GROW!

When I was a young boy, our family took a boat trip out to Blake Island one day.  We parked the boat and explored the nature refuge tucked into the south side of Puget Sound and my imagination soared.  We crossed the island back and forth and roamed and played until I found the single greatest discovery of my pre-pubescent life:  a duck nest.  And not only a nest, but stuck firmly in the middle was a huge duck egg.

The right thing to do would probably have been to leave it alone but somehow I got it in my head that the duck egg had been abandoned, that my finding it was a sign from God, and that I had a new calling in life to take the duck egg home, assist in the duck’s delivery, and have a new pet as a result.  Remember, this was in the 80’s when we weren’t quite as ecologically and environmentally conscious as we are now!  J

So we took the duck nest and egg home and set it up on my desk under a heat lamp.  For hours that night I watched the duck egg under the lamp, waiting to see the little egg crack and out pop my new best friend.  The next night I did the same.  The next night I started getting a bit tired of waiting for the duck to crack so I watched a bit of TV and took a glimpse of the egg from time to time.  The next night I started to almost forget about the duck egg.  Day by day, as the egg refused to hatch, I grew tired with the waiting and watching until eventually I almost forgot about the duck egg completely.  The reality is that with each passing day of nothing changing, I grew tired in the hope of new life.

Lately our church has been doing this sermon series called the Roots of Health.  The moving principle behind the series, and the current trajectory of our church, is that we want our church to be full of healthy disciples living out God’s call in their lives.  So we’re encouraging people to grow into the call of Christ for discipleship.  Each week we’ve been telling people to grow in their faith.  And it sounds great right?  Just grow in your faith!  But my hunch is that people leave church each week with this admonishment only to get in their cars and ask themselves or their spouse, “but how???”  How do I grow?  I’m stuck!  I’m flat!  I’m not moving closer to God and I’m tired of it.  At some level, our desire to change our life gets frustrated and subdued when we don’t see the signs of new life springing up in us.  Like waiting for the duck to hatch, we tend to stop watching when our life doesn’t yield the fruit of change.  To that end, here are some thoughts to encourage you as you seek to grow in your relationship with God currently.

#1  “There are no small days.”  Our head pastor coined the phrase and I loved the admonishment.  We like to think of big “moving days” in our faith when we’ll wake up and everything will be different.  But the bible doesn’t tell that story.  The journey of the Jewish people, God’s chosen, from being captives in Egypt till reaching the Promised Land took 40 years.  Our goal isn’t to change in a day, or arrive at a new destination overnight, but simply to take a step towards God and growth every single day.  Discipleship is a measurement of a million small steps and small decisions as we are formed into being more like God.  Every day grow into this more and more.

#2  Doing it with others is more productive than doing it alone.   The value to community on your faith journey cannot be overstated.  We like to think of ourselves as products of a modern mindset that says its all about just “Me and Jesus.”  Need church?  Need community?  Nah…it’s just me and Jesus.  But the truth as revealed in the bible is that God has called us to be intertwined with others.  When Jesus sent out his disciples to spread the gospel, He sent them in pairs.  He knew that we weren’t meant to walk alone.   People often say to me, “I’m not really into church.  I kind of do my own thing.”  And most of the time I simply ask them, “how is that working out for you?”  It is a rare case when someone is not connected to a local church but continues to flourish in their faith.  We need the inter-connection of community.

#3  Be courageous!  Live counter culturally: This is a hard one for us because at least for me, at my core, I really like to fit in with the crowd.  As we become more like Christ, we will face hard decisions.  Does our life look like Jesus as we seek to be formed by Him?  Or do we look like everyone else in today’s world?  As Christians, we are meant to swim upstream and our life should look different.  We should have strong relationships, we should be serving more, and we should be marked with the joy and love of Jesus Christ.  This year at our church we’ve been focusing on acts of service so that we can point to the things we do instead of just the things we believe.  Because at the end of the day, your beliefs really can be measured by your actions.  Do you believe in Jesus as your savior?  Your life should point to that.

#4  Give.  It will make you grow.  This is also a hard one for us to continue to learn because if you are anything like me, it feels hard to give money away.  But time and time again in my life, as I’ve given a portion of my income back to God in an offering, I have been blessed and transformed by the process of giving.  In our culture today, money becomes a God to us.  Giving back to God puts Him back into the driver’s seat in our life and turns our allegiance away from money and possessions.  Giving is growing.

#5  Show up!  Never underestimate the value of showing up:  When Heather and I were Young Life leaders doing training to new leaders, we would always state this last one and people would be surprised.  Isn’t ministry about delivering the awesome sermon?  Or hitting the final guitar chord as you lead thousands in worship?  No, most of the time real discipleship happens in a million small moments.  When we continue to show up with God, day by day by day, He can slowly form us like a river moving through a canyon.  Change often doesn’t happen in our faith journeys overnight, but over the course of months and years, patterns of following God and showing up ready to receive His love and transformation can mold us into disciples.

At the end of the day, we can’t make the growth in our faith happen- that is God’s job…much like I couldn’t make the duck egg hatch.  It didn’t hatch…it grew rotten until it started to stink.  Much like a Christian faith that isn’t growing, the idea of stasis is a myth.  If we aren’t growing, we are slowly dying.   I don’t know about you, but I want to grow.  And growth happens through putting ourselves into a place where we can receive teaching and instruction and care from the Father God who created us.  James said it in 4:8:  “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”  This week keep drawing near…and watch with anticipation as your faith grows!

Grand Adventures

“Those of you who say you’ve tried Christianity and it doesn’t work and so you’ve walked away?  I say you haven’t tried Christianity.  Not the way Jesus taught.  You’ve tried religion.  And religion alone will always fail you.  But the vibrant life of Christianity?  It’s a grand adventure that awaits.”
-paraphrase Richard Dahlstrom 9/18

Yesterday at Bethany North, we received an impassioned sermon on the roots of health by pastor Richard.  If you missed it, you need to listen to it (found here) as this sets the table for the next few months of sermons at Bethany titled the Roots of Health.  And more than just a sermon series, this sermon sets the course for the coming year at Bethany Church at all 4 locations.  The reality of the Christian faith is that we’re called to become disciples of the Christ.  Remember what Jesus said in John before he left: “You, follow me!”  It’s the point of the whole story of Christianity:  God created us, we choose disobedience and our own paths, God sent Jesus into the world to offer a way home by living with us and eventually dying for us, so that we could follow Him, and our lives would be transformed as we serve God awaiting the future kingdom in the present reality, working here and now to bring Christ’s light and love to a world that desperately needs it.

We as a Christian church have often distilled down the faith to something that Christ did not intend to:  we go to church each week thinking this is Christianity.  Then the rest of our life goes unchanged.  This is not the grand adventure that Christ had in mind.  No as Dietrich Bonheoffer said, “when Christ calls a man (or woman) He bids him come and die.”  Our old life is gone (thank God!) and our new life emerges from the ashes.  The old life of materialism and empty sexual desires and need for self-importance and pride and arrogance and selfishness and anger and greed disappears.  And out of our old life, emerges a new creation, who as a Christian is transformed to live different.

The problem, Richard pointed out, is that our different living often is slow to materialize, and at Bethany, though we’ve opened new campuses and built a new sanctuary and grown and had lots of exciting things going on, our roots of faith need some improvement.  A survey in the spring indicated many of us are still giving far less than we should, serving far less than we should, unsure of our spiritual gifts, still waiting to tell others around us about the faith in Christ that has transformed us.  In essence, a lot of us need to improve our spiritual health.

The good news, and this is truly good news, is that as a church we want to start improving this TOGETHER in the coming year.  All of us…working together to learn our spiritual gifts through an online assessment tool available later this year.  All of us learning more about discipleship and our giving back of our time and money.  All of us learning more about sharing our faith by living passionately for Christ.  All of us buying into the fact that the Christian life isn’t a series of sacrifices or deprivations…no!  The Christian life is a grand adventure where God’s love so imbues us with hope and joy and love and peace that we can’t help ourselves but become agents of change in our homes, on our street, at our job, and in our community. 

This is the joy of being the church.  And though the Christian church has struggled and lurched and lost its way at times, it is still God’s primary tool for bringing the hope of Christ into the world.  Its more than showing up on Sunday at the Spartan Gym at 10 am for worship…. but that is a great place to start.  Its more than joining a community group to meet others…. but that is a great place to start.  It’s more than the Union Gospel Mission sock drive which began this week… but that is a great place to start.  It’s more than giving a little more, opening your bible each day this week, or praying with your spouse on the couch each night.  But these are all great places to start.

Want to be part of a great adventure?  Want new life in Christ that transforms you and makes you an agent of change truly impacting the world?  Take a step with us at Bethany this fall.  Join the adventure!  We want to journey with you!