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The Church must be a place where it is okay not to be okay. The culture of the Church needs to be a safe place for the weary, weak, and wobbly. Of all places, we should welcome those who are honest about their burdens, frustrations, and pitfalls. Our people cannot be honest about their shortcomings in the marketplace. The Church provides the release valve of grace that we all desperately need, leadership included.
–Matt Chandler

Oh that all of our churches would be a place where it is okay to not be okay.
Our churches should be places where “Fine” is not the only appropriate answer to “How are you?”

The church needs to hold out a powerful message of grace to allow people to be honest about their burdens.

This in no way requires the church to be soft on sin. Rather, it is the message that where sin abounds, God’s grace is even bigger and can swallow it up.

What will it take for our churches to become places of grace where it is okay to not be okay?
It will take you (and me) making the decision to hold out grace to others.

Until individual church members are willing to hold out God’s grace to others (the grace that we received by Jesus when we did not deserve it), we will not have churches full of grace.
It starts with you!

“Lord, Send a Revival of Grace, and Let It Begin in Me!”

In a similar vein to yesterday’s quote (“a true Christian must be willing to sacrifice everything in this life for the sake of the next” –Bruce Shelley), Philip Yancey makes a statement about self-actualization – the idea that everyone needs to find fulfillment in reaching their full potential:

And yet, for all these qualities that point toward what psychologists like to call self-actualization, Jesus broke the mold. As C. S. Lewis puts it, “He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can’t really be very well ‘adjusted’ to your world if it says you ‘have a devil’ and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.”
–Philip Yancey

I pray that I can become less concerned with self-actualization and fulfilling my own goals and dreams and more concerned with fulfilling the desires of God for my life.

True Christianity is based upon obedience to the command of Jesus to “Repent and Believe” and on confessing Jesus Christ as Lord (as Paul explains in Romans 10). But making Jesus Lord requires self-death.

A true Christian must be willing to sacrifice everything in this life for the sake of the next.
–Bruce Shelley

Matthew 16:24-25
Jesus: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.”

May we be willing to lose our lives – to sacrifice everything in this life – for the sake of finding our lives with Him for eternity.

The world of fallen men does not honor God. Millions call themselves by His name, it is true, and pay some token respect to Him, but a simple test will show how little He is really honored among them. Let the average man be put to the proof on the question of who or what is above, and his true position will be exposed. Let him be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love, and God will take second place every time. Those other things will be exalted above. However the man may protest, the proof is in the choices he makes day after day throughout his life.
–A. W. Tozer

As you take the simple test, who or what comes out on top?
In each of his “choice between” questions above…
God and money
God and praise of men
God and personal ambition
God and pleasing self
God and human relationships
…does God take first place or second or third or…?

The proof of your love and honor for God yesterday was found in the choices you made yesterday.
Do any of your previous choices need to be adjusted as you begin today?

Another excellent 500-year-old prayer for us to pray today:
Father God, The greatest vanity is the evil plague of empty self-glory, because it draws one away from true glory and robs one of heavenly grace. For when a man is pleased with himself he displeases You, when he pants after human praise he is deprived of true virtue. But it is true glory and holy exultation to glory in You and not in self, to rejoice in Your name rather than in one’s own virtue, and not to delight in any creature except for Your sake.
Let Your name, not mine, be praised.
Let Your work, not mine, be magnified.
Let Your holy name be blessed, but let no human praise be given to me.
You are my glory. You are the joy of my heart.
In You I will glory and rejoice all the day, and for myself I will glory in nothing but my infirmities.
–Thomas à Kempis

Amen. May this be my heart’s cry today.