The Church Leaves the Building

Day 188: Ezekiel 45-48

Ezekiel 45:9: "This is what the Sovereign Lord says: You have gone far enough, O princes of Israel! Give up your violence and oppression and do what is just and right."

That last sentence strikes me as powerful. How often do we oppress people? Historically, we have oppressed blacks, Jews, women, poor people, and numerous others. At our best moments, churches lead the fight to stop this oppression. Many of the first and most well-known abolitionists were Christians. Churches respond to calls for help when earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis come. We take in orphans. We run homes for children without any parents.

But we also oppress people. In our hearts. In our actions. We do it. And woe to us. God wants us to do what is "just and right." He wants justice. He wants righteousness. He wants morality. May this verse percolate on your mind today as you seek to do what is just and right.

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Ezekiel 47 is a meaningful passage to me. When Shane and I were church planting, one of our friends led a "lectio divino" over it. This ancient spiritual practice involves reading a passage of scripture aloud with other people and then reflecting on it three different times. The first read through you listen for one thing, the next read something else, and the third time something else.

Out of all the passages that I have done this practice with, this one is my favorite. This chapter talks about a river leading out of the temple. As the river flows from the temple, it gets wider and deeper, produces more fruit, and has more beautiful trees. The water becomes fresh the further it goes, and swarms of living creatures abide there.

What a beautiful metaphor for how we as Christians are called to live our lives. We are to go to the temple, for that is where we go to get fed, purified, refreshed--the throne of the Lord. Then, we leave the temple, or church, and we go out into the world and share with others what we know. The trees outside the temple bear much fruit, and we, through our relationships with others, do the same.

When I was a church planter, this passage indicated to me the importance of being out in the world for it is in the world that the fruit trees live. I was excited about this, and I did it with zest and passion. Now that I am back in the world of organizational churches, this passage still means the same, except that I also understand the difficulty that comes with leaving the temple. It's comfortable to be around people we know, in a familiar place. It's a lot harder to leave.

But we must. We must go out; we must follow the river out from the temple to the places that God leads us so that we can bear the kind of fruit he has already prepared to grow. Last week, our church participated in a "Prayer Walk" as part of our month-long Season of Prayer. We walked the neighborhoods of our small town. We prayed in front of houses. We learned more about the history of our city and the people living in it. But we left the building. That is the first step in a journey of becoming more and more the people God has called us to be. May you leave the building this week and venture out into unknown and unfamiliar places along this river.