Monday Thoughts from Pastor Tim - April 28

Dear Church Family –

Thanks to Daren Busenitz for leading our time in God’s Word yesterday.  I could not help but think of the church when we read, in Micah 4:2, “Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, that He may teach us His ways and that we may walk in His paths.”

Scheduling Daren to preach yesterday gave me more freedom of thought and spirit to benefit from the Christian conference I attended in Indianapolis last week.  As Daren spoke yesterday, my mind made some connections with one of the sessions from the conference.

Alistair Begg spoke on the church from Ephesians 3 and made these observations:

The church is the sphere in which God makes known His purpose in the world.  It’s a kind of “pilot project” for the complete remaking of the earth.  The church contains the DNA of a remade world.  It’s a gallery displaying “thumbnail pictures” of what God is going.

But then he acknowledged the difficulty of human beings with sin natures actually living out the glorious entity that God created the church to be.  “All human community is fragile.”

And then he quoted D.A. Carson (who got quoted a lot at the conference), “The church itself is not made up of natural ‘friends.’  It is made up of natural enemies.  What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything of the sort.  Christians come together, not because they form a natural collocation, but because they have been saved by Jesus Christ and owe him a common allegiance.  In the light of this common allegiance, in light of the fact that they have all been loved by Jesus himself, they commit themselves to doing what he says—and he commands them to love one another.  In this light, they are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake.”  (From: Love in Hard Places)

I love the church in general and our church in particular.  I’m grieved when our humanness (mine included) sometimes creates tensions and disharmony.  It’s not easy to live and work together.  Every church has conflicts and hurts and differences of opinion, and misunderstandings.  It’s the reality of human life.  That was one of the sub-themes of the conference I attended last week.

The only way the church can work as Christ intended it to is by each of us embracing the reality of Micah 1:7 that we read yesterday, “…the Lord will reign over them from now on and forever.”

Trusting the Lord of the Church to make me, and us, a display of His work in the world.  Thanks for being a part of God’s glorious church. – Pastor Tim