Abandon the Orderly House

In the introduction to Abandon the Orderly House (Armored Pup), A.W. Regets writes, “Week after week I step into the pulpit afraid to break an already bruised reed, remembering how many griefs, fears, and conflicting emotions are carried into the sanctuary. But somehow, some way, Jesus continues to work through my feeble attempts at grace.”

Reading that, right away I knew this collection of sermons would be good news for me. Maybe for you, too.

Good news. This familiar term—always at risk of being overused—kept returning to me as I made my way through this book. Whether preaching from the Old Testament or from the Gospels, Regets returns time and again to affirmations that the God we worship is a God who enters in, who rescues, who loves.

In a personally vulnerable sermon drawing on a passage from the book of Job, Regets writes, “In the midst of my grief, I didn’t want a God who is generically kind but unmoved by my suffering.” Rather, he says, “I wanted to know that God was as mad as I was.”

We don’t always get what we want when we pray to God in the midst of suffering. Relief doesn’t always come when we want it, or how. But the God who is love is not, as Regets reminds us, “generically kind.” He is Immanuel, God with us. He is not idle, nor is he powerless. He has dirt under his fingernails. He is restoring and healing what’s broken, even now.

“And the good news,” Regets writes, “is that he won’t stop until the heavens and the earth are made new. He won’t stop until every wrong is made right. And he won’t stop until every death has sprung from the ground in resurrection life.”