God is pleased by the steps you take
“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:14-19)
This summer, we will be holding a Community Group based on the book Creature of the Word by Matt Chandler. The following is an excerpt from Chandler’s book “The Explicit Gospel” in honor of Father’s Day this coming Sunday:
There is this really magical thing that happens in homes all over the world. When you first have a child, you want your child to crawl. And then you want your kid to walk. My first child, Audrey, pulled herself to the coffee table. When she got to the coffee table, she began to bounce on her knees, and then she began to coast along. From there she started letting go and just being wobbly. At that point, we began to get really, really excited about the fact that Audrey is about to walk. Eventually she took her hands off of the coffee table, and we watched physics in motion.
God has created children, specifically young children, with gargantuan heads and tiny little bodies. So when Audrey let go of the coffee table, her gigantic head fell forward, and suddenly she has a decision to make. She can stick that foot out to catch herself or she can die. So she sticks her foot out, and now we’ve got momentum. It’s step, step, step, fall. And do you know what we did? We exploded in celebration.
We picked her up, spun her around, kissed her face, we sat her down and pleaded with her to walk towards us again. And then we were e-mailing, Facebooking, taking pictures, tweeting and all sorts of other things to get the word out that Audrey was walking. We did that with our son Reid, and we’ve done that with our daughter Norah.
What I have learned as I watched all of our friends have children is that there is always this epic celebration around the kid walking. This is news to be declared. “This kid is walking!”
For all the people I have watched go through that process, I’ve never seen anybody watch their kid go step, step, step, fall and say out loud, “Man, this kid is an idiot. Are you serious? Just three steps? Man, I can get the dog to walk two or three steps. Honey, this must be from your side of the family, because my side of the family is full of walkers. This must be some sort of genetic, shallow gene pool on your side of things." No father does that. Every father rejoices in the steps of his child. The father celebrates the steps of his child. I think what we have here is a picture of God celebrating us walking. So we step, step, step, fall, and heaven applauds. At what? The obedience to take those three steps. The Father in heaven is crying, “He’s walking!” “She’s doing it!” And maybe the accuser’s saying, “No, he only took a couple of steps. That’s nothing.”
But the celebration is in the steps, even if there are still falls. Because here’s what I know about all of my children: they start to walk farther and farther and farther, and they begin to skip, they begin to run, they begin to jump, they begin to climb and they begin to tear the house up. It’s beautiful. And I knew even when they were step, step, step, falling that that process was the beginning of what would result in climbing trees, dancing, and sprinting. Knowing in my mind what’s to come, the two steps and the stumble was a celebration. The moralist sees the fall and believes that the Father is ashamed and thinks they’re foolish. So more often than not, they stop trying to walk because they can’t see the Father rejoicing in and celebrating his child. Church of Jesus, let us please be men and women who understand the difference between moralism and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let’s be careful to preach the do’s and don’t’s of Scripture in the shadow of the cross’s “Done!” Resolve to know nothing but Jesus Christ crucified. We are not looking to conform people to a pattern of religion but pleading with the Holy Spirit to transform people’s lives. Let us move forward according to that upward call, holding firmly to the explicit gospel.
What we see in the Father’s heart in the Bible is its immensity, its bottomless depths. God’s heart is as complex and unfathomable as he is. Shouldn’t the gospel we believe stand firm in, and proclaim reflect the bigness of God’s heart for a fallen world? The cross of Christ and his resurrection are cataclysms of the unsearchable judgments and affections of God. It is this immense gospel that spurs Paul to pray:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
This summer, we will be holding a Community Group based on the book Creature of the Word by Matt Chandler. The following is an excerpt from Chandler’s book “The Explicit Gospel” in honor of Father’s Day this coming Sunday:
There is this really magical thing that happens in homes all over the world. When you first have a child, you want your child to crawl. And then you want your kid to walk. My first child, Audrey, pulled herself to the coffee table. When she got to the coffee table, she began to bounce on her knees, and then she began to coast along. From there she started letting go and just being wobbly. At that point, we began to get really, really excited about the fact that Audrey is about to walk. Eventually she took her hands off of the coffee table, and we watched physics in motion.
God has created children, specifically young children, with gargantuan heads and tiny little bodies. So when Audrey let go of the coffee table, her gigantic head fell forward, and suddenly she has a decision to make. She can stick that foot out to catch herself or she can die. So she sticks her foot out, and now we’ve got momentum. It’s step, step, step, fall. And do you know what we did? We exploded in celebration.
We picked her up, spun her around, kissed her face, we sat her down and pleaded with her to walk towards us again. And then we were e-mailing, Facebooking, taking pictures, tweeting and all sorts of other things to get the word out that Audrey was walking. We did that with our son Reid, and we’ve done that with our daughter Norah.
What I have learned as I watched all of our friends have children is that there is always this epic celebration around the kid walking. This is news to be declared. “This kid is walking!”
For all the people I have watched go through that process, I’ve never seen anybody watch their kid go step, step, step, fall and say out loud, “Man, this kid is an idiot. Are you serious? Just three steps? Man, I can get the dog to walk two or three steps. Honey, this must be from your side of the family, because my side of the family is full of walkers. This must be some sort of genetic, shallow gene pool on your side of things." No father does that. Every father rejoices in the steps of his child. The father celebrates the steps of his child. I think what we have here is a picture of God celebrating us walking. So we step, step, step, fall, and heaven applauds. At what? The obedience to take those three steps. The Father in heaven is crying, “He’s walking!” “She’s doing it!” And maybe the accuser’s saying, “No, he only took a couple of steps. That’s nothing.”
But the celebration is in the steps, even if there are still falls. Because here’s what I know about all of my children: they start to walk farther and farther and farther, and they begin to skip, they begin to run, they begin to jump, they begin to climb and they begin to tear the house up. It’s beautiful. And I knew even when they were step, step, step, falling that that process was the beginning of what would result in climbing trees, dancing, and sprinting. Knowing in my mind what’s to come, the two steps and the stumble was a celebration. The moralist sees the fall and believes that the Father is ashamed and thinks they’re foolish. So more often than not, they stop trying to walk because they can’t see the Father rejoicing in and celebrating his child. Church of Jesus, let us please be men and women who understand the difference between moralism and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let’s be careful to preach the do’s and don’t’s of Scripture in the shadow of the cross’s “Done!” Resolve to know nothing but Jesus Christ crucified. We are not looking to conform people to a pattern of religion but pleading with the Holy Spirit to transform people’s lives. Let us move forward according to that upward call, holding firmly to the explicit gospel.
What we see in the Father’s heart in the Bible is its immensity, its bottomless depths. God’s heart is as complex and unfathomable as he is. Shouldn’t the gospel we believe stand firm in, and proclaim reflect the bigness of God’s heart for a fallen world? The cross of Christ and his resurrection are cataclysms of the unsearchable judgments and affections of God. It is this immense gospel that spurs Paul to pray:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
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