The church is a messy place; we have to stay committed to each other, and we don’t get to choose who joins the club. We love people just as they are.
If we all step back and make the choice to draw bigger lines for who our family can be and is, the whole world becomes a better place. God calls us his children. That means, as believers, we all are brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s easy to say that in passing, but so much harder to live it out in the day-to-day. Family is messy. It’s a lifelong commitment. You also don’t get to choose your family. I think these facts are also true when it comes to being the body of Christ. The church is a messy place; we have to stay committed to each other, and we don’t get to choose who joins the club. We love people just as they are.
For us, growing our definition of what family is has been something that God has called us to do in a very literal sense. We have been foster parents for the past four years and have had the privilege of being the safe place for several children to live, heal, and, for some, even become our forever children. As foster and adoptive parents, I’ve had the chance to better see God’s heart for every child. He loves them all passionately, no matter what their background. He places the lonely into families, and it is able to create life out of the darkness that plagues our world. He also loves the parents of children that we have made part of our family and will never stop pursuing their hearts as long as they are here on Earth. We have seen grace meet tragedy, loss, addiction, and heartbreak. The result is beauty, even though this is not how it ever should have been.
Loving Other as Jesus Loves Us
Foster care and adoption is not the only way we can draw outside the lines when it comes to family. Embracing friends, co-workers, neighbors, and more as a part of your tribe is a way to share the love of God in a way that changes this world for the better. We are made to be together, but our world has become increasingly isolated and lonely. When we make a choice that a friend, a neighbor, a vulnerable family, or a coworker is worth loving in the same way Jesus loves us, we start to create bonds that build us up and keep us from getting dragged into the dark.
1 Corinthians 12:27 puts it this way, “All of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a part of it.” Each person plays a vital role in working together with others who know Jesus around them. When we embrace our God-given purpose, we get to be Jesus to others here on earth. What an astounding thought that when I see my fellow worshipers raising their hands beside me at church, I am seeing part of Jesus at work in the world! Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can bring light into the darkness. We can stop the powers of death on chaos by confidently being ourselves and choosing to love the people around us beyond what is considered reasonable.
The World Needs the Body of Christ
A frequent lie that I battle as a foster and adoptive mom is that someone else could parent my kids better. After all, I am just an imperfect wife, mom, and follower of God; surely there are others who are more qualified to handle trauma, to wade through “the system,” and to handle all the many struggles that go along with this journey. The enemy wants me to elect to get out of the fight for the future of the children who are in need of people to say yes to a family that is bigger, more colorful, and more complicated than what seems reasonable. Making me focus on my failure more than God’s grace is the quickest way to derail me from continuing in the work the Lord has given me.
The reality is that there is no one else. It’s us, it’s the church, in all our imperfection that God calls out to be his hands and feet. There is no other foster or adoptive mom because God has called me to this role, and my kids need me. Here is the truth: the vulnerable, the lost, kids in the foster care system, people in jail, the addicted, the broken-hearted, and your neighbor all need to meet the Jesus who lives in you. They need Jesus in you to say yes when the Holy Spirit nudges you past your comfort zone and stretches you to grow your family, your tribe, and expand your view to see the things that break God’s heart and allow them to also break yours.
The church has to stop waiting for the more qualified, more funded, and more ready to do the job that God has called every person who follows him to do. Jesus warns us that the lukewarm followers are spewed out (Revelation 3:16), which means halfway Christianity is not Christianity at all. God, all the way back when Saul was King of the Israelites, took away his kingdom because he said Saul’s partial obedience was full disobedience (1 Samuel 15).
With God, it’s an all-or-nothing kind of deal. He wants our hearts and desires to use them to do abundantly more than we could think, ask, or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). We can trust that going all in is not a way to punish us; it’s an invitation to live a bigger life than we could ever dream up on our own kind of life! He takes our little and multiplies it a hundredfold!
How can you draw bigger lines of love in your little world? What steps towards an all-in kind of faith do you hear the Spirit nudging you towards? What has God already done that has exceeded your expectations? Remember what he has done to build your faith for what comes next. A faith-filled life invites us to a story where the best is always yet to come.
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