Stronger Together

I messed up. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t make a bad decision so much as put off a good one for a little while. Then a little longer. Then time gets away from you and bad habits set in. Like millions of others, I began to treat church like a weekly event, an hour long show you sit and watch. Like a short dinner theater, without the dinner.

Many today even look for the kind of church experience where they can slip in and back out unnoticed. Maybe this is because that makes it hard for people to say, “We missed you last week.” They want a church where people aren’t all up in their business.

But church is all about having people all up in your business. For our next Lesson from Babylon, we need to look at how Daniel and the other faithful Hebrews benefitted from real community.

Daniel 2 recounts the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. A dream troubled him so much that he gathered together his “magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers” for advice. With a catch. To ensure they weren’t just making it up, he wanted them to tell him the dream, too. He declared, “If you do not tell me what my dream was and interpret it, I will have you cut into pieces and your houses turned into piles of rubble” (2:5).

Obviously no man can tell another his dream. This was a totally unreasonable request, but he wouldn’t back down. When they could not do as asked, the king ordered the execution of all his wise men — not just the failures in front of him but every last one, including Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

When Daniel found out about this, what did he do? Did he run and hide? Did he rush to the king to beg for mercy? No. He called for a prayer meeting.

“Then Daniel returned to his house and explained the matter to his friends Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. He urged them to plead for mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery, so that he and his friends might not be executed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon.” (2:17-18)

He turned to his community of believers, and together they took their common need before God.

Prayer meetings used to be common in the US, but they’ve pretty much fallen out of favor. We don’t feel like we need it anymore. But I’d bet they’re still quite common in places where believers are being persecuted. When we feel like we need God to get through, we suddenly remember prayer. The day is coming when we in the West are going to once again feel like we need God to get through this life. And when we do that there is power in a praying community.

There is also comfort in that community. Daniel and company not only benefited from the outcome of their prayer meeting, they benefited from having a believing community at all. When they had to decide whether they would remain faithful or eat the king’s food, it was no doubt easier to stand with a small but faithful group than it would have been to stand alone. And when they found themselves surrounded by hundreds of bowing satraps, prefects, governors, etcetera on the plain of Dura, as hard as it was to stand together and refuse to bow, it would have been much harder to do it alone.

So our lesson from Babylon is, Don’t try to go it alone; we’re so much stronger together.

For decades now we’ve seen church as an event. Very soon now we’re going to need to see it as a support group. I’m reminded of a passage in Ecclesiastes:

Two are better than one,
   because they have a good return for their labor:
If either of them falls down,
   one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
   and has no one to help them up. ...
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. (4:9-12)

In a world that continually tells us that we’re the problem, that says we’re not just weird but stupid, even immoral, we need that kind of community. For a time, Christianity was seen as more or less normal, but those days are quickly coming to an end. More and more our surroundings are going to press us to turn our back on our faith and fit in, to join “the right side of history.” They may even make it costly to refuse. We will need each other’s encouragement. We may have to support each other financially. Most of all we will need each other to remind us that we’re not crazy.

Our old church was huge, but we were plugged in and had a close-knit family inside that larger body. When we moved to our current home, we tried to find a place to plug in, but this one wasn’t a good fit. Neither was that one. Or that one. And we stopped trying for a little while. A little while stretched into months, then years. If you’ve also fallen into the bad habit of treating church like a weekly hour of entertainment, join me in trying to dig into the community. Even if a Sunday morning class won’t work for you, I’ll bet there are other options, whether they meet at the church building, in someone’s home, or at a coffee shop. We need a church family. And we need to establish this before we look up and need it now!

Hard times are going to come, whether they’re persecution or just the trials of life. Our Lord will see us through. But it’ll be so much easier when we’re surrounded by the family of God.

So, “let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb 10:24-25).


Related content:
What is the Church?
Why Do We Gather?

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