In preparation to help plant my church, I read a bunch of books on the subject. Apparently, you’re supposed to start with $75,000. Don’t launch with less than two hundred people, they said. Conduct high-profile marketing campaigns. According to the books, without these things (and many more), no church could consider itself positioned for success.
I failed to reach every prescribed mile marker.
Frustrated, I doubled down to hit those goals, and did make something happen. That is, I got tired, and angry.
Tripling down, I got more of the same.
I guess I think like most people. To feed a multitude, you start with a bakery, a national distribution chain, a sales staff with matching branded shirts. That’s conventional wisdom. But the approach Jesus employs starts off with five loaves and two fishes. God’s ways are surprising, even glorious for those paying attention. It’s baffling, though, for those of us who can’t let go of entrenched opinions on how things ought to transpire. A person full of himself thinks all is lost unless he gets his way.
For sure, we ought to labor for the kingdom of God. But not as though everything depends upon us. That’s a recipe for despair. Ask any parent who dotted all their i’s and crossed all their t’s in raising a Christian child, only to see them wander away. Or anyone who fought for a ministry only to see it brought to ruin through the machinations of others.
Or, a guy like me, who tries to bake a church cake according to the instructions, and gets, well, something else. Paul wrote that it is “only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:7). My experience has demonstrated He not only effects the outcome, but the kind of outcome He prefers.
We live under God-commanded blessing, rather than the blessings we piece together ourselves. The people of Israel must have often imagined life in the promised land before they arrived there. They probably thought of it as a place to labor and toil–concepts that might have smacked of life in Egypt, where they had worked themselves to the bone.
But then,
“The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you come into the land that I give you, the land shall keep a Sabbath to the Lord. For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its fruits, but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to the Lord. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap what grows of itself in your harvest, or gather the grapes of your undressed vine. It shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. The Sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourself and for your male and female slaves and for your hired worker and the sojourner who lives with you, and for your cattle and for the wild animals that are in your land: all its yield shall be for food” (Lev. 25:1-7).
Later, He adds,
“And if you say, ‘What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?’ I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year, so that it will produce a crop sufficient for three years” (20-21).
The people were to remember that the source of their life was the God-blessed land, and not the works of their hands. This is the beauty of being among God’s redeemed. Even under the most binding limitations, produce is never impossible.
COVID 2020 was one such example of a forced sabbath that manifested the secret of our survival. During that time, enormous pruning took place, as congregations that had formerly become artificially inflated were trimmed back to their true size. Dead branches fell off. Many ingenious, talented works shriveled and disappeared. No, not evil works. I’m talking about the sweaty, faithful, committed kind. Maybe even some that had been earlier trumpeted as “God-things.”
Congregational growth slowed to a crawl. Including in my own church. We were never a mushrooming operation, anyway, but it was all the harder when Sunday services were four folks in a living room. Those were hard days.
I suppose a similar principle was at work during the deportation to Babylon. For many years prior, Israel had harnessed the rhythms of agriculture. With every sabbath year they ignored, it reinforced their confidence in weather, talent, hard work, market savvy, and whatever fertility gods they adopted from surrounding nations.
It was only when the nation was shipped off to Babylon, that the land finally kept its sabbaths–approximately ten cycles’ worth of them. This was according to the warning of Leviticus 26:34-35 :
“Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths. As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, the rest that it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling in it.”
Maybe in a way, this portrays some of the challenges of the church at different times. We don’t know when we’re slipping into a spiral, trusting ministry rhythms and how-to’s. We begin banking on the right combination of staff, gifted folks, and location, location, location. (Oh, some quick prayer, too!)
My mind keeps going back in wonder to a thief on a cross, who had just said, “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He would have no opportunity to later do anything for the Lord he had just confessed. He would never be able to demonstrate his repentance through good works.
With hands and feet pinned in place, the possibility of labor would never come. Only rest.
Still, the good land of Christ would still yield its blessing.
