God makes a home for the lonely

As I write this, it is a cold and rainy December day not unlike a day nearly 10 years ago. I was going through one of the hardest seasons of my life. My husband had left our marriage, and my daughter and I felt very lost in the world. We had been out of church fellowship for a number of years. My family lived several states away, so even though we had a few Christian friends, we were essentially alone.  Scared and alone.

At the advice of a friend, I began reading some guy named Charles Spurgeon who I had heard of back in college. I was reading as much of the Bible as I could because it was my only source of hope. However, his writings awakened a hunger for sound teaching that I never had before. I read everything I could find online by this dead Baptist preacher, but I knew that wasn't enough. We needed to find a church, so we began visiting places in the area.

Some churches were too large. Some didn't use the Bible much at all. I was beginning to get desperate and resigned myself to attending a church our friends had returned to. Out of that desperation, I did an Internet search on "Reformed Baptist" churches in the area because Spurgeon was a Reformed Baptist, even though I didn't really know what that meant at the time. But if it was good enough for Spurgeon, it was good enough for me. I was surprised to have one entry show up in Google that was very close to our home.

So on the last Sunday of 2007, I drove the short distance to a little gray church I had driven by so many times. My daughter was away on visitation, so I braved going on my own. There were only about 20 people that dreary day, but they were so kind and welcoming. I didn't feel the awkwardness that would sometimes come over me when I visited other places solo. The interim pastor gave a simple message straight from the Word, and I heard exegesis for perhaps the first time in my life. I told my daughter we needed to go back the following Sunday, and she loved it as much as I did. Even though I was in all respects a stranger, it was like coming home because these brothers and sisters were family in Christ, and here we are 10 years later.

Some things have changed over the past decade. The Lord has led people out and brought more people in including lots and lots of children! The interim pastor who preached the first real sermon I ever heard and baptized my daughter is now in heaven with several dear saints who have gone ahead of us. The visiting preacher who filled the pulpit that baptism Sunday was called to be our pastor a few months later, and he is still faithfully shepherding us today. We're a group of ordinary people who need the ordinary means of grace as we journey, often stumbling on the pilgrim road. But our bond in Christ has kept us as we pray, weep, rejoice, and continue to grow together.

One verse I clung to during that tough time was "A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows, is God in His holy habitation," (Ps. 68:5) but the Psalm doesn't stop there. It continues with "God makes a home for the lonely." He has done that through this small local church for which I thank Him.

Photo credit:By LudwigSebastianMicheler (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

He Is Still Upholding the Universe

This is a respost of one of the first things I posted here at Out of the Ordinary. It's still true, but more so. God has upheld the universe—and me—for four more years, although he stopped upholding the May Day tree mentioned during a freak September snowstorm a couple of years ago. 

Right now as I write, and right now as you read, everything in the universe continues to exist because Christ is maintaining it. It is he, says the writer of Hebrews, who "upholds the universe by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3). Paul says something similar in Colossians 1:17: It is in Christ that "all things hold together." The laws of the universe are laws because Christ upholds them. He sustains the gravity that sticks everything together.

Christ and his creation are not like a watchmaker and his watch. A watchmaker assembles a watch, winds it up, and lets it run. There is no “letting it run” with Christ; He keeps the universe moving along by his own power. What’s here is here because he made it, and it keeps on working because he continues to make it work.

But the difference between Christ and the watchmaker is even greater than this. Leon Morris says the thought in Hebrews 1:3 is that Christ

is carrying [the universe] along, bearing it toward an important goal. Creation is not aimless; it is part of God's plan and the Son is continually bearing creation along toward the fulfillment of the plan.1

A watchmaker winds his watch and lets it run until it winds down. The watch fulfills its purpose best at the very beginning if its existence when it is new and freshly wound. Someday, inevitably, it will wind down and stop forever, never to fulfill its true purpose again. Not so with creation. Creation is forever fulfilling it's purpose perfectly because it is being moved toward its ultimate aim by the One who made it.

The winding down we see in creation—everything and everyone dies, for instance, and the weeds in my garden grow faster than I can pull them—is purposeful winding down. It's a winding down that's moving forward. The creation, Paul says in Romans 8:20, "was subjected to futility . . . in hope." Hope, biblically speaking, isn't a wonderful future that might or might not happen, but a wonderful future that is rock solid certain. In its futility—or in its winding down, to use the watch analogy—creation is moving toward a day when it will be made new. It will be recreated into something better than it was on the day before the first humans ate the forbidden fruit and the winding down began.

What goes for creation, goes for believers, too.2 My aging and aching body, marching relentlessly toward death, is in the same forward motion, being carried toward resurrection.

And the whole shebang—all of creation and all of us—is being transported into the golden future by Christ’s powerful word. Later, in Hebrews 11:3, the writer tells us that the universe was created by God's word; here, it's Christ's word that bears universe toward God’s goal for it. This is a perfect time to use the word fiat—a command that, by itself, creates or accomplishes what it commands. Christ created by fiat and he upholds by fiat. Christ commands and the universe responds, first by coming into existence, and then by moving forward toward a perfect destiny.

I consider the words in the title to this post to be some of the most intriguing in scripture. God’s powerful word, which is able to bring things into existence out of nothing, was not spoken once in the past at creation, but is spoken for every nanosecond of time and every nanosecond of my life. There is an eternal and personal will keeping the universe and my life together, and an eternal and personal energy source carrying them along. Christ’s command calls up the sprouting seeds in my garden, his command pulls down the crumpled leaves on my Mayday tree, and his command moves my life forward toward death, but also into what will be, in the end, a glorious resurrection. What seems like futility is Christ's powerful word bringing it all—and me, too—toward a perfect fulfillment.

¹ Leon Morris, Hebrews: Bible Study Commentary, page 20.
² Although scripturally, it's more accurate to put priority on us and say that what goes for believers goes for the rest of creation. We bring creation with us into its future freedom from the effects of sin.

God sets the stage

My church began a Sunday school series on the history of the Protestant Reformation. In the first class, the teacher gave a 45-minute whirlwind tour of the 1500 years that led up to the Reformation. He covered the eventual decline of the Roman Empire, the threats and attacks from neighboring tribes, and the political instability that ensued. Christianity went from severe persecution to Constantine's blending of church and state, setting the stage for the rise of the papacy. Sadly the church-at-large became a political entity in its own right with all the associated corruption and power grabs.

But amidst the decline, God was setting the stage. The Pax Romana and the system of roads were a means to spread the gospel and expand the early church. Even though Palestine suffered multiple invasions, manuscripts of the New Testament were preserved by the conquerors. These documents became the basis for Erasmus' translation of the New Testament into Latin which in turn was used by Martin Luther and William Tyndale to translate the Bible into the language of the common people

To my limited understanding, these inauspicious circumstances were not very conducive for launching the Great Commission or the Reformation, let alone living a "peaceful and quiet life." But church history bears witness to the fact that God's ways and thoughts are far above mine. Trying to fathom how He has woven the events of the past to bring about His purpose is mind boggling. But this is nothing for an infinite God who is all wise and all powerful and works all things according to the counsel of His will. (Eph. 1:11)

If I jump forward in time from before the Reformation to today, outwardly the situation seems equally inauspicious for the ongoing work of the Great Commission. But which lens am I using? My extremely limited and fallible human perspective or the point of view of an infinite God? If He set the stage for the coming of the Messiah, the completion of Jesus' redemptive work, the birth of the early church, and the Reformation, this is the same God who is still at work. While it is easy to point to the "big" events in history, let's bring it home. What did God do to set the stage so we would come to faith in Jesus Christ? Did you "just happen" to be born into a Christian family where you heard the good news? Or did you come to Christ because someone "just happened" to share the gospel or give you a tract or a Bible? What is He weaving together so that all who are called to eternal life will be brought into His kingdom?

I hope this encourages your heart as it does mine, and it does my heart good to rest in God's all-wise control over human history. Current events are still what they were the last time I listened to the news, but the Great Commission isn't at the mercy of the Holy Roman Empire or whoever will be the next president. Salvation belongs to our God and to the Lamb, and He is setting the stage to bring that about.


(Thanks to Neil Harding's Sunday school class and Pastor Ryan Davidson's sermon on Acts 1:1-11 for giving me food for thought for this post.)