Most small groups do at least two things well—fellowship and Bible study. However, at their best, they can be so much more!

Group life is a great way to live out the Great Commandment and Great Commission in community. As Rick Warren points out in the Purpose Driven Church Strategy, the five purposes for Christian life together are worship, evangelism, discipleship, fellowship, and ministry. A key component to the overall health and success of G3 is balancing these five areas. This is so important to the church family that we have implemented community groups through a launch resource, with the phrase Living the Five, which means living intentionally into each of these purposes.

All groups are encouraged in every gathering to incorporate these five habits:

• Evangelism—inviting new people to join the group
• Fellowship—caring for one another emotionally, spiritually, and physically
• Ministry—taking on a mission project either in the church or in the community
• Worship—praying and possibly even singing together
• Discipleship—studying God’s word and applying it to life together

The benefits to this balance are numerous. For instance, our need for membership care from staff and pastors has diminished greatly because the people are caring for each other. This frees the staff to spend more time equipping laypeople for ministry and preparing for the weekend services. By having more than three hundred groups actively seeking ways to engage in ministry opportunities in our church and community during each study, we are able, as the body of Christ, to do so much more than we could through a single church-wide emphasis.

One of our community groups—a small group of women—meets weekly to prepare backpacks for children who do not have enough food each weekend. As part of their weekly gathering, they stuff seventy-two packs for at-risk children in our area. Another community group prepares and distributes hygiene kits for the homeless. These projects are completely autonomous. The groups handle everything themselves, including coordination and funding. At Christmas, for the past few years, we have gathered together with our community group hosts to hear their outreach stories. It is overwhelming to hear of projects, which range from malaria vaccines to tutoring, being planned and done by these community groups!

The emphasis on inviting those far from God to join the groups also helps the church reach out with the good news. Through the G3 process, community groups attract many people who have not yet come to corporate worship. In other words, they have not attended church yet, but they are meeting weekly in homes with their friends to learn more. This is great! And it helps our people live out the Great Commission.

The Approach to Community

As you approach the G3 system, consider expanding your thinking about what group life can look like. Instead of thinking about Bible study, cell group, or small group, we encourage you to use the label community group. The word community implies that the group is open to everyone in your area, the entire community. In our culture the church may not always seem open to everyone even though we may mean for it to be open. For people who don’t attend your church, they may not know if they are really welcome to come in your doors or participate in your groups.

The use of the word community has been so beneficial to changing our church culture, in fact, that we now use it in most of our church advertising. For example, invitational cards and billboards may read: “You’re invited to a Community Christmas Celebration.” For people far from God, it gives them permission to belong.

The term community also opens up our groups to a wider audience. Recently, during our membership class, we met a woman who had never been to church before. Yet, there she was, in a two-hour course about what it means to be a member of the family of God and part of a congregation. Curious, right? She explained that she had been attending a community group at a neighbor’s home and found it to be life changing. When she was told about the membership class, she wanted to hear more about the church. After meeting us, she said, “Who knows? Maybe next week I’ll even come to hear you preach.”

Some people aren’t ready to come through the doors for worship. But they may be open to going over to their neighbor’s home one night a week for snacks and a video-based lesson. And if that is a positive experience, it might be their first step toward a relationship with Christ.

While Jen was shopping recently, she met a delightful woman who stopped and said, “Hey, you’re the woman that leads my community group.”

So she replied, “Oh, do you come to Harvest?” The woman replied, “Oh no. I don’t go to church, but I do go to my neighbor’s house for Bible study. You’re that woman on the screen, right?” Jen introduced herself, listened to a little of her story, and then told her that when and if she got ready to try out a service, Jen would be one of the people ready to greet her.

By simply adding the word community, a great deal is communicated. The outside-in point of view lets those who have doubts and questions know that “yes, you are invited.”

The Release of Control

It’s a difficult lesson to learn, but great leaders know that you can structure for control or growth, but you simply cannot have both. This has been one of the harder but more meaningful lessons for us to learn over the years. As you will see, as we get into the process of G3, anyone (really, anyone) is allowed to grab a resource and gather friends for the community groups.

Because the biblical teaching is delivered by a skilled biblical communicator through a DVD resource, you don’t have to worry about the quality of the teaching. The people who take the materials from the table are not teachers.

This is crucial to the G3 system!

The hosts don’t lead the actual study; the DVD video leads the study. The hosts are friends and neighbors who get together with people they know to do life together and explore God’s word. By lowering the bar in terms of their preparation and expertise, more people are able to engage.

This may be a struggle for you because as a leader, if you are like us, you may have gotten stuck on quality control. Many churches require a great deal of training before activating people into the role of a host. This seems like the right thing to do, unless it is limiting your effectiveness in advancing the purposes of God’s kingdom. If we aren’t careful we can develop a culture in which only a few people are “qualified” to do ministry. Has that happened in your church? Do only a few people lead Sunday school or ministry teams? In our day and time, with access to so much technology, we can harness mature teaching and put it into the hands of new seekers and less-mature believers.

Remember who followed Jesus? Primarily, it was ordinary people. Jesus trusted them with the message of the gospel. The G3 system follows that example and allows you to put good materials into the hands of your people, some of whom may even be far from God.

But, to be honest, when we first started the G3 system, we were nervous about loosening control. You see, we know some of our folk. We love them! But some of them are sketchy. Do you know the term sketchy? It means questionable. Our anxiety centered on what would happen if we put materials into Mr. Sketchy’s hands. Well, let us tell you what happened. Mr. Sketchy invited his sketchy buddies, and they got together and studied the Bible! In some cases, for the very first time. That’s a good thing, friends.

We can structure our churches and ministries for control or growth, but you simply cannot have both.

In our situation, we were stuck at 72 adult groups. But by trying the G3 system, in one week we went from 72 to 226 groups active in our community. We immediately found that people were willing to be in a group. They were interested. They weren’t too busy. They just needed a system that worked for them where they were.

Remember: don’t say but; keep thinking so. Consider the possibilities before you get stuck on your obstacles. By controlling the quality of the prepared material, we opened up the potential of who could be hosts in our area. We don’t call these people teachers; they are simply hosts. They are inviters, and their network of invitation is far greater than ours is without them.

One young adult who grabbed materials came up to us and said, “You know I’m an unwed mom, and I’ve always been too shy to show up at a group. I didn’t know what people would say about me and the mistakes I’ve made. Would it be okay if I grabbed one of the resources and got together with some friends, and we did this together?” Yes, absolutely. So now there are eight young women meeting regularly to seek God and study his word, aiming to live life in a new way.

Again, friends, that’s a good thing!

When people are given responsibility and begin to build relationships, their pronouns begin to change. They begin to see the ministry of the church as theirs, not just yours. They begin to think about what they can do, instead of what you need to do. This is a powerful shift.

By allowing anyone (really, anyone) who is willing to grab a resource and gather a few friends to take the materials, we had to rethink our ideas of how to do ministry and who can be involved. But we’ve found that by providing solid biblical materials, we are not giving an endorsement to any questionable behaviors people may have. We are simply saying, “Here; try this. We think it will help you and the people you invite.”

We also know that by loosening the constraints of who our inviters are, we are more likely to reach people far from God. To use the fisherman metaphor, the net gets cast into much deeper waters than just what the highly qualified church folk may be able to reach on the surface.

You may be like us and need to stop here and reread this section, perhaps several times. Most of us have structured our ministry with high control. This need often comes from a good and well-meaning heart, but it limits our ability to reach people who need God. Again, you can structure for growth or for control, but you cannot have both.

The Power of Synergy

One of the keys to the success of the G3 system is to tie the community group materials to what is taught on the weekend. In other words, the community group materials and the message from the sermon are closely related. By creating additional material and creative questions for dialogue, you get several benefits:

(1) It is easier for people to interact because they have already been introduced to the topic through the weekend sermon. Therefore, they are more likely to contribute to conversation.

(2) It develops synergy within the community by giving your congregation a common theme to talk about. For instance, when they hear that a series is coming up about family, they know that both the weekend and the weekday groups will be on this topic. It sparks conversation in the community.

(3) It becomes easier for your church to advertise what’s coming next. The congregation knows that when we have a G3 series, the community group materials and the message will be linked. It becomes easy for them to invite their friends because they can cast vision based on the advertising we put into their hands.

(4) It is much easier to cast vision from the platform or pulpit and communicate the topic to our church and into the community by tying the group materials to the weekend message.

(5) It drives people from community groups to the weekend worship experience. Many times we only think about how we can drive people from the weekend service into groups. However, the G3 system can also drive people to the weekend worship experience from their community group. Since they have interest in the study, they are more likely to show up for worship to hear more on the topic.

As we go through the G3 process you will see that selecting sermon topics and group materials that complement each other will help the process run smoothly.

Jennifer Cowart and Jim Cowart, Grab, Gather, Grow: Multiply Community Groups in Your Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016).

But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. 2 CORINTHIANS 2:14

Ancient Roman generals, returning to Rome from a victory in a distant land, would parade down the main streets of Rome with the spoils of battle—including a throng of captives from the conquered territory. These dejected captives were solid evidence to the Roman public of the great victory the general was celebrating. In this prayer of thanksgiving, Paul uses this image of a triumphal procession to thank Christ for defeating the evil forces of this world. Interestingly enough in this prayer, Paul identifies believers as Christ’s captives. We were once part of Satan’s army; but Jesus has taken us captive. As such, our transformed lives clearly proclaim Christ’s great victory. But unlike the captives of Roman conquerors, we aren’t destined to be sold into demeaning servitude. Instead, Christ has freed us from our old evil master to become his adopted children. So our captivity is really a release into the joy of Christ’s service. Liberated by Christ, we become a multimedia testimony to his power: a witness, Paul suggests, of sound, sight, and savor!

Thank God, today, that you’re included in Christ’s victory parade.

Livingstone Corporation, Zondervan, Niv, Once-a-Day: Devotional for Women, Ebook (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012).

Welcome to G3, which is short for Grab, Gather, and Grow. These three verbs are steps to help mobilize your church for tremendous growth. This system will help you achieve not only healthy numeric growth but also growth in discipleship, growth in ministry and mission activity, as well as growth in spiritual relationships. In this book and the accompanying video, you will discover a proven leadership strategy to maximize your results in connecting people in your congregation, community, and beyond through small groups.

For years we have heard prominent Christian leaders say that it is possible to see more people involved in group life during the week than in attendance in worship on the weekend. In fact, they would even go so far as to say that 100 percent participation in groups is not the goal. Instead, the goal is to see upwards of 110 percent of the weekend attendance actively involved in group life. What? Are you kidding? It preaches well at a training event, but is it really possible? Could it just be seminar rhetoric? You know what seminar rhetoric is, right? It is the things presenters tell you are possible during a training seminar, but the idea of it happening in your local setting seems unattainable. Well, if you’ve ever experienced seminar rhetoric, then you can understand our surprise when we realized that, after adopting a new strategy for group life, we did indeed have more people involved in groups some weeks than we had in worship on the weekend. (And we had good crowds on the weekend!)

Many churches are stuck in patterns that are not yielding the best results. We realized this was true in our setting several years ago, so we hired a coach, Brett Eastman from Life Together ministries, to help us move forward in the area of small group involvement. Through that consultation, we began developing a strategy that has led to tremendous growth spiritually and relationally. This is the strategy we want to share with you through this book. It’s called Grab, Gather, and Grow. Feel free to tweak this process, and make it work in your situation! As Christian leaders, our responsibility is not only to feed our sheep but also to equip them and create systems of health and growth so that they, too, can feed sheep. Ideally, these systems need little maintenance once established and can allow for years of growth in many areas. In the early church, we read in Acts:

A sense of awe came over everyone. God performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. All the believers were united and shared everything. They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them. Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved. (Acts 2:43-47 CEB)

The early church had a system! There was a system for corporate worship in the temple and a system for ministry, fellowship, study, and mission in homes. G3 is a similar system.

This is a how-to book. You already know the theology motivating it from scripture:

• Go into the whole world and make disciples . . . (Mark 16:15, paraphrased)
• Love each other . . . (John 13:34 CEB)
• Carry each other’s burdens . . . (Gal 6:2 CEB)
• A three-ply cord doesn’t easily snap . . . (Eccl 4:12 CEB)
• As iron sharpens iron, so friends sharpen each [other] . . . (Prov 27:17 CEB)
• Don’t stop meeting together with other believers . . . (Heb 10:25 CEB)
• Love your neighbor as yourself . . . (Mark 12:31 CEB)

These scriptures, and so many more, point to the need for us to be in community with each other. They stress the strength that comes from doing life together with a shared purpose. But our world, our churches, and our people are already so very busy. Within the church, we usually attend too many meetings, accomplish too little ministry, and often feel too much stress. In fact, in the bustle of life, many of the people in our churches and community find themselves desperately lonely. So what do we do? We build a system to help people connect to each other, to Christ, and into meaningful ministry. Grab, Gather, and Grow can help you do this!

In our situation, two weeks after beginning G3, we were able to assimilate more people into groups meeting in homes, businesses, and restaurants than we had in weekend worship. Even more surprising and exciting is these small groups are bearing fruit. Over the past year we have seen a 350 percent increase in the number of groups offered in our church family. This represents more than a thousand additional people now engaged with each other on a weekly basis to study God’s word, invite the lost, engage in missions, take care of each other, and worship together.

How? This result is accomplished by giving our people an easy-to-use, video-driven resource provided through our church, encouraging them to gather a few friends from the community, and having them commit to growing together in a small group setting. The video teaching on the DVD is done by a skilled communicator, which allows people who may have been previously intimidated by “teaching” to step into leadership. The gathering is done by the one who grabs the resource, and the growth occurs through the sweet process of inviting God into our lives within these group settings.

In some ways, by allowing all church members to grab a resource, the qualification bar for leadership is lowered. The average church attendee is able to step into a leadership role and reach out to his or her circle of friends and family outside the church family. This is a part of the secret sauce for G3. By equipping the people of God with high-quality materials and then encouraging them to reach out to those they know outside the church walls, we have been able to reach many more people with the love and message of Christ.

Many of our peers, with varying demographics—geography, style of worship, and size—experience similar results. For example, our friend Jeff, a pastor in Ohio, implemented a version of the G3 process with great results. Five months after introducing this strategy, his congregation moved from 180 people involved in eighteen groups to more than 500 people involved in forty-seven groups, and they are still growing.

After just two series, David, a pastor in Texas, experienced a similar outcome. His church added fifty groups. These are both relatively large churches. However, the system works in all locations and is effective with varying demographics. A smaller church trying this approach added seven groups. It sounds small in comparison until you realize this doubled their attendance. Don’t be overwhelmed by the numbers. Scale the process to your situation.

Think exponentially and not incrementally!

We are excited to share this process with you because we believe that it will work for you no matter the size or location of your congregation. And as it works, you will ultimately be able to reach more people with the love and message of Christ. In fact, as you unleash the power of encouraging everyone to reach out to those in their spheres of influence, the stories that emerge will amaze you.

With more than three hundred groups now meeting in and beyond our church community, we hear stories almost daily about what God is doing among our people. Many of these stories are about people who never attended a Bible study before. But by grabbing a resource and gathering their friends, they are now growing together in Christ.

In another example, we received a note from a participant, Tamera, who shared with us that simply by grabbing a resource and using it with friends from her work setting, she made an impact on a very unique population. Tamera works with adults who have special needs, including several who are nonverbal. After viewing a resource on love, she invited small groups of her clients into her home and did the study with them.

This group, like so many others, is one we would never have envisioned. But by loosening the constraints of who is qualified to lead and by empowering our attendees to invite, we are seeing tremendous growth both within the community and in who is being reached.

As we dig into the strategy of G3, we pray that the Holy Spirit will begin to open your eyes, as the Spirit opened our eyes and Tamera’s eyes, to all the possibilities in front of you!

Jennifer Cowart and Jim Cowart, Grab, Gather, Grow: Multiply Community Groups in Your Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016).

I (Dustin) recently sat with a group of church leaders to discuss what’s working and not working in the local church in terms of mission and reaching local communities. As I talked about biblical hospitality and the vital role it plays in mission, one pastor looked at me and said, “I just don’t think it works. I’m not sure how much it really matters.” To which another leader added, “Is hospitality really that big of a deal?”

I was stunned. And in case you’re thinking the same thing: for the record, yes, it works, and yes, it is a big deal.

Clearly the New Testament commands believers to practice hospitality:

• Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. (Rom. 12:13)
• Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. (Heb. 13:2)
• Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. (1 Peter 4:9)

These are obviously important (as commands tend to be) and we will discuss them later, but we’d also like to zoom out and show that hospitality is a big deal to God throughout the Bible. It may seem strange to think of it this way, but the entire Bible is a story about God’s hospitality.

In the first chapters of Genesis we see God’s hospitality on display in full, creative force. He creates the heavens and the earth, and by doing so fashions the perfect home for Adam and Eve. He provides everything they need to thrive in created joy.

Pick up the story in Genesis 1:28–30 and pay attention to the repetition:

God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” (emphasis added)

The word every or everything appears repeatedly in these verses. Genesis 1 reads like the most gracious host in the world is welcoming you into His castle, and He says, “Look! It’s all yours. Everything! I’ve made it all meticulously for you.” It’s like a parent who beams with delight as the children open gifts on Christmas morning.

Then in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve betrayed God by willfully rebelling against His authority, and in so doing, they neglected the gracious hospitality He offered. Yet God responded with grace by seeking them out. They did not die on the day they sinned, as God’s earlier command seemed to imply (Gen. 2:16–17). Instead God sewed clothes for them to cover their nakedness and shame, and He foreshadowed how He not only would provide for them through working the ground, but promised a Redeemer to come who would crush the enemy who seduced them into sin (Gen. 3:15).1

In this story, the biblical writer introduced a central tension that plays throughout all of Scripture: how is God going to continue to be hospitable to humanity if He is also holy and cannot dwell with evil? Even though Adam and Eve are put outside the garden of Eden because of their heinous challenge to their Creator and His holiness, God initiated a way that He could continue to be hospitable to His now-fallen creation.

In Genesis 12, God told Abraham (then called Abram) that God was going to form a special people from his descendants, a people who would be God’s and put Him on display throughout the earth: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (v. 2). Then He continued: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (v. 3). This pronouncement shows that God’s purpose for picking Abraham’s family to represent Him was so that He could use them to be hospitable to every other nation.

This choice of a people is ironic in many ways, because this “great nation,” Israel, was known to be the smallest and most alienated of all nations—the runt of the litter, if you will. Yet God lavished His mercy and love on them for a purpose that extended far beyond them.

The entire Old Testament is the story of God’s hospitality to a special people, the Israelites. He invited them into relationship with Him and taught them what community with the God of creation looks like. Even though they continually sinned and turned to false gods, just as Adam and Eve had, time and time again God pursued them, putting out the welcome mat when they finally decided to return to Him.

This story culminates in the ultimate act of hospitality: God sent His Son through the lineage of Israel to make a way once and for all for repentant men, women, and children to be reconnected to God. In Christ, God satisfied His own demand for holiness; He substituted His holiness for our wickedness and His death for ours, so that He could invite us back into relationship with Him and continue to care for us (Rom. 5:6–11).

Jesus left the comfort of His home in heaven to live a hard-working carpenter’s life, become a traveling, homeless evangelist, and then be crucified by the very people He had come to save. And as the Son of God rose to life on the third day after His crucifixion, the door of His tomb rolled open a way for men, women, and children to finally be in right relationship with the Father whom our first parents declared independence from in the garden. God did this so that ultimately we can live with Him forever in harmony in His eternal home.

The apostle John received a vision of this coming, heavenly home:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:1–4)

The Bible begins with God making a home for humanity to dwell with Him in a garden and the Bible ends with God making a home for believers to dwell with Him in a city. These beautiful bookends to Scripture mean that not only did God do what He set out to do in the beginning, but somehow through all the mess of humanity, He actually made a home to share with us that is much bigger and better than the first one.

The story of creation ends with a vibrant city, coming down from the clouds in great spectacle, resting on the new heavens and new earth that God remakes out of the debris of the first one. God makes a home for us to dwell with Him, and we will be His people and He will be our God (Jer. 32:38; Ezek. 37:27; Rev. 21:3). God finished what He started in the garden, and this last grand act of hospitality is made possible only by His continual hospitality. His grace is made evident through His hospitality toward sinners like us.

Throughout the saga of history, God consistently initiates relationship. He is a gracious host, constantly welcoming in wayward sinners who deserve His wrath—a people whose only hope is that He would show them undeserved hospitality.

If ever there has been a stranger in need, someone completely excluded and hopeless, fully dependent on the grace of another—that is us. We were out in the cold, victims of our own folly, freezing to death from the coldness in our own hearts. And all throughout history, God opens the door, rescues us, and welcomes us back into relationship through sheer, inexplicable grace.

For those of us in Christ, we have been grafted into the same rescue mission. According to 2 Corinthians 5:18, God has given us “the ministry of reconciliation,” proclaiming the good news that He’s made a way for our sins to be forgiven, for traitors to sit at His table again. He invites us into the welcoming mission that He has proclaimed since the beginning of time.

THE GOSPEL WITH FLESH ON

Any time we practice hospitality, we put human flesh on this gospel story. The apostle Paul made this idea clear when he wrote, “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15:7).

Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you.

This hospitality applies both to other believers and those who are far from Jesus. We welcome other believers into our lives as Christ has welcomed us, and as we do so, God uses the relationships that are created to model the heart of a hospitable God and draw us closer to Him.

As we welcome other believers into our lives and homes, we create a beautiful model for what life under God looks like. We become a living, breathing demonstration of the gospel and look like salt and light as Jesus said we would (Matt. 5:13–16).

We also welcome into our lives and homes those who are far from Jesus, because this is one of the most effective ways we can put the gospel on display for them. By doing so, we physically communicate the entire story of God to them: that our sin caused the sense of estrangement and disconnection we all feel (toward God and other people), but God loves us so much that He made a way for us to return to Him.

When we invite into our homes and lives those who are far from God, essentially we say to them, God loves you and He hasn’t given up on you. We present that message with our actions before we even get a chance to share the gospel with our words. If we are truly God’s ambassadors, as Paul called us in 2 Corinthians 5:20,2 then when we open our doors to a non-Christian, it is as if God Himself is opening His door. When Christians practice this simple action repeatedly, it changes the world.

Hospitality is not some stuffy, outdated practice. It is clearly a biblical idea of utmost importance, because it is the primary way we tell the astounding story that God hasn’t given up on us. Any time we practice hospitality we follow in the steps of our lavishly hospitable God. Here’s the potentially scary part: because of our role in representing God to the world, when we don’t walk in hospitality, we do not tell the truth about God. When we are cold, separated, and distant from those around us, we communicate that God is cold, separated, and distant. When we are warm, loving, and gracious, we put the gospel on display. This type of hospitality, which testifies to the character of our God, has always been a hallmark of God’s people.

Dustin Willis, Brandon Clements, and J. D. Greear, The Simplest Way to Change the World: Biblical Hospitality as a Way of Life (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2017).

I said in an earlier chapter that there were four ‘Cardinal’ virtues and three ‘Theological’ virtues. The three Theological ones are Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith is going to be dealt with in the last two chapters. Charity was partly dealt with in Chapter 7, but there I concentrated on that part of Charity which is called Forgiveness. I now want to add a little more.

First, as to the meaning of the word. ‘Charity’ now means simply what used to be called ‘alms’—that is, giving to the poor. Originally it had a much wider meaning. (You can see how it got the modern sense. If a man has ‘charity’, giving to the poor is one of the most obvious things he does, and so people came to talk as if that were the whole of charity. In the same way, ‘rhyme’ is the most obvious thing about poetry, and so people come to mean by ‘poetry’ simply rhyme and nothing more.) Charity means ‘Love, in the Christian sense’. But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

I pointed out in the chapter on Forgiveness that our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good. In the same way Christian Love (or Charity) for our neighbours is quite a different thing from liking or affection. We ‘like’ or are ‘fond of’ some people, and not of others. It is important to understand that this natural ‘liking’ is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes and dislikes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact. But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous.

Natural liking or affection for people makes it easier to be ‘charitable’ towards them. It is, therefore, normally a duty to encourage our affections—to ‘like’ people as much as we can (just as it is often our duty to encourage our liking for exercise or wholesome food)—not because this liking is itself the virtue of charity, but because it is a help to it. On the other hand, it is also necessary to keep a very sharp look-out for fear our liking for some one person makes us uncharitable, or even unfair, to someone else. There are even cases where our liking conflicts with our charity towards the person we like. For example, a doting mother may be tempted by natural affection to ‘spoil’ her child; that is, to gratify her own affectionate impulses at the expense of the child’s real happiness later on.

But though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people are ‘cold’ by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them, but it is no more a sin than having a bad digestion is a sin; and it does not cut them out from the chance, or excuse them from the duty, of learning charity. The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his ‘gratitude’, you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

Consequently, though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or ‘likings’ and the Christian has only ‘charity’. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become—and so on in a vicious circle for ever.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

Some writers use the word charity to describe not only Christian love between human beings, but also God’s love for man and man’s love for God. About the second of these two, people are often worried. They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.

On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 129–133.

In 2005 the late novelist David Foster Wallace gave an iconic commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College. Often referred to as “This Is Water,” his speech is about the difficulty of staying attuned to others in the day in and day out drudgery of normal adult life, and he opened the speech with the following illustration:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What … is water?”1

When it comes to pursuing biblical hospitality as a way of life, we immediately happen upon a major obstacle: almost everything in our culture is set up to hinder us from pursuing it. Much like those two young fish, we are so pulled by the drudgery of our everyday lives that we fail to stay attuned to God’s call on us to be missional. Our default is to swim along with the current of our culture, not giving a single thought about the water that surrounds our every move and pushes us in the opposite direction of intentional mission.

We know what you may be thinking: No! Not my home. You can’t have my home! We get it. The invisible cultural currents shape our view of our home in ways we don’t even realize. So let’s take a look at some of the currents and how they hinder our efforts at practicing hospitality.

CURRENT #1: ISOLATION

Turn your television to the HGTV channel and you are likely to find one of the dozens of shows where a real estate agent helps a prospective renter or buyer find the house of their dreams.2

We both have spent many hours watching HGTV (and let’s be honest, we’ll probably spend many more). The thing about a channel like HGTV is that it can actually teach you what people believe about the homes they live in, what they value most, and how they approach the spaces they inhabit. In this way, it’s an amazing tool to understand our culture and the ways we are most likely to think about our own homes, even as Christians.

If you’ve spent any time watching HGTV, consider some of the most common phrases you hear there. Words like oasis, privacy, and retreat come to mind.

Anytime a salesman, whether a television producer going after ratings or a real estate agent pursuing a commission, tries to sell something, they go after what they think the consumer wants. And we want our homes to isolate us from the world.

Even for those located in a bustling high-rise, we want our actual living space to be private. Our homes get us away from others (or at least the vast majority of others). Garages, privacy fences, building security guards, and key codes—all of those reinforce our desire for isolation. There is, of course, nothing wrong with appropriate isolation and wanting your own defined space. When taken to the extreme, however, a desire for isolation is at odds with the biblical values of community, hospitality, and neighborliness.

Think about this: what if you could see a bird’s-eye view of your neighborhood—if you could see your neighborhood as God sees it? Odds are you would see lots of people who may not admit it, but who desperately long for connection and community. Yet they spend most of their rare free time cordoned off in their respective homes, doors shut and locked tight, as they scroll through social media apps or watch other people live on screens. This scratches their itch for connection and community, but leaves those desires profoundly unfulfilled. Isn’t that sadly ironic?

I (Brandon) have never seen this more clearly than I did last year after my family and I moved into a new neighborhood. We invited all our closest neighbors over for dessert in order to meet them, and two of my neighbors approached each other and introduced themselves. They lived two doors down from each other. I heard one of them say to the other, “It’s nice to finally meet you. It’s sad that we’ve both been here fifteen years and we’ve never met.”

Though we hosted the dessert get-together, I admit that meeting neighbors like that is not natural for me. I am an introvert to the nth degree. So is my wife, Kristi. We both get energy from alone time—from peace and quiet and good books and stillness (at least before we had kids). At parties (when I am forced to go), I find a quiet corner with fewer people. I identify with this isolation current, the my-home-is-my-refuge sentiment, because in many ways, for me, it is. I love my home, I love the people in it, and I love the way God uses it to refuel and refresh me.

Half of all people identify as introverts,3 so if you are one, we realize you may be thinking, Yeah, but I really can’t practice—I don’t want to practice—hospitality because I’m an introvert. It would be too draining. Please do not read this book thinking the message is, Force yourself to be an extrovert because of the gospel! Please don’t let your personality type be a barrier to living out a God-ordained calling that is actually tailor-made to suit your personality type. I understand that introverts get the rap that they don’t like people, but that’s not true. We just like people in smaller, quieter doses than our extroverted compatriots do. I have found that inviting one person (or a couple of people) to my house where we enjoy quality time together, have good conversation, and experience a volume level that never gets too stressful is actually totally my speed (and completely fits the bill of hospitality!).

CURRENT #2: RELAXATION

We think a primary purpose of our homes is for them to be temples of relaxation. They are the one place that is ours—where we can kick back, veg out, and unwind. This may or may not be explicitly stated, but the default stance in our culture is that a home’s primary purpose is to rest, relax, and recharge, so anything that seems to threaten your home’s ability to be a sanctuary for you may not be a welcome prospect. We believe our homes have a unique ability to restore our sanity and help us recoup after a stressful day or week, and we’ll do almost anything to protect that sense of refuge.

The first home that my wife, Renie (pronounced “Rainy”), and I (Dustin) purchased was a 1950s, small, Craftsman-style, red brick home, which needed work. By no means was this house the ideal place to practice hospitality. The floor plan was the opposite of open. And when measuring its pluses and minuses during the buying process, the last thing on my mind was to look at it through a hospitality lens. As a matter of fact, one of the positives I liked most about this house was the privacy of the backyard. Not only was it secluded, it had its own natural canopy made by God Himself—huge oak trees surrounded the yard. The idea of the backyard becoming my own personal oasis was a primary selling point for me. My grand strategy was to buy a hammock, and I already had the two trees picked out to hang it from.

This thought process seemed easy to justify because that season of life and ministry was very stressful. We were in a city where we knew hardly anyone, planting a church we were pretty sure no one was going to attend, and I was getting paid a cool $12K a year. So having a domain that would serve exclusively as a place to relax was at the top of my priorities list. Wanting to come home after a hard day and not be bothered by anyone was not something I simply wanted, it’s something I felt I deserved. Hospitality was not even on my radar, but that hammock definitely was. Fortunately, God showed me a way to both relax and practice hospitality, which I’ll tell you about in a later chapter.

Our homes should be places where we relax and unwind. They are a grace gift from God, meant to rejuvenate and restore our bodies and souls through rest and Sabbath. As with any desire we make too ultimate, however, if we place personal relaxation and refuge at the forefront of our home’s purpose, we lose God-given opportunities to practice gospel-driven intentionality.

CURRENT #3: ENTERTAINMENT

Our desire for isolation and relaxation often fuels our addiction to entertainment. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with entertainment. There is nothing inherently wrong with passing time in an enjoyable way—watching Netflix, playing a game, or looking at Facebook on our iPhone. We can participate in all of these things from a place of spiritual fullness, and we can use them in redeeming ways.

Increasingly alarming studies show, however, just how much time we as a culture spend entertaining ourselves, primarily through technology and screen time. One recent Nielsen study states that the average American watches more than five hours of television a day.4 That average is quite a lot when you remember that the average person sleeps for around eight hours and works for at least eight hours per day (and that figure only counts television, not the approximately two hours per day the participants in the same study spent with apps on smartphones or tablets).5

The time we spend with screens seems to be rapidly filling the little free time we have, as well as much of the time we spend in our homes. There is even a new term called “show hole,” meant to describe the feeling that comes after you binge-watch a TV show.

Show hole: When you finally finish binge-watching all the episodes of a favorite TV series on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon, as the credits to the final episode roll, that empty feeling that wraps around your soul because you don’t know now what to do with your life. Like a good friend just left you forever.

“I think I cried three different times during the finale and now I have a show hole where my heart used to be.”6

This is, of course, a humorous way to describe the addictive tendencies of entertainment and the “hole” it can’t quite fill in us. Ask anyone who has binge-watched a TV show and they are likely to smile knowingly at the concept described here (and we certainly would be part of that “anyone who has binge-watched a TV show”).

The truth is, entertainment has taken a prominent role in our modern lives. The center of many homes is the living room, and much of the “living” done there is actually watching productions of other humans living on screens. Our devices usher us into another realm, and we gladly take them up on the offer. For the Christian it is necessary to look critically at this trend, because if screens take up too much of our time and energy, that will lead us to further isolation and we will forsake any sense of mission for our homes. (We will further discuss the relationship between technology and hospitality in chapter 5.)

CURRENT #4: BUSYNESS

The final cultural factor that hinders us from practicing biblical hospitality is busyness. Most people are so busy and frantic that they do not have a vision for how a lifestyle of sharing life with others in their homes could possibly fit into their schedules.

Our time is already filled to capacity with work, school, kids’ activities, clubs, hobbies, and other commitments. We run through life at a frantic pace and then finally get home, lock the dead bolt, and isolate ourselves, hoping to gain the strength we need to face the next day.

This addiction to busyness often keeps us from enjoying life the way we were designed to enjoy it, and it keeps us from practicing hospitality as a way of life. We cannot haphazardly live out hospitality. We must pursue it intentionally, and frankly, it needs to be calendared. Having people in my (Dustin’s) home for a meal or game night or to watch a big game tends to happen only if my wife and I put it on the calendar. I spend a lot of time traveling for work, we have two kids who love extracurricular activities, and we live in a city that is driven by busyness. Renie and I constantly deal with the tension that lives in the space between our hectic schedules and our conviction to slow down and enjoy people. We have to remind ourselves that busyness is not a medal of valor to be displayed.

A NEW WAY TO THINK

The harsh reality is that because of these factors, you won’t accidentally fall or stumble into changing the world through biblical hospitality. In many ways, your culture has you set up to fail, because the dominant values and ways of thinking about your home is at odds with how the gospel causes you to view your home. The water you and I swim in is polluted with things that make hospitality difficult.

Pursuing biblical hospitality as a way of life will take a very intentional shift in your life and mentality. It will happen only by offering the entire way you view your home to God and letting Him turn it upside down in the best way possible. You’ll have to learn to think of your home primarily from a Christian perspective and let that mindset uproot the ways your culture has taught you to view your home.

This will take stepping back and seeing the cultural waters you swim in. Then you will likely need to drastically reorder your rhythms and priorities. If you do nothing, you will continue to think the same way you always have and do the same things you’ve always done. Maybe a simple movement against the current becomes a way of life that leads to seeing lives and neighborhoods transformed. Imagine hundreds, thousands of believers swimming against the current.

Rebelling against the cultural norms and turning your home into a weapon for the gospel is not only completely possible, it’s a thrilling and meaningful thing to give your life to. It may just be the simplest way to change the world.

Dustin Willis, Brandon Clements, and J. D. Greear, The Simplest Way to Change the World: Biblical Hospitality as a Way of Life (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2017).

Every Christian wants to change the world.

But it’s Tuesday. And so far, you’ve done nothing but get out of bed, make coffee, and sit at your desk for another day of drudgery. That dream job where you do nothing but incredible, extraordinarily meaningful things all day long has not become a reality. In fact, it is starting to feel like a pipe dream, like some cruel joke marketers play on idealistic college kids. You’d like to find the people peddling that idea and punch them, but you’re much too busy and tired to do such a thing, because after all, it’s Tuesday and you have to go to work.

After work you’ll commute home, reheat leftovers for dinner, and hope that your DVR didn’t mess up the recording of your favorite show. This has become your way of life—a nightly ritual of sorts, a thing to look forward to in those moments during the day when you want to throw something or take a long after-lunch nap. All you want is to be home—nestled in with your comforts, at peace with the world.

Whether you are single, married, in college, or chasing 2.5 screaming kids around—home has become a retreat for you. Your home feels like one of the only places where no one is bossing you around or telling you what to do (at least after your kids go to bed, are we right, parents?). Your front door might as well be an armed fortress, because no one who doesn’t live there is getting through to disturb the little bit of peace and quiet you’ve found.

There’s work you, there’s hobby you, there’s friend you, and then there’s home you. And you’d love for the world to understand that they shouldn’t mess with home you.

Your home, as much as possible, has morphed into exactly what you think it should be: a refuge from the rat race called life, which you never realized would be so crazy. A retreat, a place to zone out and unplug. After all, don’t you deserve that? Don’t you deserve a little mind-numbing television marathon and vegging after this Tuesday? It’s just what the doctor ordered (assuming you are the doctor, of course).

Before you know it, years pass. The fortress called your home, your personal refuge, hasn’t seen a friend walk in, much less a neighbor or a stranger, in you can’t remember when. Sure, occasionally you open your home to others when you host events like the Thanksgiving get-together or the youth group movie night. But those times are more the exception than the rule.

You aren’t alone. Many Christians have bought into the cultural view that our homes are our personal and private fortresses. In our combined twenty-plus years of pastoring, we have observed that the way a typical Christian thinks about their home isn’t all that different from how a typical non-Christian thinks: It’s the place I eat, sleep, relax, and entertain myself—by myself.

This has led to a divorce between the way we view our homes and the way we view our mission as Christians. We may rightly understand that we are to make disciples as a part of the Great Commission, which Jesus gave us in Matthew 28,1 but that all feels very separate from what we do at our houses. We think of mission as something that happens outside the four walls of our homes—that, if anything, our homes are even a retreat from any Christian mission that we may be involved in (other than training our children to love Jesus, of course).

In doing so, however, we waste a powerful and God-ordained means of changing the world.

Many Christians have a growing cynicism about any possible role they could play in what God is doing to reconcile all things to Himself (see Col. 1:20). They think, Change the world? Me? Really? I can barely get my five-year-old to brush her teeth. It’s all I can do to get myself ready and out the door in the mornings. The world’s problems are so big—what could I possibly do to make a difference?

For many whose lives feel ordinary, being a part of God’s mission to reverse the curse on creation and introduce those who are far from God to a real and close relationship with Him feels unattainable, impractical, and overwhelming. We’ve given up on the hope that we can actually change the world, because when would we even do so? There isn’t much time left between waking up, rushing to work, eating meals, and preparing for the next day.

But what if we told you that you could actually change the world, right from your own home?

If you desire to join God’s mission but have no clue what that looks like in a normal life, we have good news for you. You already have access to the ultimate game-changing secret weapon that will transform the entire way you think about your life as part of God’s mission.

The secret weapon for gospel advancement is hospitality, and you can practice it whether you live in a house, an apartment, a dorm, or a high-rise.

It takes only your willingness to open your home and life to others. Many Christians believe that in order to be part of God’s mission, they have to do something drastic. (And God may call you to that. By the way, if He does, say yes.) But the reality is you can be an integral part of God’s mission from right where you are, without leaving the home you sleep in each night.

Why is hospitality essential? Phil Vischer, the successful creator of VeggieTales, sums it up well through his unique perspective on the need for Christians to open their ordinary lives and homes to those around them:

I am growing increasingly convinced that if every one of these kids burning with passion to write a hit Christian song or make that hit Christian movie or start that hit Christian ministry to change the world would instead focus their passion on walking with God on a daily basis, the world would change…. Because the world learns about God not by watching Christian movies, but by watching Christians.2

We love this quote because it hits a countercultural, but hard-hitting, truth: the world could use more ordinary Christians opening their ordinary lives so others can see what life in light of the gospel looks like. And what better place to watch Christians than in their homes?

It doesn’t seem that hard, does it? But too often we miss opportunities to practice hospitality.

If you were to break your life into very rough thirds, you could say that you’ll spend about a third of your life sleeping, somewhere close to a third working (or going to school), and the other precious third doing whatever you choose. For many of us, a great deal of that last third winds up being spent in our homes—eating, relaxing, enjoying hobbies, and entertaining ourselves. So if you divorce God’s mission from your home and see your home essentially as a refuge from mission, you’ve just knocked out two-thirds of your life from any kind of missional possibility.

Brandon and I (Dustin) had the privilege of starting and pastoring a church together for almost seven years, and during that time we witnessed Christians build a culture of mission where hospitality served as one of the primary pillars. We saw firsthand that no matter who it is—from the college student to the young family to the empty nesters approaching retirement—joining God’s mission can be as straight-forward as opening your door and inviting others inside.

ORDINARY DOES NOT EQUAL INSIGNIFICANT

I (Brandon) don’t remember what day it was, but I think it was a Thursday. A meaningless-feeling Thursday.

I walked out of my house to grab the mail from the mailbox, and I saw a neighbor in his thirties I hadn’t met yet who was walking his dog. I was tempted to do what I—and so many others—normally do: quickly wave or nod, or somehow acknowledge that I saw him crossing my path, but make it quick enough that we both could go about our business without distraction.

I’ve done that move many times. But on this Thursday a “nudge” prompted me to try something different. I changed course and walked directly toward the neighbor. “Hey!” I said, smiling. “I don’t think I’ve met you yet. What’s your name?”

He told me his name, Stuart, and we struck up a brief conversation. You know, the normal stuff. “How long have you lived here? Do you have kids? Is that your dog that’s always loose and roaming the neighborhood?”

I knew what was coming: “What do you do for a living?” Stuart asked.

I hesitated. I could have blurted out, “I’m a pastor,” but that answer tends to shut down conversation. I’ve learned that when I meet people I try to delay letting them know that information (it typically helps to build my reputation as a normal human before dropping that bomb). But as he waited for my response, I decided to go ahead and ’fess up. He nodded and then his dog dragged him away from our chat. I didn’t think much of it, other than that he’d be a good person to continue building a relationship with and that he was someone my wife and I should have in our home to share a meal.

The next time I saw Stuart in our neighborhood, I noticed he had a serious look on his face.

“I have a question for you,” he told me. “When you came out of your house that day and beelined toward me, why did you decide to talk to me? No one does that.”

I was taken aback by his question. “We’re new to the neighborhood and I’m just trying to meet our neighbors.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. “It was just weird, especially with you being a pastor and all. I was having a bad day and I was grumpy, but then you came up and we had this really good conversation.” He went on to tell me about some relationship trouble he was having, and how his therapist had recently asked him if he thought getting involved in a faith community might help him with some of his issues. “I don’t know what I believe about God and I don’t know anything about Mary or Martha or Lucas or any of those characters, but it was just really weird. I thought maybe God sent you to talk to me that day.”

I smiled. “Well, I don’t know Stuart, I was just trying to meet you. But I do believe God works that way, so maybe He did.”

I left that conversation with Stuart that day encouraged at what depth of relationship God had opened so quickly. (That doesn’t happen every day, trust me!) But I also was disturbed by this thought: how many relationships and opportunities right here at my home have I missed out on because I just smiled and waved?

No matter who we are, walking to our mailbox from our house or apartment feels like the most ordinary, insignificant thing we could possibly do. Nothing that could happen on a trip to the mailbox could be part of what God’s doing to change the world, right?

That logic gets applied to all the routine parts of our lives. We spend most of our ordinary days with our level of intentionality hovering around zero. The majority of our existence (especially the great percentage we spend in our homes) just feels so very … ordinary. We cook, we clean, we rest, we walk to the mailbox with tunnel vision. And quietly, unknowingly, we come to believe that if something is ordinary, it must be insignificant. We think,

• How could my house be part of anything meaningful? It’s just where I eat, sleep, and relax.
• How could a simple meal have any lasting value? I eat three of them a day, after all.
• How could the ordinary parts of my life be significant in any way? They feel so small.

I (Dustin) have been amazed by how the simple act of rolling my grill to my front yard (not the backyard) and grilling burgers has effectively allowed me to meet neighbors, hear their stories, share our lives, and point to truth. I’ve never printed flyers or sent out mailers. I’ve simply heated the charcoal and watched people show up. One of the most ordinary things we do every day is eat a meal at our homes. We do this small act with intentionality and usually with other people, and we simply watch the Holy Spirit bring about the significance.

Too many of us mistakenly think that in order for something to be significant, it has to be big, different, drastic, or extraordinary. It has to be something that doesn’t happen on a Thursday, because Thursday is just Thursday. Nothing could be meaningful about an ordinary day in our ordinary life …

Those deeply held beliefs, however, quickly fall apart when viewed through the lens of God’s kingdom. Consider author Skye Jethani’s argument:

We’ve fallen into the conventional thinking that a big mission demands big tactics, but we forget that in the economy of God’s kingdom, big does not beget big. It’s precisely the opposite. The overwhelming message of Jesus’ life and teaching is that small begets big. Consider, God’s plan to redeem creation (big) is achieved through his incarnation as an impoverished baby (small). Jesus feeds thousands on a hillside (big) with just a few fish and loaves (small). Christ seeks to make disciples of all nations (big) and he starts with a handful of fishermen (small). Even Goliath (big) is defeated by David with a few stones (small).

This pattern is also repeated in Jesus’ parables about the nature of his kingdom. He said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

All of this affirms the counter-intuitive nature of God’s kingdom.3

Jesus said that in His kingdom, the “smallest of all seeds” will leave a lasting impact much larger than expected (see Matt. 13:31–32). In the same way, the “smallest” things in our lives—ordinary days and meals and homes—can have a much larger impact than you’d ever imagine when harnessed with gospel intentionality.

If we are ever going to join all our lives to God’s mission to change the world, we need to reclaim all of our ordinary pieces as a part of that gospel mission. We will have to reject the notion that something has to be big or unusual to be significant. We will have to view the ordinariness of our lives as significant and allow God to use our homes as a seed to be planted and grown, not something to be discarded or devalued.

If ordinary doesn’t equal insignificant, then even a walk to the mailbox or grilling burgers matters. Everything about your everyday, ordinary, small-feeling life matters.

Your meals matter.

Your hobbies matter.

Your work matters.

Your home … it matters.

A WEAPON FOR THE GOSPEL

Thinking about our homes in this way is a wonderfully freeing concept. As it turns out, we have a more fulfilling and rewarding purpose for our homes than using them exclusively for our benefit and comfort. Instead of thinking of them only as a personal refuge, they can be opened as spiritual hospitals for the hurting around us. Instead of being an oasis of self-interest, they can be transformed into a weapon for the gospel—a four-walled tool to wield in God’s cosmic battle against evil and sin. As we do this, we become the type of counterculture that puts God’s generosity on display.

My (Dustin’s) friend Landon, who is a local photographer, actually moved into a new home with the purpose of being a missionary to his neighborhood. (Fun fact: Landon’s home is pictured on the cover of this book.) Part of his goal was to build relationships with other neighbors and to start a crime-watch Facebook group for the neighborhood. This was so successful—along with his and his wife’s efforts at hosting others in their home—that they actually became known as the go-to people when anyone had a problem. We joked that he was the neighborhood’s unofficial pastor. That joke came to light clearly when a few years ago someone was killed in a tragic accident in that neighborhood, and in such a devastating moment, the community rallied to have a memorial service for the man. Guess who they asked to lead the memorial? Their unofficial neighborhood pastor, Landon.

Another night, while Landon was walking through the neighborhood after dark, he noticed that a teenage boy was breaking into a vacant house. When he saw how young the boy was, instead of calling the police, he approached the boy to talk to him about what he was doing.

After confronting him, Landon walked him home instead of turning him in. When he got to his house and talked to his mother, he learned that she was a single mom and some of the older kids had become a negative influence on her son. So Landon, led by the Holy Spirit’s prompting, said, “I would love to hang out with your son and try to be a good influence for him. He can come to my house any time he wants.” Through tears, the mother graciously accepted his offer.

The story gets better, but let’s pause to think about something. If someone views their home exclusively as a refuge for their own comfort and relaxation, there is no way their response to finding a neighborhood kid breaking into a house would be the same as Landon’s response. To think like that, you need an altogether different view of your home as primarily a weapon for the gospel before it is anything else. Standard cultural values will never cause you to invite a thief into your home, but the Holy Spirit very well may do just that.

Over time, Landon built a relationship with the boy, TJ, and eventually he met other neighborhood kids who were TJ’s friends. Landon started playing kickball with them on Sunday afternoons. Then he got his small group from church involved and every week they all played kickball and loved these kids who, in many cases, were fatherless. After kickball each week Landon and his wife, Jordan, invited the kids to their house to eat ice cream or cake and spend quality time asking about their lives.

About a year after he met them, Landon and Jordan borrowed a van to pick up all the kids and take them to his church’s student ministry. Not long after that, they all attended a youth camp where Landon led four of the neighborhood boys (including TJ) to put their faith in Christ.

Landon’s example is one of the most beautiful ways to use our homes as a weapon for the gospel. And Landon is still pouring into those kids to this day.

At that same camp, one day TJ walked up to Landon and said, “Do you remember the first time we met?” Landon responded that yes, he did indeed remember. Then TJ pointed at a group of ten kids from the neighborhood who were also there and said, “I’m really glad I met you that night. None of this would have happened if we wouldn’t have met.”

That story, as good as it is, may feel unrelatable to you. You may not live next to disadvantaged youth liable to break into vacant homes. But then again, if you don’t know your neighbors, how would you know if you do or not? The point remains the same, however: things similar to that do not happen if we view our homes solely as a refuge for ourselves. If that was the case for Landon, then that night when he was out walking late, he would have called the police to report his boy’s crime and that would have been the end of the story.

BIBLICAL HOSPITALITY IS …

Landon listened to the Holy Spirit’s nudge and opened his home and life to the possibility of TJ experiencing Christ’s love and forgiveness. That’s biblical hospitality in the truest sense. Biblical hospitality is the polar opposite of cultural trends to separate and isolate. It rejects the notion that life is best spent fulfilling our own self-centered desires, cordoned off from others in the private fortresses we call homes. Biblical hospitality chooses to engage rather than unplug, open rather than close, initiate rather than sit idly.

At its core, the practice of biblical hospitality is obeying the command in Romans 15:7 to “welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you.” It’s receiving others into our lives—into relationship and, yes, even into our homes. It welcomes Christians as a way to walk in the truth that we’ve been made family through the gospel, and it welcomes non-Christians in an attempt to model and extend the gracious invitation we’ve received from God in Christ. Leveraging our personal refuges for this mission of welcoming others may feel like a great cost (more on that in the next chapter), but it is a cost that is repaid with an abundance of superior joys. Loneliness is traded for community, comfort is surrendered for an eternal purpose, and detached apathy is left behind for a mission meaningful enough to give your life to.

If we walk in this biblical hospitality and view our homes foremost as a gospel weapon, offering our homes for the Holy Spirit to use as He sees fit, then there’s no telling what could happen. It may not transpire fast and it may not be some glamorous story that goes into a book, but God will do what He promised: He will build His church and draw people to Himself through our ordinary faithfulness to leverage our homes for His mission. It’s just that simple.

Dustin Willis, Brandon Clements, and J. D. Greear, The Simplest Way to Change the World: Biblical Hospitality as a Way of Life (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2017).

Loneliness.

It’s a heavy word. One that everyone feels but no one wants to admit.

Something in us longs for the connection we have when we sit at a meal with those we love. There we experience abundant food, authentic relationships, laughter, and tears. We are fully known and fully loved. We wish that we could spend all of life around that table, but often we feel that we just can’t get there. We want community, yet we struggle with loneliness.

As a pastor, I’ve heard countless heartbreaking stories of people wallowing in loneliness. My friend Jay, for instance, spent ten years living in New York City. He was surrounded by people yet, by his own admission, he was the loneliest he’d ever been. He told me, “Proximity with twenty-five million people does not equal community.”

Or take Nicki who grew up in a big family. Each Sunday they plastered on smiles as they entered the church building, but Monday through Saturday, Nicki lived in a horrific prison that her parents called a home. One of the first things Nicky shared with me was that she had been lonely as long as she could remember.

Or there’s the married couple who attended a church I pastored. One evening I listened as they poured out their struggles, seemingly unable to zero in on the cause of their frustrations. These two people, whom most would refer to as the life of the party, confessed that they each struggled with intense isolation.

Loneliness can challenge church leaders as well. On countless nights during a season of incredible church growth, I felt as though no one really knew or even cared about me. Each week I’d preach three services in a row to capacity crowds, and then get in my car and aimlessly drive around, wondering why I felt so alone. I was connected to thousands of people, yet I struggled with an overwhelming sense of separation.

Isolation has no prejudice. It will seek you out regardless of whether you live in a small town or the big city, earn millions or barely make minimum wage, rarely attend church or are a pastor. It attacks all people at all times.

MORE SOCIAL THAN SOCIAL MEDIA

We live in the most connected time in world history, yet as a society we are as isolated as we have ever been. Two hundred and twenty-two million US adults can connect with the world from any location with the touch of a button. Cellphones make it possible to talk to someone without being present, and we can text without ever hearing a person’s voice. We are constantly linked through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram (and whatever else some Ivy League student creates next week).

Technology has made communication so easy that we are addicted to convenience. Sadly even with all this amazing technology, it is more difficult than ever for us to build genuine relationships. In a Newsweek interview, John T. Cacioppo, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, stated: “Social-networking sites like Facebook may provide people with a false sense of connection that ultimately increases loneliness in people who feel alone. These sites should serve as a supplement, but not replacement for, face-to-face interaction.”1

These advances—while not bad in and of themselves—have the potential to lead us into more isolated lonesomeness, especially when we replace authentic, vulnerable, face-to-face relationships with more-controlled, less-genuine social media ones.

Recently I overheard someone in a coffee shop sharing weight loss ideas. “Every time you feel the urge to eat, crunch ice instead,” the man told his companion. He explained that the sensation of chewing and consuming the ice would help soothe the urge to want to eat. “It’s a way to trick your body.”

That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, I thought. Dumb or not, sure enough, a couple days later I found myself trying it. (Just getting back to my fighting weight, you know.) I discovered that while ice is good for cooling a drink, in the end it doesn’t supply the sustainable nourishment that my body needs. And chewing ice certainly doesn’t fulfill noshing on something more satisfying and lasting. It works only for a brief moment.

Likewise, social media tricks our society into believing that it can give us what we need. But really it fails to be a sustainable means of community. We think we are growing strong bonds of friendship, while we spend inordinate amounts of time reading posts and updates from others who make us aware that everybody else has a cooler life than we do. We may think it will satisfy our loneliness, but the reality is that it only manages to deepen it.

HOW LONELY ARE WE, REALLY?

Any person can make “friends” through social media, but when was the last time you had a conversation with someone who genuinely cared for you and meaningfully spoke into your life? Far too many Americans offer an alarming answer to that question. Recent studies from Duke University and the US Census suggest that our society is in the midst of the most dramatic and progressive slide toward disconnection in history. Consider these disturbing statistics:

• 27.2 million people live alone.
• More people say they feel alone than at any other time.
• 25 percent say they have no one they can turn to as a confidant.
• More people link their depression to loneliness.
• The number of “socially isolated” Americans has doubled since 1985.2

Not only are more people physically living alone, they are becoming emotional lone rangers. Since they have no one to turn to, they seek the individualistic dreams that ultimately cripple human flourishing and societal progress. Rick Warren summed it up well: “Isolation exists because we have a culture that feeds individualism. The fruit of rampant individualism in our culture is massive loneliness.”3

Instead of sitting on the porch and talking with neighbors and friends as it was in the “good ole days,” often we now enter our homes as the garage door closes behind us, and surrounded by our privacy fence, we eat dinner alone and then vicariously live out community by watching television “reality” shows (as our neighbors do the same).

Yet even in our chosen solitude, we have insatiable need for connection. Give us two seconds of down time and we reach for our phone to scan Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feeds.

You can even see our desire for community through our television viewing choices. Some of the highest-rated shows over the past thirty years include Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, and Parks & Rec. Each show represents what the 1980s’ classic Cheers communicates in its theme song: “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name” or as Friends references, “I’ll be there for you.”

Those are not empty lyrics but rather an outcry from culture. We are part of a civilization that starves for unpretentious relationships with others who genuinely care and can share in life’s common struggles. These shows are not reality. Life is not one continuous dance in a fountain with our closest friends. Nonetheless these shows strike a felt need. People want real community. We yearn to be part of a community that discovers and clings to identity, worth, and value.

It’s as if watching these sitcoms gives us a taste of what it would be like to have genuine relationships with people who not only know our name but who know us and are willing to struggle with us.

A BETTER ANSWER

Despite our inherent longing, many of us feel that sense of belonging is somehow unattainable. We desire it, but we resist it at the same time. We fear being transparent with others. What if we get hurt? Rejected? Betrayed? Ignored? Neglected?

The answer the world might give to this conundrum is simply for us to find people we like and trust, then try to work on our issues (whatever that means). It’s a self-improvement, pull yourself up from your bootstraps mentality.

Christians have a profoundly different answer to this longing, which we find in the good news of Jesus Christ. We know that God Himself placed within us this yearning for community—a God-given appetite for honest connection with others. The idyllic garden of Eden with its unbroken relationships haunts us because that’s what we were designed for (see Gen. 2:18; Rom. 5:10). But as our self-centered sin entered the picture, that perfection was lost—traded for the brokenness and despair we feel from being disconnected from God and one another (see Gen. 3).

Yet God did not leave us there. He created a history-sweeping work to redeem us, to restore the wholeness of Eden. That redeeming work happens through the church—the people whom, through Christ’s death and resurrection, God has rescued from their own folly (see Eph. 2:1–10). He has taken a bunch of traitors and adopted us into His family, welcoming us to His table (see Gal. 4:4–7; Rev. 19:6–9). God has made us a community with a deeper foundation and a brighter future than anything the world has to offer.

During the time I struggled with loneliness, it was through community that the pockets of emptiness began to fill. Many argue that Jesus is all we need. While I agree that Jesus alone is all we need for salvation, I find throughout the Bible that the Christian life is designed to be lived with other believers. From the outset God told us, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Moreover, in all the letters the apostle Paul wrote, he specifically gave communal instruction for how to live the Christian life: love one another, serve one another, confess your sins to one another, etc.

When I battled loneliness, restoration didn’t magically and immediately occur, and it didn’t happen on its own. I had to be honest with others and then be willing to listen and soak in their words of blunt truth and timely encouragement.

God’s Word speaks in a direct, relevant, and timely way to the tension that resides between people’s desire for relationships and their inability to sustain those relationships. As the church we are called not only to seek the lost, we are called to bring hope and help to relationships, to minister to people’s loneliness. To do that, we must contend for a community defined by the Scriptures, rather than fall into the counterfeit pattern of individualism that is so prevalent in the world (and that too often sneaks into our churches).

Throughout Scripture we see the power and importance of community. In John 17:20–23, for instance, Jesus prayed for the unity of the believers, while in John 13:35, He said the world would know that the disciples were His by how they loved one another.

Even Jesus’ instruction for evangelism and mission were all given to a community of tight-knit believers—not simply to individuals (see Matt. 28:19; John 20:21; Acts 1:8). These types of communities bring hope to a lonely and isolated society. In fact, our entire lives are meant to be lived in community on mission (see Eph. 2:1–22).

Often when I speak of community, I find that people believe they are already walking in healthy community. But as I ask them to dig deeper, I find that they have a set time and place (often on Sunday) when they meet together, but they are not by any means digging beyond the surface into the matters of the heart.

Community is an incredible gift God has given us to experience, but because of our tendency toward individualism, the real thing is often far from our reach. With God’s gracious pursuit and some intentionality, however, we can recover it in all its fullness.

AN UNNECESSARY DIVIDE

For many churches, the idea of community usually takes the form of a small group. Many of these small groups follow a specific type of structure, whether cell groups, Sunday school classes, life groups, or some other clever name they’ve brainstormed to emphasize Christian community. Alongside these community-focused groups, churches have also concluded that they are designed to engage in missions (at least I hope they have).

Though missions and groups are assumed staples within the church, the depth of community often varies. These strategies have often, inadvertently, created a divide between the mission to reach those outside the church and the mission to connect individuals in the church to one another. Most churches are good at one or the other.

Some churches pride themselves in being a loving church, meaning that they care well for one another. Often these churches struggle to reach out to new people because they might mess up the fellowship that the body cherishes. Other churches pride themselves in reaching out to those who are far from God. Often these churches struggle to connect new Christians to genuine relationships where they can grow in Christlikeness.

Church researchers Tim Chester and Steve Timmis have discovered that

Western culture has become very compartmentalized. We want to spend more time in evangelism, but because this can happen only at the expense of something else, it never happens. Rethinking evangelism as relationship rather than event radically changes this.… Our identity as human beings is found in community. Our identity as Christians is found in Christ’s new community. And mission takes place through communities of light.… Christian community is a vital part of a Christian’s mission. Mission takes place as people see our love for one another.

Do mission and community have to be separated? No. We must aggressively fight against the false idea that community happens over in one area while mission and evangelism take place separately within their own space or program. When this duality exists, the church’s effectiveness is diminished severely because it compartmentalizes our lives as believers.

How do we pursue community and mission? It’s more closely connected than you may realize. As people live on mission with others, they discover community. And as people live in true community, they will seek mission. Community and mission are not in competition with each other—they are inseparable. You don’t have to choose one or the other.

If you have ever been on a mission trip then you know what I’m talking about. You return from the trip having never felt closer to a group of people or more inspired to be involved in God’s work. For many churches, mission trips are the only place that Christian community and intentional mission intersect. Why is the environment created through mission trips not the culture that daily permeates our churches?

Eliminating the duality that exists in missions and community and melding these ideas together will help spread the gospel to a lonely world. Not only do gospel communities act as a beacon of light but they also become a place of healing for the soul.

MISSION THROUGH COMMUNITY

Gospel communities alone do not bring about identity and worth, but they display the One who does. God has reconciled believers to Himself. Gospel community is a means to exhibit the gospel’s light to a dark and hurting society (see Matt. 5:14–16).

“The most persuasive argument for the Christian faith is the Christian community,” notes Todd Engstrom, executive pastor at Austin Stone Community Church. “The majority of conversions throughout church history have come not through argumentation, but through belonging to a meaningful community before belief is ever required.”5

What would it look like if our communities were united by this hope-filled gospel, actively loving and caring for one another as they live out mission together? Acts 2:46–47 gives us an indication: “Day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

Communities centered on the gospel fly in the face of isolation and yet convey the grace-filled inclusion that we so desperately desire. These communities bring with them the answer the world is hungry for. It is a community that invites others to feast at the Lord’s table.

Picture it: a community for the hurting, the lonely, the has-beens, the have-nots, the accomplished, the rebellious, the self-righteous. Picture God taking this ragtag group and forming them together for the greatest mission we could ever join. This is His track record from Genesis to now.

Community is more than a Sunday and mission is more than a trip. Discovering and building this idea may seem overwhelming, but through the Holy Spirit’s work, it is possible. Through gospel community, we can eradicate the epidemic of individualism and loneliness. I have experienced it and have watched as God has done this in thousands of others’ lives.

Dustin Willis, Brandon Clements, and J. D. Greear, The Simplest Way to Change the World: Biblical Hospitality as a Way of Life (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2017).

This book is a modest attempt to put the devil in his place. When Lucifer (whose name means “light bearer”) rolled the dice, gambling that he could do better by being God’s enemy rather than God’s friend, he set in motion a moral catastrophe that would reverberate throughout the universe. You and I have been deeply affected by his decision made in the ages long ago.

What may not be widely known is that Lucifer was already defeated the moment he sinned. He was defeated strategically, since as one of God’s creatures he would be forced to depend upon God for his continued existence. Any power he would exercise would always be subject to God’s will and decree. Thus moment by moment he would suffer the humiliation of knowing that he could never be the ultimate cause of his existence and power.

To clarify, I don’t mean to simply say that for every move he would make, God would make a countermove. That was true of course; but the situation for Satan would be more ominous. As will be shown in the chapters of this book, he cannot even now make his own first move without God’s express will and consent!

Let us boldly affirm that whatever mischief Satan is allowed to do, it is always appointed by God for the ultimate service of and benefit to the saints. William Gurnall, after encouraging believers to hold fast to the assurance that God is watching Satan’s every move and will not let him have the final victory, writes, “When God says ‘Stay!’ [Satan] must stand like a dog by the table while the saints feast on God’s comfort. He does not dare to snatch even a tidbit, for the Master’s eye is always upon him.”1 And so it is; our Master’s eye is ever upon him. After his first act of disobedience, his failure and doom were sealed.

Though he could never have predicted it, at the cross Lucifer would be defeated spiritually, for there Christ was guaranteeing that at least a part of fallen humanity would be purchased out from the kingdom of darkness to share in the kingdom of light. The fact that creatures who had fallen into Satan’s trap would eventually be exalted above the angelic realm he once led was more than he could bear. But bear it he must.

Finally, when he is thrown into the lake of fire, he will be defeated eternally in that he will be forever cast away from the divine presence. There in shameful agony he will unendingly contemplate his foolishness in standing against God. His humiliation will be public, painful, and endless. Even as you read these words, he is a hapless player in the drama that he himself set in motion. And there is nothing he can do to change the outcome.

In medieval times, the devil was often pictured as a long-tailed, cloven-hoofed jester with two horns and a red suit. He looked the part of a clown; he often was pictured as a loser in the conflicts of the ages. Cartoons depicted him as a buffoon whose very presence was an affront to humanity.

Let us not think that the people of the Middle Ages actually believed that the devil looked idiotic. They knew, even as we do, that he was actually an evil spirit who was both powerful and fearsome. The purpose of the caricatures was to strike at his most vulnerable point, namely his pride.

They wanted to convey that the devil was a fool to mount opposition to God. Though he is a being of immense intelligence, he was decidedly unwise to rebel against his Creator. The medievals made him out to look stupid because, despite his power and staggering knowledge, he was stupid indeed. They knew that the devil was both real and powerful; they also knew that he was misguided and defeated. Thus Luther insisted that when the devil persists, we should jeer and flout him, “for he cannot bear scorn.”

The medievals might be faulted for paying too much attention to the devil and often mixing biblical truth with legends and superstitions. But we must commend them for their vigorous belief in the existence of the Prince of Darkness. Our age, in contrast, must be faulted for giving him only scant recognition, or even worse, for giving him the kind of recognition he craves.

It has been said that those who are “born again” take the devil seriously.2 We who believe in the trustworthiness of the Bible are not guilty of disbelieving in his objective existence. We, above all, should take the devil seriously. Very seriously.

But our sincerity does not guarantee that our conception of the devil is accurate, even with the aid of evangelical books and messages that explore the reality of spiritual warfare. Yes, I believe that we are much better equipped to stand against our enemy because of the writings of those who have warned us of his schemes and reminded us of our resources to fight against him. As a young pastor, I was introduced to spiritual warfare by those who knew more about our enemy than I.

However, along with much helpful advice, some distortions have crept into our thinking that could play into the devil’s hands. Though they do not expressly state it, some writers imply that Satan can act independently of God; they speak as if God becomes involved in what the devil does only when we ask Him to. Because Satan is the “god of this world,” they think this means that he can be free to make his own decisions, inflicting havoc wherever and whenever he wishes.

I respectfully disagree.

Of course, all evangelicals concur that the devil will eventually be defeated; but for now, some teach he is free to do pretty much whatever he pleases in the world. The Satan of many of the so-called deliverance ministries is one who calls his own shots and wields his power, limited only by the broad parameters God has laid out for him. Satan, according to this theology, sets his own agenda and is free to harass us without much interference from the Almighty.

We need to be reminded of Luther’s words that even “the devil is God’s devil.” We have forgotten that only when we know who God is can we know who the devil is. Blessed are those who are convinced that the prince of this world has become the slave of the Prince of Peace.

History has examples of those who wrote about the devil without a careful study of the Scriptures. These writers have, for good or for ill, shaped much of our thinking about Satan. Let us remind ourselves of a few who were most influential.

Erwin W. Lutzer and R. C. Sproul Jr., God’s Devil: The Incredible Story of How Satan's Rebellion Serves God's Purposes (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2015).

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” (Isaiah 6:5, NIV)

The doors of the temple were not the only things that were shaking. The thing that quaked the most in the building was the body of Isaiah. When he saw the living God, the reigning monarch of the universe displayed before his eyes in all of His holiness, Isaiah cried out, “Woe is me!”

The cry of Isaiah sounds strange to the modern ear. It is rare that we hear people today use the word woe. Since this word is old-fashioned and archaic, some modern translators have preferred to substitute another word in its place. That is a serious mistake. The word woe is a crucial biblical word that we cannot afford to ignore. It has a special meaning.

When we think of woes we think of the troubles encountered in melodramas set in the old-time nickelodians. “The Perils of Pauline” showed the heroine wringing her hands in anguish as the heartless landlord came to foreclose on her mortgage. Or we think of Mighty Mouse flying from his cloud to streak to the rescue of his girlfriend, who is being tied to the railroad tracks by Oilcan Harry. She cries, “Woe is me!” Or we think of the favorite expression of the distraught Kingfish in “The Amos and Andy Show” who said, “Woe is me, Andy, what is I gonna do?”

The term woe has gone the way of other worn-out exclamations like alas or alack or forsooth. The only language that has kept the expression in current usage is Yiddish. The modern Jew still declares his frustrations by exclaiming “Oy vay!” which is a shortened version of the full expression oy vay ist mer. Oy vay is Yiddish for “Oh woe,” an abbreviation for the full expression, “Oh woe is me!”

The full force of Isaiah’s exclamation must be seen against the background of a special form of speech found in the Bible. When prophets announced their messages, the most frequent form the divine utterances took was the oracle. The oracles were announcements from God that could be good news, or bad news. The positive oracles were prefaced by the word blessed. When Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, He used the form of the oracle, saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” “Blessed are those who mourn,” “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst.” His audience understood that He was using the formula of the prophet, the oracle that brought good tidings.

Jesus also used the negative form of the oracle. When He spoke out in angry denunciation of the Pharisees, He pronounced the judgment of God upon their heads by saying to them, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” He said this so often that it began to sound like litany. On the lips of a prophet the word woe is an announcement of doom. In the Bible, cities are doomed, nations are doomed, individuals are doomed—all by uttering the oracle of woe.

Isaiah’s use of woe was extraordinary. When he saw the Lord, he pronounced the judgment of God upon himself. “Woe to me!” he cried, calling down the curse of God, the utter anathema of judgment and doom upon his own head. It was one thing for a prophet to curse another person in the name of God; it was quite another for a prophet to put that curse upon himself.

Immediately following the curse of doom, Isaiah cried, “I am ruined.” I prefer the older translation which read, “For I am undone.” We can readily see why more modern translations have made the change from undone to ruined. Nobody speaks today about being undone. But the word is more vivid in what it conveys than the word ruined.

To be undone means to come apart at the seams, to be unraveled. What Isaiah was expressing is what modern psychologists describe as the experience of personal disintegration. To disintegrate means exactly what the word suggests, dis integrate. To integrate something is to put pieces together in a unified whole. When schools are integrated, children from two different races are placed together to form one student body. The word integrity comes from this root, suggesting a person whose life is whole or wholesome. In modern slang we say, “He’s got it all together.”

If ever there was a man of integrity it was Isaiah Ben Amoz. He was a whole man, a together type of a fellow. He was considered by his contemporaries as the most righteous man in the nation. He was respected as a paragon of virtue. Then he caught one sudden glimpse of a holy God. In that single moment all of his self-esteem was shattered. In a brief second he was exposed, made naked beneath the gaze of the absolute standard of holiness. As long as Isaiah could compare himself to other mortals, he was able to sustain a lofty opinion of his own character. The instant he measured himself by the ultimate standard, he was destroyed—morally and spiritually annihilated. He was undone. He came apart. His sense of integrity collapsed.

The sudden realization of ruin was linked to Isaiah’s mouth. He cried, “I am a man of unclean lips.” Strange. We might have expected him to say, “I am a man of unclean habits,” or “I am a man of unclean thoughts.” Instead he called attention immediately to his mouth. In effect he said, “I have a dirty mouth.” Why this focus on his mouth?

Perhaps a clue to Isaiah’s utterance may be found in the words of Jesus when He said, “It’s not what goes into a man’s mouth that defiles a man, it’s what comes out of his mouth that defiles him.” Or we could look to the discourse on the tongue written by St. James, the Lord’s brother:

The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My brothers, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water. (James 3:6–12, NIV)

The tongue is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. This was the realization of Isaiah. He recognized that he was not alone in his dilemma. He understood that the whole nation was infected with dirty mouths: “I live among a people of unclean lips.” In the flash of the moment Isaiah had a new and radical understanding of sin. He saw that it was pervasive, in himself and in everyone else.

We are fortunate in one respect: God does not appear to us in the way He appeared to Isaiah. Who could stand it? God normally reveals our sinfulness to us a bit at a time. We experience a gradual recognition of our own corruption. God showed Isaiah his corruption all at once. No wonder that he was ruined.

Isaiah explained it this way: “My eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5, NIV). He saw the holiness of God. For the first time in his life Isaiah really understood who God was. At the same instant, for the first time Isaiah really understood who Isaiah was.

Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” (Isaiah 6:6–7, NIV)

Isaiah was groveling on the floor. Every nerve fiber in his body was trembling. He was looking for a place to hide, praying that somehow the earth would cover him or the roof of the temple would fall upon him, anything to get him out from under the holy gaze of God. But there was nowhere to hide. He was naked and alone before God. He had no Eve to comfort him, no fig leaves to conceal him. His was pure moral anguish, the kind that rips out the heart of a man and tears his soul to pieces. Guilt, guilt, guilt. Relentless guilt screamed from his every pore.

The holy God is also a God of grace. He refused to allow his servant to continue on his belly without comfort. He took immediate steps to cleanse the man and restore his soul. He commanded one of the seraphim to jump into action. The angelic creature moved swiftly, flying to the altar with tongs. From the burning fire the seraph took a glowing coal, too hot to touch for even an angel, and flew to Isaiah.

The seraph pressed the white-hot coal to the lips of the prophet and seared them. The lips are one of the most sensitive parts of human flesh, the meeting point of the kiss. Here Isaiah felt the holy flame burning his mouth. The acrid smell of burning flesh filled his nostrils, but that sensation was dulled by the excruciating pain of the heat. This was a severe mercy, a painful act of cleansing. Isaiah’s wound was being cauterized, the dirt in his mouth was being burned away. He was refined by holy fire.

In this divine act of cleansing Isaiah experienced a forgiveness that went beyond the purification of his lips. He was cleansed throughout, forgiven to the core, but not without the awful pain of repentance. He went beyond cheap grace and the easy utterance, “I’m sorry.” He was in mourning for his sin, overcome with moral grief, and God sent an angel to heal him. His sin was taken away. His dignity remained intact. His guilt was removed, but his humanity was not insulted. The conviction of sin he felt was constructive. His was no cruel and unusual punishment. A second of burning flesh on the lips brought a healing that would extend to eternity. In a moment, the disintegrated prophet was whole again. His mouth was purged. He was clean.

R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1993), 40–48.