WALK WITH ME: LETTERS TO THE CHURCH, VOL. 1
A collection of four songs specifically written to the church as a series of invitations into deeper community and restoration in the power of Jesus:
- To walk alongside one another as part of a new community, a new family;
- To truly seek Jesus as we respond to his invitations to know and walk with him;
- To reconcile the broken relationships and spaces that have developed by recentering ourselves on the grace and mercy of Jesus found at the foot of the cross; and,
- To trust God to do more than we could ask or imagine in restoring and unifying us for the glory of God.
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WALK WITH ME
The journey of faith and the life of discipleship cannot be done alone. And the life of the community of believers is designed “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:12-13)
When talking about the church, many like to use the language of it being
“a community of grace and truth.” Sometimes, however, there seems to be more of an emphasis on truth than grace. But Jesus never began with truth (except with religious leaders who were overly infatuated with their interpretation of truth), he began instead with grace. It has always seemed to me that we should lean into the example of Jesus and begin with an abundance of grace.
I am self-aware enough to know that I am in need of grace. I also know that I am more likely to be accepting of truth when it is couched in kindness, humility, and gentleness. So as I consider what it means for a community to “walk with me,” I am asking the community of believers to journey with me in that kind of grace and provide a healthy, loving, and supportive relationship that causes me to yearn for more community, deeper relationships, and additional accountability as a result.
So as you listen to this song, hear it as an invitation – a deeply intimate request, really – for the church to be more than a center for Biblical information but a place of transformational community where we come alongside one another as we journey this life. If we are in this together, may we truly be in this together.
COME LOOK TO JESUS
Rooted in the creation account where God establishes his relationship with humanity through Adam and Eve, this invitation has been echoed throughout scripture: “They will be my people and I will be their God.” God’s continued story is his never ending pursuit to reclaim all of creation back to himself by honoring and restoring that covenant relationship with us.
Jesus’ invitation in Matthew 11:28-30 is to once again lean into that relationship and his “easy yoke,” offering a new way of living as an apprentice alongside the maker of the heavens and the earth. Jesus knows that life is filled with heavy loads, sometimes because of our determination to make the load heavier by attaching things to his invitation, but he essentially invites us to “come, walk beside me. Let me help you carry the weight. You will find the load so much easier when you walk with me.”
In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well. He offers her living water and the promise that she will never thirst again. He is the focus. “Look to me,” he essentially says to her. “I have what you need.” And when she tries to shift the conversation to ancillary matters about which others were arguing (again, because we are determined to make the load heavier), he turns the conversation again back to himself: who he is, what he is offering, the fulfillment of scripture in him.
For those of us who are weary and thirsty, this song serves as a reminder that Jesus invites us to come look to him. He is the water for which we thirst, the peace we so desperately seek. For those of us who long to follow Jesus, it is a reminder to continue to look and listen to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, and not the myriad of voices adding more and more weight to our heavy load. That is not found anywhere here in Jesus' invitation. And to those who are choosing to walk away from God or deconstruct their faith, this is a reminder to look away from the different expressions of bodies of believers who have distorted who he is and refocus your gaze toward the one who says to you, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
MEET ME AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS
I want to be careful not to give away too much behind the writing of this song so as to let the listener interpret it how they need to hear it. But I think it is important to note that conflict and disagreement is part of the human experience. Even in the lives of those who long to be followers of Jesus.
If the life of discipleship is repentance and the constant act of submitting our lives to the way of Jesus, the greatest challenge comes when, instead, we begin to reshape the way of Jesus into the mold of how WE understand and see the world. Instead of discipleship, what we then create is something altogether other than discipleship, something counterfeit, something other than the way of Jesus that inversely conforms to us instead of us conforming to him.
So what has been troubling me is that while I think the way of Jesus and how we should interact with the world around us looks one way, people who I stand with in solidarity to the gospel think another, mostly due to influences outside of scripture. As a thoughtful follower of Jesus, how am I to reconcile this? Especially as I experience the dissonance of the reality in which we then find ourselves. As we divide into “camps”, it seems the concept of Christian unity is being challenged in ways I don’t think we particularly expected. And as we add to the gospel the constraints of other allegiances – sometimes making them primary rather than secondary to the gospel – we again seem to be offering something other than the gospel, sometimes even adhering to ideas that are completely antithetical to it.
My imagination takes me to a place where we both leave behind our misunderstandings of the gospel and its outworkings to find common ground that would bring about reconciliation. And the only place I can imagine where that common ground could possibly exist is the holy ground that is our uniting place of transformation: at the foot of the cross. If we break our faith in Christ down to a solitary moment that serves as our greatest common denominator, the cross is our most fundamental touchpoint – where grace, mercy, forgiveness, unity, humility, love are all bound together – and the place where we all must return to somehow find the oneness that God desires. What if I laid down my stuff and you laid down yours and we simply sought Jesus together? What if we stopped listening to all the voices around us and started looking and listening to Jesus? What could it look like? What would we look like?