Isaiah 1:2 Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For the Lord has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.”

Fellowship with King Kong Shower, an all-time classic!

Last week at the end of our Gracepoint & Waypoint Church directors retreat, we had all of our kids join us and had a wonderful gathering with all the parents and kids as a farewell get together for our Austin team. There were about 60 of us. There was so much joy and laughter. We got to play games, show them how to shoot arrows, spend hours out on the lake trying our new kayaks and boats and play volleyball on our new Sierra Lodge basketball court. These kids are growing up in the midst of so many uncles and aunts with so much love poured out to them. Although they are not relatives, they are growing up in a huge clan where they are learning from young age how to be the family together as a church.

Gracepoint church directors taking a cool break from long meetings

As I thought about my own childhood, I never enjoyed anything close to this. I always wanted to be part of a huge extended family and go on trips but I never got to. I wondered how much these kids would be able to recognize the blessing they are in the midst of. What if when our children grew up, they experienced this community of faith as a fetter that they want to break away from just as the prodigal son did? Oh, how tragic that would be.

And then I thought about God’s lament in Isaiah 1. How hurt God must have been that those he reared up and poured out his love to are ignorant of his love and rebellious? Even as human beings who exercise imperfect love, oh how hurt we get when our loved ones rebel! How much more tragic it is when human beings rebel against God’s perfect love? People who are in the midst of blessing don’t realize what blessings they have. For them, this is how life has always been. They have no other life to compare to. Only when the blessings are taken away do they realize that what they had was truly precious—like the Israelites did in exile. As I thought about these children, my prayer for them is that they would be wise enough to recognize all the blessings that God has surrounded their lives with. And my prayer for myself is the words to the song “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing“:

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.