Walking through the darkened sanctuary early Monday, I noticed that every Kleenex container was empty. Between the the Sunday services and evening prayer meeting we had gone through at least four boxes. That's a lot of nose blowing and tears.
Kleenex loss may be the best way to measure church health. It has to be better than the inflated attendance reports most churches file with headquarters or those goofy spiritual health diagnostics cooked up in a publisher's conference room.
Some of those may have been happy tears, but given the strains a bunch of our folks are under and the monster challenges staring our church in the face, I bet a lot of them were pain driven. Old time devotional writers would have called it "travailing in prayer".
Before contemporary church big wigs and spirituality experts began to smother us in straight jackets for the soul, some ancient matriarchs and patriarchs seem to have known that good prayer involves 2 things: obedience and sacrifice.
I'm glad we don't sacrifice Elsie the Cow anymore. In her absence though it looks like a lot of believers assume that having skin in the game is no longer required. No sacrifices are necessary to encounter God.
Surprisingly, New Atheists and Bible fundamentalists both make the same wrong headed assumption: that appeasing a brooding, petulant Almighty was part of the recipe for any good sacrifice.
God doesn't need appeasement, but He does need our buy-in. Locking in our participation and insuring our meaningful involvement is really why sacrifice has always been a vital part of worship. Efficiently engaging us in what God is up to is why sacrifice was incorporated into worship. Sacrifice is necessary because our engagement is essential. In many wobbly approaches to God sacrifice is noticeably missing. Without sacrifice I'm just another disengaged spectator.
Sacrificial tears emptied the tissue boxes last weekend. I'll bet God was pleased with every wet, wadded up Kleenex as a sign of sacrifice. Each one also indicates I've happily landed in a healthy, if slightly congested church.
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