Imagine for a moment that you’re a character in the middle of a novel, film, or play. Neither at the beginning, nor at the end, you might be in the middle of unintelligible action, or in the middle of a long expanse of actionless waiting. You're not sure about the purpose of the action; you don’t know for what you’re waiting.
You can be frustrated or disappointed with what’s going on around you. You can be even more frustrated or disappointed with yourself.
Yet God remains the screenwriter. He knew and knows what you’ll do before you do it, and He’s already incorporated it into his script.
Yes, we’re frustrated with ourselves, but God has accounted for our shortcomings and integrated them into His plot, as Zach Zehnder writes:
God sent Jesus not because He expected perfection from us, but simply because He loves us. However, God sent Jesus knowing that even after His death and resurrection we would fail Him.
The life we live is one of surrender. We surrender to God. We surrender our ideas and ideals, our plans and projects, our vision of the way things ought to be. We want to be perfect - for both good reasons and bad reasons. But we must surrender that ambition.
God uses us to carry out His will and His plans. Ironically, He uses us best and most when we’re not trying to be perfect. What makes His followers effective and attractive is not their perfection. It is their peace.
We want to be perfect so that we can be more effective as God’s people. But His plan is to work in our imperfections. He uses flawed people as His instruments on earth.
Shortly before his death in 2013, Byron Porisch marked the following passage in a book co-written by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay:
God has always wanted a people that would be exclusive to him holy, set apart, distinct, and beautiful to the world he is trying to redeem.It’s a bit counterintuitive to realize that what makes the church amazing is not that it’s filled with such perfect people, but rather that it manages to communicate God’s love best by communicating through broken people.
As we “boast” about our weakness, God’s powerful intervention becomes more clear to those watching us (II Corinthians 12:9).
It seems odd to say that it is our brokenness which makes us “holy, set apart, distinct, and beautiful.” Yet we see this in Scripture: people like Jeremiah and Jonah were both broken and yet powerful prophets.
Byron also marked this passage in the book:
Church is something everyone should be a part of, but it’s different than being a faith community. Church happens when a group of people decide to go on mission with God together.The authors are making a distinction between “church” and “faith community.” You might make the same distinction with other words, but here’s what it boils down to this: On the one hand, there’s the gathering of believers, those who share a creed, who meet to encourage one another, to worship and pray, and to study Scripture together. On the other hand, there are task-oriented groups who meet to go into action.
Both are good. Both are necessary. Both are important. Halter and Smay point to a cycle of gathering and sending, sending and gathering - a sort of dialectic.
Jesus gathers broken, sinful, flawed people together as His church. He’s under no illusions about our continued imperfections. He gathers us, blesses us, and builds a community of mutual support among us. Then He gives us assignments. He sends us on missions.
When we come back from our missions, we are still broken people, and we gather to worship Him and receive from Him, and the cycle begins again.
