Speaking things into existence

Ephesians 5:4 - Let there be thanksgiving.

You may have noticed that the Apostle Paul talks this way a lot: “Let there be — *insert some good thing or character trait* — in your lives and churches.” And I mean to focus on the first three words: “Let there be…”. It may not sound like much, but it stands in fairly notable opposition to the more direct, “Be [something]” or “Do [something].”

You also may have noticed that it sounds a lot like Genesis 1 when God says, “Let there be light.” It’s held out for us to see, plain as day: Paul is speaking in creation language. He’s mimicking God’s voice itself. The correlation between creation, gospel, and the Christian life is a common occurrence in the New Testament, and is made even more clear in places such as 2 Corinthians 4:6 where it says, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.” God is speaking things into existence again, just like he did in the beginning. And Jesus is the “word” he’s using.

I think Paul knows how difficult it is to just say to someone, “Be thankful.” Not that there’s not a place for that. But here he does more. He wishes it, prays it, and prophetically pronounces it into being, in the wake of the gospel’s work. “Let there be thankfulness where there presently isn’t any! May God create it out of nothing!” It’s incredibly freeing, isn’t it? — to know that many of the imperatives of the New Testament are worded this way, especially when we struggle with being thankful? Contrast this with the Old Testament which many times required capital punishment when someone disobeyed. It’s as if the Bible wants us to know that things are different now with Jesus, that God is working in our hearts to re-create us through the Spirit rather than expecting us to moralize our old selves to death.

This is also why these types of verses are always found at the end of the letters: because they’re less important. They serve as moons that reflect the light of the sun rather than serving as a source of light themselves. Thankfulness only comes from the Spirit of God, when we put ourselves (as moons) in the path of the light of the sun of the gospel. The more we think we have something to do with our salvation, the less thankful we’ll be. That’s just common sense. But the less we think we have to do with our salvation, the more we’ll be able to direct our thankfulness outside of us toward the only one truly worthy of our praise.

So, “Let there be thanksgiving” has a semantic range to it when read in context with the rest of the Bible. It means: “Hiawatha Church, let there be thankfulness among us as we gather together underneath the good news that Jesus has saved us. May he make us more thankful, not so much as a byproduct of us trying harder, but as a byproduct of our realization that all is given and nothing is earned (1 Cor 4:7).”

CHRIS WACHTER / LEAD PASTOR

Look who's coming to church!

Ephesians 4:28 - Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

It’s easy to read a verse like this and think of it as a type of universal proverb for all, that it’s the church’s job to ensure that thieves everywhere stop stealing, get jobs, and contribute more to society. But Ephesians was written to a church, not to the “world” at large. Paul is writing to Timothy and the other Ephesian elders, saying, “This message needs to be communicated to your people.”

What’s often missed, then — in light of the plain language of the verse — is that this means that thieves were sitting there in the pews. And I don’t mean non-Christians who were interested in the faith, but actual Christians who were also thieves.

This doesn’t condone stealing at all. The Bible clearly says here, and elsewhere, that it’s wrong. But it is to say: look who’s coming to church! Without precondition! The New Testament letters assume that the worst of people are a part of the church — you know, people like us, people who sin, people who struggle to shake off the old self. It reminds us of how Jesus invades the hearts of sinners rather than the more religious notion of him allowing the clean to come near. He dines with his enemies and betrayers, he touches the diseased, and he chases down the outcast. Church communities, by their very make-up, are emblems of this idea.

So, it makes sense that instead of quoting the 8th commandment from the Old Testament, which carries a “Do this, or else” condition along with it, Paul says, “Let the thief learn to do honest work so he can be generous.” The gospel is an invitation, not a threat. It’s the good news that Jesus Christ, the most generous being in the universe, was crucified among petty thieves, essentially becoming a thief himself so that he might die for thieves and in the wake of his death procure a salvation for us that we would never be able to accomplish ourselves. When we come to terms with the beauty of this gospel-truth, we start to steal less, not simply because we were told to (even from the Bible!) but because the fact that Jesus welcomes thieves to dine with him takes our breath away. And so the New Testament’s call to be generous is not so much a law to keep, but a gospel to embody, so that others might see and believe in a God who poured himself out rather than a God who took things away.

CHRIS WACHTER / LEAD PASTOR

“Don’t envy,” and other powerless maxims.

1 Peter 2:1 - Therefore, put away all envy.

Envy is a slippery sin. Right when you think you have your hands around it (in order to kill it), it rears its head in some other way in your life, unabated. Kinda like a whack-a-mole game. The grass is always greener elsewhere, and there’s always something in someone else’s life to measure ours against. But when we read “put away all envy” in the Bible, it’s very matter-of-fact, right? Just do it. Simple! Or is it?

What complicates matters is that envy — like all sin, really — is a “heart sin.” We can be told to look non-envious, but it’s another thing altogether to say, “Manufacture a non-envious heart; don’t be envious.” That’s much more difficult. You might even say it’s impossible. Especially when we consider it says “all” envy, not just some. What we really need is a heart transplant rather than a call to modify our existing one.

Fortunately for us, there’s more to the Christian story than this verse. Rather, it’s embedded in a field of related truths that don’t come to us in the form of a command, but in the form of good news. And we don’t have to look very far. In 1 Peter 1, which serves as the soil that chapter 2 grows out of, we read that we have been chosen by God, sprinkled with Jesus’s blood (v. 2), born again (v. 3) and given such a wondrous salvation that the angels in heaven long to look more deeply into it (v. 12).

It’s only when I consider these things, when I believe that in Christ I have all that I’ll ever need, that my tight grip around wanting other peoples’ perfect lives begins to loosen. That’s the irony, in fact — battling envy is best done not by trying to battle envy, but by believing the gospel. Yoda might say, “There is no try, only do.” But Star Wars platitudes aside, the biblical version is much better: “Don’t try so hard or you’ll just sink, but focus on Jesus’s sacrificial love for you and you’ll be able to walk on water, or, in this case, not envy as much as you used to.”

CHRIS WACHTER / LEAD PASTOR