Ezekiel 17:22-24

[Editor’s Note: We started writing this week’s Connect Devotionals when it appeared that we’d be in our new building on December 5.  We had decided to take a small break from our current sermon theme and re-visit our church’s “noble cedar” vision from Ezekiel 17. As you know, that opening date will need to slide a bit, but we felt that the re-visiting the noble cedar might refresh our hope as we await the final and official “opening of the doors” on Andrews Store Road!]

At last: a new “home” for our North Chatham campus is just ahead!  After much prayer, planning, fund-raising and hard work, we’re on the threshold of the opening of our building on Andrews Store Road.

The opening of this new “home” comes in the midst of our Home for Christmas theme.  And this new “home” is an opportunity to revisit and re-root ourselves in one of our church’s key verses, Ezekiel 17:22-24.

This passage speaks of God planting a “noble cedar,” a cedar that grows, blossoms and produces good fruit, a tree that becomes a home for birds of every kind.  It is also a tree which God designed to “bring down the tall tree and to make the low tree grow tall” (verse 24).  Our desire as a church is to grow to become a spiritual home for all kinds of people.  People who are not united by race or class, by education or wealth, by culture or politics, but by faith in Jesus the King.

We want our building to be a tool which we use to serve the Lord and his work in Chatham County and beyond.  We want it to be “for them,” all those “birds” out there who don’t have a good, safe place to land, rest and even nest.  Of the roughly 100 “non-sleeping” hours in every week, our church activities use about 10%.  How might our space become filled with God-honoring, people-blessing work all the rest of the time?

And: all kinds of “birds” need all kinds of foods, and can make all kinds of messes!  If God blesses this work of our hands, everything that is now brand-new and pristine will soon become stained in some ways … broken … needing upkeep, maintenance, repair, replacement: if our building gets well used, it will eventually get used up—can we see that as a good thing, and aim our efforts towards seeing that happen responsibly?

Your authors are no tree experts, but how about this as a concluding picture:  imagine our local expression of God’s noble cedar as a Christmas tree.  Imagine it decorated, not so much with lights and tinsel, but ornamented instead with the faces, and the lives, of people – all kinds of people, people as different as sparrows, herons, woodpeckers, penguins and ostriches!  People whom we invite, welcome and include in our work of following Jesus into ever-deepening love for our God and our neighbors.

Could that be a different kind of Christmas tree – and one really worth becoming?

What kinds of “birds” (i.e., people) would you love to see “nesting” in CCC?  What sorts of “birds” (i.e., people) would be challenging for you to welcome?  Perhaps if we started praying for the latter, God would also send us more of the former?