Stop Taking Those Spiritual Gift Tests (The Path)

Confession time.  I do not like spiritual gift tests.  This is not to say that I don’t believe in spiritual gifts or their value.  Spiritual gifts are real and incredibly valuable to us and to what God is doing in and through us all over the world.  It’s the tests that are no good.  A typical question goes something like this:

32. I enjoy teaching God’s word to groups of people None      A little       Sometimes      Often      Always

Hmmm. I wonder what spiritual gift that is trying to evaluate.  It’s such a mystery.  It’s obvious that it is trying to “help” you determine if you have the gift of teaching. So, if you want to have the gift of teaching, circle always and blammo! You have the gift of teaching.  Spiritual gift tests are more passion evaluators than gift inventories.  I want to be a teacher and I can have the gift according to this test if I answer the obvious questions the right way.

However, there is a big difference between you having a passion for something and you having a skill in that area.  I would even say that there is a difference between having a skill in an area and being spiritually gifted in that area.  Passion means you love something.  A skill means that you are good at it.   A spiritual gift means you have God’s power behind it.

You see, spiritual gifts have spiritual effects.  You can call yourself a teacher, but if no one is learning than you are not a teacher, you are a talker to people.  People can learn information from you and even a new skill and then you are a teacher.  However, when are you a spiritually gifted teacher? You are a spiritually gifted teacher, when you teach and God’s spirit shows up in a big way and people’s lives are changed.  When do you have the gift of hospitality? Not just that you want people to come over to your house.  They also need to feel welcomed and then that hospitality is having a spiritual effect in the lives of the people.

You don’t have the gift of teaching if no one is listening. You don’t have the gift of hospitality if no one enjoys coming to your home.  You don’t have the gift of encouragement if everyone feels worse after talking to you.  You don’t have the gift of discernment if you are always wrong.

So rather than doing a self-evaluation survey. You should give one to your friends for you. You should ask them what they see in you.  Ask them how they have seen God use you in the lives of other people.  See then if that agrees with what you think.  The best evaluation tool is to ask the question, “Where have I seen God move when I minister to others?” Again, knowing what your passionate about is a great thing to know.  That’s a great blog post for another day, but spiritual gifts have spiritual effects.

I believe that I am good at communicating the gospel to lost people.  I understand the theology of the gospel.  I have great illustrations.  I also am a pretty good communicator.  Does that mean I have the gift of evangelism? No it doesn’t.  In fact, I know that I don’t.  Why do I know this? Because people do not very often come to Christ when I share.  I remember in the summer of 1995, my wife and I were on a mission trip to Ukraine.  This was fairly soon after the old Soviet Union opened up to travelers and to missionaries in particular.  Our group was doing a lot of evangelism and people were coming to Christ in large numbers.  Except there was one guy on the team who was not leading anyone to Christ.  Would you like to guess who?

It was very frustrating and discouraging. In the team meetings there would be these great stories and I wouldn’t have one.  I feel like I was sharing very well and explaining the gospel well but nothing.  One afternoon I went out with another team member and they were sharing with someone we had met.  The presentation was a mess.  The gospel was poorly communicated.  I began to doubt my own salvation because I wasn’t sure I understood the gospel anymore.  I looked over at the Ukrainian student and they are crying.  They say they want to receive Christ.  I ask them to explain to me what that means and they proceed to explain the gospel better than it was explained to them .  At the time I was dumfounded.  Now I recognize spiritual gifts.  They have spiritual effects.  My friend had the gift of evangelism.

I on the other hand got to speak at a large group gathering one night and it was amazing.  You could feel the presence of God.  I spoke on the need for Christian fellowship.  I was talking about the early church in Acts 2.  It was an evangelistic message, using fellowship as a motivating tool for people to come to Christ.  After the service, students were talking to Christians all over the room and outside.  Dozens came to Christ that night, being led by people with the gift of evangelism after God had used someone with the spiritual gift of teaching to stir them.  Spiritual gifts have spiritual effects.

So look at the list of spiritual gifts and ask yourself and others, where and when have I seen God move in my life? What was I doing? How was God using me?  There is where you will find your spiritual gifts.

What Does the Rise of Donald Trump Say About Us?

If you watched the early seasons of The Apprentice, then you saw some amazing television.  It was during the prime of the reality TV show competitions and “The Donald” was hilarious.  The attitude, the hair, the one-liners.  He was a character made for reality TV.  It ran its course after a few years and switched to “Celebrity” Apprentice (I think we are ultimately going to have to redefine that word) and Heiid and I lost interest.  I’m stunned it was still on this year, but he is a great TV character.  But Troy, Bill, Omarosa that was some good TV.

So, a few years ago when The Donald started inserting himself into politics, I knew it was going to be good TV at a minimum.  Then, he did it.  He decided to run for president.  I follow politics closely, and guard my personal politics just as closely.  I knew this was going to be interesting.  He would cause a storm and have some great one-liners.  He would get the publicity that he wanted, have a good time and then the “regular” political race would continue.

But then something happened, he became the front-runner…by a lot…in an overwhelming large pool of candidates.  He was/is getting 25% of the Republican primary in a crowded field of 17 candidates.  This makes a brother stop and wonder, how does such a thing happen? What does this say about us and the current state of American politics?

Disclaimers: If you are planning on voting for him, you will probably think I’m slamming him.   If you think he is a big jerk, you will probably think I’m justifying him.  If both groups are a little upset, then I have set the right tone for this.  Also, for the purpose of this piece, his particular politics are irrelevant.  If he had come out as the polar opposite on the issue of immigration, I am coming to believe that the result would have been the same.  The haters would love. The lovers would hate.  Because his personality and approach to the political stage are tapping something inside of us and are the natural result of where our political culture and culture as a whole has been heading.  Final disclaimer: I am not telling you to vote or not vote for him.  I do not believe that is my place or my particular calling to do that.  My thoughts on that are pretty well-documented.  Click on the politics tag at the bottom and read for yourself, if you’d like.

1. He says what he actually thinks. There is something particularly refreshing about someone who just tells you what he thinks in easy to understand language.  For years politicians have talked in a way to make what they say seem vague enough to send the right message to supporters but confuse other people.  They also give themselves the wiggle room they need to get out of something that they said if it turns out to be unpopular later.  They intentionally obfuscate in order to be able to say later, “You may have thought that’s what I said, but what I meant was…” They can put any number of things at the end of that sentence depending what is expedient.  All sides of the spectrum have grown weary of that and are looking for someone who will just “shoot straight” with them.  If The Donald is anything, he is clear.  This leads to the next one.

2. The end of respectful disagreements is almost dead if not already dead. When is the last time you heard someone in politics or in much of anything say, “Allow me to respectfully disagree,” “I see your point but please allow me to explain why I see it differently,” “Can we agree to disagree?”  Nope, that’s not what you are going to hear.  Instead we get, “Allow me now to show you what an idiot you are,” “I could see your point if I were an idiot, but I’m not so…” “Can we agree that you are an idiot?”  Our thinking has become so polarized that we can no longer believe that there are good-hearted intelligent people who see things differently than me.  Don’t believe me? Check your Facebook wall or any cable news network, not just the one that THEY like, the one you like too.  In a world where people who disagree with me are immoral or stupid, we become attracted to someone who will just “tell it like it is.”  I think they are idiots and I want someone who will say that they are idiots.  Which leads to the third.

3. He is unapologetic. We have decided that we are sick of people who back down when they are pushed.  Say what you mean, say it strong and don’t say your sorry.  The Donald has no problem saying what he thinks, saying it strongly and not backing down if someone is offended.  Whether he is referencing POW’s, female moderators of debates or simply people who disagree with him, he will not back down or apologize.  He has said that he has never sought God’s forgiveness.  If that’s the case, I wouldn’t think that Megyn Kelly or Jorge Ramos should be waiting by the phone.  We have been building toward this for a while as well.  George W. Bush multiple times during his presidency said that he couldn’t think of any mistakes that he had made.  President Obama followed that up by saying his greatest mistake was not doing a good enough job telling people in the right way that what he was doing was right.

We take arrogance and call it strength.  “Well if you admit that you did something wrong, THEY will make an ad slamming you, so you can’t.”  I get it and this is where we are then.  We decide that if THEY won’t back down, WE won’t back down.  I’m not going to give THEM anything.  So humility and honesty are considered vices not virtues.  I want to be led by someone who makes mistakes, knows that and then fixes them.  I don’t want to be spun and told up is down and down is up.  However, that is where we are.  Until that changes, we can expect our candidates to only get more brash and arrogant.  While some of that isn’t all bad, it certainly isn’t all good either.

Bonus:

4. He is giving political speeches in a suit and a baseball cap. Who doesn’t love that?

5. He’s a celebrity. I believe we are just a few years away from exclusively electing celebrities as president.  No further comment here.  A celebrity culture rant may come later.  I’ll just leave you with this.  President Kanye West.

Love Others Like You Love Yourself, Even When It Hurts

Loving people can be easy.  It’s easy when we already like the people and they’ve never really hurt us.  It’s also easy if we don’t really hear what Jesus said in the 2nd greatest commandment.  “Love people like you love yourself.”  That is a tremendous and deep concept and it forces us to think about the way that we love ourselves and then apply that to other people.  It should force us to think about both the magnitude with which we love ourselves and the ways in which we love ourselves.  Obviously, we love ourselves a lot.  Even those of us who struggle with self-esteem, we are the people that we think the most about, try to help the most, are most worried about, etc. What if we thought about and helped and served and loved people as much as we do those things for ourselves?

It’s not just degree.  There are ways that we love ourselves that can be helpful in our understanding of what God has called us to.  I’ll mention 3.

1) I always do what is in my own best interest.  I never (intentionally) do something that I don’t believe is in my best interest.  Even when I sacrifice what I want for someone else, it’s because I believe it is best for me to be that kind of person.  Even if I were to hurt myself on purpose, it would be because I believe that I deserve it.  Everything I do is put through a grid of “Is this good for me?”  What if we used that same grid to consider the way that we treated others?  What would my relationships look like if I only did what was in their best interest?

2) I believe the best in me. I know that I make mistakes but I always have reasons. The bad things that I do are never as bad as you think they are.  If you only understood, then you would know that I’m still a good person.  That’s how we view ourselves but not how we view others.  We look at they way that they hurt us through the worst lenses.  I’m a good person with reasons for what I do.  You are a bad person with lame justifications and excuses. What if we chose to believe the best possible interpretation for what someone else is doing and worked hard to give everyone the benefit of the doubt?

3) I always give me another chance. I have never exhausted the grace that I am willing to give myself.  I have done more damage to myself than anyone else.  In fact, I have probably done more damage to myself than everyone else combined has done to me.  However, no matter how many times I have hurt me, I’m always giving me another chance.  I know that I didn’t mean it and that I’m going to turn it around soon.  However, if you hurt me a couple of times, then I’m done with you. What if we were always willing to give people another chance?

Those thoughts are all well and good, I know, when we are talking about people that we have a good relationship with that we need to love better, forgive better.  These are great tips for improving existing, relatively healthy relationships.  But what about those relationships that are just bad.  How do we love like ourselves those people that are the most unlovable? How do we love those that have hurt us repeatedly and wisdom would tell us that nothing is going to change?

1) Know the difference between mandatory and optional relationships.  You can’t be all done with your kids or your spouse (Cases of abuse being a counterexample.  Talk to a trusted friend, counselor or pastor in those cases and get help now).  God requires you to love and serve them. You cannot remove yourself from some relationships.  I know they continue to hurt you, but God’s love and forgiveness are unconditional and he is calling us to love our family in the same way.

2) Sometimes the best thing that you can do for a person is to create some real distance.  If the relationship is doing real damage, it is in their best interest to step back from a relationship where all they seem to do is cause pain.  You can believe the best in them by believing that with some distance and boundaries they will get better.  You are also forgiving them and giving them another chance in a more healthy context to get better.

3) Do not try and do this alone.  Too often we dismiss people when we are just being selfish and unforgiving.  Other times, we are trying to make something work and we don’t have the strength to do it.  In both kinds of circumstances, you need a trusted friend to lean on, to get counsel from and to just be a shoulder to cry on sometimes.

4) However, know the difference between a buddy and a friend.  A buddy will back up whatever you say.  A friend will challenge you when you are the problem.

5) Live deeply in the grace and forgiveness that God has given you.  You can’t do it alone.  You can’t even do it with just a friend.  You need to draw on the power and the experience of the love and grace that God has shown you.  We love because he first loved us.  It is the same with forgiveness.

God is calling us to love each other deeply and to model his love to the world.  The model becomes even stronger when people see the power of true forgiveness and restoration.  Don’t give up.

Christian Book Recommendations

At The Grove Church on Sunday, I recommended that some people needed to buy and read a theology book.  I also talked about some books that challenge may way of thinking.  I also talked about authors that I agree with, but they still sharpen me as well.  Here are some specific recommendations.

Does God Really Have a Plan for My Life? (The Path)

I was at Student Mobilization’s first Christmas Conference in 1992 and we were meeting in the banquet room of Bonanza right on the strip in Branson, Missouri.  One of the highlights of that is being able to pay $1 at the beginning of each day and get soda with free refills all day long!  I was a college student, back then it was the little things, not that I would say no now to all I could drink soda for a dollar. It was an incredibly fun week.  My team made it to the finals of the 3 on 3 basketball tourney. I was there with some great friends from school and was able to reconnect with new friends that I had made earlier that summer at a summer project called Kaleo.  But more than all the fun that I had and more than the joy of being able to connect with friends, this conference in Branson was a powerful week in my life.  God was confirming in my life that he wanted more from me than what I considered to be the normal Christian life.  I heard speaker after speaker talk about what it truly meant to follow God. I began to more fully understand that God did not simply want church attenders and generally religious people. God wanted my whole life.  I was being remade.  I could tell that my life was never going to be the same again.

Then one of the speakers introduces to us the idea of unreached people.  Unreached people in missions terminology are groups and cultures that are far removed from the gospel.  There is no church among the people capable of reaching the culture for Jesus Christ.  These people are relatively hopeless, not just in that they don’t know Christ but that for the most part they don’t know anyone who knows anyone who could explain the gospel to them.  I was totally overwhelmed.  I had never been confronted with that level of need before.  Between that and how God was changing my heart about discipleship, I knew that God wanted to use me to change the world.  God wanted me to make a difference in the lives of people who were unreached.

The last night included a lot of powerful worship. They were preparing us for a night where we were to reflect on the week and commit to apply what God was laying on our hearts.  They didn’t want us to get all fired up and go back to school and get into the same routines.  The last speaker spoke and encouraged us to consider what God wanted us to do. He knew that God was speaking to us and he wanted us to think about what specific ideas and applications we were taking away from the conference.  After some time of reflection they wanted us to share.  People were supposed to stand and speak out what their life application for the conference was.  After a few people stood and shared, I boldly stood up and declared that I was going to be a missionary to an unreached people. In that moment I knew that’s what God wanted me to do, so I stood up and told everyone.

Over 20 years have passed since that moment and what I declared has never happened. While I suppose that there is still time left for me to do that, I now believe that honest heartfelt declaration from a 21 year old is not the direction that God has for my life or necessarily that he ever had.  God was definitely speaking and leading.  God was telling me to make some changes and was reshaping my life, and I truly believed that was what God wanted.  Now, 20+ years later, God has reshaped my life in many ways because of that season in my life, just not by going to an unreached people.  So I wonder what really happened? I look back and ask, “What was God really saying?”

I also think about the people all over the room that didn’t stand up.  Not only did they not stand up, but they hear messages like that and think “There’s no way that applies to me. God doesn’t think of me like that.”  They do not believe that God truly has a big plan for their lives.

Two types of people both struggling to determine what God really wants from them.  One, not truly believing that God wants to use them.  The other is incredibly fired up but life took him somewhere different than what he thought.  Are you either of these? Did you once have big plans and dreams of how God was going to use you, how you were going to make a difference? Then life got in the way, life zigged when you wanted to zag, and you are left confused wondering what went wrong. Or are you someone who doesn’t believe that you are someone that God truly wants to use? Calling is for those people and you are just an ordinary person living an ordinary life.

Regardless of where you are now and how you got there.  Know this: God has big plans for your life and wants to use you to change the world.  I’m going to spend a lot of time on here for the next few months talking about how we can discover what that plan and path is and how to navigate the ups and downs and twists and turns that we will face trying to get there and stay there. I encourage you to subscribe so that we can walk together discovering God’s path for our lives.

Ashley Madison and Josh Duggar: When Christians Fall

Allow me to be the next person to weigh in on Ashley Madison and Josh Duggar. In the early days of the original controversy, there were 3 types of thoughts.  1. Grace and forgiveness 2. Judgment and condemnation 3. Some kind of innovative 3rd way position.  In part 2 (hopefully of 2) of the controversy, all we have is #2.  People are taking this opportunity of his public failing of his wife to criticize and condemn a lifestyle that they always thought was a little weird but made good television.  We stand on a high horse and declare that he deserved it.  We “other” the discussion and distance ourselves from it and make ourselves feel better.  We make a conscious decision to do what we almost always do, which is to believe that we have nothing to learn from this.  “They” have these problems.  I don’t.

As always, we choose to not learn the right lessons.  We choose to speak loudly about the lessons that other people should learn.  We fail to do the hard but necessary work to ask what I need to learn from this.

(Disclaimers: It’s difficult to talk about this when they are local.  I’ve met them. I know people that legitimately know them.  They are real people where I live. Second, I believe that my condemnation of molestation and adultery are a matter of the public record. Nothing I say here should be considered “giving him a pass” or “normalizing” his sin.  However, I have no stone to throw, certainly not publicly. It’s not my place. Why I don’t is one of the points of this post.)

There are two things that have been on my heart as I have been processing all of the controversy surrounding Josh Duggar (3 if you count the sheer lack of compassion and understanding given to his wife and kids, but that’s a blog post for someone else.)  These issues have more to do with me and us than him.  The first issue that has been on my heart is that your sin will find you out.  You may believe that you are keeping it hidden, and you may be for a little while.  However, your sin will find you.  Maybe not today or tomorrow or even this year, but it always catches up with you.  This pattern has been repeated way too many times over the years.  Consider how many public Christians have fallen in tremendously awful ways over the years.  Someone rises to prominence but the whole time they are hiding some sin.  The pressure of their fame increases the pressure which makes the sin worse, which makes them try to hide it even more.  Then the light shines on it.  They are exposed and they fall.

For every “famous” Christian that this happens to, there are thousands of regular people following the same pattern.  It doesn’t show up in your Facebook feed, but it shows up in family courts all over the world, families being destroyed because of a secret sin.  We are no different.  If you have a sin that you are hiding, the light will find you.  God loves you too much to allow you to continue to destroy yourself in private.  He wants you to be free from sin.

So if this is you, make the decision to let someone know.  Ask someone for help.  Put a little light on it, before it happens to you.  Surround yourself with help.  Your sin will either find you or you can humbly take it to people.  Either way, when it comes to light, you are going to need people to come around you and help you and restore you.

This leads to the second thought. Be careful how you talk and act toward others.  When you see the sin of others, how do you respond? Do you respond with compassion and hope or anger and judgment?  In the often misunderstood and misused passage about judgment, Jesus says this:

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

So, the way that you judge is how you will be judged.  If I see someone in sin and I say, “That’s not good.  You should stop. How can I help you?” I can expect that is how someone will judge me when it is my turn.  If I angrily condemn people, I should expect to be angrily condemned when it is my turn.  Again, don’t be fooled.  Your turn is coming. When your sin is discovered, people will respond to you the way that you have responded to people.

Why has the response to Josh Duggar not been compassionate? It seems pretty clear that he has some deep rooted sexual issues that messed him up as a kid and continue to this day.  Why is there not a call for helping him deal with whatever these deep issues are?  The reason is that he never seemed to show the same compassion.  In his role with the Family Research Council, he said and behaved in ways that made many people feel strongly condemned.  He didn’t show compassion and grace.  When it was his turn, he put out public statements asking for compassion and grace, and very little was to be found.  He is reaping what he sowed.

When my time comes (and no I don’t have an Ashley Madison account and I have never cheated on my wife) and some sin of mine is exposed (I do sin though.  Both publicly and privately), I want the people who know me to love me and help restore me.  How can I be sure that will happen? By doing the same for people now.  Sin is real and destructive.  I do no one any favors by not calling sin what it is.  However, I also do no one a favor, including me, by raining down condemnation either.

So that is why I have no stone to throw.  It is why when stories like this (and worse) come into my office, I offer love, prayers and help. I don’t tell them what they did is ok, but I also don’t literally or figuratively throw stones.  Instead I try to offer the same compassion of Jesus who said “sin no more” and offered the love and help to people to make that command a reality.

What is the Greatest Thing You Have Ever Done?

In the series we started at The Grove Church yesterday, we are looking at the Great Commandments and the Great Commission.  These are two foundational passages that should define what  a church is and what it means to be a follow of Jesus.

In Matthew 22:36, Jesus is asked this question:

36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

As I was preparing this message, before I could even get to the answer, I found myself dwelling a lot on the question.  What is the GREATEST command?  Said another way, “What is the greatest thing that you can do?”  This led me to the more personal question, “What would I say is the greatest thing that I have ever done?”

There are so many ways to answer that question. My mind always goes to the time I hit a half-court shot in overtime to send our high school basketball team to the playoffs in the last game of the year.  (If only the internet had existed in 1990, I would so be linking to that article right now) Why is that great?  It’s incredibly difficult for one and incredibly rare.  It had significant consequences for the team.  However we all know how this falls short.  It was great but it’s impact was short-lived and small comparable to other great things someone can do.

Maybe the greatest thing that I have ever done is to adopt a daughter from foster care. It is definitely near the top of things that have made me the happiest.  It also has had significant impact in all of the lives of our family. It reflects God’s deep heart and love for the orphan which is reflected all throughout Scripture.

Maybe that’s too narrow though, maybe if I were to broaden it out.  Perhaps the greatest thing that I have ever done is to be a great husband and dad, or to be a pastor, or helping lead people to Christ.  All of those things have and will have great and deep impact in the lives of people and definitely feel great to me.

What all of these candidates for “greatest” have in common are they are things that I did or do to serve other people (half-court shot included, I suppose).  Jesus, on the other hand, had a completely different answer.  He didn’t give a do/don’t do command.  The command didn’t involve serving other people.  His answer was this:

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’” 38 This is the first and greatest commandment.39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

When asked what the greatest thing that we could do, he gave a relational command.  We need to love God with everything that we are.  The greatest thing that we can do is love God.  That is so counter-intuitive to what we believe makes someone or something great.  However, God is the greatest, so connecting to him is great.  Also, it was what we created to do.  We were created for him and by him.

Even last night, after preaching on this 3 times, I was still thinking about this and this illustration came to me.   What is the greatest part of your house? Some might say the kitchen/dining room.  Wherever it is that you and connect with each other for dinner is the greatest place.  Perhaps it is the living room where the best family memories or made.  If you have small children, it might be the private solace that comes from the bathroom.  (Just me? Ok. Never mind)  It may be the bedroom (Uh.  Again, never mind)

The greatest part of the house is the foundation.  Without it, nothing else in the house can function properly.  It is the piece of the home, by which all other pieces are made possible and better and functional.  We take the foundation of our house for granted, and that’s ok.  Your foundation doesn’t care.  However, we cannot take for granted the foundational relationship by which every other part of our lives rests.  That is our greatest relationship and loving him is the greatest thing that we can do.

Why do you believe that loving God is the greatest commandment?

Making Room–I love Roots

So I’m perusing the Facebooks this morning and I see a picture of our youth group, Roots.  Nothing particularly unusual about the picture. It’s a picture of a couple of great guys, Rocky Hedrick and Connor Phillips leading worship.  Next to that you see the students and leaders worshipping.  Underneath that, there is some sort of game, I suppose.  It looks like Chase Burnett is doing some kind of dance.  (I know I said picture  singular, but it’s one of those cool Instagram things with multiple pictures together in one. Anyway…)

Something struck me. It hit me how blessed we are by Chris Martin and his team.  We are blessed to have great kids.  It is a privilege that we have to love and serve them.  God has tremendously blessed us.  I started tearing up.  I feel completely overwhelmed by what God has done and is doing here at The Grove Church.  I hope that when you think about what has happened over the last two years that you feel the same way.  You don’t have to tear up, I don’t guess.  I’m weird like that.  I do hope that you take some time though to think about how great it is that over the last two years you have been able to be a part of a church that has been able to love and serve hundreds of people.

As we move into this new season, I can only imagine what God has for us next.  How many youth will we be able to love and serve? How many kids? How many students? Families?  A bigger room is nice. Lobbies are nice. So are parking lots.  But I see the faces, the faces of people who need God, who need fellowship and encouragement. We are going to be able to make room for people who need God. I feel privileged to be a part of that and hope you do too.

Making Room–God’s Heart for the “One”

Well the Making Room campaign is nice and all, but I’ve really got one thing on my mind.  No it’s not the election either.  Today is Laylah’s birthday.  If you don’t know, and I’m not sure how you couldn’t, we brought her home from the hospital when she was four days old as a foster child and had the privilege to adopt her just about a month ago.  Now she is a part of our forever family.  Since that’s what’s on my mind today but I’m supposed to talk about Making Room, I’ll tie them together somehow.

It’s pretty common for people to ask either Heidi or me about how unusual/awesome it is that we love her so much.  The implication is that because she is adopted, it must be different somehow.  We get that, but we don’t feel different.  She is ours and we love her with our whole hearts.  I don’t even like any expression that starts with, “We love her just like she were…”  She’s not like one of our own or anything like that.  She IS our daughter in every way.  I don’t know that I could have predicted that we would feel this way, but there is no denying that is how all four of us feel about her.

This last year with her has taught me so much about the love of God.  If we, as his adopted sons and daughters, are loved by him as much (even more!) as I love her, then I believe that we have totally underestimated his love for us.  He loves us with an overwhelming passion.  In addition, he wants more and more people to be his children.  He wants to adopt more and more of us.  He loves the whole world, that’s why he sent his son (John 3:16)

Jesus illustrated this love in the story of the lost sheep (Luke 15:1-7).  In that parable, a shepherd has 100 sheep and 99 of them are fine but one is missing.  He then leaves the 99 to search for the 1 lost sheep.  If that is the model of God’s love for us, then we need to reflect that.  We need to sacrifice in order to go and find one person who is lost.  This is why we are moving, this is why we are Making Room.  The “99” of us are fine, but God’s heart is strong for those who don’t know.  He loves the “1.”

God is always searching for the one.  He is always reaching.  Let us have that same heart.

Making Room–Respond

There is a word that keeps coming to my mind when I think about the Making Room campaign.  The word is respond.  This decision to make a move and consequently raise money is about us responding to what God has done in and through our church over the last two years.  We have seen our church grow in amazing ways.  We have seen people come to Christ. God is changing lives. People are taking the love of Christ all over the world.

Every time we have added a service, parked inconveniently, stopped going to the 10am service, we are responding to the growth. We are taking steps to make it easier for new people to come and connect at The Grove Church.  Now we need to respond again.  We had 855 people at church on Sunday.  God is continuing to bless us with more people who want to worship God and follow Jesus at our church, and now we need to respond to that.

That is why we are calling the campaign Making Room.  There are more people in NWA that need Jesus and would be able to connect with him at our church if we were only willing to make room for them.  So how will we respond?  Let’s ask God how he wants us to respond.  We as a leadership team believe that God wants us to respond by making this move.  Now it is up to each of us individually to ask God how he wants us to respond.  We need to pray.  We need to listen to what God has to say.  Then we need to have the courage to respond.

For more information on the Making Room campaign, go to http://www.thegrovechurch.org/makingroom/

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