Note: This post is adapted from a sermon I first delivered at Bethany Bible Chapel in Winchendon, MA on July 3, 2022. It follows the outline of the sermon on every point but is not verbatim what I said in the initial delivery; the message was also originally taught from the ESV but has been switched to NASB here.

While some people who know me on Facebook may expect differently, it has been about 15 years since I was last punched in the face. That time, it was by my ex-fiancée; she had been led to believe by some people who didn't like me (admittedly, for good reason) that I had been cheating on her. I hadn't, but at the moment when that right hook connected, that didn't really matter. What mattered in that moment was that she really believed it, and through her actions, I was finally convinced that she really believed it. The reason for this is actually pretty simple: we act in accordance with our beliefs. That is, our behavior displays what we really believe, whether we intend to or not.

The epistle of James is heavily focused on this. James wrote his preserved letter to believers who already understood the gospel. This letter doesn't deal heavily with the basics of the faith or how to understand salvation; his concern is what they're doing about it. The passage we're looking at today is essentially a summary of the whole book in that it condenses a lot of these concerns into one neat little package.

What does it mean to say that this faith can't save? Every commentary I consulted in preparing this message had something to say on this matter, always addressing a stated concern that Paul taught a salvation of faith and James taught a salvation of works. How these commentaries addressed this was usually something along the lines of recognizing that Paul and James aren't contradicting each other because they aren't talking about the same thing. Where Paul in Romans is focused on the gospel as the basis of establishment in maturity, and therefore concerning himself with the means of salvation when talking about faith and works, James is presenting the results of establishing one's maturity on the gospel, and is therefore concerning himself with the effects of salvation when talking about faith and works. We have to understand this distinction when reading James; we read it through the lens of understanding what salvation looks like as it plays out in our lives, not how we enter into it in the first place. And James is very concerned with how it plays out in our relations to one another. In fact, the passage cited above is sort of the climax of James' condemnation of partiality. I summarized the section before it for time concerns when preaching this message, but I'll include the actual text here because I can:

James has, for some time now in the letter, been calling out the practice of treating some people in the body better than others. This is especially focused on the treatment of the poor as compared to the rich; James expresses grave concern about the church treating the rich better simply because they are rich, and will go on later in the letter to attack accumulated wealth in one of the most inflamed condemnations of the entire Bible. We can tell from James' examples in today's passage, in which he primarily focuses on the treatment of those who lack as examples, that this is still part of that condemnation. James is declaring here that our behavior, especially toward one another, is a gospel issue.

Now, I've mentioned this before, but it bears reminder here: when I and others call something a gospel issue, we are not saying that this issue is the content of the gospel. That is, when someone says that our approach to racial reconciliation or sexual abuse is a gospel issue, they aren't saying that Christ came to save us primarily from inequality or assault, as it is sometimes framed by its critics. What we're saying when we reference something as a gospel issue is that it is an issue that reveals what we believe about the gospel. James is saying that in today's passage, that our treatment of others reveals what we believe about the gospel. And Jesus said the same in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. In the parable, people are sorted 'like sheep from goats,' and each is given their due reward and an explanation on why they're receiving what they are. For example,

Jesus declares that the evidence of whether they belonged among the sheep or  the goats wasn't in lofty words or fancy theological training or their volunteer hours at church. He is answering on their behalf a series of questions that he treats as pretty fundamental to the issue at hand:

• When I was hungry, did you give me food?
• When I was thirsty, did you give me drink?
• When I was a stranger, did you welcome me?
• When I was naked, did you clothe me?
• When I was sick or in prison, did you visit me?

He makes it very clear that the answers to these questions matter. In both cases, those receiving reward as well as those receiving punishment, the addressed parties express confusion. Both ask when they ever saw Jesus in these situations, when they ever had the opportunity to act in accordance with these questions. And Jesus tells both of them "to the extent that you did (or did not) do it to one of the least of these, you did (or did not) do it to me" (Matthew 25:40,45; NASB). By their actions, the people in the parable displayed whether or not they had love for one another, but that wasn't all. Jesus tells us, by delivering this parable, that this very same behavior reveals whether or not we have love for Him. The answer to those questions, as it concerns "even the least of these my brothers," is the very same answer as it concerns Him. But how does this work?

This may sound a bit controversial, but hear me out: our actions are determined by what we believe, not by what is true. For example, I can say with certainty that it is true that Jesus rose from the grave. The historical accounts for this event meet or surpass the standards to be taken as serious historical evidence, the nature of the accounts themselves have elements that lend them credibility, and the timing lines up with what we would expect for first-hand accounts. I could go into detail, but that isn't the point right now. The point right now is that people who don't believe it's true don't act like it's true. Maybe they deny the supernatural and their actions reflect a belief in naturalism. Maybe they deny that Christ is God, and their actions display that they are not fundamentally considering Christ in their decision-making processes. Whatever it is, the actions of those who do not believe in the resurrection are defined in some measure by the fact that they don't believe it. The fact that the claim is true isn't enough to change the behavior of everyone who comes in contact with that truth; the truth of the resurrection does not, by itself, change our behavior, but our belief in the resurrection does.

As such, our actions serve as evidence of what we believe. Our words are an inferior proof in this regard. After all, we can lie about what we believe. We can even lie to ourselves. Titus is warned by Paul about false teachers that "They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed" (Titus 1:16, NASB). James touches on this same idea in our passage, when he says "What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works;" note here that he doesn't say "what good is it that he has faith," but rather, "what use is it if he says he has faith" (James 2:14, NASB). James isn't even comparing faith and works, he's showing that an empty statement of faith is not sufficient evidence that said faith exists! Works serve as evidence of what faith exists, and I don't mean big showy works. My standing at the pulpit and preaching isn't the kind of evidence God is looking for, and Jesus goes so far as to say that even miracles aren't enough on their own.

The will of the Father is not a matter of mighty works or big displays, but rather the daily knowing and being known. After all,

It's for this reason that I haven't historically liked Valentine's Day or the later addition, Sweetest's Day. I'm not anti-romance or anything, but I don't like the idea of being told I need to go big on the same day as everyone else. More so than that, though, I don't like the implication that a big showy practice on a scheduled interval is we show love. I firmly believe that if Carol and I relied on an annual ritual to prove our love, we'd be doomed. That stuff is nice, it's fine to do it, but if it exists in a vacuum it actually proves the opposite. If I can't muster up any energy to display my love outside of circumstances where I'm being pressured to do so, it sends the message that I don't actually have any love dwelling in me for her. It's the daily life, the love shown bit by bit, day by day, hour by hour; it's the life of love that proves love, not the holidays of love.

Similarly, it is the daily walking with God that displays our love for Him. In my previous Sunday morning message at this church, I referenced the then-current sermon series about the heart of Christ and said that the point of so much of what we were saying was to take the things we learn about the nature of Christ and behave as though they are fundamental truths of the universe. That all of creation, including us, is defined by the very heart of who Christ is. This happens by way of a growing relationship with Him, in which we make decisions in service to Him. Loving Him above all and loving others in that is essential to our walk as Christians, and it will be displayed in our actions toward one another. James warns, "If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,' and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?" because a faith that is fixed on God will draw us closer, not only to Him, but to those who bear His image (James 2:15-16, NASB).

It can go the other way, as well. Actions that do not glorify or serve God are evidence of faith that is not fixed on Him. One of the things we need to keep in mind here is that we each have some areas in which there is room to grow. None of us are perfect; even if our lives in general point to a faith fixed on God, we have some element in our lives that is still skewed, whether by holding onto it for ourselves or being just a little wrong about who God is in that matter. That which we believe can be our undoing just as easily as they can help us grow, and even one area of false faith in our lives will impact our general behavior. Jude warns about this, though he's mostly focused on false teachers and therefore on a pattern of behavior that displays a whole life rooted in something other than Christ, when he says that "...these men revile the things which they do not understand; and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed" (Jude 1:10, NASB). Our actions are the means by which the immediate fruit of our beliefs are realized in our lives. But we need to discuss why that is.

In my church, we do a communal scripture reading during a part of the service that happens before the sermon, and whoever is preaching that Sunday selects the passage to be read. On the Sunday when I first preached this message, I asked for the reading to be the entire third chapter of 1 John. John tends to follow more cyclical logical paths than Paul and James, so throughout the chapter (and the epistle) there's a degree to which he's saying the same thing over and over again in different ways; but what he's saying in this epistle strongly mirrors what James is saying in our text, and this message is highly apparent in chapter 3. Consider the parallels between the James passage and this from 1 John 3:

I would encourage you to read that whole chapter as related to this concept, but for now I'd actually like to highlight a verse a couple chapters later.

If we have true faith, it will be made manifest in our lives. By submitting to Christ, we overcome the world; we are no longer bound by its sinful nature, we are no longer subject to its whims and passions, we are free in the way only the victorious can be free from that which they've defeated. This new state, this nature of being one who has overcome, is manifested in the keeping of God's commandments. But not as a burden! A heart aligned toward God will have a natural inclination to move toward Him and to act in a manner that pleases Him, and what pleases Him and makes up the bulk of His commandments is love for Him and love for His image-bearers, especially those of His family. This isn't a demand that we are struggling to meet, it isn't a weight we are being forced to carry. When our hearts change, our desires and drive will change, and that will shape our behavior. We can determine if a heart is oriented toward God by whether or not that heart is producing fruit that glorifies God. In contrast, James warns us in 2:17 that a dead faith cannot stir the heart to action. The warning is presented as a question, "can that faith save him?," but it's a very stern question. And John provides an equally stern answer:

That is, if our 'faith' is so weak that it cannot stir our hearts to love the person next to us, the person we can see and touch, the person whose pain we can directly witness and understand, the person who struggles daily against the same sinful worldly systems as we do, how can it possible move us to love God? God knows our pain intimately, but we barely know His. How many of us sat with Jesus, ate with His disciples, heard His laugh and rested our heads against His shoulder? Will a heart be moved more strongly by stories about someone than by experiencing life with someone? James goes so far on this basis as to suggest that faith without works doesn't even deserve to be called faith. In verse 18, he challenges those who will not put their faith into practice to follow through; he asks for proof of faith without works. But there's no way to show faith if it isn't impacting anything! It's like asking someone to show you the wind without allowing the wind to push against anything. How can you possibly say there is wind when it affects nothing? By definition, if wind is not moving and pushing against anything (even the air itself), is it even wind? Categorically, no. And faith is the same way. Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is, categorically, evidence and conviction. And these have real world results; if one will not act in accordance with their convictions, it stands as evidence that they do not hold those convictions. What James is doing here is highlighting the impossibility of faith being knowable, even the possibility of faith being real, if it has no works.

If our faith is not moving us along the path highlighted by John, that of growing in our service to God's commandments and manifesting His love ever more, then it simply is not faith. Or at least, it isn't faith in Christ Jesus. One can have faith in many things, but if that thing is the God of the Bible, these results being discussed by James and John will be the fruit of it. James is helpful here, in that he provides some examples, and these examples are expanded upon and added to by the writer of Hebrews. James highlights Abraham and Rahab; the former is discussed in more detail in Hebrews 11:8-10 and 11:18-29, while the latter is addressed in Hebrews 11:31. They are, in Hebrews, listed among a collection of examples, people who held great faith, and whose faith was proven by their works. The examples we have of faith throughout scripture are people whose faith drove them to action. In every case, they believed God was going to do something or had done something, and they acted in accordance with that belief. The chapter highlights not only great and major decisions made in faith, but consistent daily life spent in light of God's nature, God's works, and God's promises. This is boiled down in Matthew 8, where in verse 10 Jesus declares a centurion as having more faith than He had seen in all of Israel. But what showed Him that faith? Simply put, a man who recognized Christ's authority, understood who Christ was in daily terms that impacted his life, and acted in full confidence of what Jesus would do.

There's a process to this, so let's break down how it works with an example from my own life. The first step is that our beliefs about the truth of the world inform how we process information. We decide who and what we're going to trust, and how we will analyze new data, based on the beliefs we already have about the world and the bigger picture. I'm habitually anti-authority, and while God has softened my heart toward those in authority, my natural inclination still isn't exactly instant trust. This became glaringly relevant the first time I was arrested. I was 13, got attacked in art class over a misunderstanding paired with a bad day, was arrested for fighting in school, the details aren't important right now. What is important is that the police officer who sat across from my parents and me explained that he knew I hadn't actually broken the law, every witness' testimony lined up on that fact, but it had been determined that it was better to charge me anyway so ensure the department would not get accused of racism, seeing as the young man who attacked me was black and I wasn't. He assured us that this was a thing that happened from time to time and they therefore knew the court would throw out the charges and everything would be fine; he was right in that regard, the court did throw out my case and I was never in trouble, and the family of the young man who attacked me accused the court of racism for punishing their kid but not me.

So the idea was that I wouldn't get in trouble, the police would look squeaky-clean, the kid who attacked me gets punished, and everyone wins. Based on conversations with my parents since then, I'm under the impression they very much accepted that answer as the best way to navigate a complicated situation. As I said, they had ample evidence as the situation continued to unfold that the officer was right about how the situation would be seen and how best to offer some measure of satisfaction without putting me at undue risk. I, however, did not. What I heard in that explanation was that the police were, on a systemic level, putting their image as a higher priority than their actual job. That they were more concerned with looking like they were practicing justice than in actually practicing justice. As the officer's worldview made him think he was explaining a reasonable compromise for a broken world, and the worldview of my parents made them hear a reasonable compromise for a broken world, my worldview made me hear a confession of repeated offenses against my community. While my parents thought about how much pressure that officer must have been under and how complicated the situation was and worried whether or not the judge would follow through on the officer's promise, my head was elsewhere. How many people, I wondered, had been thrown under the bus before me? How many of them didn't get their cases thrown out like mine was? How many people were in prison, or had criminal records, or were now dead because it was easier and more important to maintain the image the police were after than to do right by them?

Now, I'm not actually advocating for my position in this post, and I wasn't in the sermon. I've done that elsewhere and certainly will again, but the point here isn't whether or you agree with me or my parents. It's why you agree with who you found yourself agreeing with. The point is that, as you were reading that story, some things stood out as more reasonable than others. Some things clicked easier, some people sounded like they were being more fair to the circumstances than others did. That's what I'm trying to highlight. That moment where your mind began to interpret the story through the lens of what you already believed, that's how this works. We process information based at least in part by a system of credibility we establish based on our existing beliefs about the world and how it works. And then, once we've processed the information, the information we have deemed as credible informs how we make decisions. That event (and others) formed a long-standing distrust of police in my mind, and that distrust manifests in how I handle encounters with police. But that's not limited to isolated encounters, because how we make decisions and the bulk of our decisions shape our daily lives. How I view cops is evident in how I drive, how I vote, how I talk to my kids about the law. There is a fair chance that my anti-authoritarian mindset, by shaping how I interpreted that one situation, will not only prove to shape my whole life, but the lives of generations after me. And this is true of all of us, and it is true of every belief we hold. They all impact our behavior in this way, and by doing so, they all shape every day of our lives. Even if we try to act differently without changing those beliefs, it will break down. The consequences of our beliefs will find a way to show through, even when we don't realize it. There will be cracks, and people who know how to recognize the beliefs at play will see them glowing bright and clear through those cracks.*

We would be wise to remember that God always knows how to recognize the beliefs at play and sees all our cracks.

The result of all of this is that we can't simply "fake it til we make it." We don't rely on our own strength or willpower to behave in a manner that glorifies Christ, and the goal of sermons and posts and books aiming to help us on our walk with Christ, if they are handled properly, never seek to put pressure on us to just do better. I told the church during this sermon that I, the lead pastor, and the other regular preacher at our church are concerned with helping the church, including ourselves, live our lives in a manner that more clearly displays God's love and glory, but none of us are under the impression we can push people to any sustainable actions that will accomplish that. Sermons there and posts here are fundamentally invitations for all of us to examine our beliefs. The fact is that the only way to produce a life that glorifies God is to constantly have God before us and examine ourselves for places where we are not believing rightly about Him. As we know Christ more clearly and seek after Him more fervently, change will happen in our lives. The more we align our hearts and minds with the truth of who God is, the more our lives will reflect Him. The goal here is to ensure that our instinctive means of interpretation is who Christ is, and submit to the process by which God changes our lives through that lens.

Having Christ as our interpretive lens is more than just knowing things about Him. James ends our passage with a warning to that effect, when he says "You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder" (James 2:19, NASB). One commentary I consulted pointed out that the faith of demons is better than the faith of some of us, because they at least know God well enough to shudder.  That is, they have enough awareness of who He is and who they are and what that means for them to recognize the end result of that interaction; but even that is not enough faith to bring about any change in them. But this shouldn't be so for us!

We have the mind of Christ! By submitting to Him and becoming a new creation, we have available to us the true interpretive lens for all of reality, the very mind of the God who knows all and sees all, who dwells in us and leads us. And this perspective is alien to the world, the ways of Christ stand out against the ways of mankind. If we are living this out, truly living it out, we will begin to look strange in the sight of the natural world around us. So we need to ask ourselves some hard questions. How much of what drives our reactions to things are cultural pressures, put onto us by families, friends, our environment, our affiliations, and other social sources? How much are we actually trusting Christ to guide our minds and actions? Are we living like we have the mind of Christ? Do we look like little Christs in our contexts, or do we look like the natural product of our contexts? Our behavior is a relatively easy means of analysis, both self-analysis and the analysis we open ourselves to by entering into the family environment of the local church. Our behavior will always reveal the truth of what's happening inside us, eventually.

I used to have a Nissan Truck. It was old enough that that was its name on the title: Nissan Truck. I was delivering pizzas with it one day when I suddenly found myself sitting at an usual angle, facing significantly more upward than I was before. The truck was making a weird noise, as well, so I pulled over and checked it, and found that the frame had rusted through and snapped right where the cab met the bed. I pulled it all back together using zip ties, and used some electrical tape to close up the severed fuel line. And from the outside, for the rest of that delivery, it looked fine. But it was very apparent in the driving of it, and with even a cursory examination, that it was very broken. Sometimes we want to be like that, just make it look good and ride it out til glory, but that doesn't work. We can't prop up our lack of faith with empty works or even empty knowledge. Sin rusts us to our core, and we need a new frame. Too many of us are trying to drive around on zip ties and tape, and it's time we honestly face how little that helps us.

If you're reading this, and you've been treating the Christian life or social morality or ethics or even some other faith as a checklist that you think will save you, it's time to stop. You need to repent, recognize Christ for who He truly is, and place your trust fully in Him. Lay down whatever it is in your mind that tells you to interpret discussions like this as anything you can or should do to fix yourself, and lean on Him to change you on a fundamental level.

If you've already done that, if you've recognized your need of Christ and submitted to Him, then you need to take stock. have you fully given yourself over to Him, or are you still trying to hold on to rusty pieces? We need to always be looking to the person of Christ and our beliefs about Him, examining how well we reflect Him. And this side of eternity, there will always be something where we're lacking, where we're a bit off the mark. We need to identify those places where we don't quite look like Christ, where we don't have a natural draw to glorify Him more, and take things like this post as an invitation to ask why. What belief am I holding that doesn't align with the truth of who God is? Don't beat yourself up, don't try to force a new behavior; take a step back and examine your beliefs. Where are our hearts and habits leading us? Any place in our lives where we are not being drawn closer to God is a place that needs examined.

Our works cannot save us; they are, rather, a declaration of what has been done in the core of our being by God by His grace through our faith. We do not change ourselves, but we submit to His changing power. And the result of this is that we will practice the good works He has intended for us. So let us be a people who are trusting God enough to walk in His power down the strange paths he has for us, now and forevermore.

* - For the record, this is the essential claim behind things like microaggressions and casual racism/sexism/antisemitism/etc. The idea is that those who hold institutional power in some way are trained by their social structures themselves to view those who do not hold that same power as inferior, through various ideas that are embedded in one's worldviews. These ideas then filter through into individual words and actions across one's daily lives, and that the act of trying to resist the effects of those ideas (the stuff we quickly identify as racism, like lynch mobs) without changing those ideas themselves will still result in little signs of those ideas showing up in one's words and actions in ways the racist/sexist/etc. person does not recognize as wrong but the target of those ideas is intimately familiar with.

The first session was delivered by Stephen Witmer, pastor of Pepperell Christian Fellowship and author of A Big Gospel in Small Places​, and focused on why small places warrant care and attention.

Which isn't an entirely unreasonable question to ask. As addressed in the previous post, there are good reasons so many resources are spent on places that will have a big impact on a lot of lost people very quickly. Fulfillment of the Great Commission requires that the gospel spread fast enough to reach the world, and with the size of the world's population and the rate of its growth we need to step up that effort some. Being strategic and looking for the places with the fastest growth and largest reach helps ensure as many people as possible hear the gospel as quickly as possible.

The problem is when we only put resources into those places. Because the fact is, if the gospel is going to reach as many people as possible as quickly as possible, someone needs to be going into the places between the strategic launch points. Whether they go from the hub cities, or from neighboring communities,  or rise up from within, the farm towns and small places will need to have someone going to them. The model that relies on pouring resources into hub cities cannot then remain in hub cities or its entire justification breaks down. If these are points chosen for their ability to expand then they must expand into the places that were not chosen. If we're focusing on Boston for its ability to impact places like Townsend and Sturbridge, at some point we need to be sending people and resources to Townsend and Sturbridge. That's the point.

Which is fine as a logical and logistical explanation for why there must be investment both in large and small places, but Witmer, as befitting a speaker at a conference for ministers, focused instead on scriptural reasons.

The primary thrust of the argument Witmer presented is not that the hub city model of church planting is wrong or that it relies on expansion, or even that it fails in some way. The argument was firmly rooted in the claim that ministry in small places is, itself, an expression of certain truths about the gospel that simply are not represented by ministry in large places. Where large-place ministry showcases the universal reach of the gospel in its scope, immediacy and power in its rate of expansion, and the wisdom of the gospel through its careful consideration of method, small-place ministry shows how the gospel is also small, slow, and unstrategic.

One of the condemnations of the gospel message I have actually received in my life is that if an all-powerful and all-wise God wanted the world to know the truth of Himself and His message, He should have had the foresight to deliver it somewhere other than a backwater corner of an ancient empire. And I've heard the counterargument that Galilee and Judea actually sit on fairly important trade routes and would therefore have some strategic value to the spread of such a message, but Witmer would appear to argue that the atheist has noticed something about the gospel that we are too quick to dismiss: that Galilee really is a backwater corner of the Roman Empire and really should raise some questions about its utility in a global mission.

Perhaps the answer is that the gospel isn't, at its core, utilitarian.

Small
Is that not what we see in the life of Jesus Christ, anyway? We take for granted that Mary and Joseph were of the line of David, so He fulfills that prophesy, but have we just been assuming that David had no descendants at that time in a more noble position who could have raised the Son of God in some degree of pomp and splendor? Why pick the great-grandchildren that live in a dusty little town doing menial trade work? Why make arrangements for this child to be born in a stable away from the hub city of the region? They run off to Egypt and make no impression on the people there worth recording, then return to Nazareth where Jesus lives in obscurity until His mission begins in earnest and He spends most of that mission wandering around places where crowds could find nothing to eat. He consistently whittled down the number of people following Him, to the point that despite having a massive following at various times and whole cities that wanted to declare Him king and appearing after His death to hundreds of people at once, only 120 are still hanging around waiting for His promise to be fulfilled at Pentecost. How often we consider a church of 120 people to be too small to notice!

​Witmer notes that the Kingdom begins very small in scripture, and that God consistently shows concern for what is small. The small places like Bethlehem, the smallest son of Jesse, the smallest bit of faith, the jots and tittles of the Law.  In ministering to the small places, we are continuing the work that God has always had for these locations.

Slow
"The gospel gives us permission to have slow ministries." One thing that strikes me is that, while we do have moments of explosive growth in the church in Acts, the way in which we read the book can sometimes make us think it was always like that. One story right after another, with Paul being saved outside of Damascus and then going out and beginning to preach and going home where he's pulled by Barnabas to Antioch and then turned around and sent on their first missionary journey. But we know from his other writings that Paul spent at least 12 years coming to understand the gospel with which he had been entrusted before the vast majority of that even happened. How often we try to rush things to fit our timetable, this idealized version of the story in our heads, when God intends to take the time to make sure it's done right.

Witmer repeatedly noted that we should "want revival more and need it less." By wanting it more he wasn't saying we don't desire it hard enough; rather, the point was that we too often treat the big explosive moments as the whole picture and judge ourselves and others by whether or not these experiences are happening. But our validation shouldn't come from how quickly we outgrow our buildings or double our baptisms. These things are great, and we should value them and seek after them, but we cannot treat them as the whole picture of God's work. We should want to see everyone we've ever met come to church and make a profession of faith this Sunday; but when we consider ourselves a failure for having any less, we lose sight of the fact that our entire role is to be faithful in the task. Faithfulness is always marked more by time and consistency than by results.

Unstrategic
According to worldly wisdom, the gospel is a mess. Sending your own son to die on behalf of people who hate him in order to win some of them over is a terrible strategy by any human standard. Having all of the work in establishing your religion happen in a place that has no strategic, economic, or cultural importance just seems like poor planning. Pouring yourself out into the lives of a handful of illiterate fishermen, a tax collector, and a zealot while turning away scribes and people ready to install a new king almost sounds like planning to fail.

But this is the foundation of our faith. The gospel, and the ways it gets worked out, isn't always going to seem like it makes sense or that it's aimed at making the biggest impact in the fastest way possible. The nature of the gospel actively stops us from thinking that we can only justify the use of resources on the best available options. It gives us permission to focus and really spend time and effort on people who can bring nothing big or new to the table. In fact, it basically requires us to do so. To do anything else not only fails to showcase the way God has consistently worked across the centuries, but also kind of suggests that we think we're big enough deals to have warranted His attention. We misrepresent God and ourselves and only encourage heightened egos if we act like the gospel only belongs to the strategic few.

The last thought I have in my notes from Witmer were his words, that "if you are viewing your people as a stepping stone to somewhere bigger and better, you cannot be loving your people." Is this not what it call comes down to? If we will not love the handful who gather in the small church an hour outside of anywhere, how can we think we deserve to be shepherds over the thousands that gather under a dome in the city?

The third week of the study we're doing in Kyle Idleman's series, Gods at War, is titled "Love." It focused on the practice of putting other people into a position where you expect them to fulfill and complete you, to be the lover for you that God alone can be.

While the lesson was titled "Love," it really came down to significance and meaning. The video for the week, as well as many of the questions, leaned heavily on the way people use love and its trappings to find value and significance in their lives. Where last week's idol was built up by our desire to find comfort and peace in this life, this week feeds on the desire to give this life meaning.

But, as we discussed in the group and was touched on in the leader's guide, we don't search for love in just one way. All forms of love can fall subject to this idol. Family relationships, friendships, romantic partners, strictly sexual partners, and any other place where we seek to fill this need for companionship can fall into the trap of expecting the other party to define our lives and our worth. I can assure you I have even known people with a love for their pets that may have been idolatrous in this way.

Where the idols of pleasure are insidious because they seem to work, the idols of love are insidious because they don't. See, they don't fail us in a way that makes us realize they aren't worthy of our affections; rather, empowered by our culture's push for particular flavors of romance, they fail us in ways that make us feel like we are unworthy of them. We look within ourselves for the flaws, the thing that made this pursuit not work, and punish ourselves and change ourselves and do everything we can in our own power to make ourselves worthy of our idol's attention.

I've personally watched this play out. The type of idol I have historically struggled with the most as been self (which looks like it'll be covered in a later lesson), and before meeting my wife I was engaged to someone who very much seemed to, in retrospect, fall into making an idol of us, or me, or at least some aspect of our relationship. And those two idols worked together really, really well. There were things going on with her that I wanted to help her with, and because of my idol that meant I needed to fix them for her, and it often came off as though I needed to fix her. While her view of me meant that she kept striving to be good enough for me, to get that feeling of value and affirmation from me, and she could never quite do good enough to get it, so she would try harder and push herself farther and I'm seeing that these things are destructive and expressing my desire to see her not hurt herself and she's just hearing that she's failing even worse and this was just a constant downward spiral that almost destroyed us both.

The thing is, we don't have to prove our worth to God, He isn't going to put us into that same trap of striving to show ourselves good enough to warrant His love. He just pours it out, freely. Going to the cross while we were still His enemies. Calling out for us while we were not yet seeking Him. It's important to recognize this because the idols of love have twisted it and make us miss the real benefits of confession. Confession, when done in a Biblical manner, isn't part of an abusive relationship where we need to be constantly reminded of how inferior we are so we can be beaten down and twisted into a state of constant pain and self-abuse and attempts to prove ourselves. Even a healthy marriage has issues sometimes, and communication about those issues that cause friction so they can be addressed and handled in a healthy way is necessary; and this is a more accurate picture of confession. We are identifying the places in our relationship with God where we are experiencing friction and distance and clearing the air, not to prove we are unworthy and grovel for a taste of acceptance, but because we have already been accepted unconditionally. It is an act of walking forward together in openness and honesty. It is not a means of gaining access to a deeper love from God but a practice born out of an existing access to the fullness of His love.

Abusive, and manipulative, and controlling idols of love have given us a false understanding of what it means to talk candidly about the things that hinder our walk. And works-based salvation models have made this problem worse. But if we will be vulnerable, and honest, before our God and our fellow members of the body, we can experience the freedom and relief that comes from a truly confessional life; marked not by a seeking after meaning and value in love, but by a comfortable recognition of the value we already have to the One who loved us first.