Intro: This presentation was given in early August 2024 at the “On Holiday 5” Conference for Sword of the Sprit communities in Europe and the Middle East. – ed.
“Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to dwell together in unity, there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for ever.”
Psalm 133
It Is an honor from the Lord for us to be able to meet today face to face at this OnHoliday 5 Conference! Our desire to worship and honor the Lord together is also an opportunity to thank the Lord who honors us as we respond to his grace and call to follow him. The Lord has been quite generous with us in forming us into a people – a community of disciples on mission – both in our individual communities and in the wider Sword of the Spirit network of communities worldwide.
Our mission – to give the Lord Jesus to others
He has given us the most beautiful and most noble of missions: “to give Christ to others.” This really moved my heart, and I thought that this is particularly true in these days. Honestly we don’t have much left to give but Christ. But the Lord quickly said “ Seriously! the most precious and valuable thing you could give is Christ!”
Peter at the door of the Temple did not give the paralytic man less than gold and silver but he gave him what was even more valuable and precious (Acts 3:1-10). He gave him the Lord Jesus! And then I realized that this is our call as well – to be a community of disciples on mission. To give Jesus Christ to others is really a conditional call and the condition is to first be filled with Jesus ourselves. This is a call within the call – that is to always turn to Jesus – to come back to Jesus – to be sure that we are full of the Lord – and to know that he is all that we have. Only then can we give him to others – and when I say “others” I first mean each other and then to others outside of our homes and our community.
When I said we don’t have much left to give but Christ this really comes from a place where I think maybe we all feel we’re going through times of drought, and maybe difficulties and challenges in our communities, within our homes, with our children. As I was preparing this talk, the Lord reminded me of a word he had spoken to me right before the start of this crisis in Lebanon. it was from Matthew’s Gospel account in chapter 14, “Jesus walking on water” when his disciples – and that includes each one of us – were on this boat fighting the waves and the storm all night. Matthew tells us that the Lord came late just before dawn walking on the water in the storm – probably on purpose. The disciples were scared and didn’t recognize Jesus at first! What was mind-blowing to me was the reaction of Peter that I find hard to understand. He didn’t say to Jesus, “if it is really you, Lord, then tell me what did we have for dinner last night?” Peter asked him something that to me is not humanly logical. But I truly think Peter was moved by the Spirit when he said:
if it is you Lord, command me to come to you on the water.
Peter was not asking for a magic trick or a miracle, he was asking the Lord to command him to do something impossible for him to do by his own will-power. Who in their right mind would try to walk on water? It was a powerful word from the Lord – for myself and I think all of us today as we are in the middle of the storm today seeking to hear and obey the Lord’s voice – “Do not look to huddle in your boat, but rather hear me calling you to step out of your comfort zone and walk on water – walk on the waves in the storm towards me.”
Our time of crisis in Lebanon
In Lebanon, we have been going through a serious crisis since October 2019. That was a period when some riots broke out due to the economical situation in the country, and it was the onset of a series of unfortunate events – continuing with the covid pandemic and lockdowns. Then a couple of years later on August 4, Beirut Port explosion took away the lives of hundreds and devastated the lives of thousands. Some of us here were survivors of that explosion or had a brother or sister or dear friend who died or was seriously injured.
This by the way was deemed one of the biggest explosions recorded in history. So the short story is that the Lebanese people have been the victim of the biggest Ponzi scheme on Earth a grand theft of close to 80 billion USD in people’s savings in banks, a complete devaluation of the Lebanese lira that is now worth 1.5% of what it used to be. People lost their life savings, retired people have lost everything this means my parents are now left without a penny in a country that doesn’t provide for the elderly. It also meant that the economy is almost brought to a halt, many sectors like the banking sector, the construction sector and others were and still are almost non-existent.
We’ve had in the community, I wouldn’t say an exodus, but a hemorrhage of close to 200 particularly young members who have left the country. Many young families who have either lost their jobs and were forced to leave, or simply left because they were worried and scared of the situation. Many young people are graduating from university – not finding jobs and finding themselves forced to leave the country. Many have gone to London, Dublin, Paris or Canada or the United States.
And this storm has been raging since October 2019, I continuously ask myself, am I allowing the Lord to bid me come to him, or do I find myself fighting the waves and storms in the flesh struggling on my own.
This storm has exposed my fears and anxiety for the future of my family financially, for security, schools, etc. – will they still remain open and available? Can I be the “guarantor and provider for my family’s future needs?
At the start of this crisis my wife and I we were really being tossed and turned by these waves of insecurity and uncertainty. We have chosen to accept the call to be in community, to stay in Lebanon. And this is the only reason why we are in Lebanon (it is not the cedars, nor the tabbouleh, etc.). But why drag our kids along with us into this crisis situation? Should we stay, should we go, maybe for a while, to where the waves are smaller maybe?
And there were many voices pushing us, telling us what are you still waiting for, why are you still in Lebanon?
The Lord is our Guarantee and Provider
As we prayed about our situation, and helped other community couples and families through these same questions, the Lord spokes clearly to me and Clara: “I have not called you to be anxious or afraid, and I don’t want you to act out of fear and anxiety. I am your guarantee, and the guarantee for your family. There is no better place for you than where I call you to be – without fear or anxiety but in confident response to my call to you.”
We were reminded that the call for us to be in the People of God community, to be in Lebanon, is HIS call and we are but stewards of that call.
His call is perfect, but we are not. The world and the circumstances we live in are not stable, and “the devil is prowling like a roaring lion waiting for someone to devour” (1Peter 5:8).
Our call to be in community for both Clara and I is very dear to us, it is who we are, our identity. So our response to the Lord was this: “Lord you have called us and our children to setup our tent in this community, in this country, and we are not moving our tent unless you clearly tell us that you want us to go elsewhere.”
A while ago I had the opportunity to speak to the founder of our community during the 15 years of civil war that devasted Lebanon which began in 1975. I asked him: “With all that you’ve been through as a community in the early days of civil war, how do you as someone who’s leading this community bear the weight of responsibility for deciding whether to stay in Lebanon, to leave, and then come back later? In fact that is what happened. The first group of community members went to the community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. After a few months there, they came back when nobody was expecting them to come back, and the the war was still raging in Lebanon at the time.
Our community founder replied that it was not just up to him to decide whether to leave permanently or when to return. He reminded the community members that we are a body together for the Lord, and we trust the Lord to guide and lead us as a body, and speak to us through the body. He said he was never on his own making decisions for the body. It was the body together seeking the Lord and seeking wisdom and guidance for the times we were going through. We recognize that it is a very personal decision for each community member to decide whether to stay or to leave and to do what was best for their families. A number of people have left the country because that was the right thing in the Lord for them to do. A group of young couples and singles from our community now live in Paris and have started a prayer group there, we visited them last May. Others are now part of Antioch community in London, and other communities as well.
So we decided to stay in Lebanon, and I could talk for hours about how the Lord has generously and miraculously provided for us. But we still had to fight on a daily basis the waves of economical, political, and financial turmoils. A number of people who lived around me were bitter, worried, depressed, complaining and nagging all the time. It really felt like being stuck in a prison with grumpy inmates (and rightly so). When the Apostle Paul and his fellow mission worker Silas experienced hardship and persecution, what did they do? They praised the Lord and this changed the equation. their praise shook the foundations of the prison, their chains were broken, and more importantly the spiritual chains of the guard in charge of the prison and his family were broken.
Throughout these past four years the Lord has taught me to continually praise Him, witness to him, and have the courage to live out the call, and to talk about him and about hope in Him especially in these challenging circumstances we are going through.
A time of grace and opportunity
Brothers and sisters I have this spiritual conviction, with eyes of faith, that this is a time of Grace. Paul the Apostle wrote,
“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
Romans 5:3-5
In faith I say that this is a time of the Lord visiting his people – a time of testing “in a fiery furnace” for the metal of our faith, A time where the Lord is removing from each one of us impurities so that only pure gold remains.
This is a time where the Lord is pruning his vine. He doesn’t want us to just be branches with green leaves, he wants us to bear His fruit and bring the fruits of faith, hope, perseverance and brotherly love to many others.
The Lord has allowed these storms to strip us of many valuable things we relied on for our security and happiness. It’s as if the Lord Jesus really wants to take us back to a very personal, close, intimate relationship with him – and not just primarily a relationship that is sustained through community and church – but a relationship that is first built and strengthened on our daily personal encounter with the Lord – as we seek to personally hear his voice commanding and leading us to respond with faith and trust in his call. And just like Peter, the Lord wants us to step out of our storm-tossed boat and come to him. It is only then that we will have the courage to take on the call as good stewards, no matter the times (whether in plenty or scarcity) and bring Christ to others.
In our families, at work, in our small groups, in our service, and in our community, the Lord is saying to us, just like he did to Peter:
“Do not be afraid, it is I who is with you.”
Top image credit: Illustration of Jesus calling Peter to walk on water, from ChristianPhotoshop.com, © by Kevin Carden. Used with permission.
Mark Eid is a coordinator in the People of God community in Lebanon. He and his wife Clara have three children.