Once upon a time, you were small. Very small. Nearly invisible. Almost as tall as a poppy seed, in fact. Your whole body, from top to bottom, used to be no more than two cells wide. But those two cells were healthy and active, and they multiplied. And they multiplied again. And then they multiplied yet again. The zygomatic stage was a short one, and nine months later, you were hardly recognizable. Ten years after that and you were another several bazillion times larger. And now? We’ll, you’re nothing short of megalithic. A virtual monster by comparison. You could probably crush a pop can if you wanted to.

Physical growth is normal & expected of a fetus. It’s anticipated and celebrated. Growth is a telltale sign of good health, hope, and strength; an expression of life and the promise of a future. And it’s also quite instructive.

In many ways, the physical body is a walking, talking parable of the church, with much to teach us about typical growth & development if we’re willing to learn. One of the simplest, yet easy to miss lessons is this: If the cells are healthy, the body is healthy. It may sound elementary, but it’s important to remember. If you hope to grow bigger, you’ll need strength at the cellular level. And it’s no different for churches. If the people in it are healthy, active, and reproducing, the church will flourish. If they are spiritually sick, sluggish, and sterile, the church is going to die.

Personal Effort

The smartest man in the world once said that, “winning souls” was a mark of true wisdom (Proverbs 11:30). What Solomon meant is that the intelligence of an individual is partly revealed in the success of their evangelistic efforts. In other words, seeking converts is not the work of fools. Whether they can’t do it because they’re foolish, or they won’t do it which only proves them to be foolish, evangelism is a field in which fools will rarely if ever be found. Because the winning of souls doesn’t happen mindlessly, fruitful evangelism is reserved for the wise. It requires thinking, and it requires labor, and it requires bravery. Lots of it.

Salvation is never accidental. If souls are to be won, it’ll either happen on purpose, or it won’t happen at all. It takes passion, prayer, thought, and effort (probably in that same order). Take away any one of those crucial ingredients and you’re bound to lose the souls you had expected to win, or left them to be won by someone else. Someone wise.

Personal Responsibility

Please notice that the work is to be done by the individual, not the church. A fellowship full of people who count on the activities of the church to do their evangelism for them is guaranteed to stunt in its growth. Outreaches will never be as fruitful as one-on-one ministry. Until the cells are ready and able to proliferate on their own, the body can’t grow. Healthy cells multiply, and when they do, the body gets stronger.

A church only grows if and when its people are eager and desperate to win souls. A prayerful & persistent Christian can do more effective advertising for the church in a single month than all the cereal commercials at General Mills can do in the entire year. The effectiveness you hope for is directly linked to the work you do within the field of evangelism. You can work your fingers to the bone in all other areas, but if you neglect that one particular field, the church will atrophy.

Personal Assessment

When a cell stops working, it dies and gets replaced. This does not guarantee, however, that the cell automatically goes away. The body is full of dead cells that still manage to attach themselves to it, even though they no longer contribute to the health & growth of the body. Unfortunately, the same is true of God’s church.

People who used to invite everyone they knew to join them on their mission, have long since lost their enthusiasm. They became too intellectual or grew too complacent. Some got too busy. Others replaced evangelism in their community with a service position in their church, and the fire that used to burn for the lost souls around them flickered out. And then they got bored. And though they don’t necessarily pose any real threat to the overall health of the body, they don’t hold any real value either. They bear a striking resemblance to who they were when they still had passion, but the life has long since gone out of them. They’re still stuck in the same spot as they were when they died, and like dead skin, they’re just waiting to fall off. Don’t let that be you.

A Personal Note

Dear Church: As we head into these summer months (which tend to be very outreach oriented and evangelistic in nature), let’s be careful that we’re still looking for personal opportunities to multiply. After all, those are the ones that will make the real difference. The health of the body depends on the cells.

Are there opportunities right in front of you that are getting missed because you’re too preoccupied with private interests? Are you expecting the church to fill the quota for personal evangelism that you alone are responsible for? Prove yourself healthy by pushing yourself into the lives of those around you with a spiritual purpose. Prove yourself alive by engaging with those outside of the church about eternal matters. Never let the busyness of your schedule suffocate the personal concern you have for the lost. Don’t let yourself rest until you’ve made yourself available to them. It’s time to fish for men.  

-Pastor Justin

In November of 1988, a baby boy was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, and hardly anyone knew about it. His parents named him ‘Hafpor’. Thirty years later, he stands at 6’9”, and weighs 440 pounds. Hafpor Julius Bjornsson is currently designated the world’s strongest man. If you’re unfamiliar with what that means, let me spell it out for you: I drive a Chevy Colorado with a 3-ton towing capacity, while Hafpor has a fifteen-ton towing capacity. I can pull a trailer with my truck. Hafpor can pull airplanes with a rope.

Like all babies, Hafpor started out little; and like most babies, he grew. He grew in both physical dimension and social distinction. Not only is he the strongest man in the world, he’s also an actor. Starring in several roles on TV & film, including a part in the 4^th season of HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones”, people everywhere have now seen his face. Hafpor has become hard to hide in more ways than one. That obscure little boy from Iceland just isn’t the same as he used to be. Hafpor grew up.

Becoming a Body that Fascinates.

It’s not his size that makes Hafpor so impressive, it’s his strength. There are a lot of men in this world that stand taller than he does, and many more who are heavier than he is, but no one on the entire planet is stronger. And that’s why we’re so fascinated with his body. No one seems to envy fat; that’s just size without strength. And few people would want to be taller than everyone else, because (aside from a career in the NBA) the advantages would be so outweighed by the disadvantages. But strength? Who wouldn’t want to be a little stronger?

Strength is what God is looking for in our churches more than anything, and what we ought to be striving for above everything. Maturity, stability, spiritual durability. The Body of Christ should be fascinating the world, and it doesn’t need to be big to do it. It only needs to be strong. The Lord God is known for doing great things through small groups of people with little to offer but spiritual resilience. Think of Noah’s family, and what they accomplished. Remember Gideon’s men, and what they did. Consider Esther and her uncle. Look at the Apostles. The amount of weight they were able to pull is remarkable. Maybe that could be us. What would it take?      

Two Ways to Gain Weight.

Donuts or dumbbells. Both are equally capable of helping a person grow larger, but you don’t need to be a genius to know which one is the healthier route. Why then, in the church, would we expect God to make something impressive out of this ministry through our mere ‘snacking’? Snacking is when someone goes easy on themselves in the crucial areas of spiritual life like true humility, self-denial, and genuine repentance, by keeping it hidden beneath a thick blanket of church service & participation. There’s no real strength there, just a bunch of fluff. It’s like bulking up on a heavy diet of junk food by about 40 pounds and then thinking you can beat Hafpor at next year’s Strongman Competition. That simply will not happen. The church needs a better strategy than that.

The major difference between you and Hafpor is not so much your size, but your situation. Hafpor works alone. When he pulls an airplane, he does it by himself, but you and I pull as a team. We are inherently dependent upon one another, and if we hope to be strong at all, we need to be strong together. Anyone who refuses to pull their own weight is weakening the whole team.

You need to understand the significant effect your private life has on the rest of the people in this church family. What you do when you’re alone is partly responsible for the health you see in each other when we’re together. We can either pray for each other faithfully, or we can sin against each other clandestinely. Either practice will have an equally tangible, but very opposite effect, on the people you interact with at church. Your private life is either contributing to our health, or our demise.  

Don’t Be Like Achan.

It only takes a single individual to hold back an entire team. Achan’s folly reminds us of that (Joshua 7). He secretly took what was not his to take, and worse, he refused to confess it. Because of his private sin and the necessary deceit he used to keep it hidden, the army of Israel suffered public defeat. Thirty six men died because of him, the whole nation lost heart because of him, and God’s people were stopped dead in their tracks because of him. On account of one man’s compromise, corporate zeal was replaced with widespread cowardice, and the hope they once had was sufficiently stamped out. The entire community sustained loss, all because of Achan. Everybody was pulling their weight except him. What a haunting testimony.

Be Like Hafpor.

It’s senseless to believe you can be part of a strong church if you aren’t strong yourself. If you’re not pulling your weight, you’re forcing everyone else to do it for you, and sapping the strength that we’re supposed to have. Do you want to belong to a strong church? Are you willing to make the personal sacrifice for that to happen? We’ve got no less potential than any other group of believers, in any part of the world, at any time in history. If God can preserve the entire human race with 8 people in a boat, or save a whole nation through a young woman & her uncle, or reach this world with the gospel through 12 blue-collar men, then think of what He might do through us…

If Hafpor can pull a plane, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be moving mountains.

Can God do great things through our church? Yes, He can.

Does God want to do great things through our church? Of course He does.

Will He do great things through our church? Not sure. Are you willing to pull your weight?

Before Jesus ascended, He left His men with marching orders. In giving those orders, He made it clear to both the devil and His disciples what He intended to accomplish from afar. He intended to build His Church, just like He had always said, through willing men & women for centuries to come. Only now, this plan was no longer mere talk, it had actually begun. The Commission had been given, and the gates of hell were on high alert.

After 2,000 years of building, the Church of God is yet unfinished. The work is still happening, but the war is still raging. Our progress is sure, but it’s slow, and it seems that we’ve got a long way to go. A modern missionary to Asia gives a sobering first-hand assessment of one possible reason for any lack of success in our work, saying this: “Sadly, over the centuries of missionary efforts, there has been a huge disconnect between the church at home and those sent to the mission field. People at home are not sure what to do or say to those in the field, and those in the field often feel forgotten and abandoned. At the same time, it’s hard for those in the mission field to accurately describe what it’s like where they’re at, and so they give up trying, leaving those at home without the full knowledge of what’s happening and what they’re going through”

Another article reminds us that: “When a congregation sends out missionaries, they extend their church’s ministry beyond their immediate cultural and geographical context.  This partnership means the missionaries do not cease to belong to their sending church, or are simply absent friends, but should remain valued members of their church, albeit in another place. A healthy relationship between a sending church and its missionaries will be a rewarding and enriching two-way process, keeping the church abreast of God’s wider purposes and giving an increasing awareness of cross-cultural and global mission”  

Forgotten Statistics

“Mission’s Season” has begun for us already this year, and the season itself only seems to get longer and longer. The JFB community has a total of 4 short-term missionary endeavors in 2019, stretching from March to October, with a total of 48 participants, many of whom will be on multiple trips. The numbers are impressive for a church our size, and noteworthy for various reasons, but hidden behind those figures are other statistics that are easily overlooked. As many people as we are sending into the mission field this year, there are approximately three times as many people who are staying home. They will not be prayed over, they will not be sent out, and they will not keep us updated on the exciting things they’re doing for God’s Kingdom via the mission’s blog. Instead of fighting against malaria, jet lag, and homesickness, they’ll be doing battle with the common cold, long commutes, and monotony.

Satan’s chief concern is that we, the church, unify, and that each of us gives full attention to our particular role in missions (whether going or staying), and that we will actually fulfill the Great Commission. His strategy, in part, to prevent that from happening, is to promote a “disconnect” between the church and her missionaries. The Lord knows his schemes and has shown us how to fight against that disconnect. There is a way for those whose mission field goes no further than the county line, to partner with those we’ve sent out, and share in the work of building up the Church of Christ. But how? How can we who stay home, bless, serve, and unite with those in the field, keep the bond between us strong, and share in the eternal reward for the missionary work done by this church? 

1. Be Relational

They say that “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”. In other words, distance needn’t weaken the relationship you have to the ones in the field. In fact, because of the spiritual dynamic in true Christian fellowship, it can actually make it stronger. Read what Paul wrote to the Romans in 1:9-13 and you’ll see that his affinity for the friends he had at church didn’t diminish because of his work in the field; quite the opposite. Let separation prove how deep your friendship really is. Our missionaries know that they have the support of the church, but do they know whether they have yours?

Be sensitive, of course, to how you can best communicate that to our missionaries without burdening them, or interfering with their work (Paul wrote a letter, he didn’t bombard them with voicemails and text messages).

2. Be Prayerful

Absence can make the heart grow fonder, but it can also cause the mind to forget. This may sound like a given, but pray for your missionaries regularly. Pray for their specific needs…if you don’t know what they are, then ask them! Ask them before they leave. Get updates while they’re gone. Assure them that you’ll be praying for their specific prayer requests. And then make sure to follow through with your promise. Make the extra effort to be thoughtful and pray for what they may not be thinking of (which is the very heart of intercessory prayer; Romans 8:26).

The formerly quoted missionary to the people of Asia puts it like this: “We don’t need people at home to pray weak prayers for us like, “And God, remember ____. Bless him/her.” We are on the “front lines” in countries where the Gospel has either never been taken or is not well-known. We need powerful prayers from you! Not just short, last-thought on a prayer-list prayers. We need to be prayed for as sons and daughters on the front-lines of battlefields are prayed for. I encourage you to adopt some missionaries to battle for in prayer; prayer for faith, encouragement, continued vision, strategy, health, wisdom, protection, & harvest reaping”

3. Be Thoughtful

Find creative and helpful ways to bless missionaries according to their needs. Is there anything you can do to help them get ready for their trip? Is there something they could use while they’re gone? Is there any help they’ll need when they come back? What can you do to say, “Welcome home, we’ve missed you”. Sometimes the expression of a little extra care and consideration can be very refreshing to a tired servant of God.

“Your love has given me great joy and encouragement, because you, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the Lord’s people” Philemon 1:7

4. Be Missional

The missionaries you’re praying for have such a strong desire to see the work of God accomplished, they were willing to rearrange schedules, suffer docked pay, and leave friends, family, & comfort, in order to do it. They’ve made major financial sacrifices, and taken substantial risks to fulfill their role in the Great Commission. Nothing would encourage them more than to remember that you are doing the very same thing on domestic soil.

Be evangelistic like they are. Work hard like they are. Make sacrifices like they are. Leaving the state isn’t required for a person to be “missional”. You can serve Jesus in many ways right here, right now, that will put you in the game and bless your missionaries.

We’re all part of the same team. If we take missions seriously as a church, then let those of us who won’t be boarding a plane or piling in a van this year make sure that we’re every bit as missional as those who are. The Great Commission will be fulfilled when each of us finds & fills our place in it. And when we do, we’ll shake the gates of hell.  

“From whose womb comes the ice?” God asked somebody that question a long time ago, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve recently been asking the Lord if He has an answer. The historic cold front we experienced two weeks ago introduced many of us to cooler temperatures than we’ve ever felt in our entire life. Only twice in the last 200 years was it colder in MN than it was last week; once in 1996 by a single degree, and again that same year by only four. So yeah, it was plenty cold. And if you were one of the unfortunate souls who didn’t work for the school system or the USPS, you probably left the house. If you did, you know how it felt. It was terrible. It was so cold, it burned. I could’ve crawled inside my freezer and enjoyed a 50 degree warm-up! Penguins even thought about moving here!

I’ve yet to meet anybody who enjoyed it.

The Coldest Place on the Planet

The state of Minnesota, however, isn’t the only place on earth that’s subject to extreme temperature drops. The human heart is capable of some record-setting lows of its own, isn’t it? Every Christian soul, including yours & mine, has had a spell where the warmth we felt toward Christ and His people was at an all-time low. We’d rather not be reminded of such statistics, but in severe cases, numbers like that are hard to forget. Alternating seasons of warm and cool might be fairly normal in a Christian’s life, but when the degree of our affections bottom out altogether, and the forecast shows no sign of an upward trend, things can get kind of scary. I dread the day that we set the next low-temp record in MN, but even more than that, I fear another deep-freeze of the heart. It comes fast and it comes unexpectedly, and it doesn’t care whether you’re ready or not.

Nobody likes that. Not even penguins.

I wish I had some foolproof methodology on how to escape the pitfalls of a cold heart. If I did, I would certainly share it with you, but, unfortunately, weather seems to have a mind of its own. In America, you might be able to hop in your R.V. and drive south, but in the Kingdom of God, there is no Florida. There is no Arizona. There’s nowhere you can go to “winter-over” in the comforts of borrowed warmth. Each of us is called to “bear our own burden”, and that includes the microclimate of a frozen heart.

The Warmest Place in the World

I was chipping through several inches of solid ice on my front steps the other day, feeling tempted to grumble and complain beyond the moral threshold. But just before the heavy-duty ice-chipper cracked in half, I remembered that the rest of the city was having to endure the exact same thing. And in all honesty, I took comfort in that. Further complaining would’ve induced guilt, because, of all the people in this city, certainly there had to be one or two that were pushing through the misery with a better attitude than I was. Surprisingly, I found myself being held accountable by people I’d never met! And suddenly, I wasn’t alone in my misery anymore, a positive outlook wasn’t beyond my reach, and that made the whole sad situation a bit more tolerable. I, along with the rest of the folks in my community, were in this cold mess together, and that made a strange difference in my mind.   

How important it is to live in community! To know that we’re not alone when the weather turns sour. Even if we’re not in each other’s immediate company, we know that there are other believers from our own church family who are facing off against the same spiritually inclement ‘weather’ that we are, and doing it faithfully. We’re in this cold mess together. Sure, we’re still called to “bear our own burden” in this respect, but just knowing that others are out there doing the same, can kindle a small flame in the darkest pit of a numbing heart. Christians in fellowship inadvertently “bear each other’s burdens” by bearing their own burdens well; with an attitude that inspires their brothers to sing beneath the weight, rather than to murmur & mumble.

Real Trouble

I recently learned that on any given night in Duluth, there are between 125 & 200 homeless people sleeping on the streets. This figure of course bore particular significance during our latest polar exploit. Cities across the Midwest opened “warming centers” for vagrants to get out of the cold and survive the worst of it. Duluth followed suit, but it made me wonder what it would take for a person to make it through the night alive. What if there were no ‘warming centers’? Could a person actually live through something like this? How would you survive?

You know who’s in real trouble on a night like that? Even more so than the homeless in the city is the one who’s stranded in the wild, all alone & isolated from every human contact. No fellowship. No one to share the pain with. Nobody to help him cope with the cold. Sub-zero temps are dangerous enough, but seclusion only makes matters worse. Fortunately, for people in a frigid land like ours, God has opened warming centers all across the Midwest. They’re called “churches”, and they’re for spiritual vagrants like us to huddle together and survive the extreme weather of a hardening heart. How often has it been the loving concern of a fellow Christian that proved to be the very thing needed to pull you in, out of the cold?

Stay Warm

Frigid weather like we’ve had in the past is inevitable. It comes with the territory. As long as we live in this harsh region (or this ‘harsh region’ exists within us), we can expect spells of alarmingly low temperatures. People who live in this dark world need each other, and that’s why God has given us the church. Don’t stay out in the open air when you feel the chill of another record-setting cold front descending upon your heart. Let the warmth of Christian fellowship keep you alive. It will. It’s what we’re here for.  

Does love come easy? Should love come easy? No and no. It doesn’t and it shouldn’t…of course not. Right? We’re smart people; we know this. Love takes work, love is “tough”; love hurts! There’s nothing easy about it! Every good Christian knows that Jesus Christ is the epitome of love, and His whole life shows us just how hard love is going to be. We would never expect love to be effortless. We need to love like Jesus, and we are ready to do it! (Theoretically).

In reality, however, our working definition of love is often quite different. Our approach toward relationships betrays a defective understanding of what real love is. We believe that love can be hard, seem tough, and feel painful, but we operate in a way that says love should be easy, exhilarating, and pleasant. We avoid love when it requires too much work, and give up on it if it’s too difficult. We expect love to find us, rather than making any effort to go and apprehend it. When love hurts, we trade it away for a cheap substitute that you can simply “fall” into. We prefer a kind of love that springs up in a moment and makes us feel a certain measure of fleeting delight.

(I’m starting to wonder if we’ve confused love with serotonin).

Priceless love is seen in history

The Bible unveils a mysterious kind of love that seemed to be common among Christ and His Apostles, yet seems to elude modern man. It’s a kind of love so foreign to most of us that we don’t even know what to call it. We mislabel it as “loyalty, commitment, or discipline”, when it’s really none of those things. It’s more, far more. It’s real love. It’s a love so strong, it overpowers the natural instincts of self-interest, self-preservation, and pride. It’s a love so precious, it’s fought to be kept. It’s a love so great, it often gets the one who has it killed.

This is the kind of love that put Jesus on a cross and buried Stephen beneath stones. Love is the real reason that John the Baptist died as young as he did. Love is how James & Peter ended their lives. These guys loved to death, and the love they had was anything but easy, exhilarating, or pleasant. Their love hurt. Theirs was tough. If these men wouldn’t have loved, they wouldn’t have died. None of them. Certainly not like they did.

You’ll know you have real love when neither torture nor death is able to make you trade it away for a certain measure of fleeting delight. You know its real love when it gives up its own life for the sake of somebody else. These guys had love. Earnest love; costly and priceless.

Serotonin shouldn’t be getting the credit for a eulogy like theirs.

Kill the man, confirm his love

Extraordinary love wasn’t the only thing these martyred men had in common. They also had incredibly ferocious enemies. Their love for Christ was deep enough to incense those who had none. Curiously, however, the unstoppable opposition & violence of their foes became the very means by which the extent & sincerity of their love was confirmed. Practically speaking, a love that’s never challenged is a love that’s hard to see, and a love that’s unwilling to die, is a substandard love. Love comes into focus with ever-increasing clarity only as the hatred & hostility against that individual intensifies. Nothing proves the quality of love like dying because of it. Therefore, no one on earth can test the quality of your love better than your enemy can. The properties of genuine love are best revealed in the fiery furnace of animosity.

Aside of Christ, one of the best illustrations of sacrificial love that we have in Scripture, is that of the Apostle Paul. He was a polarizing man. Some loved him, but many hated him. He was harassed, persecuted, and eventually killed, yet still managed to love in spite of it all. He had love for Jesus that exposed latent hatred in others, but didn’t flinch when that hatred rose up against him. Instead, he loved them in return. He wrote, with utmost sincerity, about his personal desire to trade places with the unsaved Jews and go to hell in their stead (Ro.9:2-5). The same men who made Paul the target of their loathing became the target of Paul’s love. Sadly, this kind of love is hard to find, even among Christians.

Cheap love is priceless in our culture

The American church is full of people who will never have the chance to love like this. The reason being, they have no enemies. The love they have for Jesus isn’t deep enough (or visible enough) to incense anybody, and, as a result, no one really opposes them. They get along with everyone. Nobody actually hates them, and, consequently, no one is truly loved by them. Christians in this way, aren’t much different than the world. They go on loving whoever they like, giving their life in small increments, only to those who love them in return. They don’t polarize like Paul and they don’t enrage people like Stephen. They’re nice. All men speak well of them, and Jesus doesn’t like it.

A love so strong, it overpowers the natural instincts of self-interest, self-preservation, and pride…a love so precious, it’s fought to be kept

What would it take for us to love like the people we read about in Bibles & biographies? What do we need in order to live in a way that makes our love more than merely emotional, but visible, so that the whole world sees it, and “knows that we are Christ’s disciples”? Is love like this even possible for people like you and me, or is it only given to guys like Paul & James?

Be assured, it’s not God’s desire that love be withheld from anyone. He doesn’t have a limited supply from which He rations it out only to His favorites. Love like this is available to anybody, in great measure, but it comes at a cost. Real love is expensive. Very expensive. Love like this requires becoming the target of animosity & attack. It will mean suffering injustice, receiving opposition, & enduring persecution. And for that to happen, we’ll need the help of our enemies. We can’t do this without them. If you have no real enemies, it’s impossible to fulfill Christ’s command to love them. And if you only love Jesus secretly, you’ll never have any real enemies. This is where it all begins. Only when we’re hated by the world for our undying, undeniably visible love toward Christ will we have a chance to love like this.

Therefore: Love Jesus passionately, and love your enemies unflinchingly…

(And don’t blame serotonin for what happens next).