Matt Chandler - Citizens of the Kingdom

Good morning, church. My name is Luke, and I serve in production here and in our Young Adults Ministry. Today, we’ll be reading from Revelation, chapter 21, verses 22 through 27. And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb. The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light, the nations will walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations, but nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

«Anaplastic oligodendroglioma, grade three.» That’s what came out of his mouth. All I remember about that day is it was really, really cold. So, I grabbed my jacket. Lauren had to drive; I had only been out of neural rehab for maybe a week. We got in the car and drove, navigating Baylor downtown. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there or not, but it’s not laid out well for someone with my aptitude, especially someone whose aptitude is diminished without a right frontal lobe. We found ourselves in an office—me, Lauren, and Brian Miller—and there it was again: «anaplastic oligodendroglioma, grade three.»

Now, you might not know what that means; I certainly didn’t at the time. He began to explain it was terminal brain cancer, then laid out the treatment protocol: we would quickly start radiation and low-dose chemo. As soon as that was over, they would give me about a month to recover, and then we would start 18 to 24 months of high-dose chemotherapy with the hope that I would live two to three years. To say that things went dark in that meeting is an understatement.

If you think about the logistics of a moment like that, you have to inform some people. I needed to call my parents, call my in-laws, and figure out how to let the church know in this moment. For the first time in my life, I found myself unable to talk. Can you imagine me unable to talk? I couldn’t do it. I called Josh Patterson; he knew what we were going in for, but I couldn’t say it.

So, just so you can understand the dynamics of my marriage, I handed the phone to Lauren—sweet Lauren Steely, who was sometimes terrifying—who started to unpack what she had heard to Josh and then made the next call while I tried to get my thoughts together. I just couldn’t do it. I handed the phone to Lauren, and so it went. I didn’t even need to inform him about the church; Brian Miller was with me for those reasons. He was an elder here, chairman of the Elder Board for a long time, and one of my closest friends. What a gift from God he was for both of us in those days.

And then, man, I won’t sugarcoat this: I couldn’t see anything but loss for weeks. Audrey was six, Reed was four, and sweet Nora back there was six months old. She was going to have no memory of me; she would only look at her daddy on YouTube clips and hear stories from her mama. Some other jerk, dirtbag man might be living in my house. I mean, you’ve seen Lauren—somebody’s going to snatch that up! You might laugh at it, but I wasn’t laughing; it hurt, and I couldn’t see anything but loss.

I had spent six years trying to prepare our congregation to suffer. If you remember, in those early years we were all in our twenties; there were all weddings and no funerals. When we did have funerals, no one was 70 and living a great life. I think I was here a decade before I performed the funeral of a seven-year-old. It was 28-year-olds; it was 32-year-olds; it was cancer; it was children; it was awful. I poured all my energy into how to prepare us to suffer. Let me point to it in the Bible; let me teach what God is doing in it. I was just so naïve that I wasn’t reading it for myself.

The only way I knew to survive was to put on headphones, listen to worship music, and pull back, because everywhere I looked broke my heart. It was in one of those moments that Lauren, in her unique way, cornered me and said, «It’s not over. You’re not going out like this. If you take those headphones off, re-engage, and we’ll see what the Lord has for us.» Around that same time—a big wake-up call for me—I had this single verse pop into my head. I don’t know how the Holy Spirit works, but often it’s just a single verse that comes to mind, and I loved this verse. I just knew it, and it was found in Romans 8: «And we know that in all things…»