You Belong Here Yes, You. Here.

by John Garrod

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation…” (2 Cor. 5:17). When you come to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ after a life spent way outside of it, you bring with you a lot of baggage. Trust me, I know. I got saved at twenty-eight after a dozen years of alcoholism, and I was full of preconceptions about the church. Most of those had to do with Christians, who I had all figured out already. You “church people” as I referred to Christians, well, you’d been all clean and proper all your lives; at the least, you hadn’t done any of the things I had done. I was relatively sure that your diapers didn’t even stink. (Having raised 6 kids as a Christian, I can now verify that this was completely false, by the way.) And I was very sure that you didn’t want the likes of me in your midst. It might have been a sunny Sunday morning in Florida, but I was looking for a lightning-laden cloud to drift over to keep me from entering the church. Because I most certainly did not belong in that church.

The devil, my friends, is a liar. And that lie he told me was and is one of the biggest lies he tells men with pasts: That you don’t belong, that you don’t qualify, that you’re not good enough to be in that house with that God who you know knows what you’re really like. If you’ve been raised in the church, got saved at youth camp at fourteen, and you were a Junior Bible Quiz Champion, then you know all of those verses that debunk his lies, but we men who limped in, scarred, traumatized, shamed by our sin, and fell at the altar in our late 20’s, 30’s, 40’s or later, we don’t come with those words imprinted into our brains.

We don’t know that He says we’re fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). We don’t know that the sins of our wretched past have been separated from us as far as the East is from the West (Psalm 103:12). Nobody’s ever explained to us that once we are in Christ, we are a new creation; that old things (our record) have passed away, and that all things (our future) are made new (2 Cor. 5:17). We just know who we were. We need to learn that we belong.

This is why it’s important that we connect new men to the body of Christ. It’s not enough to wait and see if they find their place in the church. We need to go to them and each other as men and say, “Welcome to the family, brother! I’m glad you’re here!” We need to put our arms around shoulders and help them find their place of ministry. God has washed their sins; it’s our job to help them find their place at the table and feed them.

About The Author John Garrod is father of 6, husband of 1, an ESOL teacher in Dalton, GA, a Lee U graduate (c/o ‘19), a U.S. Army veteran and a member of South Cleveland COG.