Saturate E-Book

Jeff Vanderstelt

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 339

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

What does living for Jesus look like in the everyday stuff of life? Many Christians have unwittingly embraced the idea that "church" is a once-a-week event rather than a community of Spirit-empowered people; that "ministry" is what pastors do on Sundays rather than the 24/7 calling of all believers; and that "discipleship" is a program rather than the normal state of every follower of Jesus. Drawing on his experience as a pastor and church planter, Jeff Vanderstelt wants us to see that there's more—much more—to the Christian life than sitting in a pew once a week. God has called his people to something bigger: a view of the Christian life that encompasses the ordinary, the extraordinary, and everything in between. Packed full of biblical teaching, compelling stories, and real-world advice, this book will remind you that Jesus is filling the world with his presence through the everyday lives of everyday people… People just like you.

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SATURATE

Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life

JEFF VANDERSTELT

Saturate: Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life

Copyright © 2015 by Jeff Vanderstelt

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Published in association with Yates & Yates, www.yates2.com

Cover design: Erik Maldre

Interior illustrations: James Graves, Visual Jams

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked RSV are from The Revised Standard Version. Copyright ©1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4599-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4602-0 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4600-6 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4601-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vanderstelt, Jeff, 1969–

Saturate : being disciples of Jesus in the everyday stuff of life / Jeff Vanderstelt.

      1 online resource.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description bsaed on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4600-6 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4601-3 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4602-0 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4599-3 (hc)

1. Christian life. I. Title.

BV4501.3

248.4—dc23                             2015004179

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To

The Soma Tacoma family.Thank you for ten great years!“You are our glory and joy”(1 Thess. 2:20).

Mom and Dad.God used you to plant the seeds.Saturate is part of your legacy.

Jayne, Haylee, Caleb, and Maggie.You are my greatest gifts.You all bring me great joy!

Nicki.This book is written in your memory.Distant neighbor who became sister, mother, grandmother,and friend,you are finally with the man of your dreams!

Contents

CopyrightAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart 1: Beginnings  1 It Began in a Boat  2 Jesus Goes to Poker PartiesPart 2: Jesus  3 Jesus Is Better  4 Jesus Did It Better: We Have Been Saved  5 Jesus Does It Better: We Are Being Saved  6 Jesus WillMake It Better: We Will Be SavedPart 3: Discipleship  7 All-of-Life Discipleship  8 Life on Life  9 Life in Community10 Life on MissionPart 4: New Identity11 You Do Who You Are12 We Are Family: Baptized into the Name of the Father13 We Are Servants: Baptized into the Name of the Son (the King)14 We Are Missionaries: Baptized into the Name of the Holy SpiritPart 5: The Everyday Stuff15 Everyday Rhythms16 An Everyday Plan17 Everyday People on MissionConclusionAppendix A: Missional Community Covenant TemplateAppendix B: Missional Community Covenant SampleGeneral IndexScripture Index

Acknowledgments

This book exists because of the prodding of many people. I certainly prefer speaking over writing, but the elders from Soma Tacoma, along with several leaders from churches that belong to the Soma family, urged me to write. They were relentless. I owe them a great deal of gratitude, both for pushing me forward and for giving me the space to dedicate time to this work.

I also am indebted to the Soma Tacoma family. We have struggled together, failed forward, and grown in grace, and we have more stories of God’s faithfulness to tell than there are pages in this book. I am so thankful to God for each man, woman, and child who has been part of the body of Christ on mission together in Tacoma these past ten years. This book represents our learning together. It has been a joy to grow with these dear brothers and sisters.

I am also grateful to my assistant, Sara Parker, who served me so well. Without her help, this book would not have been completed. Randy and Lisa Sheets’ encouragement kept me from throwing in the towel; they constantly reassured me that what is written on these pages will serve people well. And the Wedge missional community, every iteration of it for the past ten years, has its fingerprints all over this book. Life together has been beautifully redemptive.

Lastly, Jayne, my truth-telling, Jesus-loving, Spirit-filled, praying wife, has kept me grounded, keeps it real, and prods us all to keep looking heavenward with faith-drenched, hope-filled expectancy that our Father has great plans in store for us all. God knew I needed a partner and friend like Jayne. Not only would I not have written a book, I wouldn’t have the ministry I have without her.

Introduction

I don’t like to write.

In fact, I have avoided writing a book for more than six years. But I couldn’t hold back any longer, because my heart has been captured by a vision that I cannot shake.

This vision is Jesus saturation—every man, woman, and child in every place having a daily encounter with Jesus through words spoken and deeds done through his people.

This isn’t really my vision. It is God’s vision. He says, “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14). And God will accomplish this vision through his Son, Jesus Christ, working through his body, the church. Ephesians 1:22–23 says, “He put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

Jesus is the head of his body, the church, through which he intends to fill every place with his presence. This is saturation—Jesus saturation.

Can you imagine every city, every neighborhood, every street, and every house saturated with Jesus’s presence through his people? What if, in every school, every classroom, and every extracurricular activity, students daily experienced the person and work of Jesus? Can you dream with me of a day when no business office, retail center, or industrial hub can get away from the good news of Jesus proclaimed in words and expressed in gracious deeds? A day when every café, pub, restaurant, or bakery smells of the aroma of Christ?

This is God’s intention for his world. And his plan is to do it through his people.

He wants you to be a part of it!

I hope you are reading this book because you want to be part of this. If you know, trust, love, and follow Jesus, you are part of it. If you haven’t yet submitted your life to Jesus, I pray you will. Jesus saturation can’t happen through you until it’s happened to you.

As you read these pages, you, like others, may think this book and its message are for the spiritual elite: a special group of Christians who are uniquely called of God, the paid staff members of a church, or the professionally trained. Don’t believe that lie. It isn’t true.

Or maybe you think the only people through whom God works are the radicals who sell all they have and go into foreign lands. He certainly works through them. But he also works through people who stay. His plan is to work through all of us in every place.

It’s possible that you’ve never experienced Jesus working through you to fill every place you go with his presence. Don’t let that prevent you from believing he wants to and is able to. The truth is, if you belong to Jesus, you are called to participate in his vision of saturation.

To be clear, this is not a leadership book, though I hope leaders will read it and benefit from it. Rather, this book is written to encourage the everyday Jesus follower to engage in the everyday stuff of life with the goal of seeing Jesus saturation for everyone in every place.

This book is for you—the normal, unimpressive, everyday person, young or old, male or female—because Jesus means to carry out his mission of filling the world with his presence through you. You are meant to do this.

The mission of Jesus is yours to participate in. It has always been God’s intention to choose normal, everyday people, and to show his amazing power and glory through them. He’s not looking for the most impressive person because he already is that person.

You are a perfect candidate for God to use to accomplish his purpose!

The people you will read about in this book are perfect candidates too. They are real, everyday, normal, unimpressive people. (Well, I’m impressed with them because I know them, love them, and have seen Jesus do remarkable things in and through their lives.) They are no different from you. What is most impressive about them is not they themselves, but Jesus at work in and through them. That is what Jesus saturation is really about—him filling us so he can fill the world through us.

I pray your journey through the following pages will lead you to become a disciple of Jesus on his mission in the everyday stuff of life and will result in exceedingly great joy for you as Jesus works through you to fill the world with his glory for his fame. What greater purpose and joy could there be?

I don’t know your starting point on this journey, but let’s begin where Jesus woke me up to this vision. It began in a boat.

Part 1

Beginnings

1

It Began in a Boat

The sun was shimmering off the smooth water of Hamlin Lake. The lines on our poles hung quietly undisturbed in the water. We hadn’t had a bite for a while.

I enjoyed these moments with my dad. Though I loved catching fish, I was also fine just looking at the water and being with my father. And I needed some time for nothing: no sound, no conversation, no work. Just space.

I had been a youth pastor for twelve years, but was at a crossroad. I had served in three churches and had experienced what many would call success in all of them. However, it was clear to everyone around me that I no longer fit the youth pastor role.

I was the director of Student Impact, the high school ministry at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. I had started off strong there as we restructured the ministry to better mobilize the students for mission to their campuses. At the beginning, it seemed as if I was the golden boy. People loved me. The team followed my lead. The ministry grew considerably. The leadership above me seemed to believe in me. I had taken on a position that needed a catalytic thinker with a new vision and strategy, and I had delivered. But eventually I had found myself in a management position, with a team that was losing trust in me. I didn’t fit any longer. I had gotten into ministry because I loved seeing people’s lives changed, and I had gone into youth ministry because teenagers, in their youthful idealism, believe they can be a significant part of changing the world. Now I was largely running an organization and becoming more and more distant from people.

As a result, I had fallen into a deep depression and had started seeing a counselor. I was anxious, afraid, and felt like a failure. Most nights, I tossed and turned till dawn, barely able to sleep. My wife, Jayne, had to regularly wash the bed sheets because they were drenched with my anxious sweat. I pondered the purpose of my life and how I could continue in the work I had in front of me. My heart agonized over what to do next. Some nights, I contemplated suicide. We had a newborn daughter and a newly purchased house, but I was clueless about our future. I knew I needed to get away from it all for a few days.

I needed God to speak.

I needed direction.

I needed help.

And I needed to be with my dad on the lake.

“Clearly Something Is Broken”

For some time, we didn’t speak. I like that about fishing—I don’t have to talk. I needed that quietness.

Finally, Dad broke the silence: “Did you know we just hired a discipleship pastor at our church? Your mother and I really like him. He’s been training us to be disciples of Jesus who make disciples. We’ve been in the church for over fifty years now, but we’ve never been trained to do that. We’ve been having these neighborhood parties and getting into discussions about Jesus. Your mother and I are learning a lot and really enjoying it.”

My dad continued to share that when his church hired its new discipleship pastor, the majority of the members didn’t know how to obey Jesus’s command to make disciples. Now, they were seeing that it should be normal for everyone to do it.

As he spoke, I thought of all the years I had worked with youth. I’ll never forget the first student I led to faith in Jesus—Lynn. As soon as she believed, her adoptive parents kicked her out of the house. The families in our church took her into their homes and treated her as if she was one of them while she struggled forward in her faith. Her life was messy, but in the mess, she brought many others to join our community of faith.

I pictured many afternoons going through Bible stories after school with Pedro, a freshman, and his friends Jessica, Jennifer, and Adam. I laughed thinking about Jessica, who had no Bible knowledge at all, saying Joseph’s new name over and over again—“Zaphenath-paneah, Zaphenath-paneah, Zaphenath-paneah”—because it sounded funny to her.

I remembered Todd, whom I walked with from seventh grade through high school. He was a shy kid whose passion came out on the field of sports. He hardly spoke out about Jesus at first, but eventually he grew to disciple boys younger than him. I thought of Nick, who, as a junior, was the life of the party. God grabbed hold of his life, transformed him, and used him to lead dozens of his classmates to Jesus—in the halls, at parties, or at a restaurant after a football game.

One of those classmates was Stephan. He had a very sad story. His mother had left him on the side of the road when he was a little boy. Eventually, he found his way through the foster system and landed in a boys’ home. Stephan came to believe he had a loving Father in God because of Jesus. He went from being a lost orphan to becoming one of God’s children.

Name after name, face after face, kept coming to my mind. All of these kids were everyday teenagers whom Jesus had worked in and through to accomplish great stuff.

All of them had become disciple makers.

In other words, all of them could tell the story of God’s love for them through Jesus. All were growing in knowing, believing, and obeying the Scriptures. They prayed for people regularly and saw many friends come to follow, obey, and depend on Jesus as well.

Some did it through sports, others in the classroom, and many just by hanging out together and talking about Jesus in normal life. They loved being together and were excited about Jesus, and that excitement spilled out into everyone around them.

As I thought of all these kids and what my dad had just said, I found myself angry and dumbfounded. “How is it possible that someone could be in the church for over fifty years and not know how to make disciples?” I wondered. “What’s wrong with the church? I’ve witnessed teens begin to do this in a matter of months. And why would you hire a discipleship pastor when the whole point of the church is making disciples of Jesus? It’s not a separate program of the church! It’s the mission of the whole church! Every disciple of Jesus is called to it.

“Clearly something is broken!”

You Are the Church

My dad continued to talk about the training he and my mom were receiving. He spoke about the parties they were throwing, the neighbors who were attending, and the conversations they were having. I was excited for his newfound ministry, but I was also sad, because as I thought about what it was like growing up in our house, I realized my parents had been doing much of this for years.

My parents were the epitome of hospitality. They arranged their lives and home so that people would want to be there. It didn’t seem remarkable to me when I was growing up; it was all I knew. They put a pool in the backyard. My dad remodeled our basement and set up a pool table, Ping Pong table, coin-operated video games, and pinball machines. Our house was the place for teenagers to party because the door was always open and my mom always had the pantry fully stocked with food and drink. It was clear my parents wanted people there. It was completely normal to come home from a night out with my friends to find my parents hanging out with a group of teenagers. I’d walk in and hear them having a conversation about sports, school, dating, sex—you name it.

It seemed a little weird when I thought about it: “Why would teenagers want to hang out with my parents and talk about sex?” I wondered. “What do my parents know about sex?”

It also was not unusual during dinner for my parents to bring up a person who was in need of a place to stay: a boy whose parents had kicked him out of the house; a husband who was not doing well in his marriage and needed a break; or an ex-drug addict who needed shelter from peers who wanted to pull him back into the world of narcotics. There were dozens of these stories over the years. After they would share such a story, my parents would ask us four boys: “Should we invite him to live with us? Would one of you like to give up your room for a while?” I can’t say that was always easy for us. What teenage boy wants to give up his bedroom to a stranger? However, there are many men today who call Jesus their Lord and the Vanderstelts their family because of the way my mom and dad included them.

“If my parents didn’t know how to make disciples, what were they doing all those years?” I asked myself.

As I stared at the water, it dawned on me that no one had ever validated what my mom and dad did. It didn’t fit into the mold of church programs. The leadership of the church never told them that they were doing the work of the church in their home. Church had been wrongly defined only as an event: a Bible study on Wednesday or a class and the worship service on Sunday.

People went to church. It was an event or a program. Church wasn’t seen as the people of God doing the work of God in everyday life. What my parents did, didn’t count—or at least that’s what they believed.

That day in the boat was a defining moment in my life. As I look back, I recognize that the Spirit of God was showing me a deficiency in how the church was understood and structured and how discipleship was defined and practiced.

The reason the teenagers I worked with were able to make disciples of Jesus was that they believed they were the church. For them, church wasn’t something you go to. Church was something you are.

This is confusing to some because the word church literally means “gathering.” So people naturally think it is something you go to—after all, you go to a gathering.

However, when the Bible uses the word church, it is referring to God’s people gathered to Jesus to do his work in the world. The teens were the Jesus-gathered people sent to the soccer team, the classroom, and the party on Friday night, to do Jesus’s work of loving others toward him. My parents were no different. Neither were those who surrounded Jesus.

Neither are you.

When you read the accounts of Jesus’s life in the Bible, you see this. You discover the everyday, messed-up people that Jesus gathered around himself to do his work. You see warriors and women, fishermen and fathers, pagans and prostitutes, the religious and the ragamuffins. And you see Jesus in the middle of all of them, doing the work of God with them in the marketplace, at a party, on a mountainside, in a house—and on a fishing boat on a calm lake where there seemed to be no fish.

He still does his work on quiet fishing boats in the middle of calm waters far away from religious gatherings. He was doing it in me, right there with my dad.

Everyday People Doing Everyday Stuff

It was then that I realized something. The youth I had worked with had experienced something closer to church than my parents’ generation had. These kids were the simple, regular, messed-up people that Jesus had chosen to use in everyday life.

My parents weren’t alone.

I was one of them as well.

I began to realize that I didn’t fit the typical mold of a church leader either. Yes, I could preach on a stage, but I didn’t fit the “church-as-event-only” approach anymore. I wanted to see people, all people, all kinds of people in every place, mobilized to be the “Jesus-gathered people” on his mission.

Then I started to think about all the youth I had worked with over the years and considered where they were. It occurred to me that many had come to believe the same thing my parents had. They didn’t see themselves as a key part of the church anymore. What they did didn’t seem to count. They had graduated into what the kids called “big church.” They had gone from actively seeking to reach their peers through the everyday stuff of life to being asked to sit in the bleachers and watch someone else play the game. They had joined the thousands of people who unwittingly believe the lie that church is only an event you attend and that the mission of God is accomplished on a stage where only a few do the ministry in front of the many.

As a teenager, I played goalie on a hockey team that traveled throughout Michigan. At one point, I had the opportunity to step up into a higher division, a change that could have led to a hockey career. However, our family had friends who had played professional hockey, and hearing from them about the lifestyle on the road toward a hockey career made it unappealing to me. Besides, at that point in my life, I was planning to become a lawyer. So I turned down the opportunity, and with that, I stopped playing hockey altogether. I hung up my skates. In fact, I even stopped watching the game. It was a sad moment—a kind of death moment for me. I died to being a hockey player. I figured, “Why keep playing when there is nowhere to go from here but down?” I didn’t want a regular reminder that I could have done more but chose not to.

This is what had happened to many of the teenagers I had led. Some of them had just taken their seats. They gave, they attended, they invited, and they served from time to time. But they were sitting most of the time. Some of them had become disillusioned with the church. They had been key players in the game. They had experienced the victories, but they had been demoted to being spectators! I think they figured that if all they were ever going to do was just watch after having played the game, then why should they even be around the game at all? Some had left the church altogether, I’m sad to say. Others had found themselves involved in college campus ministries or overseas work—places that still believed everyone should be in the game—while others had gone on to join new expressions of the church that were calling them back into the game of everyday mission. In many cases, the local churches lost some of their best players.

There I was, in a boat with my dad—and with Jesus. My dad didn’t see it, but Jesus had been with him all along—and with me. He had been in all of those acts of love, open doors, and late-evening conversations. Jesus had been in the midst of his church, doing his work through my parents’ lives. My mom and dad didn’t need to be trained in a new form of discipleship. They needed to know that all those years they had been creating opportunities for disciples of Jesus to be made. They just needed to be equipped in how to engage those opportunities more intentionally with Jesus.

Several times throughout the next couple of days, I shared with my parents how they should see what they had always done as the ministry of the church—they could make disciples of Jesus in their home. A spark was ignited in their hearts and they began to get excited about how God had uniquely designed them for his purposes in the world. What they did mattered! He could use them as they were.

And even though they didn’t know it, they had been discipling their own children while they were reaching out to others, so their example had deeply shaped me.

A New Beginning

Months passed after that time on the water, but the thoughts I’d had that day didn’t leave me. “Something has to be done about this!” I kept thinking. I believed there was a need to call normal people to see all of life as the context for Jesus’s ministry to happen. Everyone could be and should be a part of this. And the everyday stuff of life matters—Jesus wants to see his church engage in all of life for his purposes.

When I finally resigned from my position four months later, I believed I would never serve in a vocational capacity in any church again. The leadership had graciously paid for me to receive a thorough assessment, which revealed that I should be involved in new business start-ups, consulting, or catalytic leadership. The assessors warned me against ever getting into a management position again and clearly directed me away from church leadership unless it was church planting.

At that point, I really didn’t think the church had a place for someone like me. I thought: “Why not fall back on your business degree and start a company? Make disciples of Jesus as a businessman and then teach others to do the same. Maybe you could be an encouragement to businessmen like Dad, who were never told business could be done as ministry.” I also wondered: “How can Jayne and I partner together for ministry in and around our home? What if we could retrain people to see that the mission of the church can be done in the home and the marketplace?”

The day I stepped down, I received three phone calls, all from people unaware that I had resigned. Each call was an invitation to be a church planter. One of them was from a former mentor of mine. He invited me back to the greater Seattle area to plant churches with him. As he described what he felt called to do and invited me into it, I sensed a nudge from the Holy Spirit: “This is the beginning of what I started to birth in your heart on the boat. I’m in this. Trust me as I lead you into something new.”

Not fully grasping what we were embarking on, Jayne, Haylee (our ten-month-old daughter), and I found ourselves, two months later, in January 2003, driving across the country in our minivan, ready to use our life savings to support us as we began planting churches where everyone is involved in the work and every part of life counts—where people like my mom and dad, single moms, teenage boys, and fisherman have a part to play.

2

Jesus Goes to Poker Parties

“I’ll raise you a hundred,” Greg said as he pushed a stack of poker chips into the middle of the table to show he meant business. At the same time, laughter erupted from the next room, where the ladies were sharing stories about marriage and motherhood. Greg’s wife, Mary, listened as the women poured out their hearts to one another.

This was the first time Greg and Mary had been at our house for one of our parties.1 Jayne and I had been in the Puget Sound area for about a year, and we were beginning to call people together to be the church in the greater Tacoma area. Parties and feasts were one of the means we were using to gather people and give them a taste of what it might look like to be the church in our community.

In the past, several of us in the Chicago suburbs had experienced community forming this way around meals and celebrations. Caesar and Tina had introduced us to the art of hospitality and the joy of the party. Tina is an amazing cook, and she and Caesar hosted the best dinner parties around. If they were hosting a dinner, you did not want to miss it!

At one of these dinners, about three courses into an amazing five-course meal, it dawned on us: “This is a great picture of the kingdom of God!” While immersed in the feast of food and life together, we recalled Jesus comparing the kingdom of God to a feast where everyone is invited in (Luke 14:12–24). Together we started to imagine what the church would be like if we all believed we were a picture of God’s kingdom breaking into the world in ways that felt like a party. One of us said: “If the church believed this, it would radically change what we do and how we live! We would be known as the most celebratory people around. Word would spread. People who wouldn’t normally want to come to a church event would come to our homes. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?”

A seed was planted in our hearts at that moment, and the conversation never really ended. We began to ask questions: What if we were to start a church that feasted and celebrated around Jesus together? What if our homes were intended by God to be some of the primary spaces in which the ministry of the church should take place? People could be welcomed in, cared for, and experience belonging to a people who enjoy one another and life together. This would transform people’s perceptions of the church. Their understanding of who the church is and what she does would be very different from others’. As a result, people would come to understand Jesus in an entirely new way. If church were more like a feast and ministry took place regularly in our homes, everyone could join and anyone could do it. Everyone loves to feast and celebrate together, and anyone who knows and loves Jesus can host a party around him.

Jesus’s church celebrates and feasts together. His people live life to the fullest for his glory and learn how to do the normal, everyday stuff of life for his glory. Not just parties and feasts—everything!

This isn’t a new idea. God called his people Israel to remember him and show the world what he was like through the everyday stuff, the big and the small. The special feasts, which were extraordinary, were meant to remind them that everyday meals mattered as well. Parties are God’s idea. During the Israelites’ parties and feasts, they were to remind one another that all of life was to be done as an expression of their love for God. God called them to see their celebrations and feasts as an expression of their worship. He wanted them to use something mundane and everyday—eating—as a reminder that he is to be the center of all the everyday stuff.

God is brilliant, isn’t he?

He wants us to see that all of life, every aspect of it, is a good gift from him. He wants our hearts to cry out, “God is so good!” in the middle of everyday life. He wants us to eat, play, create, work, celebrate, rest, and relate to one another for his glory. God always intended that every part of life be a participation in his activity in the world and a celebration of his goodness to us all. So he told Israel to do all the stuff of life—working, resting, eating, and celebrating—in remembrance of him.

I love this about God!

I grew up believing that after I died, I would go to heaven, which would be like an eternal church service. As a teenager, I wasn’t too excited about that. All I could imagine was a bunch of us in white gowns floating on clouds that felt like hard wooden pews. We would forever listen to long sermons and sing songs from red hymnals. Later in life, as I read the Bible, I found out that this is not an accurate picture of our future with Jesus. The Scriptures tell of a day when we will dwell on a new earth and enjoy a sin-free existence, living life fully and abundantly with God in our midst. We will eat, play, create, work, celebrate, and rest in perfect harmony with God and one another. It will all be good and it will all be worship!

Imagine if the church was like this now.

God’s Calling to Israel

That was clearly God’s desire for Israel. While the whips of Egypt were still fresh in their memories, God reminded his people that he had delivered them from slavery and would be in their midst continually. He commanded them to eat a meal (the Passover) to regularly remind them of how he had rescued them. But he didn’t end there. He also commanded them to throw several other kinds of parties that would tell the stories of his love and provision for them. In fact, God not only commanded Israel to party in his name, he also required that the people give a significant portion of their money to make sure the celebration was done well.

Can you imagine churches today taking offerings so they would be known as the people who threw the best parties?

God wanted the nations to know what he was like by looking at Israel’s celebrations and feasts. He wanted the other nations to want to belong to Israel because the best of life is lived in God’s care and under his leadership. He wanted Israel to be a people who pointed forward to a new world, where life would be lived perfectly together. They were to be a foretaste of the future reality so that all nations would want to join them in it one day.

God didn’t want just Israel as his people in the new world. He wanted all peoples, every tribe and tongue, all the creative expressions of every culture, together worshiping him through every aspect of life.

It didn’t happen.

The people of Israel failed. They didn’t make God the center of the party.

Their parties and festivals became empty rituals—passionless religious events. God wanted them to love him and others through the everyday stuff. However, they let the everyday stuff of life become mundane. Sure, many of them continued to observe the feasts, but their hearts were not in it. At one point, God told them that he hated their parties and feasts because their hearts were not directed toward him.

Can you imagine how sad a day that must have been? The invitations have been sent. The decorations are hung. The food is prepared. The guests arrive. Then God arrives; after all, the party is for him. But imagine that he tells you he hates the party. He hates it because you have forgotten to celebrate him. He hates it because every aspect of your celebration tells a lie about what he is like. The party doesn’t demonstrate his character and desires. And it clearly doesn’t show how much he loves people. It is a Godless, loveless party. And he hates it!

That’s what God did to Israel. They forgot about him, not just at their feasts and festivals, but in the stuff of everyday life as well. Their celebrations and life together became merely empty rituals. They did not love God and they did not love the people he sent them to bless.

God doesn’t just want us to feast or celebrate as his people. He wants us to remember him, keeping him central to the party by showing kindness, love, and mercy to all those who lack a reason to celebrate. We are to be the “good-news people” to the world, who show the good news in our lives and invite others to receive it into theirs. The celebration is to be for God. The party is to be about God. After all, it is meant to tell the world what he is like.

The Israelites forgot who they were and why they had been called to be God’s people. Their feasts became empty, heartless, ritualistic events. They were partying without the life of the party, celebrating without a reason to celebrate. That led to self-absorbed consumption and heartless activities without love.

The same can happen to us if we forget to keep God central. Church becomes an empty, heartless religious event.

Jesus Redeems the Party

So Jesus came as God in the flesh to show us the heart of God for people. Before Jesus did any formal ministry, he spent thirty years of his life doing normal, mundane, unremarkable stuff. He lived a regular life for the glory of God. He ate, played, learned, celebrated, worked with his hands, and rested just like the rest of humanity. Think about this! God moved into the neighborhood, and nobody but a few shepherds took notice. And they did so only because a bunch of angels showed up while they were watching their sheep and told them to go see Jesus.

Jesus lived a normal, quiet life for thirty years in an unknown town. He was so normal that when he began his public ministry, the people from his hometown couldn’t believe it. “Isn’t this Jesus of Nazareth?” they asked. “Isn’t he the carpenter’s son who lived among us, doing normal stuff like the rest of us?” (see Matt. 13:53–58). The difference is that Jesus did everything for his heavenly Father’s glory. He lived all of his life as an expression of his love for God the Father. Jesus did what Israel didn’t do. He did what we don’t do. He set apart every aspect of life as holy unto God.

That is what the word holy means—“set apart.”

God first sets people apart for himself. He makes people holy. It is his job, not ours. We can’t make ourselves holy; only God can do it. He did it with Israel. God set Israel apart as his people and made them holy. However, they failed to set apart life unto God. They became a holy people living unholy lives.