Glorious Mud

Came across this quote today over at Luke Simmon's blog  - it is from Kevin DeYoung's new book, the Hole in Our Holiness.  Too good not to pass on. In more than a decade of pastoral ministry I’ve never met a Christian who was healthier, more mature, and more active in ministry by being apart from the church. But I have found the opposite to be invariably true. The weakest Christians are those least connected to the body. And the less involved you are, the more disconnected those following you will be. The man who attempts Christianity without the church shoots himself in the foot, shoots his children in the leg, and shoots his grandchildren in the heart. Something to think about - God's says the church is his inheritance, his treasure (Ephesians 1:19).  How do you feel about it?

Lauren and I have been reading through Tim Chester's A Meal with Jesus .  It has been a fascinating look at the role of food in the life of Jesus in the gospel of Luke.  As Chester says, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus seems to always be coming from a meal, eating a meal, or traveling to the next one.  That sounds like my kind of ministry! The picture above is our dining room table - and this is one of the primary places we build community.  Sharing meals with others is a way to value them with practical service and love.  Lauren wrote a  blog  about the the power of keeping that meal simple and practical.  You should check it out. Eating is a daily reminder that we need something outside of ourselves to sustain us.  This is one of God's many ways to remind us that we are not autonomous - we are not independent, isolated beings.  We were created by a God of community for community - with him and with each other.  Sharing a meal wit...

I preached on Philemon last week.  It is Paul's shortest letter - and his only letter that is addressed to a single person instead of a church.  It is a valuable glimpse into how the early church navigated the challenge of applying the gospel to the mess of community.  What happens when an escaped slave becomes a follower of Christ and then returns to his Christ-following slave master?  It gets messy. Community was a mess for them and it is a mess for us.  In Colossae, in the church that met at Philemon's house, you had men and women, laborers and wealthy land owners, slaves and slave-masters sitting side by side worshiping the same God.  And, amazingly, they didn't kill each other.  They didn't implode into infighting and bitterness or explode into a hundred different affinity groups. They united together around the person and work of Jesus.  And if they could do it, so can we. Most of Paul's letters are a combination of lesson and lab. ...