This is an excerpt from Preaching in a Post-Truth World: Recentering the Pulpit in a Chaotic World by Mike Glenn.
As Christians, we often forget God is still at work even when we can’t see him working. If things aren’t going right, if things aren’t working out the way we want, we assume that justice is going to be left up to us. We either give up altogether or worse try to fix things ourselves. In short, we lose faith and we lose out on being used by God when the moment is ready. If Joseph had been unfaithful in any of his circumstances, he would have forfeited his place in the greater story of God. Many Christians don’t want to stick out. They don’t want to be noticed. They choose to blend in, and when they do, they give up all their usefulness to God and His kingdom. Salt that isn’t salty isn’t good for anything.
Several years ago, I was the teaching pastor of a Tuesday night young adult worship service called Kairos. I was asked by a group of our young adult leaders to help them get a city-wide service started, and I promised to help them get it started. I told them that I didn’t have time to lead the service, but I would help them get it up and running. Famous last words. I ended up leading the service for eleven years. During one of the nights, I was teaching about prayer I could tell by the way they were engaging me and the questions I got from them later that they knew how to pray. They didn’t. No one had ever told them how to pray. We had assumed since most of them had grown up in and around church, that someone would have taught them to pray. We discovered we had to slow things down, way down. We reworked our prayer time so we always included a moment of teaching about prayer, even letting them practice, and then we would let them pray.
We found out they hadn’t been taught a lot of things. Most of them didn’t have a Bible. They may have had one their parents gave them when they were children, but few of them had a Bible of their own. They would go to the store to buy a Bible but leave the store empty-handed. When I asked them why they didn’t buy a Bible, they told me the store had too many Bibles to choose from and they didn’t want to buy the wrong one! We ended up having a service where we talked about all the different kinds of translations and the purposes behind each translation. One of the most unforgettable moments of my ministry was talking to them about “their Bible.” There was more. No one had taught them about marriage, or careers, or financial management. We had to install an entire life skills curriculum.
Most people are doing as well as they know how to do. We talk about broken families and never stop to fully understand the damage done to the next generation. Children are cut off from their fathers. Sons always learned how to be men from their dads, and now they don’t. The crisis of boys in our society is well documented. Girls are having their own problems. Young men get married and try to be husbands having never seen a husband. Young women get married and try to be wives having never seen a wife. They’re trying to build families when they’ve never been part of one.
One of the beautiful truths of grace is when you’ve lost your own family, God will give you a new one. In small groups, God will give you mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters – all in the faith – that will rebuild what's been lost. We forget most of our neighbors want to live lives of meaning and purpose, they just don’t know how.