#25. The Inconvenient, Inefficient, Indispensable Church
With very young children, we can find ourselves a long way from Jesus and his people. While there’s a type of Christian zeal which leads some mums to opt out of motherhood, there can be a zeal for motherhood, or sometimes just a passivity in motherhood, which causes mums to drift from Jesus. This distance doesn’t usually come in one big crisis of apostasy. It happens when good things get disordered; when we forget who this role is from and who it’s for. When we forget where the life and joy really are.
Last week, we saw how the foundational duty of motherhood is to abide in Jesus, staying put in him by listening to his words and doing them. Abiding in Jesus can’t be separated from reading his Bible; reading with a prayerful, submissive responsiveness, a posture of readiness to obey—a readiness to pursue all that God says is good. When we’re not reading the Bible, we forget the varied range of obedience Jesus calls us to. We end up with a caricature of life, a caricature of good motherhood and a caricature of Christianity. Away from Jesus’ words, we end up with the distortions that destroy. We fixate on little things and forget the source and goal of all those details. Not only does our experience of motherhood become unhealthy, but our relationships in church do too. We’re already weary, so we withdraw to a simpler space with our tribe.
Abiding in Jesus is partly a hidden piety. But in John 15, Jesus reminds us that abiding in him is not only done on our own, we abide in him together. The Jesus vine is big and we are one branch among many. Jesus braids together love for him with obedience to his words. (John 14:15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”). Jesus highlights a particular command to obey: to love one another:
John 15: 9-14 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
Jesus repeats this command in the chapters around John 15 (in fact throughout all of John’s writings),
John 13:34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
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John 17: 14-23 “…Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth…I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”
Love for Jesus is shown when we love his people. As the New Testament continues, we come to understand that this love for other members of the Jesus vine is meant to be expressed in particular ways, especially in the local church. Have you noticed all the “one another” passages throughout the New Testament letters? Loving Jesus’ people is done in definite, long-term gatherings where all kinds of people are abiding in Jesus, around his word. Ephesians is one of Paul’s letters to a local church. Read it as an expansion of what Jesus says in the parable of the vine: how “in Christ” we are brought into every spiritual blessing, dead people made alive in Christ; and made one not only with him, but with each other. Ephesians is a superb explanation of how God has brought this about and how we are to live in tune with it. Paul tells us how to love one another by preserving the bonds of peace. Ephesians also shows how the relationships where we owe particular dues (e.g. husbands, wives, children and parents) fit into the one Body while maintaining a distinct shape. Peculiar duties are ordered within the united whole.
Sometimes, being conscientious in pursuing what we think is good as mums, we end up disobeying what God has plainly told us. It’s easy for us to put a lot of effort into a niche path—a family health regime, v’cc’n’t’’n views, theories of child training, educational choices, our family hobby. These convictions can lead us to withdraw from Christians who don’t share our ideas and practices. Strong opinions and strong preferences can spoil our fellowship (I speak as someone known for having strong opinions!). When this happens, we’re privileging our views on lifestyle over our oneness in Jesus. The views might be worth having, but when we are more concerned about these than expressing our unity with Jesus’ people, that’s when a tool for obeying Jesus becomes a replacement for him.
Then, there are other more easy-going mums, who prize convenience over conviction. They won’t likely fall prey to alienating opinions, but they might trip up on the sheer effort of continuing to know and love other believers. The demands of young children make staying in meaningful fellowship very inconvenient.
If our kids are the reason we stop being meaningfully knitted into our church (because feeding the baby is too hard in public, because we don’t want naptime to get messed up, because the toddler is distracting, because the kids just don’t like it, because their sport team plays out of town on a Sunday), then we’ve placed a false idea of good motherhood—or maybe just convenience—above obeying Jesus’ command to love each other. Refusing to obey Jesus is a refusal to abide in him. It’s refusing the sap of life and joy—the two things we are trying to preserve by being somewhere else.
We may not withhold love (in its many, varied, God-ordered, God-defined forms) from those who belong to Jesus, even if we struggle to agree on educational choices, or sugar consumption, or co-sleeping. Just as we can’t have Jesus but then ignore his words, we can’t have Jesus and then ignore his people, however perplexing we find each other. Our unity does not come with the type of nappies we use. Our unity is in Jesus (Ephesians 2). The fact that so many different people, with different tastes and subcultures are knit together in love only magnifies Jesus’ power.
Abiding in Jesus will slow us down, when we already feel behind. It takes time to read his Bible. It feels tedious to assess everything in our life by the standard of Scripture. Loving other believers is a costly detour. By utilitarian measures, it looks very inefficient. It will mean running toward things which don’t give us that golden sense of mastery. Things like, showing up where Jesus’ people gather, even though we’re so busy training our kids to obey that we miss half the sermon. Like persevering through interrupted conversations. Like putting ourselves in the way of God’s word and people even though our exhaustion makes it hard to pay attention. Like saying ‘yes’ to the lunch invitation, even though a nap would have been pleasant (although, there are some days when the nap might be the most godly thing you can do!). It’s the overall pattern of loving connectedness to each other, rather than the isolated occasions, which are most telling.
A commitment to Jesus and his people will often feel like it isn’t ‘working’ when we’re in the years of great dependence. When we find ourselves asking, “What’s the point? I didn’t hear anything or contribute anything,” we are using the wrong measure. There’s more to be said about what the point is, but in the very least, let’s start with the fact that Jesus commanded it. Personally abiding in him will mean loving other branches on his vine. And on that vine is life and fullness of joy.
When we do care about abiding in Jesus, we can be tempted to think of our children as a hindrance (because it’s harder to read the Bible and meet with other believers when we’ve got knee high persons in tow). That’s what we’ll get to in article #26.
