“Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Camp is always fun. It wears you out, but it’s always worth it. There’s just something about getting away from it all and doing life in a different setting that helps you focus in a bit more closely than usual on what matters most. Sometimes getting above the fray lets you see things a little more clearly, or at least in a new light. On our fourth and final full day, the camp pastor shed some new light on an old verse for us. It was a good reminder about another of God’s great gifts. Let’s talk about a forever family.

Families are the bedrock of any society. They are the most basic unit and the place where the next generation of any culture is produced and raised in the healthiest environment. That doesn’t mean that all families are healthy and good places for the next generation to be raised up, but they are better than any of the other available options. And it’s not close. When families are strong, so is the society. When families are weak and broken, the society will follow suit on that as well.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture in which families are mostly weak and broken. And although many years of relative strength created a strong foundation for us to build a prosperous and successful society on, when the foundation gets broken, that damage eventually works its way up the structure until it shows through at the highest levels to the harm of everything below there. That is bitter fruit we are only beginning to taste.

Because so many families are so broken, many, many people experience the pain of that brokenness. This means there are scores of millions of people in our culture for whom the image and idea of family is not a wholly positive one. For some the image is not even slightly positive but wholly negative.

Yet family is a natural right of all people. Children deserve to have and know and be loved by their mother and their father. When they don’t have this, even when they’ve never known it, they long for it. They long for that even if they don’t know why. It’s built into us. And all the counter programming in the world can’t banish that from our desires.

Well, to paraphrase something C.S. Lewis once said, when there is a desire we have that cannot be fully filled in this life, perhaps it is meant to be filled in the next. In this case, while we can experience the joy of family in this, what God offers us in His kingdom is a family that is truly forever.

That family lies at the heart of what Paul was saying here. How that could be isn’t immediately apparent, so let’s talk for just a minute about how family lies at the heart of Paul’s words here.

Paul tells the believers in Colossae that they are to “let the word of Christ (that is, the Gospel) dwell richly among you.” Our temptation given the fierce commitment to individualism in our culture is to make this command personal. Paul is telling us each to do this. We are to individually meditate on the Gospel so that it becomes the primary shaping instrument of our worldview.

The trouble with this understanding is that it isn’t what Paul says. Indeed something can’t dwell among one person. It could dwell in, but not among. Among requires more than one person. Actually, it requires more than two. Paul is talking to a group here. Appropriately, then, the word you in the original Greek is a plural. In other words, he is speaking to a community not as individuals, but as a community. This is a family of believers where this happens.

This same idea makes sense out of the rest of the verse as well. If you are teaching, that implies at least two and likely more. You don’t admonish yourself (at least not very effectively). You admonish in the context of group. The singing Paul envisions is corporate. Everything about this verse and indeed this whole passage is communal in nature.

As followers of Jesus, we were not created to live individual lives separate and distinct from one another. We were and are called to be a body; we are the body of Christ. There is one body that has many parts or members. Every member is uniquely created by God for a special role in the administration of the body so that every member has the opportunity to both be discipled, but to also disciple others.

The result of all of this is a family where we are loved and accepted no matter who we are or where we are from or what lies in our background. This is how we are connected not just in our local body of Christ, but to all the believers all over the world. And this family, because it is God’s adopted family, made to dwell in His eternal kingdom, lasts forever. It is our forever family. We may say see you later for a time when these bodies finally wear out, but we have new bodies coming that will hold up in a way these were never so designed.

The only real question that matters here is whether or not part you are a part of God’s forever family in Christ. If you are, rejoice at the gift you have from Him. If you are not, why not? What’s keeping you from making the most important decision of your life? I urge you with all the emphasis I can to get that addressed and start following Him. Become a part of God’s forever family. You will most certainly be glad that you did.