Creation Care

The Church God Uses

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What is “the Church God uses,” and how do we become that Church?

Lately, I’ve had numerous encounters with fellow believers who espouse a Christianity that makes no sense to me. It makes no sense because it misses entirely the role of the Church in the world. How that’s possible, I can’t understand. The New Testament can’t be understood unless we grasp what God intended when He called the Church into being.

To become the Church God uses, we must rediscover the one distinction that sets the Church apart from all other groups and institutions on this planet. We can talk about what the Church does, its commission, its command of the things of God, but none of those define the Church.

What makes the Church The Church ? The Holy Spirit.

Have we forgotten the mind-blowing reality of Pentecost? The Eternal Creator God came and indwelt men and women! He sealed them for eternity as His people. He empowered them with charismata by His Holy Spirit. The charge Jesus Christ gave could now be fulfilled because He lived inside those who believed on His name!

The Muslims don’t have the Holy Spirit. The Hindus don’t have the Holy Spirit. The Rotary Club doesn’t have the Holy Spirit. The United Nations doesn’t have the Holy Spirit.

The Church of Jesus Christ alone has the Holy Spirit! That radical truth quakes the world and demolishes every misconception we hold about the task Christ charged those of us who have the Holy Spirit.

The Lord speaks:

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
—Acts 1:8

The transcendent power of the Holy Spirit took a handful of human rabble and used them to turn the world on its head! God-filled people tore down the wisdom of the philosophers. God-filled people raised the dead. God-filled people touched the untouchable and loved the unlovable. Why? Because God put His Holy Spirit in them—and us today–to accomplish His will on earth.

Christ gave us a commission and provided Himself living in us to make it happen. All we must do is say yes to that commission.

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

—2 Corinthians 5:18-20a

He gave us the ministry of reconciliation. He didn’t claim that ministry for Himself, but charged us to do it! And we can do it because He empowers us by His Holy Spirit.

Think of it—we are His ambassadors!

An ambassador comes in the name of the king of his nation, for the king has empowered the ambassador as his full representative. The ambassador embodies the law of the king, the words of the king, the ministrations of the king, and the power of the king, for the king Himself has imbued the ambassador with his title. When others receive the ambassador in their homes and palaces, it’s as if they receive the king himself.

Do we understand this, Church? Do we understand our ambassadorship as the people who minister King Jesus in all His glory? Do we understand what He has given us and the price He paid for it so that we can establish His Kingdom?

Some would say the need for fully-empowered ambassadors passed away once the initial establishment of the Church came to fruition. But that’s a grievous error. For the Church of Jesus Christ is forever being established until the Great Day of the Lord when He comes again in glory. The Church is still being established in people groups and nations that have never before heard the Gospel. And the Church is still being established from generation to generation. Because the Church is perpetually being established on earth, we ambassadors of Christ continue to be imbued with all the gifts, truths, and power to meet the commission of Christ as those first Christians on the day of Pentecost. None of those tools and gifts used to establish the first church have passed because the Church continues to be established!

For as Peter quoted from the Prophet Joel on that Day:

“‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'”
—Acts 2:17-21

The empowerment of the Church to do the work of Christ continues unbroken and in full until the perfect King and Kingdom come in full revelation on the Day of the Lord, just as it says in the Scriptures. We are His ambassadors in the complete charge and power that He gave us until the end of time.

And we are to do the work.

But some don’t believe this.

If you’re a parent, you know that sometimes kids don’t always do what you ask them. Take cleaning a room. You ask the child to do the work of cleaning the room, you provide garbage bags, dusters, shelves and closets, and even a vacuum. And yet how many times have we all heard that precious little child look us square in the eye and say, “No, you do it!”

I think I speak for every parent here when I say that insolence doesn’t make mom and dad happy.

But it’s worse than that. Far worse.

Imagine that you literally wrote the book on cleaning. All knowledge and power to clean resides in you. You then tell your child that you will make the cleaning a snap to do because you will come live inside him/her and make it possible to do the work, even if it seems impossible. You lay your hands upon your child and confer all your cleaning skills in a moment. Afterwards, your moppet looks you square in the eye, folds those little arms, and says, “No, you do it!”

Watching, waiting to see who will do the workFolks, sad to say, that’s today’s Church. God gave us His Holy Spirit to work through us, but we continue to resist doing the work. We keep going back to the Father and telling Him He needs to do the work Himself. Even though He empowered us to do it by His Spirit, we’re sitting this one out. Or we’re picking and choosing when He can work through us and when He can’t, asking Him to bypass us to do the work when it seems too tough.

I’ve said this more times on this blog than I care to think, but if the Church doesn’t do the work, why do we think God’s going to step in and bypass us to get it done? When the widows and orphans of the Book of Acts needed to be fed, did God do it by raining down manna from heaven? No! He used the Church to feed them because God tasked the Church with that job and empowered them to do it.

Take a look at one man the Lord chose to do that work:

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch.

—Acts 6:1-5

And Stephen, full of grace and power, was doing great wonders and signs among the people. Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called), and of the Cyrenians, and of the Alexandrians, and of those from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and disputed with Stephen. But they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking.
—Acts 6:8-10

God chose a man full of the Holy Spirit, an ambassador of His Kingdom, to wait tables filled with the lowest of the low, the widows and orphans of Palestine. Why? Because He trusts that kind of man to do the work.

Folks, God equips us for a reason: to do the work. We can’t sit back and act as if He’ll bypass us to do it if we sit this one out. Nor can we tell Him we don’t want Him to use us in impossible or supernatural ways. If that’s the way we think, then we should pack up the Church and go home.

The Scriptures exist so we can do the work:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
—2 Timothy 3:16-17

Faith exists so we can do the work:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.
—James 2:14-18

The Church God uses understands this. It understands it’s empowered by God to do the work. It knows that apart from God we can do nothing, but it also knows we do not stand apart from God! He lives in us by His Spirit, and He is perpetually rewarding those who do the work with a larger container to hold His poured-out Spirit. And from that growing container, greater works will be done so that even the mountain cannot remain if told to be cast into the sea.

The priest and Levite who passed by the robbery victim lying near death on the side of the road were of Israel, but they didn’t do the work of their God. Instead, they passed the work back to God and insisted that He do it. But the Samaritan, filled with the kind of love that only the Holy Spirit can instill, saw the need and did the work. He didn’t pray to know what to do. He saw the need, understood the love of God within him, and did the work. He didn’t need to ask if he should do the work, because the Lord had already said yes. And the Lord always says yes to doing the work.

Every day, God brings others in desperate straits into our lives. They might not know Christ. They might be destitute. They might be facing disease or discouragement. God gave us His Spirit to do the work. His Spirit does not change, nor does He flinch in the face of the work. He empowers to do the work today exactly as He did 2000 years ago because the work has not changed and neither has He. We have to trust the Spirit.

If we want to be the Church God uses, we have to do the work. If we want to be the Church God uses, we must see the need and meet the need. If we want to be the Church God uses, we must not toss the work back to Him to do apart from us, but understand that He will work through us because He lives in us. That’s our reason to exist. That’s our worship.

If we want to be the Church God uses, if we truly want to be with all our hearts, we will be.

Are we ready?

Murder in My Backyard

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And to Adam [God] said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
—Genesis 3:17-19

I turn into a brutal murderer this time of year. Ask the tens of thousands of victims I killed just this week. I’ve got a bucketful of rotting corpses sitting on my patio that I’ll be adding to in just an hour or so.

My preferred method of dispatching my victims? Suffocation. They trash around for a couple minutes and then its lights out—forever. And nothing gives me more pleasure.

Hey, it’s them or me.

You see, it’s Japanese Beetle season here at Edelen Acres.

Being organic fruit farmers ain’t easy. About the only things that kill Japanese Beetles outright are pesticides strong enough to kill a motorcycle gang or the traditional method of dealing with them by hand. So that’s what we do. Lacemaking, the Japanese Beetle wayWe pick many of them by hand and dump them into a jar of soapy water. The soap plugs their breathing holes and that’s that. It’s a lot of work, but weirdly satisfying, too.

We divert many of the beetles by stationing a couple pheromone traps far away from the trees. The first year we used the traps, we had them too close to our trees and they ate the trees anyway. This year I put them in the middle of nowhere on our land and that seems to work far better.

I’m using a natural kaolin clay mixture to coat our cherry trees, the hardest hit of our fruit varieties. The first year we had the trees in, we took a day trip over to the county next to us to visit the Amish general stores, only to get home and find that in one afternoon the beetles had eaten our tender cherry trees leaves down to lace. One day. We tried natural pyrethrin (as opposed to synthetic) powders that summer, but the bugs ate the leaves and then died. Didn’t see the point in applying pesticides, even organic ones, if the beetles eat the leaves and then die. The end result is still a bunch of eaten up leaves and a highly distressed plant. You’ve got to stop the beasts before they eat anything and pesticides are not going to work when you’ve got several hundred Japanese beetles coating your tree. If each one takes a hundred bites before the pesticide does them in, your tree’s done for.

We put up netting last year. However, the trees grew so fast the branches deformed against the netting. Now we’ve got a few trees with branches that look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. Plus, netting a big tree is a lesson in futility. Beetles will find the smallest gaps in the netting and they’re in by the droves.

So I’m trying the kaolin clay barrier. It seems to work well. We’ve been under assault by the beetles for about ten days and my cherries have hardly been touched. When it rains, though, it has to be re-applied. Still, it’s natural and washes right off. They use kaolin in makeup. Obviously not a health threat. I suppose you could use it to thicken gravy, but it has a certain yuck factor. 😉 But if the beetles don’t like eating it, that’s fine by me.

Talk to me about that curse in Genesis and I’ll tell you just how much a curse it is. Weeds. pests, drought, even fire. We’ve had a drought going on in this area and the farmers all have that anxious look. Sure, it’s rained, but five minutes of sprinkling followed by a clear blue sky and a hot sun ain’t gonna do it. Downpour. That’s what we need right now. Don’t need more stinking non-native Japanese Beetles or any other non-native beasties. Ask me about the non-native, invasive weeds we get around here, too.

God had a plan and we threw a huge wrench in it didn’t we? We had our own ideas, but consider the outcome.

That kind of arrogance lives on. You can see it in farming. Pesticides coat our food and pool in the fat stores in our bodies. They linger for decades in the soil. They run off into our water supplies and poison the fauna. Haven’t seen a frog or salamander lately? They’re the canaries in the coal mine, folks. Our man-made pesticides killed them off. And now the true pests are resistant to what we spray. We thought we had an answer but it’s not a very good one.

Scientists splice jellyfish genes into corn and then tell us nothing’s wrong with that. Then those jellyfish genes wind up moving into the genetic structure of other grasses surrounding our corn fields. We solve one problem to create another, another that may well be far worse than the original.

God’s given us natural ways to combat problems. We just need to trust them.

It’s like that in every aspects of our lives, isn’t it? Sometimes the old, simple ways are the best ways. But we don’t trust them. Science tells us otherwise and we get paranoid that we won’t keep up with the times. Well, the times they might well be a-changin’, but the wise man doesn’t give up wisdom to suit the age. Remember, Adam listened to the wrong voice in a certain situation and look where it got us.

Our churches launch some guaranteed program backed by the slickest marketing and the best sound bites from the hottest church leaders and we hope and hope. A couple years later, that program stands forgotten. Sure, it was billed as the pesticide for whatever plagued us, but it wasn’t God’s way, was it? No fruit.

It’s all about the fruit. If all our work produces no fruit, then we’re just being wasteful. Sadly, that’s what a lot of churches are doing, just wasting time, money, resources, and people’s patience.

I think our problems with patience underlie the greater issue here. Yes, people get upset when the newfangled program bears no fruit, but it was sterile from the get-go. What people need is patience for the simple ways that work, the real discipleships that spans decades, not months. You try too hard to rush the fruit and you wind up with tasteless fruit. Think your typical grocery store here. Sure, you bought a package of mass-produced, industrial-strength strawberries. But they taste more like straw than berries.

We may be doing the same with our disciplemaking process. Better to go local, go organic, be patient with the old ways that served us for eons—even when it comes to making disciples.

God knows we have enough spiritual pests out there, but we can’t poison our young “plants” in our attempts to kill the weeds or wipe out the bugs.

Unless…

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Unless...My favorite Dr. Seuss book is The Lorax. The eponymous main character looks something like an angry groundhog with a walrus mustache. Claiming to speak for the mute trees, he stands in the gap when the story’s narrator, The Once-ler, rides into the pristine forest with profit on his mind. As the Once-ler has his way with the world, despoiling every last square inch of land, chopping down every tree, forcing the forest creatures out, only the Lorax remains to stand up to him.

Many years later, in relating the sad tale of the destruction of the last truffula tree to a boy, the chastened Once-ler speaks these haunting words:

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance…
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance…
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.

And I’ll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.

And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word…
UNLESS.
Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn’t guess.

That was long, long ago. But each day since that day
I’ve sat here and worried and worried away.
Through the years, while my buildings
have fallen apart, I’ve worried about it
with all of my heart.

But now, says the Once-ler,
Now that you’re here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.

The lesson of The Lorax goes far beyond a simple environmental message. It reinforces a Biblical truth that today’s Church in America best heed—the reality of UNLESS.

UNLESS we Christians share the message of Christ with the lost, they’ll endure eternal punishment for all eternity.

UNLESS we feed the hungry, they’ll succumb to malnutrition.

UNLESS we fight for justice for the disenfranchised, they’ll continue to be exploited.

UNLESS we visit the prisoner, they’ll die in a prison of their own loneliness.

UNLESS we minister to the sick, they’ll get sicker and perish, forgotten.

UNLESS we show the world love, it’ll never know what true love is.

UNLESS….

We can fill in a thousand statements behind that UNLESS, can’t we? The job Christ left us to do is vast and not getting any less so. We are the Body of Christ—His hands, His feet. And UNLESS we do the work He’s called us to, it simply won’t get done.