I have been told that when things seem to be getting difficult to manage as a church, that it is not necessarily a bad thing. This is incredibly hard for me to be “okay” with. Oh, how we would like to have a predictable path for success that were easy and totally within our means to make happen, but that wouldn’t place in us dependency on God at all would it? It would simply be -the church that man built.
Over the next 5-6 months, I expect not necessarily chaos, but I expect God will put us in position to cry out to him for help(I feel lik
e I am there now). In the Gospels there is a story of a Father, begging for his son to be restored. He was possessed with a demon, and the disciples tried and tried, but couldn’t cast out the demon. Later on, the disciples asked Jesus “Master why could we not cast out the demon ”Jesus replied, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed…..nothing will be impossible for you.” [1] As we grow in our walk with Christ, we don’t achieve independence and mastery. God gives us challenges that bring us back to Him. After all, we are not the answer to all of life’s questions, challenges, and problems, God is. It is not our job to be people fixers, it is our job to stay with Jesus. “I am the vine, you are the branches, apart from me you can do nothing….He who abides in me will bear much fruit”.
Sometimes it takes a little chaos, or being overwhelmed, or a reminder that we truly are outmatched in and of ourselves and our own resources to bring us back into dependence on the one who is never outmatched, never overwhelmed, and never out of sovereign control over what seems to us to be chaos.
I expect in the future, there will be people we build relationships with that have no idea what church is like except what they may have seen in the movies or tv.
I expect in the future, we should be asking ourselves questions like “where should we put this ash tray”.
I expect in the future, we will have parents who had no parents asking for help in how to parent.
I expect in the future, we will say things like “God we have no idea how we’re going to do this”.
BUT
I also expect in the future, that we will look more like the church in the new testament than we ever have before.
I expect that in the future, ou
r fellowship will be filled with more joy than ever before.
I expect that in the future, we have come out the other side of challenges of things that we look back and say “Wow! That is only something God can do!”
So the prayer that I ask for from the church as we move forward is that:
1) We be totally dependent on God
2) We are patient through chaos, because God is in control
3) We trust him when life presents us a problem that is too big for us.
What a church we can be if we place ourselves in God’s hands.
Pastor Tyler
[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Mt 17:20.
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