http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16103668/what-makes-you-happiest
Audio Transcript
What makes you the happiest? What are you after? What’s the one main thing that, if you got it, would make you the most joyful person for the longest amount time?
Every breathing human being on this planet is on a quest to find a fountain of joy. The whole Bible assumes this quest. And the Bible answers the quest too. To see how, Pastor John has historically turned to a handful of key Bible texts, particularly four of them — four go-to texts he mentions a lot, about fifty times now on this podcast to date. And each is worth a close study — worth writing out by hand into a journal, worth meditating on, even memorizing. They include Psalms 40:16; 70:4; Romans 5:11; and 1 Peter 3:18. Each of them, in their own way, says God is the prize of the gospel.
Two of these texts came up in a short video Pastor John recorded in 2017. I recently found it and pulled it to share it with you here. Here’s Pastor John.
What’s the deepest root of your joy — what God gives to you or what God is for you? One way to get at that question in your own soul is to ask, Why did Jesus die and rise for me? And of course, there are glorious answers like, “He died to forgive my sins, and to take away the wrath of God, and to give me deliverance from hell, and to give me imputed righteousness, and to give me entrance into heaven, and to cause my body to be raised from the dead, and to give me entrance into the new heavens and the new earth and take away all my tears.” And that would be right and gloriously true, and we should rejoice in it. But none of them is the ultimate reason for why he died.
“Christ died to bring us into fellowship with God because in God’s presence is fullness of joy.”
First Peter 3:18 says, “Christ . . . suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” He died to bring us into fellowship with God because in God’s presence is fullness of joy, at his right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:33), and all the other works of redemption are a means to that.
It says in Psalm 40:16, “May those who love your salvation say continually, ‘Great is the Lord.’” It doesn’t say, “May those who love your salvation say continually, ‘Great is your salvation,’” but, “Great is the Lord.” Of course, our salvation is great, and we should love it as great. But mainly our salvation is happening to us — and all the gifts of God are coming to us — in order that we might know God, love God, treasure God, be satisfied in God.
So the biblical answer to the question “What is my ultimate, deepest source of joy?” is not his gifts. It’s him, known and enjoyed in and through his gifts.
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Do Answered Prayers Depend on My Holiness?
Audio Transcript
The Bible is very clear on a point we address today. And it’s this one: for our prayers to be answered, we must be obedient to God. That’s right — for our prayers to be answered, we must obey. The point is blunt and pervasive, and you can find it all over the Bible, in texts like Isaiah 1:15–18; John 15:7; 1 John 3:21–23; 1 Peter 3:7, 12; 4:7; James 5:16; and on and on. Okay then, so how holy must I become in order for my prayers to get answered? If you’re paying attention to your Bible, this is a legitimate question, and one Pastor John took up in a sermon over forty years ago. Here he is to explain and to add two more texts into the mix that I didn’t mention.
God said to Solomon, “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14). And the psalmist confirmed it in his own experience: “I cried to him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer” (Psalm 66:17–19). Therefore, I find it taught in the New Testament and the Old Testament that if a child has bad attitudes or misbehaves, God will not give him everything he asks for. In order to have our prayers answered, we must be obedient children.
Now, there are two possible misunderstandings of this, which I want to ward off. Both of them would result in a great diminishing of our joy of faith, and a belittling of God’s mercy.
Obedient, Not Perfect
First of all, it would be a mistake to go away from here and say, “The Bible teaches that one must be sinlessly perfect in order to have our prayers answered.” There is a big difference between an obedient child and a perfect child.
You know the Lord’s Prayer? At the heart of the Lord’s Prayer is this petition that Jesus taught us to pray: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Now, I assume that since immediately prior to that was the petition, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11), that Jesus means for this prayer to be prayed each day, which means that he expects us to need to pray, “Forgive us our sins” each day. I don’t think Jesus had any illusion that his disciples would in life outgrow the need to pray for forgiveness for sins. That’s a great reassurance to me, who sins daily in my own attitude.
Here’s the inference that I draw from that: Since he taught us to pray, “Forgive us our sins,” it would be a contradiction to say that in order to have our prayers answered, we must be without sin. That’s plain, I think, and therefore, it does not follow from Jesus’s teachings that we must be perfect, without sin, in order to have our prayers answered.
“The righteous person, whose prayer avails much, is not the sinless person, but the repentant person.”
No, the righteous person, whose prayer avails much — as James says it does in James 5:16 — is not the sinless person, but the repentant person. He’s not the person who falls into sin, but the person who stays there and is content with his sin. The person whose prayers are not answered is not the person who fights against temptation and now and then loses the battle, but the person who is quite content with his spiritual mediocrity and makes no effort to improve or to overcome his lethargy and carnality. Therefore, never say, “I must be perfect in order to have my prayers answered.” That’s the first misunderstanding I want to avoid.
No Merit Involved
The second misunderstanding that might arise from the fact that we must be obedient children in order to have our prayers answered would be that this obedience merits or deserves the answer to prayer. That one would follow very naturally, some might think. If you’ve got to obey in order to get your prayer answered, then what he’s teaching is that you’ve got to merit or deserve answers to prayer. But that would go against everything I said at the beginning, to the effect that the death of Jesus purchased for us the answers to our prayers that we might receive them through mercy freely.
Now, the way I picture this — namely, the importance of obedience in relationship to God’s mercy — is something like this. None of us is a child of God by nature. On the contrary, Paul says we are all children of wrath by nature (Ephesians 2:3), which means that we have freely, by mercy, through grace, been adopted into the family of God. We have our standing as children not owing to anything meritorious in ourselves, but only owing to the grace of God.
Therefore, all good behavior in this family must spring from this dependence upon mercy. All true obedience to Christ, the only obedience that pleases him, is the obedience that springs out of our confidence in the power and the wisdom and the love of God.
The only reason to disobey God is that we don’t trust his advice, isn’t it? The only reason my sons disobey me is because, on the spur of the moment, or planned out, they don’t think what I’ve said is best for them. “Don’t play there.” “Well, it looks like it’s more fun to play there. Therefore, I will play there.” Tacitly, Daddy’s wrong. That’s why we disobey. We do not trust God.
Therefore, since all disobedience flows from not trusting the Father’s counsel, it follows that all genuine obedience flows from trusting God. There’s a huge difference between trusting God for mercy and meriting answers to prayer. Merit looks at itself and thinks about its own value that it can offer to God. Mercy looks away from the self to God and thinks about how much value there is in his mercy to me in my lack of merit.
“God answers the prayers of the obedient because he delights so much in their faith, out which their obedience springs.”
So God answers the prayers of the obedient because he delights so much in their faith, out of which all of their obedience springs. He sees faith, wherever he finds it, as a token or a sign or an outworking of what he values above all. But faith is not meritorious because it looks away to mercy rather than looking at its own value. So never say, when you get an answer to prayer, “I have merited (or deserved) this answer to prayer.”
Asking as God’s Children
If we avoid these two errors — perfectionism on the one hand and legalism on the other hand — then the teaching stands. According to John 9:31, “We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him.”
It seems to me that the application of this teaching is plain; it hardly needs any emphasis. But I’ll state it in a sentence: When Jesus commands us to ask, to seek, to knock, he is not merely commanding that we pray, but that we live like children of a merciful Father ought to live. “Let my words abide within you. Cherish no iniquity in your heart. Love your fellow believers. Do good to all. Forsake oppression. Confess your sins.” If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we will have confident communion with him, and see great answers to prayer.
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What Does It Mean to Be Spiritual?
Audio Transcript
Ask three people to explain what it means to be spiritual . . . and you’ll get four different answers. That’s a humorous way to state the problem. Definitions of spirituality are very squishy things. The term means something different to everyone. So, what is biblical spirituality? Can we settle on an objective definition of spirituality from the Bible?
That’s the question today from a young woman — and for her, it’s not a theoretical question at all. “Pastor John, my mother and I have differing views on biblical spirituality. So much so that she has said that my husband and I are not spiritual. I believe this is because she embraces spirituality as spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues, interpreting dreams, and claiming healing. My husband and I have worked in the mission field, are heavily involved in church, love the Lord, and seek after him in all things. I don’t know what to say to this. Is it possible that we — my husband and I — are not spiritual? I feel that this is not the case as I see fruit of the Spirit in our lives. How would you respond to such a statement towards yourself? And more broadly, what does authentic Christian spirituality look like?”
Let’s start with a few comments about the use of language and the importance of definitions, and then we’ll move over to the biblical use of the term spiritual, which is especially interesting because, in the ESV, the word spiritual or spiritually occurs 29 times, and 27 of them are in the writings of the apostle Paul, and the other two are in Peter’s first letter. So, it isn’t a very widespread term, and we’re mainly dealing with Paul — we’re dealing with his understanding of it — when we talk about the meaning of spirituality or being spiritual in the New Testament.
Whose Spirituality?
So first, a few thoughts about the use of language. I wonder what our friend would feel or think if a New Age spiritualist who practices divination, fortune telling, necromancy, palm reading, and earth worship were to say to our mature Christian friend, “You’re not spiritual because you don’t pursue these spiritual practices like I do.”
“Paul’s most basic use of the term ‘spiritual’ is to refer to true Christians who have the Holy Spirit.”
Now, my guess is that our friend would not feel very threatened at all or seriously criticized because she knows that those practices are not at all what the Bible means by spiritual. In fact, just the opposite: the Bible opposes those practices. But the point is that the New Age spiritualist is spiritual by his own definition. So, there would be no point in arguing which of those is spiritual. If you don’t define your terms, it would go nowhere. The argument would go nowhere if you said, “Which one of us is spiritual?” because they don’t agree on what they mean by spiritual. They are using the word in drastically different ways.
So, when our friend says, “My mother and I have differing views on biblical spirituality,” she could mean, “My mother and I agree on the meaning of the word, but we disagree on whether my husband and I are living up to it.” Or she could mean that they seriously disagree on the biblical definition of spirituality, and so they can’t assess the other with the same criteria, and we just talk past each other.
Now, I’m pretty sure, from what she says, that our friend takes the latter view because she says she embraces spirituality as spiritual gifts such as speaking in tongues, interpreting dreams, claiming healing. So, the mother thinks that being spiritual in a biblical sense is exercising spiritual gifts, while our friend thinks being spiritual means something else.
Spirit-Indwelt People
Let’s go to Paul’s writings and see what the term actually means. Paul uses the word spiritual to refer to spiritual wisdom, spiritual blessings, spiritual songs, spiritual bodies, spiritual gifts, spiritual rock, spiritual food. Now, we’re going to leave all that aside. We’re only going to talk about spiritual people.
I think he uses the term in three ways, but they are all rooted in the same basic idea. And I think that basic idea is that a person is spiritual if, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he has experienced a new birth and is no longer defined by the flesh, which opposes God, but is defined by the Holy Spirit, who causes him to trust God and love God. So, a spiritual person is most fundamentally a supernaturally transformed person who has been transferred by the Spirit from the natural condition of unbelief to the Spirit-created condition of a new creature in Christ. They are spiritual in the sense that they were created by the Holy Spirit, and are indwelt and formed by the Holy Spirit.
So, you can see that if I’m right, Paul’s use of the term spiritual gets its meaning mainly from God’s Spirit, not my spirit. Paul doesn’t call others spiritual because their spirit is especially active or because they have an unusual preoccupation with mystical things, spiritual things.
Spiritual vs. Natural
Now, the most important text for seeing these things is 1 Corinthians 2:12–15. Let me read a couple of verses:
Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. (1 Corinthians 2:12–13)
Now, who are they — “those who are spiritual”? We’ve received the Spirit. We’re imparting things from the Spirit by words taught by the Spirit, but we can only do that to “those who are spiritual.” Who are they? That’s what Paul turns to. They’re the only ones to whom Paul can successfully transmit spiritual truths.
So, Paul explains why that is and who they are in verse 14, the next verse: “The natural person” — that’s the unregenerate, unsaved person, without the Holy Spirit, contrasted with the spiritual person — “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually [assessed]” (1 Corinthians 2:14). They are spiritually assessed — that is, in the sense that the indwelling Holy Spirit enables a person to assess them rightly. They’re not foolishness, but they’re true and beautiful.
He goes on, “The spiritual person” — now he’s contrasting that with the natural person, the unregenerate person — “[assesses] all things, but is himself [assessed] by no one. ‘For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:15–16). That is, we have the Holy Spirit shaping the way our mind assesses things so that we don’t call wisdom “stupid” or “foolishness.” Instead, we assess things in the true light of Christ, but natural people can’t make that act. They can’t do that, because it’s not real to them. It’s just foolishness to them.
So, my conclusion from this passage is that Paul’s most basic use of the term spiritual is to refer to true Christians who have the Holy Spirit and therefore are no longer merely natural people but supernatural people, who have been born again by the Spirit, and whose minds are therefore able to see in the gospel the beauty of Christ and the wisdom of God. All true Christians are spiritual in that fundamental sense, and that’s his most basic sense.
Now, I think there are two other uses of the term in Paul, and both of them are adaptations of this meaning, not contradictions of it.
Mature in Christ
The first is that Paul can use the term spiritual for Christians who are more mature in their experience of this newness of their spirituality.
“Here’s the real test of being spiritual: it’s not gifts, but submission to the apostolic word.”
He writes in 1 Corinthians 3:1, “But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people” — which is different from saying that they’re not spiritual people — “but . . . as infants in Christ.” Now, I don’t think that means — I used to think this — that they’re not spiritual in the first sense, but that they weren’t acting like it. Strife and jealousy were all over the church, and so Paul treats them as babies.
Here’s another example of this use of the more mature Christian as spiritual in Galatians 6:1: “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.” Now, he’s a Christian, and yet he’s calling these “spiritual” folks to go restore him. Those who are walking in the more mature influence of the Spirit and have the Spirit’s fruit — like meekness, which he refers to — you go restore that one back. That’s my second use of the word, a more mature experience of that spirituality.
Submissive to Scripture
The other use of the term spiritual is ironic in 1 Corinthians 14:37. It goes like this: “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord.” So, ironically, there are those who have spiritual gifts — and they really do, like (I think) our friend’s mother is thinking — and they claim therefore to be spiritual. But Paul says, “Now here’s the real test. You people who are speaking in tongues and experiencing healings and exorcisms, here’s the real test of being spiritual: it’s not gifts, but submission to the apostolic word. Do you acknowledge that our word is from the Lord?”
So, my counsel to our friend who sent this question is that she will, with all humility, in the pursuit of all the fruit of the Holy Spirit, not be shamed by her mother’s misunderstanding. Don’t let her words shame you. She should realize that having spiritual gifts does not make a person spiritual. That was the problem at Corinth. It’s having the Holy Spirit that makes one spiritual — and being formed into the image of Christ by his fruit. That’s mature spirituality.
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Do Not Despise the Day of Small Groups: Four Marks of Daring Community
Some three hundred years ago, an unusual kind of church gathering spread throughout the English-speaking world like fire in the brush. When describing these groups, church historians reach for the language of newness: one refers to the gatherings as “innovations,” another as “a fresh ecclesiological proposal,” and still another as “decidedly novel.”
To some, the groups seemed dangerous, a threat to existing church order. But to countless normal Christians, the groups held immense attraction. They were a new wineskin of sorts, and new wineskins have a way of offending and appealing in equal measure.
Revealing the name of these gatherings risks anticlimax, however, because today they seem to many Christians as somewhat ho-hum, a churchly inheritance as traditional as pulpits and pews. For these innovative groups, these fresh and novel gatherings, were none other than the first modern small groups.
Daring Idea of Small Groups
Small groups, of course, were not all new three hundred years ago. In fact, when the German Lutheran Philip Jacob Spener (1635–1705) proposed the idea in 1675, he likened the groups to “the ancient and apostolic kind of church meetings” (Pia Desideria, 89). Bruce Hindmarsh, in his article “The Daring Idea of Small Groups,” suggests Spener had in mind passages like Colossians 4:15 and 1 Corinthians 14:26–40, where the early Christians met in houses and exercised the gifts of the Spirit. To these we might also add Acts 2:42–47, where the newly Spirit-filled church met not only at the temple but also “in their homes.”
For Spener, then, small groups were a retrieval project, an attempt to restore an ancient gathering somehow lost through the centuries. He wanted passive laypeople to act like the “royal priesthood” they really were in Christ (1 Peter 2:9). He wanted to see the Spirit working mightily through not only pastors and teachers but all members of the body, as in the days after Pentecost. Spener couldn’t help but trace a connection between the new-covenant ministry of the Spirit and the New Testament pattern of small groups.
He was right to trace a connection. A few decades after Spener proposed his daring idea, a massive spiritual awakening spread throughout Western Europe and America. And just as in the days of Acts 2, the newly Spirit-filled church began to gather in small groups. Sunday morning couldn’t contain the Spirit’s flame.
Fostering and Facilitating Revival
Richard Lovelace, in his Dynamics of Spiritual Life, notes “the persistent reappearance of small intentional communities in the history of church renewal” (78). And so it was in the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and beyond. In the decades surrounding the awakening, small groups were instrumental in both fostering and facilitating revival.
In the first place, small groups had a way of fostering revival. Fascinatingly, we can draw a providential line between Spener’s small-group advocacy and the awakening of the 1730s. Spener’s godson, Nicolaus von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), led a group called the Renewed Moravian Brethren, who themselves had experienced the Spirit’s power in small-group community life. Then, in 1738, Moravians in London helped start the Fetter Lane Society, one of whose members was named John Wesley (1703–1791). And that society, writes Colin Podmore, would become “the main seed-bed from which the English Evangelical Revival would spring” (The Moravian Church in England, 1728–1760, 39). Spener’s idea — taken, tried, and tweaked from the 1670s to the 1730s — became one of the greatest means God used in the awakening.
From then on, small groups also had a way of facilitating revival. As awakening spread through England, Wesley and his colaborers gathered earnest believers into small groups or “bands.” As awakening spread through America, writes Mark Noll, Jonathan Edwards created small groups “as part of his effort to fan this spiritual blaze” (Rise of Evangelicalism, 77). Really wherever you look, Hindmarsh writes, “As the fires of evangelical revival spread, the fervor of small-group religion branched out too.”
Small groups may have looked, at first, a little like the disciples in Acts 2:1, huddled “all together in one place,” waiting for the fire to fall. And then the fire did fall, creating communities that resembled Acts 2:42–47 in various degrees. Those awakened wanted to gather — indeed, felt compelled to gather — just like those early Christians in Jerusalem. And one gathering a week simply was not enough.
Small groups fostered revival, and small groups facilitated revival, in both the first century and the eighteenth. And so they may again today.
Four Marks of the First Small Groups
Three hundred years after the First Great Awakening, small groups no longer raise eyebrows. The new wineskin has grown familiar, becoming one of the most common features of evangelical church life. Nevertheless, a closer look at these groups reveals a gap between the first modern small groups and many of our own. Often, we have settled for something less daring.
Recovering the features of the first groups would not guarantee revival, of course. Awakening is the Spirit’s sovereign work. But in God’s hands, small groups like those of old may become a means of revival — or, short of that, a means of greater growth in Christ.
Consider, then, four features of the first small groups, and how we might work to recover them.
Experiential Bible Study
When many of us think of small groups today, we imagine a Bible study: several people in a circle, Bibles open, discussing some passage and praying afterward. The Bible held a similarly central place in many early small groups; Spener couched his whole proposal, in fact, within the larger aim to introduce “a more extensive use of the word of God among us” (Pia Desideria, 87). Even still, the phrase Bible study may not capture the practical, experiential spirit of these groups.
Listen to Spener’s hope for “a more extensive” use of Scripture: “If we succeed in getting the people to seek eagerly and diligently in the book of life for their joy, their spiritual life will be wonderfully strengthened and they will become altogether different people” (91). Altogether different people — that was the goal of Bible study in these first groups. And so, they took an immensely practical bent to the Scriptures, studying them not only with their minds but with their lives.
I can remember, as a young college student freshly awakened to Christ, how eager a group of us were to open Scripture together, often spontaneously. The Bible seemed always near, its wisdom ever relevant for “all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3). Importantly, we were as eager for application as we were for knowledge. Yet I can also recall Bible studies that must have seemed, to any impartial observer, like a mere matter of words. We were studying a map without any clear intention of visiting the country.
The first groups, needless to say, resembled the former far more than the latter. “These were not book clubs, lifestyle enclaves, or discussion groups,” Hindmarsh writes. “These were places for those who were serious about the life application of the teaching of Scripture.” We cannot manufacture a spirit of biblical earnestness, of course; we can, however, refuse to treat Scripture as a mere collection of thoughts to be studied.
Frank Confession
Zeal for life application, for becoming “altogether different people,” naturally gave rise to another feature: utterly honest confession. In fact, Podmore writes that, for many of the groups associated with Wesley and the Moravians, “mutual confession, followed by forgiveness and the healing of the soul, was not just a feature of the society, but its raison d’être” — its very reason for being (Moravian Church, 41).
The word band, sometimes used for these groups, referred to “conversations or conferences where straight talking had taken place” (129). Hence, “these small groups were marked by total frankness.” For biblical warrant, the group leaders often looked to James 5:16: “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” The rules of the Fetter Lane Society even stated that “the design of our meeting is to obey that command of God” (Pursuing Social Holiness, 78).
The groups exercised wisdom, to be sure: they often shared only with those of the same sex, and they agreed to keep others’ confessions confidential. But there was no way to escape exposure in these groups. Honesty was the cost of admission.
Some of our small groups already have a ready-made structure for mutual confession in what we may call accountability groups. Yet even here, I suspect much of our accountability has room to grow toward the kind of utter honesty Wesley and others had in mind, as reflected in one of the rules for Fetter Lane: “That each person in order speak freely, plainly, and concisely as he can, the state of his heart, with his several temptations and deliverances, since the last time of meeting.”
How can our groups grow toward such free, plain honesty? Partly by believing, as they did, that greater healing lies on the other side.
Common Priesthood
The Reformation, as has often been said, did not get rid of the priesthood; it gave the priesthood back to all believers. Or at least in theory. In Spener’s Germany, a century and a half after Luther heralded the priesthood of all believers, the laity once again had become largely passive. And not only passive, but fractured by class, creating an unbiblical hierarchy not only between clergy and laity but between rich and poor laity: “Elevated and upholstered places were reserved for the upper classes and only the common people sat on hard seats in the nave,” Theodore Tappert writes (introduction to Pia Desideria, 4–5).
The small groups of Spener and those who followed him dealt a devastating blow to that state of affairs. All of a sudden, normal Christians — mothers and fathers, bakers and cobblers, lawyers and doctors, farmers and clerks — sat in the same room, none of them elevated above the others. And more than that, they believed that they, though untrained in theology, could edify their brothers and sisters by virtue of the Spirit within them. Small groups made the people priests again.
“Small groups made the people priests again.”
The groups, rightly, did not aim to erase all distinction: pastors often led or oversaw the gatherings, aware that small groups could sometimes splinter from the larger body and seek to overturn godly authority. That danger will always be present to some extent when the people are empowered to be priests. But far better to deal with that danger than to render laypeople passive.
Are we as persuaded as they were that the body of Christ grows only when it is “joined and held together by every joint with which is it equipped, when each part is working properly” (Ephesians 4:16)? If so, we’ll seek to unleash the gifts of every believer, including those “that seem to be weaker” (1 Corinthians 12:22). Though weak in the world’s eyes, they have been given crucial gifts “for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7).
Outward Mission
We have small groups today, in part, because some of the first small-group members refused to keep the groups to themselves. Hindmarsh notes that, among the Moravians, revival drove them “in two directions: inward, in an intensity of community life together; and outward, in missionary enterprise to places like Georgia and the American frontier.”
How easily the Moravians might have prized their rich community life at the expense of outward mission, as we so often do. Instead, they lifted their glorious banner — “May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of his suffering” — and sought to spread that same community life elsewhere. And because they did, they encountered John Wesley, helped begin the Fetter Lane Society, and thus gave shape to the small groups that would explode throughout the North Atlantic.
“From the beginning, small groups, like cells in a body, were meant to multiply.”
From the beginning, small groups, like cells in a body, were meant to multiply. Sometimes multiplication happened as Christians like the Moravians traveled to far-flung places as missionaries; other times, it happened as small groups remained porous enough for outsiders to look in and, like the unconverted John Bunyan, hear serious believers speak “as if they had found a new world” (Grace Abounding, 20).
One of our great challenges, then and now, is how to move our groups outward in mission while maintaining the kind of trusting relationships that allow for mutual confession and life together. That challenge likely will feel perennial. But believers with an inward bent — perhaps most of us — can probably risk erring in the outward direction, whether by finding some common mission, inviting outsiders into the group, or praying together earnestly for the nonbelievers in our lives. We may even find that mission binds us together like never before.
Small Day of Small Groups
Perhaps, as we consider the vitality that marked the first evangelical small groups, our own group grows a bit grayer. If so, we may do well to remember the biblical passage cited, it seems, more often than Acts 2 or 1 Corinthians 14 — that is, James 5.
James 5:13–20 lays out a compelling program for small-group life. Yet we know from James’s letter that the community was not enjoying the kind of awakening we see in Acts 2. Class division, bitter tongues, fleshly wisdom, and worldly friendships were compromising the church’s holiness (James 2:1–13; 3:1–18; 4:1–10). Yet even still, James tells them to gather, to sing, to confess, to pray.
Spener, himself unimpressed with the state of his church community, reminds us,
The work of the Lord is accomplished in wondrous ways, even as he is himself wonderful. For this very reason his work is done in complete secrecy, yet all the more surely, provided we do not relax our efforts. . . . Seeds are there, and you may think they are unproductive, but do your part in watering them, and ears will surely sprout and in time become ripe. (Pia Desideria, 38)
Indeed, those seeds did bear fruit in time — far more fruit than Spener could have imagined. So don’t despise the small day of small groups. More may be happening than we can see.