Raising Christians to Be Like Christ

A good fellowship is hard to find

There are people in my congregation who don’t know any other fellowship that is like our own.

This is the first fellowship they have joined where the focus is on developing the believer to become like Christ and not on getting converts who would be church workers or bench warmers.

We don't believe in the idea of clergy and Laity. We believe every believer is a Prophet, a Priest and a King and should be trained in the things of the Spirit until they are steadfast and independent of circumstances in every dimension of life.

Unlike the traditional churches where the founder is like Moses and the church members like the children of Israel, we believe a good Christian fellowship should be more like Jesus and all the members being Apostles.

So when people join us, they find themselves participating and practising Christ instead of just sitting down to listen to a sermon and seek the counsel of pastors when they are facing any kind of challenge.

They joined us, found a community, found a place to belong, and for some of them, they’ve never had anything else to compare it to. So sometimes I look around the room and wonder if they think that all fellowships are like this.

Then I talk to people who have moved away, landed somewhere else in the country, and tell me, “I just can’t find another fellowship like that fellowship.”

A few years ago, there was a woman in our fellowship who eventually moved away. Not long ago, she went to heaven, and her family came back for her memorial service.

Her father wrote me afterwards and told me, “She grew up a muslim, but she fell in love with the Lord at your fellowship!”

A fellowship isn’t a themed country club, except with no golf course and no cocktail bar. A fellowship is the place where we meet Jesus.

I think our fellowship has tapped into what Jesus is offering in his shortest parable. He offers a chance to trade up.

Jesus says,

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” (Matthew 13:44, NIV)

Sometimes Jesus teaches a parable with a lot of words. And sometimes he writes an entire book in a single sentence. This is one of those.

In the world Jesus lived in, there were no banks where you could safely store your money. If you had something valuable, you might put it in a box and bury it in the ground. And if you died without telling anyone where you buried it, well, it became a hidden treasure.

Jesus describes a man walking across a field, taking a shortcut maybe. His walking stick hits something in the ground, and he hears an unusual sound. He digs around a little and discovers a box filled with treasure. It’s worth more than everything he owns, so he goes and sells everything.

That is Jesus’ picture of life with God. Life with Jesus is worth more than anything else.

I believe Jesus is the most loving, healing, forgiving, restoring person we will ever meet. I believe all power in heaven and on earth belongs to him. And I believe that when we begin a life with Jesus, something happens to us that is best understood as being rescued from one kingdom and welcomed into another.

I sometimes think of it like an aeroplane breaking through the clouds. Down below, there may be rain and turbulence and darkness. But the plane rises through the clouds, and suddenly there is sunlight and calm.

I once watched a woman whose life had been consumed by insecurity.

She was so ashamed of herself that she was cutting herself and hiding from the public. She wouldn’t even go into a grocery store if she thought she might run into someone who recognised her.  

She had cheated on her husband, so she had been rejected by her community and then lost her job in the chaos that ensued. After that, she just tried to hide. She hated herself.  

Then someone invited her to our fellowship.  

She heard the gospel, and for the first time she understood that it was actually for her. She discovered the God who loves broken people.

She had always assumed a Christian fellowship was for good people who kept it together, a category to which she had never belonged.  

She remembers the first time she walked into a grocery store again, and someone looked her over and made some rude comment.

That was the point at which she realised that Jesus’ opinion of her had done to other people’s opinion of her what the moon does to the sun during an eclipse.  Jesus was all she could see.

She left both her sin and her insecurity behind.

That little treasure parable is at the heart of everything Jesus taught, because the word Jesus talked about more than almost anything else was “kingdom.”

That word would have meant something to the people listening to Jesus. The Hebrews had spent generations longing for a kingdom of their own. They had lost their land and regained it twice. They were waiting for the promised Messiah who would finally bring victory and establish God’s kingdom.

When Jesus shows up, what he talks about most is the kingdom of heaven. This was their love language. His central prayer is, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” His greatest sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, is essentially an invitation to exchange kingdoms. Jesus asks us to give up the ways of the kingdoms we have constructed for ourselves and take hold of the kingdom of heaven. Give up revenge for forgiveness, lies for honesty, greed for generosity.

If the kingdom is Jesus’ favourite subject, money has become the favourite subject of the men and women of the church in this generation.

It is either Christians are complaining about money, complaining about tithes and offerings, complaining about seed sowing, complaining about monstrous church projects, private jets, expensive cars, outlandish lifestyles, or poverty and all its ills.

Our focus has seriously changed.

Jesus says, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19–21, NIV)

And where does Jesus say that? The Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus knows we carry our hearts in our wallets. We vote for our wallets. We plan our calendars around our wallets. We sometimes hold our wallets up in the mirror and use our net worth to measure our self-worth.

Wallets are thermometers

I think of our hearts as thermostats and our money as a thermometer.

A thermostat tells us what temperature we want the room to be. A thermometer tells us what the temperature actually is.

I can tell everyone that my heart is burning with passion for the kingdom of God. I can say all the right things about how much I love Jesus and how much I care about what God is doing in the world. Jesus then says my wallet is a thermometer that tells me how hot that passion really is.

If I don’t give a dime, I don’t care about the kingdom.

Jesus isn’t trying to take something away from me. He’s trying to give something to me. The problem is that my hands are full.

I once heard about a father who took his young son walking along the beach. The boy was collecting little rocks, broken shells, pieces of driftwood, and whatever junk caught his attention. Soon his hands were completely full.

Then the father spotted a sand dollar a few feet out in the water. He told his son to go get it.

The boy waded into the water, reached down, and tried to pick it up. But he couldn’t.

“I can’t get it!” he called.

The father said, “Why not? Just pick it up!”

The boy looked back at him and shouted, “I can’t! My hands are full of rocks!”

Some of us walk through life with our hands full of rocks.

Our pockets are full of rocks. Our homes are full of rocks. Our calendars are full of rocks. Our lives are full of things we thought would satisfy us. But if those things really satisfy us, why are we always trying to get more?

The kingdom of God begins when I drop the rocks. I stop clutching the things I thought I needed in order to discover what God has been trying to give me all along.

And when I finally see what God has given me, all that other stuff becomes like the sun behind the moon in an eclipse.

There are all kinds of people in this world who have been broken by the kingdoms around them. Some have been wounded by other people. Some have done the wounding. Some have spent years trying to fill their hands with things that never satisfy.

I don’t want to add to that brokenness. I want to live into God’s kingdom. I want to pursue God’s kingdom. I want to invite other people into God’s kingdom. More than anything, I want to live to see the answer to the prayer Jesus taught us to pray,

“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”