Bless our God, O peoples! Give him a thunderous welcome! Didn’t he set us on the road to life? Didn’t he keep us out of the ditch? He trained us first, passed us like silver through refining fires, Brought us into hardscrabble country, pushed us to our very limit, Road-tested us inside and out, took us to hell and back; Finally he brought us to this well-watered place.
– Psalm 66:8-12 [MSG]

This past week, we started our Spring Rooted experience. As I talked with people, giving them a picture of what is to come in the next ten weeks, I saw a number of reactions. Some looked right at me with eager excitement. Some nudged each other. Some stared at the floor. Some shuffled their feet and attempted to get comfortable while I described how some of the best “stuff” of Rooted is in the parts that are a bit un-comfortable.

But, everyone’s attention gained focus, unblinking as I talked about the value of each of our stories. We acquire, quite tragically, a belief that only some parts of our stories matter or are worthy of being shared. We learn, through the subtle parlance of social conditioning that our own story, the personal narrative that informs how we live, may not be worth the risk of sharing. Yet, it is God who is working his own redemption narrative through (not in spite of) the story of our lives – every chapter, every page, every sentence of dialogue, in every setting, and in every conflict, God is at work in us.

What I am discovering (often unpleasantly) is that God’s script to intentionally shape me into the kind of person He intended me to become occasionally surpasses my fiercely defended need for comfort. The Psalmist writes that God should be granted a “thunderous welcome” because “He trained us… push[ing] us to our very limit.”  People who push me to my limits are hard-pressed to receive any kind of welcome from me. But limit pushing, it turns out, is how God’s renovation script often meets our story. Someday, I will learn to greet trials with gratitude. Someday, I’ll give God His due applause for taking me to “hell and back.” In the meantime, I’ll learn to thank God that He knows more than I do; that His intention is, in fact, to shape me. In all of it: the discomfort, the conflict, and the being made new, constitute my story.

And that story is a good one – one worth telling.

See you Sunday,

Jeff

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…”  Matthew 28:19-20a

Jesus’ final words, as Matthew records them, are among the most central to historic Christianity. Jesus instructs the apprentices to His way of life (the disciples) to multiply themselves. In some cases, this gets interpreted flatly as: “Go make converts…” In that sense, the principle goal of faith is merely to give to someone a fresh thought on the spiritual life. But, Jesus tells people who have recklessly given up their lives to follow Him to help other people to do the same foolish thing. And, the task has the whole world in view.

Then He instructs His own disciples (the insecure, shallow, power-hungry, people-pleasing, attention-grabbers that they were) to baptize these new apprentices. They’ll immerse these new disciples in water, symbolic of dying to an old life. Then, they’ll be lifted up out of the water soaked in new life with Jesus.

For a lot of us, we wonder how to “disciple” people. What does that really mean? We neither want to seem pushy nor insincere about conveying what life with Jesus is really about. Churches have a number of ways in which people come to understand all of what it means to walk with Jesus. No system is truly perfect. But, the best methods involve discussion, authentic relationships, personal experiences with the practices of discipleship, and (not least) an examination of God’s Word, the Bible. Mariners’ method is called ROOTED. If you are looking to get the clearest picture of what it means to follow Jesus, Rooted is for you. If you are a person taking Jesus’ commission seriously, consider inviting people to join you in a Rooted experience (even if you’ve already been a part of one). Get signed up for Rooted here.

This Sunday, we’ll celebrate, publicly, what life with Jesus is about in baptism. It’s a powerful symbol succinctly telling the story of letting old things go and embracing the Holy Spirit infused newness of life that is given to us in Jesus. If you’ve never been baptized as an adult, consider what is holding you back. Baptism isn’t a gimmick. It’s a powerful public marker, made in the presence of the church family, of the work Jesus has done and is doing in our lives. Email Kim Alexander to let us know if you’d like to be baptized. But, should you show up and wish you had emailed us, don’t worry about it, the water’s fine. We’ll make room.

I cannot think of a better way to illustrate all of what Jesus accomplished during Easter weekend than with Baptism. I am as excited about this coming Sunday as I have been for any since I started at Mariners.

See you Sunday,

Jeff