Dear Friends
It’s the ‘rhythm’ in our common life which I’m keen we examine and grasp: the ‘respiratory’ work of the Spirit of God, as it were, the pulse of the body of Christ: the ‘rhythm’ inherent in the ‘going out’ and ‘coming in’ of which the psalmist speaks.
Of course you can take that famous final phrase from the well-known psalm (you know the one, how “the Lord watches over your going out and your coming in for this time forth and for ever more”) and apply it, I guess, in any number of different ways.
It’s the pattern of our working life. Our going out to our work in the morning; our coming in as the sun starts to set.
It’s the route-map of our life on planet earth. Our going out on surging streams of expectancy into all that our adulthood brings; our coming in, on the tide of the toll of advancing years, to God’s stepping stone into His future.
It’s the sequence of our life in Christ. Our going out from the bondage of Egypt; our coming in to the freedom of Canaan.
But it’s also the ‘rhythm’ of our communal life as the born-again people of God. A people who are ‘gathered’ and ‘scattered’, ‘gathered’ and ‘scattered’ incessantly: gathered as those who are saved, scattered as those called to serve. The breath of the Spirit, the heartbeat of heaven, the pulsing life of the Lord.
Gathered, scattered. In, out. Together, apart.
It’s a rhythm writ large, as I tried to briefly demonstrate last month – a rhythm writ large across the whole, expansive spectrum of God’s truth. And it’s a rhythm in our communal life which the Lord has been careful to regulate right from the start.
One day a week in their own small patch of Israel, up and down the land, the locals were to gather, a coming together which was in many ways to define the very essence of the people they’ve become. They’re a ‘congregation’ because … well, because the very essence of that life they’ve been given by God is that they congregate: they’re a people who’ve been gathered together as the family of God.
And three times a year, they were to do the whole thing big time. A week long festival of faith on which they all converged: a sacred pulling together of all of the people of God from wherever their ‘lines’ might have fallen, a festival of faith, so large and so steeped in the grace of God’s blessing that it would dwarf the likes of Greenbelt in terms of both its size and its significance.
One people, one place, one passion. If ‘strap-lines’ had been in vogue back then, that’s the sort of strap-line they’d have had. One people, one place, one passion: the living Lord. The family of God, the city of God, the glory of God.
Their life as the people of God, sent out as they were (and thus everywhere scattered) by their great redeeming God, to declare and display ‘the glories of His grace’ – their life had its own clear ‘punctuation marks’.
To be better equipped for the service for which they were scattered, they required that coming together. Week by week on the Sabbath: and then three times a year, way up on the mountains of Judea, and in the city of their God.
And the ‘rest’ and refreshment God promised lay not so much in the downing of tools and in stopping their work, as in their coming together to worship and rest in their Lord. It was never intended as a ‘do-nothing day’, a ‘sit-there-and-twiddle-your-thumbs’ sort of day, with your working clothes thrown in the corner, and your lazing around with the chance to catch up on some sleep. Anything but.
This was the business of gathering again, ‘coming in’ once again from where they’d all been scattered, converging, as though drawn by some magnet on high (the Lord does have that magnetic, magnificent pull, doesn’t He!) to the place where the springs of the worship and love in their hearts would erupt in a fountain of praise.
So here are the questions we need to explore. Why is that week by week ‘gathering’ in which we engage so crucial to all we attempt when we’re sent out and ‘scattered’ to serve? And how do we best give expression to all the Lord means us to know in thus gathering His people together?
Or framing that question a different way: if the ‘One people, one place, one passion’ sort of strap-line has significance at all, then –
- How do we give expression to our being, indeed, at one as the family of God? That’s essentially a relational
- How does our converging on this one shared gathering place best point us back to that one great place in history where on His cross our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ effected that which brings all things together under Him? That, I suppose, is an essentially theological
- How is that single, focused passion both stirred and expressed, such that, sent out once more, we’re on fire for the Lord, inflamed with His love, and eager to share the good news? That’s, I suppose, an essentially spiritual
Let me suggest, then, the four main points of our ‘congregating compass’: four primary reasons why our God graciously gathers us in week by week from wherever it is we’ve been scattered. Maybe then we can start teasing out just how best all these week by week gatherings will encompass the purpose God has.
History
We each of us have a history. And, yes, it is at its core always His story: the story of the Lord’s gracious dealings with us down the years. It’s the story which the blind man told – I once was blind, but now I see (Jn.9.25), replicated by the grace of God in all our lives in who knows how many different versions, but always with that quintessential contrast and its pivot on those two great telling words “.. but now ..”
We are not what we were. Once we were blind but now we see. Once we were lost but now we’ve been found. Once we were enemies, now we’re His friends. Once we were dead but now we’re alive.
Our present experience has a history we need to recall: we forget our past at our peril. Remember your story: remember it’s always His story: and remember what all is involved in those two simple, pivotal words – ‘but now ..’
That’s the first reason God gathers His people together: and needs to do so every seven days – our memories are short, our concentration poor, and thus, too easily and often, our whole perspective shifts and we become, no longer blind, so much as blinkered in our thinking, forgetful of those very basic truths which give our daily living such an edge.
For those two great pivotal words, ‘but now ..’, words which tie the riches that we now possess to what was but a wretched and impoverished past – those two great pivotal words ensure that we are once again all tethered to the trinitarian ‘trig points’ for the living of our lives: the grace of God, the cross of Christ, and the work of the Spirit.
These three combined realities, enriching, ennobling, enduring as they are – these three combined realities alone explain the stunning contrast which there is between our present and our past. Lose sight of these three, and the edge to all our living as we’re scattered through the week – that ‘edge’ is also lost.
Identity
Sundays address an endemic identity crisis in our lives.
For our world has it all upside down. It defines who we are (by and large) by what we do. Go into the barber, go into the hair-dressing salon, and, first time there, right at the top of the list of the questions you’re asked is ‘what is it you do?’
And how do we answer? We define ourselves by what we do.
You spend the larger part of all your days in educating children – “.. well, I’m a teacher” is the answer that you’re as likely as not to give.
But this world, which bombards us from morning to night with this subtly distorted perspective – the world has it all topsy turvy. Who we are is not defined by what we do: it’s the other way round entirely. Who we are defines what we do. Our identity comes first. It’s paramount.
But a week out there in the upside down world – well, it weakens our hold on this truth, doesn’t it? We need such a regular reminder in regards to our identity.
Our identity is found in Christ. It’s a relational thing in the end of the day. I am His: that’s who I am. He is mine and I am His. Everything else flows from that: and nothing is bigger than that.
That’s to say, our identity is an essentially relational thing. In the words of the Bethel Music song – “I’m no longer a slave to fear, I am a child of God.”
Except it’s plural. Always plural. Once we were not a people, now we are the people of God (1 Pet.2.10). Strangers who’ve become citizens: foes who’ve become family. Our identity now is a plural, relational thing.
And God gathers together His people each week to remind us of this once again.
“Our Father ..” He taught us to pray, and those first two words say it all. We are both children of God, and related as brothers and sisters. Related, note. Our identity is a relational thing. In Christ; and part of God’s family. That’s who we are. And who we are then defines and determines both what we do and how we live.
Destiny
We are a future-oriented people in the way our lives are lived. Sundays serve to redirect our focus to that future God’s secured.
We’re gathered each week by the Lord to remind us of where all He’s wrought and accomplished for us in His Son – to remind us of where it will end. With the ultimate in ‘ceilidhs’.
Does that offend the sensibilities of some, to put the thing like that? I mean no offence! I mean only to stretch all our thinking, to help us all see that in gathering His people each week as He does, the Lord is intent that we grasp once again what’s in store – that glorious coming together of all of the saints, “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb” (Rev.7.9). There’s music and movement; isn’t that what the Scriptures all teach? The ‘great dance’ as C S Lewis once famously put it. Joy and delight, peace and pleasures, a family together and festive forever at last.
Sundays are there to calibrate our living once again. To pull up all the anchors of nostalgia which tie us to the good times of the past. To drag us away from the lure of the present and the pleasures it presents. To remind us that we’re pilgrims here, not residents. To assure us that, however dark the tunnel we may presently be walking through, there’s light at its end. Always.
The very act and fact of gathering reminds us of our destiny; and motivates us afresh to keep on pressing forward to that end with both an urgency and hope. Because the reason why we’re scattered to the far-flung corners of God’s world is to serve Him as His signposts to, His heralds of, that new and better day which soon will dawn.
Energy
As Jesus was conscious while He ministered of the power which was always going out from Him, so the service which we render in our ‘scattered’ lives saps streams of spiritual energy from our souls. Our reserves need replenished.
And it’s there in His gathering His people that the Lord thus refreshes us all. Like sponges wrung dry as our lives have been used by the Lord to bring cleansing and comfort to all of the folk we’ve been with, so we need once again to be drenched in the Spirit of God: fed afresh through the Word of the Lord, fired afresh in the praise of the Lord, filled afresh with the Spirit of God.
Gathered by God, to be scattered. Empowered by the Spirit poured upon us: encouraged in the knowledge of our destiny: ennobled by the grace of our identity: and inspired by our recalling His great story in our lives.
But how all that becomes the great reality of every weekly gathering of His saints – well, that must wait, I’m afraid, for another time!
Yours in Christ’s service
Jeremy Middleton