A sign of a healthy church is that hope is the antidote for tough times.
The hope of the Kingdom of God
The book of Psalms is a collection of poems, songs and prayers. The two main themes of the book are lament and praise. Lament for the evil in the world and praise for God’s goodness.
The whole thing was put together after Israel’s exile to Babylon. They were still waiting for a future kingdom that God promised would come to the world through them. But the present moment was a really tough time. It didn’t look good for the fulfillment of that promise.
But by this point in their history, Israel had story upon story to retell and reflect on that provided hope in the midst of their circumstances. Their people had been in similar and worse situations in the past, and God worked out even the most hopeless of circumstances.
So while the psalms ebb and flow back and forth between lament for the state of the world and praise to God for His goodness, the design of the collection communicates something profound about how these two themes relate to each other in prayer.
Not only does each of the major sections of the book end with poems of praise, the whole book does as well. This reinforces the message that Israel’s focus was the hope of the Kingdom of God making things right.
So it communicates a certain posture or mental attitude. In the midst of undesirable circumstances, they embraced hope because they trusted in God’s promise.
We shouldn’t always be happy
We live in the here-but-not-yet Kingdom of God. We’re still waiting for its total and complete appearance. While we do, there are tough times when it sure doesn’t feel like God’s Kingdom is coming.
But we have stories to tell of God’s faithfulness that creates trust that what He has promised will come to pass.
Churches can buy in to a philosophy that Christians should always be happy. After all, how could you be sad or depressed when you know God, how much He loves you and what he’s done for you?
But as this book communicates, Christians are not called to behavior that disregards the state of our world and the tough realities of living in it. On the contrary, God’s people live through much the same realities as anybody else. The difference is we have hope.
The contents of prayer
Walk into many churches and you’ll experience prayer that’s centered around the phrases “God, forgive us” and “God, help us.”
While bringing requests to God is certainly a healthy part of the act of praying (Phil. 4:6-7), it’s meant to be so much more. It’s meant to involve all our our being, including our very real struggles and the realm of thoughts and emotions that come along with them.
Lamenting is an important part of the prayer experience. But, it should not be the end because evil is not the end.
Israel hung it’s hope on the promise of a new king that would bring a perfect Kingdom. They trusted this would be the end of the story, even when life seemed bleak.
Their response was praise for what God had already done and was still yet to do. His goodness would prevail somehow, someway. The result of trusting that is expressions of praise.
Problems are opportunities
How a church responds in a difficult season goes a long way toward how it is with not only getting through it, but growing from it.
Its response shouldn’t be…
- Indifference or apathy.
- Sitting in it.
- Dismissing it.
A healthy church embraces them and moves through them because of the hope in God’s promise.
The tough times is exactly when the fruit of God’s Spirit is given the biggest opportunity to nourish His people through one another (Romans 12:5). If we don’t embrace these times, we fail to take advantage of those opportunities. The result is a bunch of wimpy Christians.
One of my favorite authors (Frank Viola) has said…
A problem is an opportunity for Christ to be your all.
Tough times are a church’s golden opportunity to respond with His goodness, and the evil in the world presents opportunity constantly.
A healthy church responds to specific evil in the midst of it with countermeasures of God’s goodness. If a society is killing babies, it saves babies. If a society is promoting gender confusion, it’s finding ways to demonstrate healthy gender expression.
How are we responding to the evils of the world around us? A healthy church gives the world a taste of what its hope is in and expresses praise for it along the way.
Michael Fleming
Mike Fleming is the creator of Finding Healthy Church. Over 20 years ago, he was sparked by the frustration of failing to experience what the biblical story claimed a healthy church was like. He caught a vision and passion for seeing local churches be what they were designed by God to be. He shares what he's learning along the way so the health of local churches around the world are improved. He’s currently working on an eye-opening book that will help better understand what it means for a church to be healthy.