Good morning to you all.
It’s Sunday. Coffee’s poured, shoes are by the door, and in a little while we’ll load up and go to church.
It’s going to be hot again. Bismarck has had fourteen days over a hundred degrees this month. Eight of them back to back. The highest readings have been in the 110s, and the triple digits came back for this weekend. Step outside around noon here and the air doesn’t move. It presses. You’re wrung out by two in the afternoon and you haven’t done anything but exist.
We’re going anyway.
Not because we’re tough. Because there’s nothing else I’d rather do with the morning.
For twenty years I worked two and three jobs at a time.
Security, twelve-hour shifts. DoorDash. Uber Eats. Domino’s. Pizza Hut. Postal truck. Garbage man. Seventy-hour weeks were normal for us.
That left one day off. Sunday.
And Sunday was never really off. Church nine to one. Back again five to six-thirty, sometimes seven. The only day I had with my family, and half of it was already spoken for.
I never once resented it.
Now hear me carefully, because I know how that reads. I am not telling you this so you’ll think well of me. There is nothing admirable in it. A tired man who goes to church is still a tired man, and my wife and my kids are not the point of this letter either. If you finish this thinking about the Johnson family, I’ve written it badly.
I’m telling you because I know what the other Sunday looked like. I lived it.
Before I started really going, my Sunday was a morning service, maybe. Then video games. Books. The TV. Bored out of my skull. Killing the rest of the day by myself, or out running a truck.
I wasn’t in rebellion. I was just alone. I had an hour of religion and thirteen hours of nothing, and I called it a day of rest.
Nobody made me go. I was worn to the bone and I went anyway.
Here’s what I actually want to say this morning, and it’s for a particular man.
There’s a whole crowd now that has decided it can do all of it from the house. Homeschool. Home church. Home everything. Family devotions at the kitchen table on Sunday morning with the coffee pot on, dad reading a chapter, and that’s the service.
I am not writing against homeschooling. We homeschool. I’d argue for it with anybody.
I am not writing against family devotions. That table is holy ground and I’ve said so in plain words before. A father who opens the Book with his children is doing something most men in this country have quit doing.
Keep the table. Keep the schooling. Keep every bit of it.
But a family altar is not a church, and dad reading a chapter is not preaching.
There is no accountability in a room where you are the only voice. There is nobody in that room who can tell you you’re wrong. Nobody watching for your soul who will have to give account for it. No brother who’s been where you are and came out. No widow in the third pew you’re supposed to check on. No pastor.
Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account.
You cannot submit to yourself. You cannot be sharpened by your own opinion. Iron doesn’t sharpen iron alone in a drawer.
The house of God. The people of God. The hymns of God. The work of God. The preaching from the word of God.
I gave up half my only day off for those five things while I was hauling other men’s garbage.
And here is the reason, and it isn’t community, and it isn’t tradition, and it isn’t because I’m the kind of man who goes to church.
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
In the midst. Not in the idea of it. Not in the livestream of it. There is a promise attached to the gathering that is not attached to my living room, and the promise is not about the people who show up. It’s about who stands among them when they do.
That’s what the lone wolf is missing. He thinks he’s skipping a meeting. He’s skipping a place his King said He’d be.
Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.
As the manner of some is. Not the slip of some. The manner. The habit. The settled way a man lives.
So no. I don’t understand the man or woman with every Sunday free who stays home.
I don’t think that’s a rule being broken. I think it’s an appetite that was never there.
And I’d rather tell you that plainly this morning than let you sit another Sunday believing you’ve already got everything the gathering was going to give you.
It’s a hundred and ten out there. We’re going anyway.
-Adam
P.S. If you haven’t been in months and you’re reading this over coffee, you don’t need a program or a plan or the right season of life. You need a pew and a pastor who knows your name. There’s a service this morning within twenty
A hundred degrees and we went anyway. If you want to read the Book like it matters that much:
How to Study the Bible Like Your Life Depends on It. https://biblicalman.gumroad.com/l/ellmoqminutes of you. Go.
