Growth

Filled Yet Empty

We’re a numbers-oriented society. We measure sports teams by their win/loss record. Grades are assigned based on the percentage of questions that a student answered correctly. Even employees are routinely evaluated by a numbers-based system. Perhaps it’s because math is the universal language. Two plus two will always equal four regardless of whether you are in France, Japan or Antarctica. In a  day in age where we parse what the word “is” means, numbers are easy to understand.

It’s tempting to bring this same mentality to church. We measure a church’s effectiveness by how many seats are filled, much like we measure a baseball team’s success by how many tickets they’ve sold. We’ve become a nation that celebrates the mega-church, that delights in warehouses and stadiums filled with parishioners. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m a firm believer that numbers aren’t what determines a church’s adherence to teaching and applying the Word of God. After all, 3,000 new believers were added in a single day after Pentecost. That would qualify as a mega-church by any standards today. However, it can become a problem when all we are looking at is the numbers; when we are more concerned about the quantity of people instead of the quality of their growth.

As Charles Shedd is quoted as stating –  “The problem is not that the churches are filled with empty pews, but that the pews are filled with empty people.” If the people in attendance have a vapid faith, if their understanding of God is diluted by their personal preferences rather than illuminated by truth of God’s Word, than the church is empty regardless of how many seats are filled.

The challenge is to make sure that this is not true of us. We need to be people who have a deep and growing understanding of Who God is, and what it means to follow Him. We need to be filled with His love, and His wisdom, committed to doing the work that He has set before us to do. We need to go to church thinking not what we can get, but how we can use what we’ve been given by Him to further His kingdom.

We need to make sure that when we fill a seat, we are coming as people who are filled by Him.

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Purpose

Usable

Even in the era where there are TV shows about hoarding and people’s propensity to keep things that do not appear to add value to their lives, we still are a generation of discarders. According to this article, the average American generates four pounds of trash per day, equating to 200 million tons of trash per year. That is a lot of stuff! The reasons behind our trash largesse are probably many, but perhaps the greatest reason is that we’ve ceased to find a useful purpose for that thing that we are throwing away. We tend to be a nation of pragmatists and consumers – and if something no longer does the thing we want, in the way that we want it do, we simply discard it and purchase something else.

It’s a mentality that sometimes infiltrates our interactions with people. We sum people up by their ability to be useful to us or to a project that we are trying to accomplished. We look at their talents, their attitudes and their character and determine whether or not they can be part of what we were doing.

The challenge, of course, is that Christ is in the business of changing people, of strengthening people, and in bestowing wisdom where previously there may have been a lack. After all, who would have thought a shepherd boy could defeat a giant? Or that the child of the king’s former mistress would be besought with unparalleled wisdom? God often does the unexpected, at least according to our standards, and uses people that we would have written off. After all, this is the God who said that the first would be last, and the last first  (Matthew 20:16) – an idea completely absurd to our ideas of winners and losers.

Perhaps there is no more unexpected example of how God uses the “unusable” than Paul. Here was a man who persecuted and despised Christians, yet he arguably became the world’s greatest evangelist. Not only did he become a witness for Christ, but he did so to the most ostracized and unlikely group of people (at least from a Jewish religious leader’s point of view) – the Gentiles.  He was such an unexpected candidate to be used of God that when Ananias was told to go to him after his conversion, he questioned whether God really knew His man. However, as Acts 9:15-16 tells us the Lord dispelled the concern with these words,

But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (emphasis mine).

Even as Saul, as he was then known, was persecuting Christ’s followers, it was ordained that he would be the one who would be an ambassador of Christ’s message. Even as he was intent on bringing about death, God was intent that he would be used to bring the Gospel of eternal life.

It’s a great reminder to us that God’s standards of usability are often different than our own. As the prophet was reminded about the shepherd boy, man looks at the outside, but the Lord looks at the heart. So when we think someone can’t be used by God, we may want to reconsider that position, especially if that “someone” is us.

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