a commitment to this teaching. Have you ever made a vow? I did on my wedding day...I vowed once not to eat green olives, otherwise I don't recall specifically vowing to do or pursue anything in particular. It's not our language. Yet this is the language in the text. These early believers vowed to pursue the doctrine of the Apostles - the Gospel, the Truth of Christ, the Reality of the Creator of the Universe!

A hunger and a joy, an honor and a healthy terror, a newness of life in such incredibly new fellowship that I imagine a unified devotion being the only possible response in this season of the ecclesia, the budding communities of believers.

Foundational to both the devotion and the fellowship is the teaching. What were they teaching? The Gospel. This new Message regarding the life of the Messiah and how this alters their paradigm of life in God.

How did they teach it? Their immediate response was to gather together as many believers as possible and...well...talk about Jesus while living about Jesus. Talk about the OT with new light shed on the grand Story, a story they were all a part of.

Guys, if we're going to be a part of Kingdom growth in coming generations we must move beyond our Western view of partitioned community (family/friends/church members/neighbors/coworkers). Who we 'click' with doesn't ultimately matter. This lone-wolfism-amidst-the-crowd-culture is killing the mission of the Church (Matthew 28:19-20) and it's killing our built-in reputation (John 13:35). Put bluntly, we must wholly reengage in exegeting our communities, our culture, the next generation and so rebuild the bridge to Luke's Gospel movement in this Acts 2 devotion to the Word in growing fellowship.

1. Is your home church devoted to Scripture in fellowship? Let's stop thinking of genuine friendship as optional when we gather.
2. Are you leading out of a devotion to Christ both in fostering the Word and fostering genuine community?
3. Is your small group devoted? To one another, to the Word, to healthy community, suffering together, to enjoying life together, to sharing in this devotion with more and more people..

Read Members of One Another. Check out Building Missional Communities. Dig into to remaining story in Acts and trace out the connection between teaching and fellowship.

How's Your Community Group: Part 1

How's your Christian community going?

Do you like it? Not in a 'boy likes girl' sort of way, but do you get excited that your community is fulfilling the Great Commission and joyfully! Or are you just spending another night with a 'hang-out' crowd, or another Bible study, or another 'save-the-world' service group with no real discussion on Truth?

If you're anything like me you spend more than enough time evaluating whether or not your Life Group, Cell-group or Missional Community is healthy or not. While every church may have a different matrix for discerning health I want to take some time to discuss the early church koinonia (fellowship gatherings) that was forming and multiplying following the explosion of growth in Acts 2.

Disclaimer: I realize that some very brilliant theologians (much more so than I) push against the idea that the community we find in Acts 2:42-47 should ever be considered normal, especially not in our Western culture. Others lean in the opposite direction and say that if the early Church were able to more readily fulfill the Great Commission in Matthew 28 through tight-knit family/friend communities, then we ought to adapt and adopt.

I agree.

That said, I want to use this passage in Acts as a dynamic discussion guide to gauging healthy community. It's not nearly definitive and it doesn't have to be normative...but it says something about community in a time where the Spirit was rapidly moving (not to mention it was deemed noteworthy to be included in our Canon), so let's lean into it a bit.

Before we get started I've stolen and compiled different sources worth of information and put together a 'health' diagram to foster our conversation. You'll notice that there are several stages a community group grows through, each one being necessary and all a piece of the divine puzzle that is co-Mission.

I'm going to start with the assumption that if the Son of God rose from the dead to send us on a mission, then that mission must be central to our community - and so every other 'stage' of communal growth only drives us to our mission which never actually ends. In fact, if your group is on mission then you will grow through these stages time and again.

In the next post we'll start Teaching and clarify the text, ask some questions and press on our own experience in our community groups.

Read Acts 1-5 - crazy times. The Master Plan of Evangelism is a great compass in this discussion as well.

Rubble & Renewal

The evil one hates growth. Maturing in Christ goes against everything he stands for, everything he rebelled against in the first place.

I was reading in Nehemiah and noticed an ongoing analogy. The men who opposed the rebuilding of the wall used language that, quite frankly, resembles the noise and ethos of Satan at work today. In particular they verbally mock and attack two key aspects of the rebuilding of the wall (in chapter 4):

1. Renewal: 'Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble - burned as they are?' :2
2. Maturity: 'But when [the opposition] heard that the repairs to Jerusalem's walls had gone ahead and the gaps were being closed, they were angry.' :7

Renewal is foundational to the Christian journey isn't it. The God who makes all things new (Revelation 21:5) is at work in and around us always. The whole idea behind the Christianese phrase 'born again' (which by the way we find in the interaction between Jesus & Nicodemus) is simply this, that through Christ's perfect work in divine reconciliation between God and man we are made new.

The baggage we carry, the brokenness in our hearts and souls, the misunderstanding of self-esteem and the depression that ravages, physical challenges and excruciating pains, the false ideas of self-gratification and fulfillment that never quite come to pass...this 'rubble' that makes up our lives, these pieces that have been burned and appear to be useless - they aren't. These aspects of our lives are the very elements God uses to reconcile us to Him and rebuild life on a new foundation. Satan hates to see his work undone.

Maturity. You know that fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5? Or the growth chart in 2 Peter 1? Or the qualities of the Overseer in the Pastoral Epistles? Or what about the profound profession of the thief on the cross next to Jesus on Skull hill (Luke 23:39-43)? Or in Acts 2 and 4 where the Church begins to care for one another in dramatic and powerful ways? Maturity in action.

Satan hates the maturing and fruitful believer. Think of Job and the Apostle Paul. These men were connected to God in different but deep ways and both were spiritually attacked in incredible ways.

The account in Nehemiah of the rebuilding of the walls and the detail of the opposition is a clear reminder that Satan is real and at work and even using the same techniques today as he did then. Satan isn't the focus though. If you'll notice above the focus is immediately taken from the evil one and placed on the awesome work of Jesus through the Gospel - the eternal, sinless, incarnate, crucified, resurrected, ascended and eternal Son of God.

He rebuilds our personal rubble for breakfast and closes the gaps in our broken lives for dinner. This is the grace of God at work in us and Satan cannot overcome Him.

Are you discouraged by opposition? Read Psalm 139. Read John 16.
Are you burned out, a pile of personal rubble? Come to Christ for starters, He alone rebuilds.
Are you being worked over right now? Are you growing in Christ painfully? Read Philippians.

Spend some time praying. Connect with God and Thank Him for His work eternally past, present and eternally future on your behalf.

Word of Beard

'You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather serve one another in love.' Galatians 5:13

Grace is an interesting thing. By the grace of the Creator of the universe we are able to know Him and be known by Him. By His grace we are capable of knowing True Love (Christ) and true forgiveness.

By His grace we are freed from whatever sin it is that has an exasperating grasp on our ankles, whatever it is that weighs on our hearts and minds when we're alone...we are free.

'It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.' 5:1

When divine grace abounds in us, calling us to experience freedom from both the (meta)physical chains of slavery to sin as well as the man-made walls of legalism that close us off from the world...when His grace abounds in freedom we must remember that we're now freed to experience every aspect of authentic, undying, eternally divine love, not freed so as to sin in new ways (which in our flesh is always a possibility).

Freedom from sin and freedom from legalism, through the power of the grace of Christ, send us off as men and women on mission with a divine call on our lives to love the Lord and as an overflow of this God-love we then love others...and while this new-found freedom may very well be abused (which is slavery once again) in our freedom we discover the divine desire to love others through the Great Commission (and as a result discover our own worth in His sight as well).

Freedom is what it sounds like. Freedom from chains and walls and confusion and pain. It's freedom to experience Truth and Love as citizens of a Kingdom of Life.

Read Galatians 5, Ephesians 2, Philippians, Colossians 2:6-3:17, John 12-21...In fact, if you've missed the heart of the message of grace you ought to read through the Gospels and make note of Christs mission of mercy on your behalf.