After a long day of drop-offs and pick-ups, meetings and meeting needs, opening up our home and our hearts to more people is usually the last thing I naturally want to do. Yet, every time we host a small group or Bible study, I go to bed both tired and satisfied.

I love quiet. I love calm. And these are nearly always on backorder in a household of three growing boys in the context of ministry. I feel like I can barely keep enough food in our pantry for our children. As such, thinking for snacks for weekly guests grows my task list, my grocery bill, and my already-overflowing shopping cart. Keeping up with basic cleaning is a challenge for me, so getting the boys’ shared bathroom in suitable condition for strangers feels like a Herculean task.

However, once the people are finally gathered in our backyard, at our table, or on our couch, all those concerns flee.

Once God has gathered saints and strangers in our home, I am reminded of the priority of persons in the economy of the kingdom. Sentient, living, breathing, burden-bearing souls come to our home each week to be received by other sentient, breathing, burden-bearing souls. We talk about the weather and the latest taco spot, but we also share tidbits of our stories. We multiply each other’s joys and divide each other’s sorrows. For some portion of an evening, we are reminded that there are cares outside the casing of our own hearts.

In the Church, small group leaders do a lot of heavy lifting. They faithfully accommodate their homes and hearts to others. They are tempted to grow weary in well-doing, especially when it does not seem like huge things are happening week in and week out.

This temptation to have drooping hands and hearts is not new to the church. In fact, the writer of Hebrews continually reminded the Jewish believers to keep going in the seemingly ordinary act of regularly meeting together.

“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:24-25).

The Kingdom Hinges on Hospitality

For the past 6 months, I have been living in the book of Acts, studying it with multiple groups of people. This time through, a different cast of characters have been standing out to me. And it is not the likely crew of Peter, Barnabas, Paul, and others. It is people like Ananias, Mary, Priscilla and Aquila, Philip, and Jason.

I wonder if Mary was having a long day when the early church decided to gather in her home for a prayer meeting for the recently imprisoned Peter? We don’t get a glimpse into the whirling preparation she likely made to accommodate a group of prayer warriors who would stay through the night. We only know that, after the angel had released Peter, he knew where to find the believers. They would be gathered at Mary’s house. They were in the habit of doing so (Acts 12: 12).

When Jason opened his home in hospitality to Paul and Silas in Thessalonica, he had no idea that such a simple gesture would become so much more. Refusing to give them up a mob, he was dragged out of his own home, brought before authorities, and extorted for funds (Acts 17:1-9).

The kingdom hinges on seemingly small acts of faithfulness. The body of Christ must be housed, fed, and nurtured, both physically and spiritually.

Weary small group leader, don’t grow weary. Keep opening your home and feeding the flock of God placed under your care. Keep making room in your schedule and soul for the household of God.

Let us not grow weary in well doing, for in due season, we will reap, if we do not lost heart. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith (Galatians 6: 9-10).

I must run now. I’ve snacks to purchase and bathrooms to clean.

Peace, as a concept, is easy to proclaim, but hard to purchase. It makes a good buzzword, but it is a near impossible goal for humanity.

As I write this, rockets rip across the skies in the land where Jesus Himself once walked and two people groups threaten to annihilate each other. As I sip my coffee, churches and families are being ripped apart by political ideological battles, whether they be aggressive or passive aggressive, virtual or actual fronts.To say we need peace is an understatement. To say we cannot achieve it ourselves is also an understatement.

God’s people longed for peace, and understandably so. They knew too much of war, both within and without. They also knew that peace would not be cheap. They innately knew it had to be purchased.

As an anxious soul, I have always had an eye for verses promising peace. In fact, when I first came to Christ, there were two anchor-line verses from Isaiah 26 which I memorized and to which I clung.

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock (Isaiah 26:3-4).

O, Lord, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works (Isaiah 26:12).

In both of these Scriptures, God’s people realize that any hope of obtaining or experiencing peace on earth would only come from focusing on the very nature of their God, Yahweh. In a sea of adversity and in waves of shifting regimes and kingdoms, their only anchoring point was in the Rock Everlasting, the One who did not change.

Where they stood in the story of the slowly unraveling history of redemption, God’s people could not see what we see clearly on the other side of the Cross of Christ. They knew that peace could not only come when one’s mind was fully set on God. They did not know that the only One who would ever have His heart fully fixed on God would set His face toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). They knew God would ordain peace for them. They did not know that such peace would be purchased through the costly, sacrificial love of God-Himself-made-man (Ephesians 2:14; 1 Peter 1:17-19).

We have access to the life-transforming knowledge that peace is a person, the person of Christ.

Perfect Peace

The human record is wretched;
We’ve accomplished naught.  
All our most elevated efforts
Nothing but wind have wrought. 

Your peace will not be earned
By our ceaseless striving.
It is present and purchased,
While we await your arriving. 

Your long-promised peace
Is not to our performance tied.
It is wrapped up in the God-man
Who lives though once he died. 

All that our good God ordains 
He Himself will expertly fulfill. 
It is His to do and ours to trust,
As He accomplishes His will. 

You keep him in perfect peace
Whose mind is stayed on you. 
For all our God has purposed,
He’ll ultimately carry through. 

With such knowledge of the person of peace, we are invited to wage peace on this war-torn earth and to proclaim gospel hope to war-ravaged souls. But before we can properly proclaim His peace, we must let Him permeate our own lives.

And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace (James 3:18).

Presently, churches all across the nation are splitting and splintering, being pulled quite literally left or right. Both sides are claiming their way to transform the culture and both sides are claiming the name of Christ. While both sides think they share little in common, they are both involved in a power play for positions of influence, assuming that God’s primary call on His people is to transform or better culture.

But God’s call on His people is that they become a peculiar people.

Like many of you, my mind has been spinning this past year trying to make sense of what is happening with Christian congregations. Recently, the Lord has used a book written in the 1990’s to help me see more clearly what is happening in the 2020s. In their joint book Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon address trends that were planted back in the days of Constantine and have been growing into full-fledged forests by now.

“That which makes the church ‘radical’ and forever ‘new’ is not that the church tends to lean towards the left on most social issues, but rather that the church knows Jesus whereas the world does not. In the church’s view, the political left is not noticeably more interesting than the political right; both sides tend towards solutions that act as if the world has not ended and begun in Jesus (Resident Aliens, page 28).”

Both sides are equally likely to fall into worldly patterns of thinking that change comes through positions of power and political prowess. Believers in either camp can want the right things but go about trying to get them through means that God has not ordained.

The primary job of God’s people is to be the people of God, not to transform culture. Culture may and likely will be transformed, but such transformation will be a by-product, not a means in and of itself.

“For to us, the world ended. We may have thought that Jesus came to make nice people ever nicer, that Jesus hoped to make a democratic Caesar just a little more democratic, to make the world a bit better place for the poor. The Sermon, however, collides with such accommodationist thinking. It drives us back to a completely new conception of what it means for people to live with one another. That completely new conception is the church (Resident Aliens, page 92).”

If the church is to do the work of Christ, the church cannot seek to accomplish His means through the mechanisms of a dying world. God has given us the church as His means to accomplish His work. Practically speaking, this means that Supreme Court justice appointments or decisions, while important, are not our hope. This means that laws enacted by our government do not sideline us from doing the work of God and being the people of God. We do not to be propped up by the government to be His people. In fact, when the laws of the land go against our beliefs, we have an even greater opportunity to stand out.

My fear is that our churches are missing their moment to show the watching world the compelling and true story of the gospel. A pandemic got the world’s attention, but the church has been so engaged in fighting each other, they look no different than the political ads.

When Paul spoke to the Church that he loved and helped establish in Galatia, his heart was heavy over their interactions with one another. They were using their new-found freedom in Christ to further their own agendas and catching each other in the crosshairs of their disparate aims.

“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another (Galatians 5:13-15).

We have been stuck in a brutal power play when we are called to be spending our time on being God’s peculiar people. We don’t need laws to be His peculiar people. We don’t need a sitting president who affirms our ideals. We have His Word and His Spirit, which is all the early church needed to be set apart.

The Church should be odd. We won’t fit neatly into a political system because God’s word wasn’t concerned with political systems. God’s Word was concerned with announcing an altogether different kingdom. In the words of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, “We want to claim the church’s ‘oddness’ as essential to its faithfulness.”

Oddity 

Often the faithful seem foolish,
Their trust in Your Word naive. 
A world calculated and strategic
Estranges those who believe. 

For the story that grabbed them
Has sunk deep into their veins. 
The storyteller’s life-giving Word
Continues to guide their reins. 

Those who’ve heard such a story
Must see everything in its light. 
The One who’s seen through them 
Has Initiated them into His sight. 

Staking their lives on a Savior
Despised and rejected by men,
They are to reenact His story
Again and again and again. 

As they resist prevailing notions, 
The world calls the meek weak,
When power takes on the posture 
Of gently turning the other cheek. 

The odd way they try to trod
Is labeled limiting and narrow,
For they don’t know the One
Whose Spirit is their marrow. 

Lord, hold our fumbling feet
Fast to your glorious way. 
In your likeness let us live
Until that promised day. 

When I hear benefits, I immediately think of insurance plans, copays, deductibles, and group numbers. Adulthood will do that to you. Thankfully, when the Scriptures talk about benefits, they speak about something far more incredible than insurance plans.

In Psalm 103, David invites both himself and his listeners to consider and count a very different set of benefits.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s (Psalm 103:1–5).

As a celebrated king who reigned during the golden era of Israel’s history, David knew a thing or two about benefits. Yet, when he wrote poems and songs, he did not elaborate on his home or the homage given him; rather, he recounted the spiritual blessings bestowed by God.

Paul, when writing to the Ephesian believers, borrowed the financial language of a city familiar with wealth. However, like David before him, he elaborated on the spiritual blessings that are bestowed on those who trust in God. After a short introduction, he presents his thesis and then unpacks it with countless blessings.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places (Ephesians 1:3).

The verses following the aforementioned one are replete with rich examples of the benefits of being in Christ. Verses four to fourteen are littered with words like blessed, lavished, fullness, inheritance, and possession. Yet, Paul does not mention physical comfort or financial peace. Rather, he reminds the Ephesians of the spiritual blessings they have in and through the person of Christ.

In a world where we tend to count our IRA’s, our profits, and our bank accounts, the Scriptures command us to count a very different set of benefits. These will not deplete or decay (see Matthew 6:20–21). They cannot be repossessed or reneged. They don’t wrinkle or ruin with age. Unlike all our physical possessions, they pass with us from this lift on to the next.

Benefits

The benefit of bodies,
Powered by pumping hearts,
The care of the Creator
Who every breath imparts.

An inheritor of language,
Born into a world of words,
Woven wide with wonders
His goodness undergirds.

Buoyed by borrowed breath,
Blessed by first and second birth.
Worthless and unworthy, yet
Esteemed at His infinite worth.

Counted among your family
Though failing countless times.
Assurance and endurance,
Separation from our crimes.

Forget not all His benefits;
Rather, recount and rehearse.
For us to receive HIs blessing,
Our Christ took on the curse.

Earthly blessings are bonus.
Hold them lightly as such.
But these eternal benefits,
Count and cherish much.