Pastoral Reflection 3.27.16

Dear friend/visitor,

If you're here today at our worship gathering because it's Easter, under some vague obligation or because of an invitation, welcome!

I was asked to write a little bit about how one can determine whether deciding to attend/join a church was the right decision, and so I found an old blog post that I've culled from that I thought would be relevant to this question:

An old pastor of mine once said “Commitment before certainty.” As is true with many relationships and commitments in life, you can almost never truly anticipate what life in a church will be like. To know that, you’d have to commit and stay a long time, maybe years, or a lifetime! But then how can you know? You can’t!

Hence the phrase “commitment before certainty.” You are certain about a church because you’ve committed to it, not the other way around. Churches are not static entities. Recent research suggests that people change in personality every ten years - how much more so with a church being changed by the Holy Spirit!

I can’t tell you how many people I talked to who were so bent on feeling “comfortable” or “happy” at a church that 4 years later they still hadn’t fully committed anywhere!

We must discern God’s call for us, navigating a life in which God is control, and yet we are called at every moment to choose to live in step with His word and presence within us. But listen to God and His word, know that certainty comes after commitment, and seek a place of sustainable commitment by the Spirit’s power. And when you commit, COMMIT. Be all in. After all, isn’t that the message of the gospel? When we enter a relationship with God, we should be all in, because he’s all in with us.