The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you today.
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(Yesterday on the blog: I Feel At Home in Your Church)

John Piper has written a powerful and comforting article for older Christians. “Dear older saint, I need to join you in the fight against the fears of aging, and to do so by faith in future grace. There are five fears that we will likely walk through together. God has given us antidotes for each in his word. These antidotes work through faith, and without faith they won’t work. But by faith they will work, and fear will be overcome, and we will go to be with Jesus in due time without walking in fear during our last season. That’s my confidence.”

Reagan Rose explains why he decided to permanently quit social media. And while none of us are obliged to follow his example, we’d all do well to at least consider his reasoning. “In this post, I will explain what led me to this decision, why I didn’t do it sooner, and specifically how I thought about the choice to leave social media as a Christian seeking to steward my life well for the glory of God.”

How holy are you? Stephen Kneale helps you evaluate yourself in light of Scripture.

I really enjoyed reading this sweet tribute to an ordinary/extraordinary man. It gets off to an interesting start: “When I was in 10th grade, the Power Team came to my church.  They were a group of powerlifting Christians who went around from mega-church to mega-church, lifting weights and smashing bricks in order to bring ‘glory to Jesus.’ I was excited to see them “perform/preach,” but I was mostly excited that my friends and I got to work out with the Power Team at Gold’s Gym one day between their nightly sessions.”

Mindy Belz has a moving article about life after the loss of her husband. “For months now finding solid ground has eluded me. The rules of the road feel broken. I wake in a house I’ve lived in for nearly 40 years with my husband and family, but I wake alone. The sun rises to greet me, and the dog waits for breakfast and a ball throw, but I float, suspended in this familiar but strange world—watching as though for the first time normal rhythms I once gave no thought to. They appear part of someone else’s life.”

Few of us have the expertise to be able to assess the significance of newly-discovered manuscripts. Ian N. Mills looks at one titled P.Oxy. 5575 to explain why it’s not as groundbreaking as some people are claiming. “My goal here is neither to minimize the importance of this new piece of early Christian literature nor to exaggerate the evidence for similar works but, rather, to help the reader understand P.Oxy. 5575 by setting it into a larger comparative context.”

Paraphrasing one of her favorite authors she said “It’s okay to be angry with God about this. It’s okay to tell him exactly how you feel about him right now. Let him have it. He doesn’t mind.”

The world will laugh with you when you laugh, and romp with you when you romp, but it will not weep with you when you die.
—De Witt Talmage

My annual journey through Scripture has once again taken me to the early books of the Old Testament and those long passages in which God lays out the laws that are meant to govern his covenant people as they come into their promised land. Among the laws are a whole host that describe the system of sacrifices. So many sacrifices to serve so many purposes!

As I worked my way through chapter after chapter, I noticed one recurring theme: the people are meant to bring to the Lord what is first and what is best. Where they may be tempted to wait until their barns are full and their larders stuffed before offering their sacrifice, God demands the firstfruits. Where they may be tempted to sacrifice the animals that are lame or unsightly and that can otherwise serve no good purpose, God demands what is perfect and unblemished. He makes clear that if his people are to worship him, they must worship him in ways that prove he is their first priority.
And as I read I began to wonder: Do I give God what is first and what is best in my life? I don’t even mean the first of my money or the first of my possessions, because in my context those concepts don’t even really make sense. What is the firstfruits of a paycheck and what is a spotless and unblemished sacrifice in a twenty-first century urban context? What do these things mean when our worship no longer revolves around an intricate system of sacrifices?
Yet the New Testament does demand at least one kind of sacrifice. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1). Where in the Old Testament God’s people were to sacrifice an animal, we are to sacrifice our bodies and, more than that, to sacrifice our very selves. As we come to Christ we are to surrender to him our bodies and souls, our attitudes and actions, our time and talents, our dreams and desires, our … everything.
This is why we sing songs like, “Take My Life, and Let It Be” in which we piously say,

Take my life and let it beconsecrated, Lord, to thee.

And, later:

Take myself, and I will beever, only, all for thee.

Or “All to Jesus I Surrender”:

All to Jesus I surrender,All to Him I freely give;I will ever love and trust Him,In His presence daily live.
I surrender all, I surrender all;All to Thee, my blessed Savior,I surrender all.

But I wonder: Do we really mean it? Are we really “ever, only, all for thee?” Do we really surrender all? Or do we surrender merely some or most? Do we offer him the best of what we have or those bits we know we can do okay without? Do we really fully surrender to him those things that we love most, or do we effectively bring him what is lame and spotted, what is of little consequence and low on our list of priorities? Do we surrender the firstfruits of our lives or the lastfruits?
“I surrender all,” except my money and comfort. “Take my life” but not my position or reputation. “Take my heart it is thine own,” but please don’t take that sin I enjoy so much. “Take all I have Lord,” minus my health and strength, minus my spouse and children. “All to Jesus I surrender,” except those things I value most. We may as well be the Israelites of old entering the temple with the ugliest of our animals, the leftovers of our harvest.
When we come to Christ we must come all the way, which means we do not merely surrender our souls, but ourselves. Our prayer is to be not just “save me” but “use me.” “Use me even if it involves pain. Use me even if it involves loss. Use me even if it means you must break me. I love you, I trust you, and I surrender all.”

We aren’t colleagues. We aren’t comrades. We aren’t neighbors. We are family. If we are to understand the nature of the relationship between believers, we don’t need to understand work, politics, or geography. We need to understand family.

The Bible displays this truth in any number of ways. Together we call God “Father,” and if he is Father, then we are sons and daughters. We call Christ our elder brother, making us his siblings as well as one another’s. Young men are told to relate to older men with all the respect of sons to fathers and to older women with all the love of sons to mothers. They are to treat younger women with all the purity of sisters and to relate to widows as if they are their very own mothers. We are to love one another with brotherly affection and to understand that whoever does the will of the Father is a brother, sister, mother.
We see it in another way as well—in the way pastors are to be evaluated for their suitability to the office. If the church is more like a family than a business or nation, then pastors are more like fathers than bosses or managers. There is a closer relationship between church and family than between church and corporation or church and country. This is why a pastor must be evaluated on the basis of his home life more than his work life or political life. A man may be a great boss or an electrifying politician, but if he is a poor father he has no business leading a local church, “for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?”
What is true broadly across all of time and space is true more particularly in the context of the local church—especially if that local church makes membership truly meaningful. While Christians who lived centuries ago and Christians on the far side of the earth are brothers and sisters, there is a special way in which the family relationship is manifested and displayed in the local church. It is there in the context of living and worshipping together that we see mostly clearly how Christians relate as members of the same family.
If all of this is true, there is an interesting implication that is especially relevant in these days of turbulence. We read often in the news about “The Great Resignation.” Beginning in early 2021, great numbers of people began to resign their jobs, some looking for new work and some content to quit working altogether for a time. Economists are divided on the reasons for the trend, but whatever the case, they seem to flow from a discontentment deep enough to have impacted churches as well. Churches are seeing a Great Resignation of their own in which an unusual number of people have resigned their membership to move to another local church (or sometimes to settle in with a distant church’s livestream). Almost every church has some seats conspicuously absent, and remaining members who dearly miss the ones who have departed—people they loved, people they ministered alongside, people they rejoiced with and wept with. Almost every pastor has some fresh wounds, some fresh sorrows, as he has learned that yet another person, yet another family, has decided to move on—precious people he has counseled, preached to, prayed for, and attempted to serve with love.
In those situations when we consider whether it’s time to pull up roots and move to a new congregation, there is something we ought to deeply ponder: To leave a church is more like seceding from a family than resigning a job. It is more like removing yourself from a household than emigrating from a nation. It is not like working your way up the corporate ladder by moving between companies as much as it is like revoking your participation in one family to establish yourself in another.
In few places do we see our inner individualist more clearly displayed than in the ease and carelessness with which we bounce from church to church. In few places do we see our predilection for selfish decision-making with greater clarity than when we think so little of removing ourselves from one family in preference for another. While granting that there are many good and legitimate reasons to leave a church, I’d wager there are far more that are unnecessary, unwise, or unkind. And I’d wager that the most common reasons are the least legitimate of all.
With all that being the case, it seems that when we are in any doubt at all, we ought to stay put. When we are uncertain, we ought to stay the course. When it is not perfectly clear that we must leave or when we haven’t received wide affirmation that it’s wise to leave, we ought to set aside thoughts of finding a new family and instead joyfully recommit ourselves to loving the family we are already part of.