Good morning church family,
Societies produce many points of tension for the people living in the honeycombed communities they create. Take the time we spend in public bathrooms, elevators, and waiting rooms, for instance. Complete strangers forced into tight, confined spaces are left with the difficult decision of either entering into pained conversation with one another or enduring some of the most awkward silence imaginable. I mean, what exactly does one man relieving himself say to another man doing the same or what do we say to one another as we collectively stare at the digital display on the elevator, waiting for our floor number to ding? Or, to mention another tension; how about four-way stops? Of course, there are rules to govern these traffic conventions but absent a uniformed enforcement agent of some kind, the vigilantes are left to employ nods, waves, flashing headlights, and cold stares to keep everything moving in an orderly fashion. And providing one more example; we all appreciate it when a stranger holds a door for us – but not when we’re twenty or thirty paces from that door. In those instances, we try declining with an aw-shucks wave of the hand but quickly hang our heads and do a half-jog to the door while the stranger stares smilingly at our awkward progress. It’s brutal.
Now none of the above examples represent any profound stresses in our lives nor are they illustrative of any real hardship we must endure, but instead are just little tensions for us to experience and study. There’s a lot that we might learn about human nature and the way we’ve been designed by God when we ponder on them a bit. I got to thinking about this recently when I was reading Paul’s letter to the believers in Ephesus. A part of the following passage jumped out at me: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…” (Ephesians 2:4-6)
What struck me was that last part about Christ making his followers “sit together in the heavenly places”. I think we all understand the odd tension that’s created when a person in your company is standing while you and everyone else present is seated. You can picture it – you’re dining out with some friends when someone you know comes over to your table to say “hi”. Unless the exchange is very brief, you will feel the need to either have the person sit at your table with you or you will feel compelled to stand with him during the dialogue. The conversation is bound to be pained otherwise. You feel the same sort of thing when someone comes and stands by your desk while you’re in your chair at work or when someone drops by your house for a visit and proceeds to just stand there in your living room while you and everyone else is seated on couches and recliners. I get a keen sense of this phenomenon whenever I go and visit someone in the hospital. One of the most important things for me to do in order for the visit to have any chance of being a blessing, is to find some place to have a seat when I enter the patient’s room. Every moment that I remain standing in a moment like that, a palpable tension builds in the room until I either beg an early exit or finally have a seat. Why is that? Well, as social conventions go, sitting is certainly a more casual, unhurried, and open-ended manner of relating than standing seems to be. When someone opts not to sit down but to remain standing, he’s putting the whole exchange on a timer; the conversational equivalent of leaving the car running. But to sit down is to communicate a certain commitment to the time and place; it’s a decision to fellowship with another in whatever is going on. Sitting down somewhere with someone says “I’m with you in what’s going on here”, “I would like to belong here”, and “I’m in no rush to be somewhere else”.
Too many of us (myself included) leave the car running, so to speak, when we come to worship or when we sit to read the Bible or volunteer in some Gospel effort. We come into the Lord’s presence and He offers us a seat but we dip our heads, shove our hands in our coat pockets, and kindly decline. “We can only stay a minute,” we tell Him and then proceed to half-heartedly lean against the door jamb or anxiously shift our weight from foot to foot. We’re there with the Lord in what’s going on but, then again, we’re really not.
But praise the Lord – because of His great love for us and His mercy, He won’t let us stay in that cagey state for long but instead gives us new life and raises us up to where He sits. He lifts us out of all the worries, concerns, and entanglements that make our eyes dart about and which keep our souls shifty that He might bless us with Heaven’s perspective of things. The Lord lightens our hearts, lifts our heads, and causes us to want to dwell with Him. He makes it so we want to take off our coat, have a seat, and stay a while.
So, what do you say? Will you pull up a chair?
The Lord’s invited all of us to His house on Sunday morning! He has something to give us, something to tell us, and something for us to do. It’s going to be so good for all of us to be together with Him then and throughout the week. Isn’t it grand to be a Christian! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!
– Pastor Tate
