Ways and Means
In the seventh grade, I had to take a class called “US Government and Civics.” Truthfully, I don’t remember a whole lot from that class, but I do remember becoming oddly obsessed with The Committee of Ways and Means of the United States. If you’re not familiar with the Ways and Means committee, they are primarily responsible for figuring out how the federal government receives its revenue through taxes. They were put in place to determine the most sensible and (ideally) ethical ways and means to go about that goal. For some reason, those ideas stuck with me, and I think about it a lot in relation to faith. So much of the Christian life is about determining the proper ways and means to go about things. It’s not just good enough to have the right goal but we must reach that goal in the right way. Understanding the proper ways and means is easier when we know where we’re starting from and know where we’re going. Fortunately, Scripture provides all those details. We know that we are sinners adopted by God and have become his children (1 John 5:1) – our starting point – and that we are heading towards true fellowship with God in his kingdom (1 John 5:11) – our goal. We’ve also been given the teachings of Jesus and the rest of Scripture to know how to navigate this journey – our ways and means. But what happens when our end goal gets distorted? Or our beginning? Both drastically change the ways and means we go about life. Together, we’ll explore exactly how to get back on track and some of the reasons our ways and means get altered in the first place.
Caleb McCaughan, A Journey through 1 John
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