"It"

I'm reading this book called It:How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It, written by the founder of LifeChurch.tv Craig Groeschel.  I highly recommend reading this book as it helps to uncover essential truths about what it means to be a church that is genuine and real- a church that gets it!

In one chapter Groeschel talks about the unnecessary and damaging reality of competition between churches.  He draws on a quote from a seventeenth-century Puritan minister named Richard Baxter who writes:  "Is it not enough that all the world is against us, but we must also be against one another?  O happy days of persecution, which drove us together in love, whom the sunshine of liberty and prosperity crumbles into dust by our contentions!"

Amen brother.

I am convinced that it is our petty insecurities that cause us to bicker among ourselves.  Our insecurities that cause us to doubt our own foundations enough that we need to build huge fences around us in order to compensate for our lack of trust in a living God who invites us into relationship.  I also think that our longstanding approach to the Christian religion has been so influenced by appeals to reason that we have inadvertently adopted an "us/vs/them" approach to everything.  After all, if we believe in our specific doctrines, and someone else has different doctrines, then somebody must be wrong!

Yeah, I think we are all wrong in some ways. . . .after all, if the Truth that we are all so hell-bent in defending is actually known through a relationship, then maybe all the aspect of what makes a relationship real and genuine are needed to understand what truth is in the first place!

Groeschel points us in the right direction when he says: "It is not about your student ministry, your children's ministry,  your new logo or website.  And it is certainly not about your name.  It is about Jesus.  There's no other name under heaven that's anywhere close to his name.  It's all about him."

Groeschel uses "it" to describe that special something that exists when people are living in genuine relationship with each other and with Jesus.  And I have to agree with him,  it is really all about Jesus.

I wonder what would change around us if we lived with that kind of thinking--that the only thing that really counts is Jesus?

Maybe we would defend ourselves less, and love a bit more.  Maybe we would spend less time in meetings and more time meeting people in relationship.  Maybe we would care less about distinguishing ourselves from other churches and become carefree about sharing in the abundance of God's love with other believers and with those who need Jesus more than anything.

Jesus, help us to live in "it"--that place where we know you and are known.  Help us to live with arms open wide, and no more fists, but hands that are willing to be lent to someone in need.  Help me to overthrow all the deep-seated ways of thinking that prevent me from seeing what real life in you looks like, and help us all to be humble enough to receive--really receive You.

BT