we are family

For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 3:26)

Renew, the new singles group, met today at 3:00 for their monthly Bible study. They are a new group here at Firm Foundation.

They have a unique (to me at least) perspective on life in general. They are single. I have been married for 41 years (just last week, in fact) and can barely remember what it was like being single. My perspective on the Christian life is not that of a single person.

Listening to them talk gave me some interesting insights. What they considered vital as single people, I do not. The single people and I live, in some ways, in totally different worlds.

But – and here is the caveat – we – both married and single – are both Christ-followers. Even though we look at life in different ways, we are all Christians, children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

I had an ex-inmate ministry in a church I pastored a few years ago. Their perspective too was so different than mine. I never have been in jail or in serious trouble. Yet we were both children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

The same with all of the other people in the church. Even though we are all different, we are all alike in one way: we are part of the Kingdom of God.

In the church are married and single people, ex-inmates, recovering drug addicts, former prostitutes, government workers, manual laborers, college people, educated and uneducated, poor and rich, old and young. And all stand before God equally.

That is the beauty of the church, that motley collection of all kinds of people from all kinds of life.

And no one is better than another. All are equal in God’s sight. He loves none more than the others. Yes, we have different functions, different jobs, different talents – but we are all equal where it counts: we are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus.

What makes the church work is when all of these people come together, when we all stand united in commonality of belief. When we do that, we are triumphant.

And we are all family

daily java

Daily Java:

Then the Lord said to me, “Even if Moses and Samuel stood before me pleading for these people, I wouldn’t help them. Away with them! Get them out of my sight! (Jeremiah 15:4)

I had a van once that was basically a good van. But it kept breaking in small ways. Nothing really huge, but just kept breaking. I had spent money to fix it and all, but I was getting tired of it. Since I do not like to change cars, I was trying to make it work. If it had continued, I would still have it.

But finally, one thing too many broke and it was again sitting by the side of the road. I had a friend who was extremely good at keeping cars going and kept a sorry old pickup he had running with duct tape and spinner wire. He really needed something else. So I gave him the van.

He took it home and found out that there was a bolt that had come misplaced somehow in the underassembly somewhere. He put it on and it worked fine.

He told me that it was a small thing and that it ran fine now. He felt bad taking it when it was such a small thing. I said no. I was sick of it. It had been a hassle and I had worked on it and worked on it until I was through with it.

Jeremiah the prophet pleads for Israel before God. But God says no. I am sick of them. I have given them my love and shown them my power and fed and clothed them, protected them and they have never really loved me. They spurn me at every opportunity like an unfaithful wife who cannot get enough of other men.

He says to Jeremiah, even if Moses and Samuel came to ask me, Moses and Samuel, two of the best men who ever lived, men who had an extremely close relationship with God – even they could not convince God to help them now.

They had gone into idolatry so far that Manasseh, one of the kings in the recent past, had even introduced infant sacrifice to the idol Dagon. To God this was absolutely repulsive. He was through.

Oh, he would bring them back as a smaller group, under the control of other empires. But they would never be like they were. In 900 BC, under the leadership of King David, they were the largest empire in the world. now they were a remnant in captivity.

Sooner or later, they would turn from worshipping him and begin worshipping his law and he would finally cut them loose and set up a new Israel, spiritual Israel )Romans 9-11). In this new system, he would gather all of the people of earth who really wanted to be part of his family and make them his children.

No longer could someone brag that they were physically born into his kingdom. Now all of the people who wanted to be with God could do so. It was a voluntary family, made up of volunteers, of people who wanted to be there. Anybody who wanted to come into that family could do so.

The God who was rejected  took all the people rejected by the world and made them his new family.

Sooner or later, enough was enough, even for God.

daily java

Daily Java:

This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. (Colossians 1:21-22)

The story of Little Orphan Annie used to be one that people really liked. Annie was a little girl in an orphanage who was adopted by a rich man. Because of this, she got to go on adventures and had a great life. She went from being a poor orphan abused in an orphanage to being the child of a rich man.

The story struck such a chord. It is the dream of all children who do not have a home, finding someone who will love them and take them home with them.

Everybody, no matter who they are, want to belong to a family. We all have that need.

God looked at us. We were without a home, without a family, lost and adrift in the world. And the funny thing is, every person goes through that. Every person finds him- or herself coming to a place where they realize that they are alone.

When God made humanity, he made us to be with him, to walk with him, to talk with him. He never intended that we be alone in the first place. He meant for us to have a face to face relationship with him.

But humanity sinned and continues to do so. Since we sin we cannot be with God. He is holy and we are not. Our systems are diametrically opposed. Yet we want to. It is our makeup to be with him.

So what to do? How do you solve this dilemma? We want to be with God, God wants us to be with him, but it is impossible. We are sinful and he has no sin.

What was done was that Jesus came. He was God yet human. He was human, yet sinless. And he could touch God and us at the same time. In doing this, he brings us to God and makes us part of his family, the family of God.

We were sinful. Now in him we are sinless because God looks at us through Jesus. We were once far away, now we boldly approach the throne of grace where we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most (Hebrews 4:16). Where once we stood outside, now we are in his presence and stand before him.

He loves us. He has always loved us. But our human condition is such that we can choose. And when people choose, they almost always choose the wrong thing. When that happens, we find ourselves outside of God where neither we not he wants us to be.

But we do not have to stay there. We can choose otherwise. And we can choose to be his children, part of his family, basking in his love, immersed in his grace.

But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:57)

daily java

Daily Java: Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.  Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:33-35)

I recently read an article in Biblical Archaeology Review about a man who was searching for the Jesus of History vs. Jesus of Tradition. I did not agree with many of his conclusions but one was really good.  He said:

“All the Gospels say that once John was arrested, Jesus moved into Galilee. Now that move is very important. He’s going back to Galilee, going back to his own roots, but he’s not going back to settle in Nazareth.
“There’s a famous story in Mark where Jesus is in a house with people gathered around him, and they say to him, “Your mother and brothers are outside waiting for you and calling for you [Mark 3:32].” Mark had made a very unexpected assertion that [his family] thought that Jesus was out of his mind [Mark 3:21–22]. But Jesus does not go out to meet them. Instead he makes this amazing statement, asking “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Those who do the will of my father, he says, are my brothers and sisters and mother [Mark 3:33–35]. In other words, he’s establishing a new kind of family that is based not on kinship, but on following his way of understanding what God’s will is. For me, those are some of the core moments in trying to reconstruct the way I see Jesus developing a new vision within the contemporary varieties of Judaism in Galilee.” (Sean Freyne in Biblical Archaeology Review, November 2010,)

I have seen this as portrayed as insensitive of Jesus in a movie lately. His mother wants to see him and he ignores her and even spurns her. But Jesus was doing something different here. He wasn’t being ugly. He was saying, “my family is greater than just physical”. He was saying that the family of God is not a physical family, but a spiritual family, transcending all earthly ties.

That is a powerful thing. If I am in the family of God, I am in an organism that is greater than any other in the world. It is greater than my own physical family, no matter how much I may love my wife and children. It is greater than any professional organization I belong to, no matter how far-reaching. It moves over the entire world, and for that matter, over time.

I am a member of a family that stretches back to the beginning of time and forwards to the end of time. I count as family members, people who have been dead for millennia and who have not yet been born, and may not be born for millennia. I am part of a family that crosses cultural, physical, national and socio-economic bounds more than any other.

I sit here in my den in Lincoln, NE, knowing that I am spiritually related to a woman in Africa who lives in a hut, with a child in Thailand who fishes with her family for a living, with a man in Europe who is in the government, a man in Australia who is a teacher. My spiritual family is astonishingly far-ranging.

I am a brother to my parents, who are children of God. I am a brother to my wife, who is a devoted follower of God. I am a brother to my grandparents, gone now for many years. I am a brother to my great grandchildren who decide to accept his grace.

The old song says, “I’m so glad I’m a part of the family of God.” And I am. It is great.