We need not be Christians for very long before we are able to look back at the various stages of our spiritual development and see peaks and valleys, revivals and dry depths, far from revival. Such is the wisdom of our Father that He would not only permit but fully ordain our sanctification to take place like this. We are called to apply ourselves to grow and develop as servants of Christ. But just as we are never given permission by God to assume that we are the authors and originators of this growth, so too we are never given permission to believe that the valleys are evidence that God was dormant. He began a glorious work of sanctification, and He will bring it to completion by being with us every step of the way (Philippians 1.6).
I hope you were able to participate in our various Holy Week gatherings. We don’t normally gather together in the sanctuary on Thursday or Friday. I hope you took advantage of that. I also hope that you were able to follow this week of our Lord’s earthly ministry by using the Bible reading guide to carry you through Scripture. We don’t normally, as a body, read large portions of Scripture together (apart from the sermon text, that is). All this is to say that I hope that our Easter gatherings were for you a peak of spiritual reflection and meditation. We need help, don’t we, stepping outside the busyness of the world, especially a world more and more adept at pulling us down into valleys? When we gather together as a church family around the life and ministry of Christ, whether it be worship, fellowship, service, or work; we are being equipped to grow spiritually. We are, in partnership with the saints, growing. There is something special that happens when the entire church body comes together. Our valleys are turned into peaks.
It is true that life, in God’s will, greets us with all manner of circumstances. Sometimes we cry out to Him in despondency (Psalm 57.1), and sometimes we raise our voices in praise (Psalm 138.1). For our Father, it is all the same: He always remains at work, without interruption, fulfilling His purposes for us. A quick comparison of Psalm 57 and Psalm 138 shows this plainly. David sometimes found himself in relative peace, walking amidst “trouble,” but sure that his prayers were being answered (Psalm 138.3,7). David sometimes found his very soul in the midst of lions, surrounded by men whose teeth were like spears and arrows, more like “fiery beasts” than human beings (Psalm 57.4). What was true for David is true for us: peaks and valleys, always peaks and valleys! But God is there and at work. His purposes for us will always be fulfilled, in all circumstances (Psalm 138.8; 57.2).
I believe we are in need not of less, but more opportunities to come together as a church family and be reminded that God is with us. When we are together, our various peaks as a church family raise our various valleys as a church family. Just think of the kind of world in which we live and the struggles that greet us each and every day. Karen Swallow Prior and others are right to alert us to “the disjointed, fragmentary, and addictive nature of the digitized world -- and the demands of its dinging, beeping, and flashing devices (On Reading Well, 8).” Our world specializes in pulling us into the valleys of sanctification. Writing more than five years ago, an author for the Guardian interviewed the key creators of social media who regretted their handiwork. They not only admit the addictive nature of the social media features they created but also confessed their desire to protect their own children from the same social media features that lined their pocketbooks (Paul Lewis, “‘Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia”).
This is our world, the world in which we are acclimated and well-versed. We know how it works. We can both navigate it and use it for our own purposes. Never mind that technology writer, Nicholas Carr, says that all of this is exactly backward: this world knows how we work, navigates us, and uses us for its own purposes (see, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains). We have become used to a world that actually draws us away from our need to be together as a church family; to pray, worship, fellowship, serve, and work as a body.
Did you participate in our various Holy Week opportunities to come together? Please value these occasions. We believe that the more time we are together as a church family, the more we are able, by God’s grace, to offset the conforming pattern of the world and spiritually grow and mature - filling valleys and raising peaks.
