Order and Sacrifice

Num 7:30-43         10/28/2017

Tribal leaders take turns offering gifts to the Lord according to their ordered position within the community. They start with Judah and systematically move clockwise around the tent of meeting through all the other tribes.

Success is about order.

You need order to be effective. In fact, the most effective people have a habitual disposition to order. They order their environment. They order their bodies. They order their minds. That’s what it means to be effective.

Effective communities are likewise oriented to order. There is order in relationship. There is order in cooperative effort. There is order in transcendent purpose.

This is the good work. This is the work that brings real, actual, good.

The children of Israel stood before the Lord, who had brought them out of Egypt, in order. This was the first authentic community – the origin of all authentic community. They ordered the camp with God symbolically and literally in the center of the community because it was necessary. They were arrayed in the camp with purpose. Their relationships were well ordered. None of this was accidental.

So, Authentic Community is essentially ordered.

“So what?” you say, “We are post-modern, existential, denigrators of essence. We decide what we are and how we are. We can’t go back. We won’t go back”

Maybe. But you also can’t go forward. It’s time to rethink this.

“but everything must be done properly and in order” 1 Cor 14:40