Welcome to the 4-L club…

If you’ve grown up in any rural community then chances are quite high that you know all about the 4-H club, probably participated in it or know of someone who has. Its focus has been on instructing youth through improved farming and farm-homemaking techniques, skills which to a city-slicker might seem antiquated but provides a vital component to the life in rural communities. This note is not about the 4-H clubs but about another that has been around a whole lot longer and works across rural and urban areas. You’ve been a member from your birth but probably never even knew it. Welcome to the 4-L club.

I have given it this name after recently reading Parables of Grace by Robert Capon. This man has a command of the English language that sends you into fits of laughter and serious contemplation within moments of each other. According to Mr. Capon, Jesus came and ministered to four types of people: the least, lost, last, and lame. Pretty much everyone at one time or another in their life.

Notice who is evidently missing from this club: the most, found, first, and whole. This crowd looks down on the select of the 4-L club not wanting to even recognize that they too have come up through their ranks, or on their way to rejoin them. As exclusive as their elite ranks may appear to be, 4-L membership is open to all, 24/7/365.

Jesus speaks highly of the 4-L club in all his parables pulling characters from within it to confound the elite in their myopic thinking. Blind, leprous, tax collecting, Samaritan, adulterous, harlots and children all become the poster child for a here’s-a-plank-in-your-eye story from the master. If you don’t fit into one of these descriptors it doesn’t matter, you’re included in spite of your condition. As a matter of fact, your condition is what qualifies you as an honorary lifetime member.

How often has your peers held up their index finger and thumb to their forehead and mouthed the tag line, “Loser” to signify their verdict on your acceptability? That symbol is the secret handshake to the kingdom of God. When the world uses your insignias to demoralize, you need to praise the one who wore it with pride. His societal insignia of a bastard child was the lowest of lows. He never let it interfere with his purpose to lift those around him who shared his de-valued status in the minds of the world.

We all like a champion, one who rises above the ranks to take the head of an industry or nation. We hold their struggle as our own, the declaration that even we can succeed like the hero because they went through the same difficulty we have, or are going through. As our role model, they work for us to raise our belief in what is possible. Yet, when our life is finally accepted as ours, and the realization that we aren’t like the role model, the pain of our false identification is all that Jesus needs to welcome you into the club. If you count on glamor to determine your value in a group, this is the richest one to belong to.

Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. (Mat 5:11-12)

Now I know that no one likes to be classified as being the least, the lost, the last, of the lame. As Jesus points out this position is cause for people to revile you for an indeterminate period of time. This position also creates conditions within our own mental configuration to revile ourselves just as others do. This perpetuates our conditions in an on-going negative-feedback loop. But I’m here to tell you are in the prime of life now. The way the Kingdom of God works is not like anything you ever seen in this world.

Have you ever noticed how worldly, rich, successful people don’t think they need Jesus? Have you ever looked at all the people who come to Jesus? They aren’t rich or successful. They’re broken, battered and bruised. They are bona fide members of the 4-L club and they don’t even know it. Salvation is like that – you don’t know you are until you feel like you ain’t. The trouble with worldly, rich, successful folks is that don’t know they’re members of a larger club than the one they want to think about. The door is always open and the light is always on.

As the last Adam, Jesus came to find the lost, love the least of the brethren and heal the lame. In Him, we are destined to do the same as fraternal members of a divine club. In the 4-L club everybody plays at the same level with the same rule. Love.