It All Began In A Barn

It all began in a barn. 

And the Midwest is full of them. My Dad’s first job was in a barn. The revival that lit a fire of the Gospel for many through his ministry started in a barn. The birth of the Country Church in Ruthton, Minnesota through Pastor Rich DeReuyter happened in a barn. The first snow of Winter always seems to close the door on the previous season in more ways than one. This time, the close was dramatic. Along with my cousin, Frank, I preached the funeral for a very dear friend, Karen DeGroot, at the Country Church. 

The glow of the lights from the inside were welcoming under a sky where the gray clouds hung low over the harvested fields. The beautiful building was bursting at the seams on this wet and windy day in November and as Traci and I walked in the sanctuary we were greeted by people I hadn’t seen in more than 30 years. Frank, still on oxygen from visiting the edge of death in the hospital with Covid, preached like the roof was on fire. At one point I thought he might settle down and pace himself, but instead he reached back and turned up the oxygen full blast. That’s Frank. My childhood friends, Dave and Chad, who were at the first barn revival my Dad did in the early 80’s, were there. It was as if there was this leap from childhood to adulthood where the conversations that happened tied together the gaps of time into a complete picture as we simply heard the updates on where life has taken us. Isn’t it interesting how seasons have a way of taking you on an unpredictable journey that you couldn’t have planned on if you tried? But the thing about seasons is that they change. 

The reminder of the changing of the seasons began to take shape as we found the warmth of kind connections brought together once again by the passing of a friend. The biting cold of the prairie winds, famous for being so strong and consistent over buffalo ridge, met us at the graveside as the temperature fell below freezing. They’re a hearty bunch, Midwesterners. Like a herd of buffalo huddling in a blizzard, the crowd of black clad mourners stood in solidarity to celebrate a life well lived. For the young mother in the crowd holding her infant, the changing of the seasons was wonderful, even if she didn’t feel prepared to be a mother yet. For the DeGroot family shivering together on folding chairs under the tent that day, it was a moment painfully marked by the handoff of a life too soon. For many of us, seasons change way too quickly. As the service concluded and people made their way to their cars, the flurries began to swirl around in the air like excited children running out to recess. The passing of a life and the passing of the season, the last breath of day and the first dusting of Winter, it all speaks to the way that God has orchestrated this world where everything and everyone eventually engages in a forced handoff of sorts. The scorching heat of Summer gives way to Fall, as the leaves of Autumn which change from green to yellow to red seem to signal us in a universal understanding that even nature tells us when to slow down and prepare to let go. Yet what we let go of is never truly lost. It only gets picked up by the next generation and carried further into the unknown. 

At Christmas time, God reminds us that even He surrendered Himself to the processing of seasons. We enter this world and surrender to the direction of our parents. He entered the world surrendered to the direction of Joseph and Mary. We grow and are faced with decisions and choices and hopefully we learn to live in obedience to our Heavenly Father, even if it comes through suffering. Jesus grew and was faced with decisions and choices and Hebrews 5 literally says that Jesus learned obedience through suffering. We come to the end of our season on earth, often too soon, and as much of a struggle as it may be, we are forced to let go. 

Jesus faced this same conflict as he appealed to the Father to find another way to transition the season ahead as he was going to the cross. There was no alternative presented in that moment, and even the Son of God now had to experience letting go. Thankfully, his cross became our victory and now we celebrate his birth for the same reason. It’s an unreasonable reality that God would step into our stories and seasons and include us in his victory and resurrection. But he’s not afraid of the unreasonable and he is the Lord of reality. At this time of year, slow down and remember that this life is an exercise in letting go. Who have you encouraged? Who are you empowering? Who are you training and teaching as a disciple? Every one of us has been given the task to make disciples. At some point, every teacher must help every student to become a teacher themselves. 

Embracing the changing of the seasons helps us realize that we can’t take up space forever, no matter how much wealth or success we experience in this life. We are to live to give away whatever wisdom or influence we can to those who come behind us so they’re more equipped for what’s ahead than we ever were. This Christmas, take a moment around the table to recognize the people God has placed in your path of influence, and ask the Lord to guide you victorious through the seasons ahead. We are equipped to live victorious nomatter what season it is, and when life gets confusing and complicated, remember that it all began in a barn.

Bill Vanderbush

Masked, Canceled, and Woke (Transcribed from the podcast)

Does the grace of Jesus have anything to say about the hot button issues of the day? Absolutely it does. So today we’re going to take a fresh perspective on three big ones. 

Most of our complaining comes from the fact that we don’t know how powerful we really are. When we feel overpowered by outside forces, we feel helpless and hopeless and we complain about it. I think this is why Paul said in Phil 2:14 to do everything without grumbling or complaining. The deeper revelation is that everything we complain about we have probably contributed to in some way. For example. Have you been irritated or even infuriated about being mandated to wear a mask? I was. And I was complaining to the Lord and my friends about it, not quite in that order. I found other people far more cooperative in agreeing with my complaining that the Lord was. I was somewhat cut with conviction when I felt him say, “Bill, why are you so bothered by wearing a mask now? You’ve been wearing them for years.” I immediately saw flashing through my mind all of the doors of churches I’ve walked into in the past year with signs on them that read, “Must have mask to enter.” And I realized that in the spirit that sign has been hanging on most church doors for years. Think about it. You may have had the worst week of your life, or may have fought with your wife and kids on the way to church, but the minute you hit the church door and someone asks how you’re doing you say, “Blessed and highly favored.” If we preach vulnerable transparency but live a spiritually masked life, we can’t blame the world for not taking our message seriously. So we’ve made it easy to live masking our broken places. And I get it. We’re supposed to be examples of moral virtue, and in trying our best to present that image the maintenance of a spiritual facade has become an art form. I’ve served in enough church staff situations to be able to tell you that the unity or holiness you see from where the audience sits is not always the case behind the scenes. Now I’m not saying we need to flaunt our brokenness and air all our issues. But I AM saying that we need to develop trusted relationships where we can be vulnerable about our brokenness. Have a few close friends and fathers in the faith who you can be completely open with, and make one of them your spouse. James pointed us in the direction of wholeness when he said confess your faults one to another and pray for one another that ye may be healed. Don’t just find any “another” to confess to. Find another who will actually pray FOR you, not gossip ABOUT you. I think that’s probably why we have a hard time with unmasking in a culture of faith where righteousness by works is held as a virtue. This is why making a shift to a culture of righteousness by grace is so necessary. Grace purifies the motive for good works, because under grace you’re not working to get anything from God or prove anything to anyone. A life laid down to surrender to the voice and direction of the Lord is an act of Love when you already know that you’re accepted by grace. 

If you get transparent before the wrong people, prepare to be cancelled. And that leads me to another modern complaint. Cancel Culture. Have you heard this term? It refers to the current trend to scrutinize the past actions and words of every person to find any place where they behaved badly in word or deed, and then to declare them done, over, cancelled. Right behind my irritation with masks was this personal outrage over the fact that the secular culture, that had in past decades released a flood of soul sewage into our lives without apology, now presumed the right to morally judge the world. How dare they, I thought. They have no right to judge anyone. That’s what WE do… And then I realized, we invented cancel culture. Just like the masks, I found myself complaining about a culture of our own making. The church has been canceling people for years. We decide who is qualified for ministry and who isn’t based on a whole bunch of criteria that I now imagine that God probably doesn’t prioritize. I once thought that if you studied enough apologetics and gained enough knowledge where you could out argue any atheist or agnostic, that level of gained wisdom would keep you in a holy zone of monastic purity. --------- pretty much killed that theory. Maybe if you were a hip charismatic leader with a slamming wit and decent enough messages to blow up your brand into megastardom, that level of altitude before men would hold you fast to the pedestal you were on. ------- brought that notion crashing down. What if you were a seasoned prophet with signs and wonders in your bio, a fierce national loyalty, and a no compromise attitude toward the word of the Lord. Could that keep you from compromise? When Newsweek published the article about ---------, I knew that wasn’t the case either. So I realized that academic wisdom, magnetic charisma, and prophetic success can all come crashing down in a moment. The one thing these leaders need right now, that the world needs to see and hear from the church, is the Gospel of the grace of God. Unless we get this beautiful revelation of the grace of God that can restore the fallen, we will continue to present a facade that a fallen world can’t relate to, and we will never discover the mystery of the message of the Gospel that drew the fallen to Christ. As you’ve heard me say before, grace is not something we fall from. It’s someone we fall into. Most of our messes come from giving in to an anti-christ spirit. Here’s what I mean by that. If you look up the Greek for the word that’s translated as Antichrist, you’ll discover something remarkable. Anti, in this sense, doesn’t mean opposed to. It means “instead of.” Now this is very important because It’s common for us to assume that the antichrist spirit would be easy to spot by the violent or forceful opposition to anything related to Christ. But this isn’t the case. It simply means setting Christ aside to focus on something else. Christ can still be in your life but he’s no longer front and center. Money, fame, politics, and building our personal ministry brand can take center stage in our lives all too easily. Pretty soon, we find ourselves going to ridiculous lengths to make the Gospel more attractive to the world.

My wife, Traci, got up in a church right before Covid took over the news and gave a powerfully uncomfortable word. She’s kind of good at doing this. She said, “The bride of Christ is having her implants removed in this next year.” I began to sweat nervously wondering where in the world she and God were going with this. She continued by saying, “We have made ourselves sick by introducing artificial enhancements to the body to make her more attractive to the world.” Traci was never one for tickling ears. Lest we thought this was a product of her imagination, a prophetic friend of ours, Charlie Coker, got the same word on the same day a thousand miles away. Kind of like the time she told a church that they were spiritually constipated, but God was going to give them a release so things could freely flow once again. It would be messy but in the clean up they would learn to work as one. After this, every toilet in the church literally backed up and overflowed causing quite a mess as you might imagine, but as people worked together to clean up the mess, it certainly drove the point home. 

Christ won’t be relegated to second or third place in our lives. I’ve checked the Scriptures today and Matthew 6:33 still says, “Seek first the Kingdom of God…” It doesn’t seem to matter what’s going on in the nation, politics, the stock market, or the world. That verse never changes to seek second or seek third the Kingdom. We can’t seek the kingdom without the King. And Jesus Christ is king. So we never deviate from fixing our eyes on Christ, the author and finisher of our faith. Jesus is drawing the gaze of his bride back to the fire in his eyes.

A friend of mine who used to be a judge in central Texas heard of Traci’s word about the bride and offered this insight. She had once owned a wedding venue and had spent ten years dealing with brides and realized that so much of the western culture about brides doesn’t line up with the Bride Jesus is coming for. Christ isn’t coming back for a bridezilla. But our holiness and perfection are not a work of the flesh, or the quality of our masks, or the purging of our culture through cancellation. Our righteousness is ONLY based upon the blood of Jesus Christ. His was grace revealed in the resurrection when he didn’t drop the gavel on everyone who cheered his crucifixion. In the resurrection he has no words of vengeance or revenge. He simply tells the disciples in John 20:23 whoever’s sins you forgive they are forgiven. In Matthew 6 he takes unforgiveness off the table as an option. Cancel culture is not the Kingdom of God. What he is cancelling is all of the lies and labels we have believed about ourselves and others. He’s cancelling our sin based identities.

But somebody’s gotta be the judge right? And if we can judge, we can certainly cancel right?

As far as the Bible is concerned there are only two things we are to judge. We can judge prophecy and angels. But what about people?

Hebrews 12:23 calls Father God the judge of all. But…

Jesus, in John 5:22 says the Father judges no one, but has given all judgement to the Son. But…

Jesus says in John 8:15 I judge no man.

So the Father isn’t judging us, though he certainly could.

The son isn’t judging us, though he certainly could.

Then where does the judgement come from?

It comes from us. Jesus told us in Luke 6:37 not to judge because to the degree we judge another we will receive the same in return. The verse right after that, verse 38, is the one that always gets quoted for offerings in church. “Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return.” That verse has nothing to do with money, but rather with the giving of judgement. So why do we do it?

Jesus tell us in John 5:45 when he said I’m not accusing you, but you do have an accuser. He says the accuser is Moses, but it’s not Moses fault. They made Moses their accuser by taking his words and turning them into rules rather than letting those words lead them to Jesus. The Gospel isn’t the way to righteousness. The Gospel is the way to Jesus, and Jesus is the way to righteousness. We don’t get any grace apart from Christ alone. And we can’t freely give what we haven’t freely received. If you’ve worked to feel righteous, you’ll make other’s pay the same price. If you’ve come to realize that grace is a gift for those who need it, not a reward for those who deserve it, then you’ll give it away freely. What people freely give reveals what they freely have. The truth is that the reckless grace of Christ has been offered to us all, without exception. From the porn star to the preacher, from the holy to the hypocrite, the grace of Christ doesn’t discriminate. It’s been accepted by some, rejected by others, but offered to all. 

But even when it looks like an entire generation is rejecting Christ, don’t lose hope. I learned this the hard way in a recent conversation with a dear friend and incredible Bible teacher, Lynn Hiles. Sitting across a table where we were having dinner I said, “I feel like the next generation is dead to the things of God.” Lynn shared something with me that I’ll never forget and I believe is a timely word for us all. “Do you remember the story of the woman with the issue of blood who touched the hem of Jesus garment in a crowd and was healed?” I did. “Did you ever ask yourself where Jesus was going in that story?” I thought about it a minute, searching my memory for the right answer. “He was going to raise Jairus’ daughter from the dead.” “Right” said Lynn. “He would have been there sooner but he was delayed by the older generation because of an issue in their blood. She was bleeding where she was supposed to be birthing. And do you know how you’re ready to give birth again? You stop bleeding. Jesus heals her and deals with the demand of the moment, but then continues his journey. When he arrives at the house, everyone says she’s dead, but what does Jesus say? She’s not dead, but she’s just asleep. He has come to awaken her.” The crowd that has gathered to mourn the girl begins to mock the messiah. Jesus sends all of the mockers out of the room and then raises her from the dead. The first thing Jesus says to do is to give her something to eat. Revival must be accompanied by teaching, getting nourished buy the word of the Lord. What was she after that encounter with Jesus? Woke. Could it be that God has stirred the language of awakening within the hearts of the next generation and they’re searching for an authentic awakening encounter with God? I realized that perhaps the irritation with the woke language many are hearing comes from the painful realization that the authentic Gospel they’re searching for they’re not finding in us. The language of awakening reveals a heart prepared for change, for transformation, for revival. I believe God is preparing this next generation to receive the great awakening we have been praying for, because God does not stir within us a cry for revival that he does not intend to answer. 

You see, whether it’s masks, cancel culture, or the woke movement, these are all physical manifestations of a greater spiritual reality. We are reaping in the flesh what we have sown in the Spirit.

Today I want to pray that your eyes would be open to see how powerful you really are, and to realize that there is weight on your words, and to understand that God has equipped you with everything necessary to live this life as an overcomer walking in the light of his glory and grace.