Remember your journey

By Ted Johnston
Great Lakes District Superintendent

CANTON, Ohio—Several U.S. congregations are reaching their 40th anniversary this year. We congratulate them, noting that such milestones are opportunities for remembrance and reflection.

As I have joined with some of these congregations in their anniversary gatherings, I have reflected on my own experience in our fellowship. I became a Worldwide Church of God member 34 years ago, and life in our church has been for me a mixture of joy and sorrow—satisfaction and exasperation—gratitude and remorse.

Perhaps it has been something like that for you—a journey full of ups and downs, high points and low points, progress and pitfalls. Such it is with most journeys in this fallen world—even ones within the church—including our church. No matter what your personal journey in our fellowship has been, we have traveled together, and with God.

In Scripture, God often exhorts his people to remember their collective journey. For example, the Lord called out through the prophet Micah to Israel, saying, “My people, remember what Balak king of Moab counseled and what Balaam son of Beor answered” (Micah 6:5a).

In the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, Israel encountered great trials and peril. There was, for example, the time king Balak tried to annihilate Israel using the offices of the pagan priest Balaam to curse the nation. God intervened and turned a potential curse into a blessing (even speaking through a donkey to do so!—it’s amazing how God works, isn’t it?).

The Lord continues, “remember your journey from Acacia to Gilgal...” (Micah 6:5b, New Living Translation). Israel’s journey hit a particular low point at Acacia, east of the Jordan in Moab, where the nation descended into terrible sin—displaying a great lack of loyalty toward God.

Yet, despite this unfaithfulness, God granted Israel amazing deliverance—eventually taking her across the Jordan to the first encampment in the Promised Land at Gilgal. God exhorts Israel to remember that journey—one of many obstacles, trials and disappointments, including their own terrible sins and faults.

But why remember all this—why focus on the past? Is the goal to glory in one’s own strength—or to despair over one’s own sins (or the sins of others)? No, God encouraged Israel to remember their journey so that “you may know the righteous acts of the Lord” (Micah 6:5c).

I suggest that we reflect on our journey together in the Worldwide Church of God for the same reason.

If we take an eyes wide open look at our collective journey as a church, I think we find that we eventually arrived at our own Gilgal despite ourselves and over a rather circuitous and perilous route. My point is this—for any good we now experience (and my personal conviction is that there is much good), the credit and praise go to God—the Lord of “righteous acts.”

Many have fond memories of the journey. With them, we rejoice and give thanks to God for what was good. Yet, for others, the journey was painful and their memories are tinged with sorrow and sometimes anger.

With them we grieve and we acknowledge that our journey was a mixture of good and bad, joy and sorrow. It was a journey laced with human weaknesses, mistakes, faults and sins. And to those who were harmed, we reach out in compassion with a desire to help. The current leadership of the church has, appropriately, confessed our institutional sins and asked forgiveness from those who have been hurt by our sinful practices and beliefs. I join them in that confession and request forgiveness for any personal misbehavior, including leadership practices that brought harm to others.

It is my desire (one shared by all the current WCG leaders I’m blessed to know), to lead the church in newness of life so that on one hand we might not repeat the sins of our past and so that on the other we might experience the fullness of God’s blessing. It is thus essential that we remember and learn from our journey that we might see more clearly where God is taking us in the future.

Regarding that future, notice further God’s words, through Micah, to Israel: “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:6-8).

Israel often misunderstood the basis of her journey with God. If the people of Israel thought their righteous acts (including offering of sacrifices), earned favor with God, they were mistaken. Their favor with God was because of who God was, not who they were. It was because of God’s grace that Israel was delivered from Balak.

It was God’s righteous acts, not theirs, that opened the way for them to enter the Promised Land at Gilgal. The sacrifices of the law of Moses were given to remember and celebrate God’s righteous acts of deliverance, not earn Israel God’s favor.

God’s point to Israel is that their deliverance is rooted in his grace, not in their obedience (or lack thereof). But notice also that God invites them to respond to that grace by embracing his heart and then expressing that heart in a life-style characterized by justice, mercy and humility. I think God has used our journey as a church to teach us a similar lesson and to offer to us a similar invitation.

My experience with members of the Worldwide Church of God is that we are a people who are serious about obeying God. Sadly, we often thought our obedience would earn us God’s favor. Worse, yet, we thought we were unique in gaining that favor. On both counts, we were wrong—terribly wrong.

To make matters worse, this approach toward God, rather than causing us to feel God’s favor, caused many to feel condemned. Knowing they were not living up to our standards and modes of obedience, they thought God rejected them.

Yet God is gracious—he indeed is the Lord of “righteous acts.” Rather than experiencing his condemnation, he has granted us confession, repentance and deliverance—leading to a transformed heart.

As we wrestled with our deeply entrenched legalisms and false doctrines, we began to hear a clear, compelling and (for us) new message from the God who had not abandoned us, despite our sin.

God, in his grace, wanted us to share fully and freely in the heart of the one who fulfills God’s charge to Israel. That one is Jesus, and we are invited to share in his heart of justice, mercy and humility.

The heart of Jesus is the heart of the one who is rightly related to God. Rather than being defined by religious ritual, that heart is defined by and expressed in the patterns of Jesus’ life and love, conveyed in his teachings and through his Spirit.

In words directed toward some Jewish religious leaders, Jesus paraphrased Micah’s exhortation: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel” (Matthew 23:23-24).

Even under his covenant with Israel (the old covenant), what God sought was a heart that beat to his rhythm, reflected in a life of fairness and tender compassion toward people and one of faithful dependence upon God. Jesus called such love toward God and toward people the great commandments of the law.

This love, now exemplified fully in Jesus, is the great command of the new covenant. Under this covenant, those who put their trust fully in Jesus are brought into union with Christ through the Holy Spirit. In this union, they share in Jesus’ love for God and for people and are led to express that love by participating in Jesus’ patterns of relating to God, to people and to self. Jesus is thus the purpose—the goal of the journey.

In our past, we often tried to earn God’s favor through our self-defined set of sacrificial acts. Many of us tried hard. But our efforts did not get us into the Promised Land. Yet, God, in his mercy, did not abandon us as we wandered in our wilderness. Rather, in his righteousness and love he corrected us and brought us to Jesus, where we find the perfect union of God’s justice and mercy. In Jesus, God’s righteous judgment against our sin is fully satisfied—paid for in full at the cross in Jesus’ sacrifice. God’s mercy—his grace toward us—is made possible, not because God ignores our sin, but because the terrible price for our sin is met in Jesus.

In Jesus, our journey is finished—complete. In Jesus, mercy triumphs over justice, because justice is met on our behalf. That is the gospel.

In our relationship with God, in Christ, we discover a new relationship with people based now on the way Jesus relates to us—with mercy and grace. And that new way of relating with people includes a new way of relating with ourselves. During our former journey, some of us saw ourselves as failures—unable to live up to the standards we defined.

We walked with God not humbly, but in despair. Others of us saw ourselves as good—as measuring up to the standards and thinking God must be pleased. We walked with God not humbly, but in self-righteousness.

Neither view was accurate. Both were spiritually destructive—but, thanks be to God, he is delivering us from both—to Jesus.

To see our journey in this light is both liberating and humbling. But freedom with humility is God’s good gift. Concerning humility, Robert Morneau wrote in 31 Reflections on Christian Virtue: “Humility ... is that habitual quality whereby we live in the truth of things: the truth that we are creatures and not the Creator; the truth that our life is a composite of good and evil, light and darkness; the truth that in our littleness we have been given extravagant dignity.”

To see God as he is leads us to see ourselves and our journey as the mixed bag they truly are. Such humility leads us not to despair nor the desire to abandon our journey, but it leads us to a life of joyful, thankful dependence.

That dependence is not upon ourselves, but upon God, who in Jesus, gives us all we need for the journey and will take us on to its ultimate completion.

And so as we consider our journey, let us remember, rejoice and give thanks. Let us also, as appropriate, confess and seek forgiveness. Let those who were hurt be helped to grieve and be healed. And let us all embrace God’s gifts of justice, mercy and humility.

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