Words from WW Blog

“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” (Luke 15:31-32)

Church business meetings are a necessary evil. However, evil is frequently the dominant feature of the gathering of the saints, and the salt that can become salty. Instead of direction and vision, the meetings have a way of diminishing into an analysis of the finances, what is being spent to pay the staff, and how the church constitution and by-laws are not being followed.

Doing business has its place. The healthy church deals with the necessary business, trusts and empowers its shareholders and volunteers to minister and serve, and talks about what it looks like to be a church driven by the Good News, the gospel.

Honestly, I can’t remember many meetings where the main, consuming conversational point of the saints was Jesus’s good news. It makes me wonder if we’re so uncomfortable with the gospel that we focus on lesser things. Or you might call it “non-eternal business.”

The gospel takes in the hard-to-believe news that the unloveable are loved, the unforgivable are forgiven, and the unworthy are redeemed. It’s much more comfortable to talk about the lack of quality in the restroom toilet paper rolls and the sad state of the local high school football team.

I confess that there have been many times when I have detoured from the good news to a topic that doesn’t penetrate my heart. It’s easy to steer away from the love story of God to an event that will be forgotten in the next few minutes.

I think of the configuration of most evangelical church sanctuaries, where the pews or chairs are arranged to face toward the pulpit. It’s a visible picture of who we have entrusted the telling of the Good News to…the preacher. He or she has been trained and educated to tell God’s story, and we’re comfortable with that scenario or, maybe better said, it’s more convenient that way.

It seems that those most comfortable with talking about the gospel are those who were as far away as the prodigal son, realized their lostness, and then found their way back to the arms of the Father. It’s hard to continue to talk about the pastries being served when you’ve been eating the scraps that even the pigs didn’t want.

Finally, it’s uncomfortable to talk about a God Who operates out of grace when we’re dealing with our personal vindictiveness, a God of love when we can’t even stand the person sitting in front of us in worship, and a God Who forgives when we crave revenge and ill on our neighbors.

Lesser things monopolize our time and focus and crowd eternal matters out of the agenda. We don’t have to be religiously weird, but there is more to life than the Sunday sports lineup, even if your team is called the Angels or the Saints.

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This entry was posted on July 20, 2024 at 5:28 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Christianity, church, Faith, gospel, grace, Jesus

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