Churches and ministries, ministers including myself, have often operated with an unspoken and unfortunate formula for engaging with people and so if I forget to say it later let me say it now, I'm sorry because we the American standard American church have asked you to engage in a rhythm that looks something like this: believe, behave, belong, be seated—and it's not working very well.
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Pause. We turned discipleship into spectatorship, making following Jesus a comfortable show to watch instead of a life to live. Pause. Does that sound like how Jesus interacted with people? Is it any wonder why people are walking away?
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When we truly discover Jesus as presented in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we see a more life-giving rhythm that looks like this. Belong. Believe. Become. Belay. You see, with Jesus, it all starts with belonging. And by that, I mean His process starts with love.
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For Jesus, meeting a new person was to love them. To see a new person was to have compassion for them. When Jesus invited someone to follow Him, He invited people like us, selfish, full of doubt, carrying a lot of baggage, who didn't believe at first that Jesus was who He said He was. To put it simply, with Jesus, people belonged before they believed. They were loved before they had learned. They were graced before they had expressed gratitude. They were shown mercy without merit.
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Prevenient grace is God's grace that precedes any human action. It's the grace of God that enables us to freely respond to His gift of salvation and love.
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As people grew in their knowledge and trust of Jesus, they began to believe in Him too. For some, that takes a while. For the disciples, it took years. Many of them didn't confess their belief in Jesus until the final hours before the cross.
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Behaving, that's the old rhythm, is about external compliance, following rules, being good. In contrast, becoming, that's the new rhythm, is about internal transformation, being remade from the inside out, being remade to be less hypocritical and more merciful, less fragmented and more whole, less sin-prone and more holy, less foolish and more mature, less selfish and more like he created us to be, like himself.
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In other words, he called them to live life, not from a comfortable seat of watching, but in the servant role of belaying. If you're not from Colorado, you might not know—belay is a climbing term. To belay someone is to help them climb. It's a humble job. You're not the hero. You're not even climbing. You're holding the rope, managing the slack, ready to catch them if they fall. You're there to support, to be an anchor, to serve. Belaying is arguably the most loving thing to do when climbing.
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We're going to challenge the existing rhythm, believe, behave, belong, and be seated. And we're going to aim to recover something closer to the rhythm of Jesus. Belong, believe, become, belay.
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How does someone communicate that you belong? Do they just say, you belong? Maybe. When sincere, those can be powerful words, but do they have to be said explicitly, or is belonging something communicated more clearly through action?
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Henry wasn't convinced our church was a place of love and belonging because of my sermons. He was convinced because we showed up on a freezing roof. Anybody can do that. To put a finer point on it, Henry didn't become fiercely loyal to our community because someone shook his hand in the church lobby and said, we love you. You belong here. Honestly, maybe those words had been spoken to him. I don't know. But any messages of love that had been spoken didn't land until he was pounding nails in the snow with a group of men.
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Are you catching this? God's style of love is to demonstrate his love first. Prove it. Show it. Then he points back to his actions and says, see, I have loved you.
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Perhaps even now you can look back and hear him saying it to you too.
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If you look closely at the story, the character who most resembles the Good Samaritan is Jesus. And the character who looks most like the man on the side of the road is us. I'm not the only one who thinks this. Some of the earliest church fathers, Origen, Clement, Augustine, saw it similarly. When we read it this way, we get a deeper understanding of the love and the belonging that's available to us in Jesus.
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There are no words spoken between the Good Samaritan and the injured man. They don't talk. This leads me to assume the man was unconscious since the robbers left him half dead. Therefore, this love is not just without words, but it's also unnoticed. It makes me wonder, how has Jesus wordlessly loved us? How has he loved us in ways we haven't noticed?
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He'd been loved without knowing it, helped without asking for it, cared for while unconscious.
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The good Samaritan empties his bank account, his own bank account, not the injured man's, while the injured man lies unconscious. Oil? Not cheap. Wine? Not cheap either. Two denarii? Two days wages. And what about his own life? The Samaritan risks everything on a road known for robbery and violence. Does that sound familiar? Jesus walks straight into our danger, into our mess, our violence, our rejection. Knowing exactly what it would cost him.
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We may never know how the man responded when he finally woke up but we can know ours. How will you respond when you wake up to his love? Go and do likewise.
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We're that unconscious man on the side of the road. We're the ones who've received such remarkable love. We're the ones that love keeps coming back to. Here's what I'm getting at: belonging doesn't start when you wake up and say thank you. It doesn't begin when you finally recognize who's helping you. It doesn't even require your awareness or consent. Belonging starts when love finds you on the side of the road and decides you're worth saving.
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Belonging doesn't start when you wake up and say thank you. It doesn't begin when you finally recognize who's helping you. It doesn't even require your awareness or consent. Belonging starts when love finds you on the side of the road and decides you're worth saving.
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Imagine waking up like the injured man, suddenly aware of all the costly love that's been poured out while you were unconscious. What would it mean for you to truly wake up to God's love? What might change?
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