Grace Church Sermon Discussion

Hot Topics: Open or Closed Communion

2012-01-22T08:54:00.001-06:00

Sermon Summary:
There are varying practices of the Lord's Supper across the Christian church. No matter what churches' differences might be in their understanding of the Communion meal all agree that Communion is a significant part of our practice of our Christian faith. In this message I explore the origins and possible biblical direction for the practice of open or closed communion - are all believers invited to the communion meal or only those who are baptized.

Questions for Reflection:

What is your earliest memory of the Communion meal?
What was the practice of the church where you first partook of Communion? Was it an open Communion or a closed Communion?
In our current culture, what might be a benefit of the practice of closed Communion or even making Communion something that requires a special effort to attend?
In our current culture, what might be a benefit of the practice of open Communion? What is gained when everyone who attends a worship service where Communion is celebrated being invited to attend?

Sermon: Hot Topics: Open or Closed Communion

This is Communion weekend here at Grace Church. We try to celebrate Communion about five times a year. This particular celebration of Communion falls within the Hot Topics series this year. As I wondered what to do about that I thought about talking about something that generates vigorous discussion within the church about Communion. In the past couple of years a couple of the churches where friends of mine are pastors have worked at whether or not to change what their constitution says about who is invited to the Communion table. Their constitutions said that only baptized believers were invited to the table. They wondered if they still wanted to say that. The issue is often called Open or Closed Communion - is the meal open to any believer or only to baptized believers. In fact in some denominations that practice closed Communion the table is only open to members of their particular conference or even their local church.

I want to tell you that I am very thankful for the church in which I grew up. It was a church of godly people trying to follow God’s call in their lives. I tell you that because last week as well as this week I want to share with you some of the things that were unique and, last week in particular, a struggle for that church and I don’t want you to think it was a bad church. It was and it is a church filled with people just like Grace Church and that brings with it struggles and questions at times. But Whitewater Mennonite is my spiritual home and I thank God for the way He raised me up in that church and the fantastic godly men and women who mentored and discipled me in my faith in that place.

I think I’ve shared before about when I was a kid in Whitewater Mennonite it was the practice of the church to limit Communion to those people who were baptized believers. In fact everyone who wasn’t a baptized believer was asked to leave the sanctuary during the Communion meal. The very first Communion meal I ever witnessed in my home church was also the very first time I ever ate the Communion meal in that church. That sounds kind of strange to any of you who’ve grown up in Grace Church where we don’t ask anyone to leave for the Communion meal. Who do we invite to eat the meal with us?

The earliest constitution I could find in the church office was the 1988 edition of the Grace Mennonite Church constitution. In that copy of the constitution it said that “we practice open Communion by which we mean that an invitation is also extended to all adult believers who have made a responsible decision for Christ, are at peace with God and men, who try to live a godly life, and who wish to express their faith in this manner.”

I don’t know when the church adopted that wording for the celebration of Communion or if it that was always the way it was at Grace Church. The best I can tell that’s the way the constitution stayed until 2005 when we decided to remove the word ‘adult’ before the word ‘believers’. Now it simply says that an invitation is extended to all believers.

I remember two conversations happening with Grace Church people over the years about this issue of who should be allowed to eat the Communion meal. The first conversation went like this. Someone would come to me about a week or so after Communion and they would say, “I noticed a youth or an adolescent eating the Communion meal on Sunday. I don’t think that’s right. We need to make sure that only those who are baptized or who are adults or who are older than that person should be eating the meal.” I would talk about that with the person who came to talk to me about their concern. I would ask why it was a problem. They would usually speak about tradition and respect for the meal and not eating in an unworthy manner; all of which are valid concerns. We’d talk about it for awhile and sometimes I would maybe change the invitation next time the meal was served; to tighten it up a little bit.

The other conversation went like this. Someone would come to me again some time after Communion and they would say, “I noticed a youth or adolescent eating the Communion meal on Sunday.” At this point I would brace myself for another discussion on who should be invited to the table, but instead the person would surprise me and they would say, “I was deeply moved to see a young person confident enough in their faith to eat the meal. I’m so glad that we as a church invite any believer who wants to eat the meal to eat with us. What a beautiful thing to not deprive this young person of such a significant experience.” So what’s the right way to go on this? Who should be invited to the table.

If you’ve got your Bible with you I would invite you to turn with me to the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 11. Last week we looked at the verses immediately before today’s section. You might remember that last week I said that this section of the book of 1 Corinthians is a section where the apostle Paul deals with some of the struggles that were part of the Corinthian church. They were struggling with women’s roles and particularly what was appropriate and inappropriate for women in worship. We talked about that last week. The Corinthians were struggling with the Lord’s Supper and with spiritual gifts and with Christian freedom. I mentioned last week that one of the key verses in figuring out women’s roles in ministry is 1 Corinthians 10:23 where we read,

²³“Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive.

When we talk about open and closed communion in some ways that’s still a useful verse. In verses 17-22 of chapter 11 we read about the problem the Corinthians had that when they got together for the Communion meal. What was happening was that everyone brought their own food and drink to the meal. The wealthy people brought a lot of food and were getting drunk and over eating. The poor people couldn’t bring much food and they would eat their morsels and go hungry while they watched the wealthy over eat and get drunk. Those who had plenty weren’t sharing with those who didn’t have enough and it was creating disunity within the Body. There wasn’t a problem that some people weren’t invited to attend the Communion celebration. Everyone was invited but since it was a bring your own food sort of meal, there was a disparity and some people probably felt less welcome than others.

Beginning with verse 23 we read this,

²³For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread,

²⁴and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.”

²⁵In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

²⁶For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

These are Jesus’ words of invitation to the meal that Paul repeated to the Corinthians. Jesus invited those who are His followers to come to the table to eat, drink and remember what He did for us. What had been happening was that in the Corinthian church there were people who were being excluded for all the wrong reasons. They were being excluded or degraded because of their economic station in life. That’s not a good enough reason to be excluded from the table of the Lord.

Verse 27 says this,

²⁷Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.

²⁸A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.

²⁹For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself.

In these three verses Paul gave a warning to the church at Corinth not to eat the Communion meal in a frivolous way. Paul said it was possible for them and for us to eat the meal frivolously in three different ways.

The first way we could do that is found in verse 27 where Paul warned about eating from the table in an unworthy manner. To eat in an unworthy manner is to eat with the attitude that we’re so good on our own that it really wasn’t that big a deal for God to save us. When we eat like that we minimize Jesus’ sacrifice. The other way we can eat in an unworthy manner is to somehow have the attitude that says there is no possible way that God could ever save us because we’re so all around awful. When we think like that we’re saying that the sacrifice of Christ which this table represents is not sufficient for us. We eat the meal in an unworthy way.

We can also eat the meal frivolously when we do so without examining our lives and our relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Is there unconfessed sin in our lives which we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that God overlooks? Is there a relationship that is broken that we’ve done nothing to correct? If we come to this meal and think that sin and broken relationships within the Body of Christ don’t matter we’re eating the meal frivolously.

I read this week that the early Anabaptists, when it came time to eat the Communion meal, before the meal was served they would take a vote to see if people thought the church could eat the meal. If too many people voted no, the meal would be put off until such a time and greater unity was part of the church. They took very seriously the warning Paul gave about eating the meal without examining their lives; not just their personal lives but their collective life as well.

In verse 29 Paul said it’s also possible to eat the meal frivolously by eating the meal and not recognizing the body of the Lord. I think that means if non-Christians eat the meal without recognizing Jesus as their Lord and Savior they eat the meal frivolously. They eat and drink judgment on themselves. They think that they know Jesus, or they want others to think they know Jesus so they eat the meal. They fool themselves and they will be judged as not having known Jesus. Paul warned the church not to serve the meal to everyone because maybe not everyone in their meetings would be a believer. The church is not to help people eat and drink judgment on themselves. The church is to point people to Jesus.

You’ve probably noticed by now that there really doesn’t seem to be a spot in this section of Scripture or for that matter in the other Scriptures that describe the Communion meal that limits which believers can and can’t take part in the meal. There is nothing that says anything about needing to be baptized to eat the meal. It warns that non-believers shouldn’t be served but I think we should allow those present to determine if they are believers or not. I can’t say who is a believer and who isn’t but we each know that about ourselves.

So how did the practice of closed Communion get started? It actually started within the first century church and it’s a product of persecution. It was risky to serve just anyone the Communion meal because they might report you to the authorities and that would result in persecution and torture and even death. Every expression of their Christian faith was done in secret. In order to be sure that those who were served Communion really were believers and not just pretending to be believers only those who had been baptized were allowed to be present for the meal. Their lives depended on it (Eleanor Kreider “Communion Questions” The Mennonite - 02/17/09).

The early Anabaptists didn’t announce where or when the Communion meal would be served. If any government or state church official found out where and when they were meeting it would mean persecution, torture and death. Instead the family of believers sat around a table, read the Scripture, broke the bread, distributed it and drank wine from a plain earthen crock. It looked to anyone who might see it as an ordinary meal between ordinary people. Often no words were spoken so that they could not be accused of taking a role that belonged only to the priests. Closed Communion at one time was a matter of survival and safety (The Lord’s Supper in Anabaptism by John Rempel).

For that reason I like our invitation to all believers who are in a right relationship with God and with their fellow believers and who are seeking to live a godly life and want to express their faith in this way. I like the way we extend the invitation at Saturday Night Grace. That group is smaller and so we serve Communion differently; it’s much less formal. We invite people to come forward to the table and serve themselves after we’ve spoken the words of institution and prayed a prayer of thanks for the meal. We invite families to come together and we place the onus on parents to decide at what level their children will participate. We try not to turn anyone away and we try not to coerce anyone to come forward who doesn’t want to or who might not be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Once again with this issue I come back to the verse in 1 Corinthians 10:23,

²³“Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive.

I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong with the Closed or Open Communion discussion. There is something to be said for eating the meal surrounded only by brothers and sisters in Christ who want to be there and have deliberately chosen to be there. There is also something to be said for eating the meal among those who do not believe in Jesus Christ and for eating the meal in front of our children who aren’t yet ready to eat with us. It models discipleship and it invites questions about what this all means. As a church we’ve chosen to be open and to eat in a way that invites others to join us.

Hot Topics: Women in Ministry

2012-01-15T08:39:00.001-06:00

Sermon Summary:
Paul speaks with a different voice when he speaks about women's roles to the church in Corinth than he does when he speaks about women to the church in Galatia. How might we reconcile these conflicting words of Paul regarding women and their role in the church? In this message I offer the place to which I've arrived in my thinking around this difficult and at times divisive issue in the church.

Questions for Reflection:

How do you react when you encounter two sets of rules, one for women and one for men? Why do you react that way? Where or when did you learn that response?
What do you believe are appropriate roles for women in the church? On what do you base your opinion? How long have you held this opinion?
In your opinion does the Bible speak with a conflicted voice about women's roles?
What difference does it make to you whether the person who is leading something of which you are a part is a servant leader or a leader who is more concerned about their position? What changes for you in that situation?
How does someone having a different view than you affect your ability to love them?

Sermon: Hot Topics: Women in Ministry

Most years in June we as a pastoral staff go away for a week of Study Leave. During that week we spend some very intentional time in evaluating one another’s work as well as some time reading and thinking about big picture type things. During Study Leave I use some of the time to plot out the coming year’s preaching themes and topics. In June it always sounds like a really good idea to preach through a series of what I call Hot Topics; come January it’s a bit more tense, however. Hot Topics are those topics, which, when we discuss them in groups or as individuals, tend to generate more heat than light. Hot Topics are topics that are uncomfortable to talk about in public settings, especially in church. In June I ask my pastoral colleagues to think with me of what topics to address. Most anything is fair game. If it’s a topic that we encounter in our lives as Christians in the 21^st century we need to be able to talk about it and teach about it in church. So, for next year, if you think of something you’d like me to talk about during this series, drop me a note, or an email or something that I can put in a file where I’ll remember it when I plan next year’s preaching schedule and I’ll give it my best effort.

Women in Ministry. If there’s an issue that has generated more heat than light in the church and in other places it’s this issue. In some ways the Women in Ministry issue in the church is linked to the larger Women’s Liberation movement and Feminist Movement in our society; the one has kind of followed the other. Women in Ministry was probably a bigger deal a couple of decades ago than it is now, at least in our church and conference. Probably the issue of homosexuality has risen up to take its place in the last years as the really hot topic. The Women in Ministry issue is not an issue that is settled in the sense that everyone in all the churches in our city, much less in our conference or in the global church have come to an agreement about it. We’ve kind of decided to agree to disagree and move along or to live and let live.

Every once in awhile I find out it’s an issue for people when they’re new to Grace Church and interested in making this their church home. They learn that we have a female pastor on staff and some have the integrity to say something to the effect of, “I have an issue with female pastors. I’m not sure we would be able to attend a church that has a female pastor on staff.”

It’s an issue that’s out there. It’s an issue that’s not as volatile as it once was, but it’s still there. I want to take some time today to look at some of the biblical writings around this topic and then offer ways in which I’ve come to make my peace with the issue over the years. I hope this proves helpful for you. If you want to talk about this issue some more feel free to call, email or come by and see me.

The Scripture reading this week is an interesting passage of the debate in the issue of Women in Ministry. Turn in your Bibles with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 11. In point of fact this Scripture is a passage about the posture of women in worship but it’s been used in the debate about women in ministry. As research for this message I read a portion of the book Slavery Sabbath War & Women by Willard Swartley. Willard Swartley was for many years a professor of New Testament at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. Essentially what Willard Swartley does in the book is work through issues where the Scripture seems to say two different things about an issue. The Bible seems to speak to both sides of the issue when it comes to slavery; is it allowed or not. The Bible isn’t specific which day of the week should be observed as the sabbath. The Bible, as we Mennonites are very aware, speaks in different ways about the rightness or wrongness of war. The Bible also speaks in different ways about the role of women. I’ve been told that after the book was published, Willard Swartley was challenged by some that he should also have included the topic of homosexuality in his book. He disagreed and said the Bible speaks consistently about homosexuality and he later wrote another book called Homosexuality: Biblical Interpretation and Moral Discernment. I hope to read that book and I’ll speak more about homosexuality later in this series.

1 Corinthians 11:2-16 is a very curious passage. The place where this Scripture sits within the book of 1 Corinthians is in the middle of a number of issues in Corinthian church which Paul addressed. In chapter 10 he talked about idolatry and idol feasts and believers’ freedoms. Perhaps a key verse in that discussion which has something to say to this issue is 1 Corinthians 10:23 where we read,

²³“Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive.

Later in chapter 11 Paul talked about the Lord’s Supper and what the people were doing in that meal that was dishonoring to one another and to Jesus. In chapter 12 and 14 he talked about Spiritual Gifts and in between those chapters he wrote that beautiful chapter on love, not love in marriage but love in the body of Christ which must moderate everything we do. Love must moderate how we determine roles for men and women. Love must moderate how we celebrate the Lord’s Supper so that we don’t exclude anyone and destroy the unity of the Body of Christ. Love must moderate how we exercise our Spiritual Gifts. The measure of a church is how the church loves, not it’s programs or worship styles or anything else; what matters is how we love.

1 Corinthians 11 has an interesting feature which you will probably see in the margin or the footnotes of your NIV if you have an NIV bible. The interesting feature is found in verses 4-7. In the main body of the text of the NIV we read this,

⁴Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head.

⁵And every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is just as though her head were shaved.

⁶If a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off; and if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head.

⁷A man ought not to cover his head,

That’s an interesting section all by itself but what’s really interesting is that there is a reading in the margin or in the footnotes that reads like this,

⁴Every man who prays or prophesies with long hair dishonors his head.

⁵And every woman who prays or prophesies with no covering of hair on her head dishonors her head—she is just like one of the “shorn women.”

⁶If a woman has no covering, let her be for now with short hair, but since it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair shorn or shaved, she should grow it again.

⁷A man ought not to have long hair

Essentially what the NIV has done is offer two translations. One uses the words head covering or head uncovered - which, as I checked with Gerald, seems like the best translation. The other translation uses the words ‘long hair’ or ‘short hair’ instead of head covering. I can see where verse 7 in the marginal reading would have been very handy back in the 1960’s and 1970’s when the Beatles and long hair were all the rage and the church was deciding how to deal with young men who wanted to grow their hair long. I vaguely remember this verse being referenced in some discussions.

What’s weird or interesting is that so far I’ve not been able to find another version of the Bible that uses this second translation. The one thing that Gerald and I found is that Greek women, and Corinth was a Greek city, Greek women all wore some sort of covering on their hair. The only women who didn’t wear those coverings were high priced mistresses of the rich, convicted adulteresses and temple prostitutes. Beyond that I’m not sure what’s up with these verses and translations. If you know or find out please let me know, I’m curious.

It all feels very restrictive for women in 1 Corinthians and our modern culture is quite sensitive to anything that feels restrictive toward women. Our culture doesn’t like it when there are two sets of rules for men and women. We don’t like it that there’s a restriction on a woman’s freedom to choose how to style her hair or whether she should wear a head covering or not. 1 Corinthians feels especially restrictive when you consider chapter 14 verse 33-35 where we read,

³³For God is not a God of disorder but of peace. As in all the congregations of the saints,

³⁴women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says.

³⁵If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

What do these passages mean for us as a church? What do we do with these verses when we talk about Women in Ministry or the roles of women? I think there must have been some sort of issue or problem in the Corinthian church that led Paul to write these words. The reason I say that is because Paul does not have one consistent way of speaking about women’s roles particularly in the church. Paul wrote to the church in Galatians chapter 3:26-28. These are the Call to Worship verses in your bulletins where Paul wrote,

²⁶You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus,

²⁷for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.

²⁸There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Here Paul said all those dividers, those things which kept us separate and in different classes and some of us subject to others of us, all of those things disappear when we are in Christ. In fact all of us, no matter our gender, are sons of God through faith in Christ. We’re all favored children of God when we come to faith in Christ. We’re all most important children of God when we come to faith in Christ - that’s what sons were in the ancient near eastern culture to whom Paul was writing. Those things that used to divide us and subjugate us - Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female - they all disappear when we come to faith in Christ.

Paul speaks in two ways about the role of women. He speaks restrictively to the Corinthians about the role of women and he speaks in a freeing way to the Galatians about the role of women. Wait a minute. Who is the author of Scripture? We believe that the author of all Scripture is God. I should really say that God speaks restrictively about the role of women to the Corinthians and God speaks to the Galatians in a way that frees women. God seems to take both sides on the roles of women.

I can very clearly remember about a decade in my teens and twenties when this discussion about women in ministry was intense in the church in which I grew up. I remember being at a membership meeting where I was afraid I was watching a church blow up in front of me because of this issue. That meeting was so intense that the chair of the meeting would not close the meeting in prayer because he said to pray after such a meeting would mock God. There was some truth in what he said, God could not have blessed what we did at that meeting; we probably should have prayed prayers asking for forgiveness.

After that meeting we were afraid that we would not be able to have a worship service the next Sunday. Somehow we managed to find enough people willing to serve so that we could worship together the next Sunday morning. I don’t remember exactly what happened after that but I know that there were more meetings and the church continued. Not only did it continue but there came a time when they hired a woman from within the church to be their lead pastor.

I grew up learning and being taught that women were limited in their roles in the church. Sunday School was okay. Playing piano and organ for worship was okay. Leading the choir was okay. Preaching and being a deacon was not okay. As I went to college I was able to find authors who agreed with that position and supported it biblically and I felt affirmed in my position.

During that time I also met women who insisted they should be allowed to hold positions in church leadership because it was their right and they demanded that role. They argued, “Why should I be excluded from that role just because I’m a woman?” Their arguments made sense but they did nothing to change my mind; in fact they only served to strengthen my resolve. Being in our conference and being exposed to more inclusive roles for women, I was able to intellectually agree that there were more roles available to women in the church than I had grown up thinking there were; but many of the women I saw in pastoral roles or asking for leadership roles didn’t seem to have pastors’ hearts and didn’t seem to have servants’ hearts. They all seemed like activists intent on making a point. I struggled with that.

I know that Grace Church at one or more points in our history has grappled with the issue of women in ministry and I have heard from those who were there that this issue created tension and pain and division and may even have hurt friendships and relationships within our church. The result of that churning and tension and struggle is that our constitution and by-laws now state that all positions in Grace Mennonite Church with the exception of the Senior Pastor role are open to any qualified member of either gender.

I learned this when I came to Grace Church to interview and read the constitution - I may even have been told in one of the interviews or meetings, I can’t remember. I thought I could live with that but I wasn’t sure the church would ever hire a female pastor. What I didn’t know was that Katie Booy had already served on the staff of the church as a Youth Coordinator. About seven months after I got here Sharon Peters began work as our youth pastor - youth pastor not youth coordinator which I think was an important distinction.

I was somewhat nervous, but I’m always somewhat nervous how it will work out when a new staff person begins work here. You as a congregation were convinced and voted convincingly to extend the call. Clearly the way Katie went about her work had shown you that a female in a pastoral role could be a good thing.

Pastor Sharon did more to change my mind about women in ministry than any lecture or book or discussion ever has or could have done. Pastor Autumn has picked up right where Sharon left off. These women are gifted by God for pastoral ministry. They came as servants of God and of His church. There isn’t an ounce of activism in them, unless certain male staff behave like jerks. They are called by God and they come to serve, not to demand. That to me makes all the difference.

That’s my history with this issue. There’s three conclusions I’ve come to about Women in Ministry. Number One: The Bible speaks in conflicting ways about the roles of women. In the Old Testament Deborah was a judge - the same rank and role as Samuel but women were not part of the priesthood nor did they serve in the Temple. We have the Corinthian passage about head coverings and women not speaking plus we have the Galatians passage about all dividers being gone in Christ. We have women like Junia in the list of the apostles and Priscilla listed before her husband and they are described as leaders of the church. Both sides are presented as right and proper in the Scripture. Both restrictive and freeing views are obvious within the Scripture. What that tells me is that to God it really doesn’t matter that much what we decide about the roles of women in the church.

In the things that matter the Scripture is very clear and never speaks with more than one voice. Salvation by Christ alone is the one voice of Scripture when it comes to how we can have a right relationship with God. In that the Bible is very clear, but on the issue of women’s roles it’s less rigid and I think that’s a model for us. We should be less rigid as well. There’s a freedom to be in a number of places along a spectrum of women’s roles in the church.

Do you remember the verse I mentioned from 1 Corinthians 10? It said,

²³“Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive.

Maybe that’s instructive when it comes to this issue as well. When it comes to Women’s Roles in Church everything is permissible but not everything may be beneficial or constructive. We have freedom but how we use it matters. That brings me to my second thought on Women in Ministry.

Number Two: The heart of the servant matters more than their position. This is the difference between demanding a position because it is our right and obeying a call of God on our lives and offering ourselves to serve. This applies to men as much as to women. It is just as unattractive when men demand roles simply because of their gender as it is when women do it. People who demand roles because it is their right seem to forget that when Jesus talked about those who would occupy roles of leadership and authority He spoke about them needing to be servants and needing to be willing to do the menial jobs. When we are called to positions of authority and leadership we are called to take the lead in serving the church. It’s servanthood and a willingness to be used by God for the benefit of His church and His Kingdom that matters most of all when it comes to filling roles in the church. When we agree and we achieve unity as a church around this issue of gender roles what we decide doesn’t matter - servanthood matters. Christ calls servants.

Number Three: Love is the bottom line. I notice that when someone disagrees with me I find a term to describe that person. We do that all the time in our society. In the Abortion issue there are terms like Pro-Choice and Pro-Life which are the nicer of the terms that are thrown about. Around the issue of Women in Ministry some use terms like hierarchical to describe those who see limited roles for women in the church and liberationist to describe those who see all roles available to women. What I find I do with terms like that is when I attach a name or a term or a designation to people I usually stop referring to them as brother or sister in Christ and I refer to them by some other title or term than I would use for myself. Usually the term I choose for them makes them somehow less than me and makes me better than them.

Sometimes I stop loving people because they don’t agree with me. Do we use someone’s views as an excuse to withhold love from them? When a person’s position on an issue affects whether or not I love them the enemy wins because he’s used an issue where God is good either way to divide the Body of Christ.

Women in Ministry. It doesn’t really matter to God where we come out on this - the Bible speaks in conflicting ways about the issue. Everything is permissible but not everything is constructive. What matters is that those in roles in the church are servants. What matters is that we love.

How to Waste Time and Ruin a Year

2012-01-01T09:36:00.001-06:00

Sermon Summary:

As we begin a new year I would like to offer to you a series of suggestions on ways in which we can waste an incredible amount of time and probably ruin an entire year. If you stay with this long enough we ask two important questions at the end of the message. Happy new year.

Questions for Reflection:

In your life what were the best times of 2011?
In your life what were the hardest times of 2011?
How was God involved in both the good and hard times of 2011?
How would you improve the way in which God was involved in your life in 2011 this coming year?
What are going to do to make this happen?

Sermon: How to Waste Time and Ruin a Year

Today is New Year’s day. We are in the first hours of a brand new year. New Year’s is an occasion when we naturally think of the passage of time. This is a time of year when we talk about how we hope to spend our time in the coming year and how we hope to use our time and what we hope to accomplish. Today the expanse of time that will be 2012 stretches out before us. Today 2012 seems a bit like a guest whom we’ve just met, a guest around whom we’re still a little unsure. We don’t know what this year will bring; we have no experience with this year. We were familiar with 2011. Be December 2011 felt like a pair of comfortable slippers but we don’t know about this new year.

Our society is very time conscious. So many of the things we do are regulated by time. We govern our lives by what time events start and end. We, as a society, believe it is necessary to have clocks hanging all over the place, except maybe in malls and stores. If we aren’t within sight of a clock we can get a little fidgety and panicky.

Because of that we wear wrist watches and we have desk clocks and clocks on our computer screens and clocks in our phones. We have clocks in our cars, trucks and clocks on all our appliances and time and temperature displays on signs on buildings in our city. Some churches even have clocks built into the pulpits with the objective that then the preacher will quit on time so the people can get to wherever they are going next on time. Some preachers thwart that by not using the pulpit.

Isn’t it amazing how much of our lives are governed by the clock and by keeping track of time. I remember when I worked at a job where we had punch cards and a punch clock. I remember seeing people dashing to the punch clock so that they wouldn’t be a minute late; we also weren’t supposed to punch in a minute early. We pack our lives so full of things to do that we have to keep such close track of time and we need to keep calendars and write down everything we’re going to do so that we don’t double book ourselves. In some cultures people can get by without a calendar or a watch but not in ours. We’re much too time conscious for that.

Years ago we bought a computer program that did nothing but create calendars. When I first saw this program I was amazed at how many different kinds of calendars there were. There was the calendar where you could see only one week on every page and write down what you do or hope to do every hour of every day. There was also the calendar for the person who was extremely busy that has only one day on every page so that you can pack a lot of things into every day. There was the calendar where you could put a month on each page or the one where you could put a year on each page. And every one of those calendars came in a variety of sizes, styles, shapes and colors and you could custom fit them exactly as you would like them.

If calendars in varying shapes and sizes weren’t enough to help us organize our lives we could also buy books and take courses on how to manage our time; probably there’s an app for that. These things are supposed to teach us how to plan and plot our days and weeks and how to set priorities so that we can put in order of importance the things that need to be done and the order in which we will do them. This assumes that we have the discipline to actually do what it is we’ve written down. This all reminds me of the words of Will Rogers who once said, “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.”

In answer to this whole hubbub about time in our society the apostle James perhaps gives us a different perspective when he said in chapter four of the Epistle of James beginning with verse 13

¹³Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.”

¹⁴Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

¹⁵Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

¹⁶As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil.

¹⁷Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.

In answer to a society that is obsessed with saving time and being good time managers and being efficient I would like to offer us some suggestions for this new year not on how we can be more efficient but on how we can waste time. I think if we look somewhat tongue in cheek at how to waste time we might gain insight into how to make better use of our time. These suggestions come from Chuck Swindoll’s book The Finishing Touch.

The first thing that we can do to waste time is to Worry a Lot. Get up early in the morning and begin the day by worrying about all the things that can possibly go wrong. Worry that you might get run over by a bus or that your children might get severely injured while playing. Worry that you might burn yourself on the stove or that you’ll electrocute yourself with the Vacuum Cleaner. Worry that you might be in a bad car accident. Worry that you might be involved in a grisly industrial machinery accident.

Worry about what might have been or what could have been if only you had done this or that differently. Worry about what you might have done wrong, mistakes that you might have made but aren’t sure whether or not you actually made them. Worry about things you could have done but didn’t do. Worry about your weight, your marriage and the fact that we’ve just begun a new year so that means you’re getting older. There is almost no limit to what there is we can worry about in our lives if we set our minds to it. And worry is one of the most wonderful time wasters there is.

Should you run out of things to worry about within your immediate family then you can start to worry about other people’s affairs - you could even worry about the affairs of people on your favorite TV program. Turn on the radio, watch T.V or read the paper and worry about what you hear on the news or the weather or the sports reports. Worry about what the unusual weather this winter might mean - heard a guy the other day who had a whole year of things to worry about because of the lack of snow cover so far this winter. He was obviously an accomplished worry-er. Worry about crime in our country. Worry about youth gangs and the federal deficit and increasing taxes and decreasing government services. Worry about whether or not our province can support both the CFL and the NHL. There are so many things that you could be worrying about; probably most of which you’ve not yet worried about. Worry that you’ve been underachieving in your worrying. Whatever you do make sure that you never think about the fact that the vast majority of the things you worry about won’t happen. Or, if you happen to think of that then convince yourself that clearly your worrying is effective because what you’re worrying about isn’t happening.

Wake up at night so that you can lose sleep worrying about some things that you didn’t get around too worrying about during the day. Need some help with things to worry about? Spend time with negative people like the Pessimist who was the neighbor of an Optimist. One bright sunny summer day the Optimist said to the Pessimist, “My what a lovely sunny day.” The Pessimist replied, “If this heat keeps up the grass will be all brown and withered before we know it.” Several days later it began to rain and so the Optimist greeted his Pessmist neighbor by saying, “My what a lovely rain we’re having.” The Pessimist replied, “If it doesn’t stop raining soon my garden is going to float away.”

The Optimist bought a hunting dog and eagerly asked his Pessimist neighbor if he wouldn’t go hunting with him one day. The Pessimist looked at the dog and said, “Looks like a mutt to me.” Eventually with great persistence the Optimist was able to persuade the Pessimist to go hunting with him. They got out to the swamp where they were going to be hunting and quite soon the Optimist scared up a flock of ducks, fired and hit one of them. He snapped his fingers and his new dog walked out on top of the water and picked up the duck and walked back on top of the water. The Optimist turned to the Pessimist and said, “What do you think of my dog now?” “Humph. Dumb dog, can’t even swim” (Illustrations for Biblical Preaching #988).

Worry more and spend time with negative, pessimistic people. If all goes well we can be riddled with ulcers within a month. The best part is that if we’re worrying we’re not doing anything and we’re wasting time.

The first key to wasting time is to worry a lot. The second key to wasting time is to Make Hard and Fast Predictions. State in categorical terms what it is you will be doing. Then follow through on those statements as though your life depended on it. Forget what it says in the passage we read from the book of James about not knowing what our life will be like tomorrow. Make predictions and set your expectations in motion. Be as specific and as forthright as possible and follow in the footsteps of other hard and fast prediction makers who have gone before us.

If all goes well we might end up like Irving Fisher the economist who, in 1929, just six weeks before the great Stock Market Crash said, “There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash.” He then added in a speech made just nine days before the stock market crash, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Or, we could be like the manager of the International Monetary Fund who in 1959 said , “In all likelihood, world inflation is over.” I did some research this week and found that in 1959 the price of gas was 25 cents a gallon back then. I think inflation somehow squeaked through.

Maybe we could be like Joseph Califano Jr. who said of Jim Jones the cult leader who killed hundreds of his followers, “Your commitment and compassion, your humanitarian principles and your interest in protecting individual liberty and freedom have made an outstanding contribution to furthering the cause of human dignity” (776 Stupidest Things Ever Said pp.51, 52, 146, 21). Or like Jimmy Hoffa who one week before he disappeared in 1975 said, “I don’t need bodyguards.”

Make hard and fast predictions and stick to them. Don’t pray about your intentions or desires Don’t subject them to the Will of God. Don’t seek His will for your life. Determine yourself what you want to do and then set out and do it. Be the master of your own fate. As you’re spinning your wheels you’ll pursue your selfish goals and neglect what is best for your life; what God wants for you. Worry a lot, make hard and fast predictions and follow through on them are the first two ways we can go about wasting time this year.

The third thing to do that will help us to waste time is to Fix Our Attention on Getting Rich. Make the chief end of your life the acquisition of more money. If you need help just go to the local bookstore and look on the shelf under self-help books and you’ll find lots of books telling you how you can get rich. If you’d really rather not read about getting rich, you can watch late night T.V infomercials, they’ll tell you how to subscribe to a series that you can listen to in the car or while you’re walking and this series will make you a millionaire before you’ve got them paid for in three easy payments on your credit card.

If we make the acquisition of money the focus of our attention we won’t have to worry about building relationships with family and friends. We won’t get bogged down with all the hassles of building and maintaining friendships and caring about people and being there to support them in difficulties or having to celebrate with them when they reach milestones. If we focus our attention on getting rich we’ll be able to hang out with high pressure salespeople and we’ll never have to worry about being home for an anniversary or birthday party again because that’s not important since it doesn’t contribute to our goal of making more and more money.

If we are successful at this when we grow older we can look back at our friendless lives, at our families who at best don’t know us or at worst won’t speak to us because we’ve neglected them all our lives and we can feel satisfied that we have chosen what really mattered, that which was really important: money.

Focus our attention on getting rich, make hard and fast predictions and stick to them and worry a lot. Three ways that we can waste time in this new year.

The fourth way that we can waste time in this new year is to Compare Ourselves with Others. This time waster has a dual benefit. The first benefit is that we will bounce back and forth between feelings of arrogance and worthlessness. If I compare myself with this person I can see that I am a lot better than they are. “Man, I am good and you are lucky to know me and have me associate with you I am so good.” Arrogance. But if I compare myself with this other person well you see they’re a lot better than I am. “Oh, I am such scum. Look at what a lousy person I am compared with him or her. I’m not worthy of anyone loving or caring about me. I’m so terrible.”

As long as we focus on comparing ourselves with other people we bounce back and forth between those two extremes: a sense of arrogance and worthlessness and we accomplish nothing because we either are too good to do that job or we’re too worthless.

The second benefit of comparing ourselves with others is that we will spend our lives not knowing who we are. Am I a good person or am I a lousy person? I don’t know because I’m never in one spot long enough to find out for sure. I have no idea who I am.

This idea of comparing ourselves to others is, potentially, a wonderful time waster in our society because in our society no matter what we’re into we can find out about people who are really good at that and compare ourselves to them or we can find really average people and compare ourselves to them. If we’re into sports we can learn about professional athletes or Olympic Athletes or we can go to the local arena or ball diamonds and compare ourselves to people there. If we’re into cooking and things around the house we can buy magazines like Good Housekeeping and compare ourselves to the people and the pictures in those magazines or we can visit a house or two that we know about where the family isn’t as neat as we are or where they don’t do things in the way that we do.

Comparing ourselves with others is a wonderful method of wasting time. We can add it to fixing our attention on getting rich, making hard and fast predictions and worrying a lot.

The final time waster that I want to share with you this morning is to Lengthen Our List of Enemies. If there’s one thing that will keep our wheels spinning and keep our minds racing around unproductive topics it’s the old Blame Game. “Oh, there’s this and this that’s wrong in my life and it’s all that person’s fault. I could be ... if it weren’t for what they did to me way back when.” If we want to lengthen our list of enemies we need to cultivate suspicion. Always question other people’s motives when they offer to help us or do something for us. If we want to lengthen our list of enemies we need to become more paranoid, more worried that people are always out to get us. We need to adopt the saying, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me,” as our life’s motto. If we’re going to lengthen our list of enemies we need to foster resentment.

One Christmas we were out at my parents’ place in Brandon and one of the T.V stations in Brandon during the Holiday season ran Christmas greetings and New Year’s greetings from area businesses. These commercials really are rather predictable after a while and they get rather tiring actually unless you recognize someone on one of the greetings. That’s what happened to me. I was watching T.V when up on the screen pops the picture of the bully who used to beat me up in school when I was a kid. I said, “Hey, that’s the guy that used to be the bully in school. He’s got a respectable job, he’s on T.V extending Christmas greetings to me. I still don’t like him because he used to beat me up.” It’s been more than 35 years since I last laid eyes on the man much less since he last beat me up, you’d think I could have gotten over it by now. But I keep extending the list of enemies, harboring resentment.

If we cultivate suspicion and paranoia and resentment we can wile away the hours reveling in our feelings of hate and bitterness while stewing over folks who have made or might yet make our lives miserable.

Five suggestions for wasting time: Worry a lot, make hard and fast predictions, fix your attention on getting rich, compare yourself with others and lengthen your list of enemies. If we can only set these surefire suggestions in motion we can attain to new heights of wasting time in 2012. As an added benefit we can also forget all about the hassles connected with being happy and efficient and productive and contented. If we focus on these time wasters, it is quite conceivable that within a few months we can be the most miserable people who have ever lived.

I suppose I need to offer an apology to you this morning for the tone of this message. It’s been sarcastic and grossly exaggerated. But my point in presenting a message like this is to ask us two questions as we close this morning. Number 1: As exaggerated and overdone as what I’ve said this morning has been, how much our our lives have we wasted in the past doing any one or a combination of several of the things I have just talked about? How much time have we wasted worrying instead of praying? How much time have I wasted setting my own predictions and agendas instead of becoming familiar with the mind and the Will of God? How much time have I wasted focusing only on the money end of my work and complaining about not being rich instead of focusing on the enjoyment of being able to work and being allowed to do a job that I enjoy and still being within the top 5% of the richest people in the world? How much time do I waste annually comparing myself to others and becoming arrogant or feeling worthless and not knowing who I am instead of recognizing the person that God has made me and striving together with God to make the best of that personality? How much time do I waste cultivating enemies and lengthening the list of people whom I dislike instead of forgiving and being free?

Question Number Two: How do we want to spend this coming year? Do we want to waste it in the five areas I mentioned this morning or in others that we can think of? Or, do we want to invest it in our relationships with people and with God, those things that are truly important and will bring contentment, peace and joy in our lives?

As I close this morning I would like to direct our thoughts to the words of Ephesians chapter 5:15 & 16, which are also printed in the bulletin as our Call to Worship verses this morning, where Paul wrote,

¹⁵Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise,

¹⁶making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.

My challenge to us for this coming year is to make the most of our time, to not simply spend it but to invest it in those things that last forever.

Wise Man Seeking Christ

2011-12-25T07:56:00.002-06:00

Sermon: Wise Man Seeking Christ

Once again this year for the Christmas morning message I have chosen to share with you a story. This year the story is of a member of the magoi who came to see the child Jesus and to worship and bring Him gifts. I trust you be blessed by the story. May God bless you with a Merry Christmas, filled with an awareness of God's presence in your life.

Good morning! It is good to be with you this morning. I have never been in a Mennonite church before, especially at Christmas time. This is quite different from the region of the world from which I come and needless to say quite different also from the time in which I lived. Do any of you know who I am?

If you have looked in the bulletin this morning you may have deduced that I am one of the Magi. Do you want to know my actual name? I’m not going to tell you my name; the Bible doesn’t give you my name and if the Bible doesn’t give you my name then Yahweh must have His reasons. In the Bible we are simply called the Magoi which is translated as Magi in English.

Do you know how many of us there were who followed the star to visit the child? Be careful. Children in Sunday School quizzes have gotten this one wrong for centuries. How many of you were going to say there were three Wise Men or Magi? Yahweh has never told you how many of us there were that came to visit His son. He only told you that we brought three gifts. He told you that there was more than one of us; magoi, you see, is a plural noun. I know how many of us there were, I was there, but like Yahweh I’m not telling.

I must tell you my story, the story of the Magoi and the star. The word ‘magoi’ literally means ‘magician’ and later in history it was a term which came to define those hucksters and charlatans like Simon the sorcerer (Acts 8:9, 11), people who traded in the magic arts and attempted to use their skill to cheat people out of their money. During my lifetime the magoi had not yet stooped to such depths.

The magoi had a long and proud history. In fact a very famous character in Yahweh’s Bible was a member of the magoi. The magoi are the priests of the Medes. One of the Median kings was a man named Darius the Mede who retained a certain Hebrew named Daniel as his Rab Mag - the head Magoi. Magoi were experts in interpreting dreams and there was none better in his time at interpreting dreams than the great Daniel. The magoi were, for many years, advisors to kings. Daniel was perhaps the greatest advisor to a king in the history of Israel - he and perhaps Joseph and the Pharaoh of Egypt.

The magoi were the supreme priestly magistrates for the Medes and the Persians and when those nations were conquered the magoi continued as the supreme magistrates for the Seleucids, Parthians and the Sasanians. The magoi held absolute decision making authority as to who would be king. We were king makers, not just in Parthia but throughout much of the region to the east of the Roman Empire. When we rode into Jerusalem that day we were a group of world renowned Parthian king makers.

Yahweh’s Bible says that pretender king Herod was disturbed when we arrived in Jerusalem. He had good reason to be disturbed. When the magoi ride into your foreign city in force we are not coming to make a social call - it was a business trip. Frequently, when the people of foreign nations heard of our choice of king they would foment rebellion and pogroms until our choice was eventually installed as king. Herod knew he was only half Jewish and half Edomite, and that he was only tolerated as king because of the force of the Roman empire on his behalf. He knew the Jews were waiting for the day when a full-blooded Jew would once again ascend the throne. Herod was terrified of that eventuality.

The period in history during which we rode into Jerusalem was a worldwide time when all peoples of the world were waiting for the dawning of a new age. Roman historians such as Suetonius and their poet Virgil wrote about a coming age when a new king would rise and a new era would dawn on the earth. Surprisingly, there were even those who said this king would come from the eastern portion of the Empire, from Israel of all places.

We were astrologers, which in our time, was a mix of astronomy and astrology. In our country every man believed that we could tell the future by looking at the stars. We believed that the star under which a man was born set the direction for his life. We watched the stars. We knew the stars and their courses as well as you know the streets of your own city.

One day a strange phenomenon occurred. We had been observing the sky when a star of unparalleled brilliance appeared. Not only did it appear but it moved. All stars seem to move ever so slowly but this star moved quickly - as though it were inviting us to follow it. The star seemed to be moving in a westerly direction. The next night the star was there again, the same place it had been when it appeared the night before and once again it moved toward the west. If stars could speak I imagine this one would have said, “Follow me. I will show you something no one has ever seen before.”

Since the magoi were part of the government establishment it was necessary for us to appoint a committee to study what should be done because of this star. While that committee met and deliberated, each night the star appeared and moved and invited us to follow. We knew we had to follow the star. With the worldwide expectation of a new era about to dawn it made sense that there would be a new star to herald the beginning of this new time in human history.

Well, it takes time to put together an expedition of government officials traveling uninvited to what, in all likelihood, would be a foreign nation ruled by a hostile foreign power. There were security considerations. Being government officials, king makers at that, we would be targets for every robber and rebel along the way. We didn’t know the countries through which the star might lead us. We didn’t know how long our journey would take or how far we would have to travel. We didn’t know our destination before we left. Do you ever leave on a journey where you don’t know your destination?

We would carry treasure as a gift to whomever we would find at the end of our journey. We would carry additional treasure with which to purchase provisions as well as to pay for safe passage as we travelled through countries of which we did not yet know. We needed an armed cavalry of sufficient size to ensure our safety and the safety of our treasure as well as to ensure that hostile foreign powers would take us seriously. It was a very complicated and involved process to plan a voyage the length of which you do not know before you leave to a destination you will not know until you arrive following a star which you have only seen for a month or two.

We as magoi needed to decide who would go on this journey and who would stay behind. We had no idea what we would encounter on our arduous trip, a journey which might take months or years in both directions; we didn’t know. Oh the meetings we had to decide who would be the ones to follow the star. Since it was such a momentous occasion the most senior of the magoi were insistent they should go. However, the most senior of the magoi were also the most frail and least able to endure a hazardous journey of unknown length. In the end we struck a balance between vigor and experience and I was among the magoi selected to go.

Of course when you are going to see the one who has been born the king of a new era of human history you cannot go empty handed. We agreed on which gifts to bring. Our gifts were gifts fit for the station of the one whose appearance was heralded by a unique star but our gifts could also be used as currency in the region through which we projected we would travel. We brought with us gold which is a gift fit for a king but which is also a readily accepted currency the world over. Frankincense is the gift that represented the priesthood - being the highest order of priests in the world we thought it right to bring this to the one who would begin the new era. Frankincense, also, was traded around world and could be traded for food or safe passage should the need arise. And, we brought myrrh, the traditional embalming spice of the eastern regions of the empire. We thought it fitting to bring myrrh to the new king to celebrate the death and the burial of the old and to herald the beginning of the new era.

The day we left we travelled in the direction the star had been tracking every night since it had first appeared months earlier. That night the star did not appear in the spot where we had grown accustomed to seeing it appear. Instead it appeared over the place where we were and proceeded from there. The star led us across the Syrian desert between the Euphrates and Syria. The star led us to Tudmar and then turned us toward Damascas. The star led us south along on the Great Mecca route. We continued to the south along the east side of the Jordan river and the Sea of Galilee. The star wisely elected to show us and our extensive entourage to the Romans from a safe distance at first. We hoped to communicate that ours was a peaceful journey not an attempt to trigger some sort of border incident.

When we did cross the Jordan at the fords of Jericho it still caused a stir. We were greeted by platoons of soldiers and commanders who vigorously demanded to know what business we had crossing into their territory. We told them that we were searching for the one who had be born king of the Jews. One born king of the Jews would be in sharp contrast to Herod the half-breed pretender to the throne who currently went by the term ‘king’ in Israel. We were searching for one who would be the rightful heir to the throne of Israel.

We were directed to Jerusalem - where the temple and the seat of Israel were located. We entered Jerusalem with all the pomp and circumstance we could muster after eight months of travel. We were, admittedly, a rather impressive entourage of Parthian cavalry and Persian magoi the priestly magistrates who were world-renowned king makers. These king makers appeared before the pretender Herod and asked him to tell us where the rightful king of Israel had be born - not appointed to the throne by Rome after a purchase had been negotiated - born King of the Jews.

Herod was visibly shaken by our presence. He assured us there had been no royal birth since the time we had first seen the star. We pressed him further assuring him that we knew that a new and great king had been born in the nation of Israel because a new star had led us to this place. Largely to appease us he called upon the priests of Israel and asked them if they knew of any place other than Jerusalem in the palace of the king where a royal birth might take place. The priests looked no more thrilled to see us than Herod had but they answered and told him that their prophets had foretold that in the town of Bethlehem there would one day be a royal birth. We asked if this birth had taken place at some point during the previous year. They had no idea and even if they had known they would have never admitted it in the presence of Herod, that most vindictive and paranoid of rulers.

Finally, we knew we were on the last leg of our journey. After weeks of planning and gathering provisions. After a seemingly endless stream of meetings to determine the logistics of a journey whose length and destination we did not know. After months of travel through nearly 1200 miles of difficult terrain and danger and discomfort, through cold and heat and rain and arid spaces. After having endured an audience with that insufferable Herod finally we were traveling the last six miles to our destination. To our great relief and joy the star led us on from Jerusalem to Bethlehem where it appeared to stop and, if anything, it grew brighter.

We stopped on the outskirts of Bethlehem to review our protocols. Our most basic assumption was that we couldn’t just burst in to visit the king who had been born to begin this new era of human history; it would be presumptuous and undignified and unbefitting either of our stations. Furthermore, we knew that any king so great as to command his own star which had led us to the place where he was had to be a king whom we could not merely greet with a casual hello and a wave of the hand. A king this great had to be greeted with the greatest display of deference and reverence we could muster. Such a great king must be worshipped by all who came into his presence. If the king makers of Persia worshipped a king, he was a king of the highest order.

For months, I had imagined the moment when we would first set eyes on this great king. I had constructed in my mind a grand and magnificent scene; a scene of utmost pomp and splendor. Then the star that led us stopped over a house; a house not a palace. It was a peasant home, not the palatial mansion I had imagined. For the first time I doubted the star which had so faithfully led us to this point. The star must have made a mistake, this couldn’t be the home of the child born to be the king who would usher in a new era of human history. I looked to the sky to see if the star had moved but clearly the star shone brightly on this peasant house and only on this peasant house. There could be no doubt this was where the star wanted our journey to end.

The star didn’t seem to know or care that in our experience kings don’t live in peasant homes amid squalor; kings live in palaces amid splendor. Kings should have an aura of majesty and royalty about them; this king had only the odor of a stable in a poor part of town about him. What king is born and lives in such commonness?

When we entered the home and saw the child he was overwhelmingly normal. He looked and sounded like any other Israelite child. His voice was loud and his demands were insistent like any other child his age. Protocol demanded that we pay homage to this child. We did so. We did our duty and we bowed low. We soiled our splendid clothes on the earthen floor of the peasant home as we prostrated ourselves before this most ordinary of children. No act of worship was ever carried out more reluctantly and with greater scorn than my act of worship before this child on that day so many years ago. I followed the demands of protocol with my body but my heart and spirit didn’t believe what my body was doing; my heart and spirit were disgusted by what my body was doing. I felt so cheap and used and dirty. I could not wait to leave that house.

What an unmitigated disaster this journey had turned out to be. How embarrassed I was to have been part of the group of magoi who had been selected to make this arduous journey. How I wished I had been either old enough or young enough to be allowed to stay home. I turned to leave the house completely deflated.

Not only had we prostrated ourselves before a peasant child and given him our valuable gifts, we also faced the prospect of having to pay a return visit to Herod to inform him of what we had found. How could we appear before Herod and tell him that we had indeed seen the future king of an new era of human history when all we had seen was a peasant child? How could we hold our heads up when we arrived home? The shame of having to admit we had invested nearly two years of our lives and an enormous fortune from our kingdom’s coffers on a trip and gifts for a peasant child who happened to live beneath the path of a strange and unusual star. King makers, indeed. Surely, this was the beginning of the end of the reputation of the world renowned magoi. Thankfully we were saved a measure of ignominy when each of us, on that very night, dreamed an identical dream telling us that we should not return to Herod but should travel home by a different route. What a relief to leave and to finally cross the Jordan river and see the scene of the greatest embarrassment in magoi history fade out of view.

No doubt some of you are stunned to hear that I left the presence of the child as one who didn’t believe. Indignantly you ask, “How can you encounter the living Son of God and not believe?” Let me answer that by saying there are thousands, no millions and millions of people the world over throughout human history who have encountered the living Son of God and refused to believe. There are thousands of people in churches this very morning worshipping and singing songs of praise to the newborn King of Kings who do not believe. I may have been among the first but I was certainly not the last to encounter the living Son of God and not believe.

I did, however, return home a changed man. What changed was I no longer had the absolute belief and trust in our abilities as magoi. If we could have made such a colossal blunder in the case of the moving star who was to say that we would get anything of note right in the future.

For some reason I could never get that whole sordid incident out of my head. I never forgot the star and I always wondered what had gone wrong and what we had misinterpreted. I never forgot that journey; it is impossible to forget an ordeal that lasted more than two years from the time we first saw the star until we returned home from Bethlehem. I remembered the hardships and perils of the journey. I remembered Herod and wondered what had happened after we chose not to keep our appointment with him. Most of all, for some strange reason, I could never forget the face of that child - so ordinary but for some reason it was that very ordinariness of his face which was deeply embedded in my brain and I was never able to get rid of it. I tried to forget. It would have been more comfortable for me in my life if I had been able to forget but I couldn’t forget. I often wondered what had become of that peasant child. I wondered what that family had done with the treasure we had brought them, which must have seemed to them as though they won the lottery.

It must have been more than 30 years later when a man named Thomas ventured east from his native Israel into the land of the magoi. I heard him speaking one day of a man with whom he had spent three years of his life. Thomas spoke of this man, Jesus was His name, as being God who had become a man and lived among human beings. He spoke of how this Jesus had been born to an ordinary, peasant family in Bethlehem. Thomas said that he had once been told that magoi had come to visit this child after he had been born and he asked if any of those men might still be alive.

I searched out this Thomas and told him that I had been on that journey and I had often puzzled over that child. He told me of the teachings of Jesus. He told me that Jesus had spoken of a God of grace and mercy and love and forgiveness. He told me that this man, Jesus, had been killed by the Romans at the insistence of the Jewish religious leaders but that He had been raised back to life after three days. I must have looked completely dumbfounded at his story. He looked at me and nodded and chuckled. He then told me that he too had refused to believe that a man put to death by the Romans could come back to life after three days. When Romans kill people, they stay dead. Thomas told me how one evening he and his friends had been locked in a room for fear of the authorities. He told me that Jesus had appeared to them and had invited Thomas, by name, to put his hands in Jesus’ wounds. At that point Thomas fell on his knees and worshipped Jesus. He worshipped Jesus because at that point he believed.

I told Thomas that I had worshipped Jesus all those years ago when He was a young child, yet I hadn’t believed Him to be worthy of worship at that time. As Thomas and I spoke together over the years I came to believe that the story of the Star had been true. I came to believe that the historians and poets of the day had been correct. A new era of human existence had begun when Jesus the King of kings was born in Bethlehem. A new era had come. An era where people could know God and have a relationship with Him had begun on that day. I believed that the magoi, the king makers, had gotten it right after all. Eventually, Thomas baptized me and I spent the rest of my life worshipping and serving the King who had been born as a peasant in Bethlehem.

If I might I would like to leave you with one final thought. Some of you worship Jesus in buildings like this on a regular basis, yet, by the way you live your lives, it’s obvious you don’t believe. My challenge to all of you is to worship Jesus every day, in the songs you sing and in the way in which you live your life. Merry Christmas.

Christmas and the Last Days

2011-11-27T08:32:00.001-06:00

Sermon Summary:

The Old Testament prophet Joel spoke to the people of God about their need to repent of their sin. He spoke of the plague of locusts as being sent by God as part of the Day of the Lord - a day when sin would be judged. The Old Testament people of God had assumed that they would be exempt from judgement because they were God's people. Joel then shared a blessing with the people - God would restore them and be with them at all times. Furthermore, God would pour out his Spirit on all people irrespective of race, gender or social status.

Questions for Reflection:

When you think of an Old Testament prophet, what are your first thoughts? On what have you based those thoughts?
As you read through the book of Joel what are your thoughts about the locusts Joel described in the book? Are they literal or do they represent some other threat to the people of Israel? Why?
How does being Children of God impact how we might be disciplined by our Heavenly Father? What does it mean to be a Child of God when it comes to His discipline?
When did the Last Days begin? What are the signs we are in the Last Days?
What does it mean to you that God lives within believers at all times?

Sermon: Christmas and the Last Days

I got a new Bible recently. Actually it’s not a full Bible. Usually when a portion of the Scripture is produced it’s the New Testament or the Gospels. It’s not that either. What I got is a copy called Olde Charlie Farquaharson’s Testament. I’m not sure if any of you know of or remember Charlie Farquaharson, he was on Hee Haw if any of you remember that TV show. Charlie Farquharson is played by canadian actor Don Harron. The premise is that Charlie is a rather well-worn Ontario farmer from near Perry Sound. Charlie provides commentary on various events but he mixes and muddles his words and in mixing and muddling his words he adds new meanings to what he was saying.

I found an example of Charlie’s commentary that goes like this:

“Every guvmint estimit incloods an extry estimit of how much more it’s gonna cost than yer ferst estimit. That’s how come they always leeve this big deficit on the floor of yer House. And a deficit is what you’ve got wen you haven’t got as much as if you jist had nothin’. If we tried any of this, we’d end up in jail. But the guvmint gits rid of its detts by Nashnullizing them. That’s like the alkyholick who solved his problem by poring the booze in all of his bottles into one big container. Himself.” [from Charlie Farquharson’s K-O-R-N Filled Allmynack, 1976, pg. 79]

In Olde Charlie Farquharson’s Testament when he gets to the prophets he describes them like this:

A profit is sumbuddy gets up on a high place, looks down on everybuddy elts. No matter what ther name is, everyone of htem profits seems to tell the peeple the same thing: YER DOIN’ IT ALL RONG!!! (p. 158)

It’s tempting to agree with Charlie in the way in which he describes the prophets. It seems as though the prophets always needed to bring words of judgment and condemnation because the people of God always seem to stray. What we often overlook when we read the prophets are the words of blessing that they also brought. The passage we want to look at as we prepare for Communion today and as we begin the season of Advent is a passage of blessing from the prophet Joel. If you have your bibles I would invite you to turn with me to the book of Joel. Joel chapter 2. Before we get to today’s passage which begins with verse 28 of Joel chapter 2 I want to take some time to go over the other three sections of Joel chapter 2.

Verse 1 of Joel chapter 2 says,

¹Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy hill.
Let all who live in the land tremble,
for the day of the Lord is coming.
It is close at hand—

If you read the first section of chapter 2 which extends from verse one to verse 11 you will read that the people are in a time of national emergency. There is a plague of locusts that is either in the process of or has recently ravaged the countryside. They have destroyed everything. The locusts have moved across the country like a great army or like a wild fire. Before they came everything was green and lush and after they had passed the nation was like a barren desert. The locusts totally destroyed everything. They came into the cities and crawled into the houses of the people.

Some scholars aren’t sure if the term ‘locusts’ in the book of Joel always refers to actual insects or if ‘locusts’ might refer to the large armies of Judah’s enemies. Most agree that there must have been an actual plague of locusts at some point that Joel used as a point of reference which all the people would know or remember but scholars also seem to think that Joel might be warning the people that their human enemies could also be used by God to destroy the land.

The interesting thing is that in chapter two Joel chose to begin these words to the people by using the term “the day of the Lord”. The Day of the Lord was seen by the people of Israel and Judah as a day when God would judge their enemies. The Day of the Lord was supposed to be a day when Israel was vindicated before her enemies, a day when they were justified for having chosen to follow after God.

The people would not have seen the plague of locusts as the Day of the Lord because in their minds the wrong people were judged. They were God’s chosen people and therefore God would not judge them. The people seemed to think that being God’s children meant they were God’s spoiled brats who would never be held accountable for their actions - they’d get a free pass. The prophets often reminded Israel and Judah that the Day of the Lord was a day when God would judge all sin including their sin when necessary.

Joel spoke in verse 11 of the Lord being at the head of His army, the locusts. God was in charge of this plague that was affecting the people of Israel. He was leading the army and no one could endure the Day of the Lord.

That leads us to the second section of Joel chapter 2 where God called to the people to repent. In verse 12 and 13 we read,

¹²“Even now,” declares the Lord,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting and weeping and mourning.”

¹³Rend your heart
and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
for he is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love,
and he relents from sending calamity.

The Lord’s aim in leading the army of locusts was to bring Israel to a point of repentance and return to Him. The people were used to expressing their grief by tearing their clothes and sitting in ashes. Perhaps because of the plague of locusts the people had begun to grieve and tear their clothes and wonder why God would do something like this to them; they were after all His chosen people.

Joel encouraged the people to tear their hearts in repentance instead of their clothes in anguish. This plague wasn’t a random act. It was God’s very serious invitation to them to return to a relationship with Him.

God is the perfect disciplinarian. Whenever things happen to us that are His judgement on His people He will let us know the connection between our struggle and our sin. If we are struggling and we wonder if it is God’s judgement on us for our sin we need to ask Him. Don’t take the word of those who come to us and tell us God is judging us for sin in our lives. Ask Him. If we are being punished for our sin He will show us our sin so that He can forgive it and restore us to a right relationship with Him. If we are not being punished for our sin He will show that to us as well and He will be present with us as we struggle through our pain; He is the perfect disciplinarian.

In verse 16 the people were invited to come before God for a sacred assembly - a time of collective repentance and prayer. When the people of God gather to pray and seek His face and repent of their sin something good always happens.

Beginning in verse 17 God spoke to Israel through Joel about their restoration. He spoke to the people of fields that once more would be green and of trees that would bear fruit. Threshing floors would once again be filled with grain and vats would once again overflow with wine and oil. God promised to repay Israel for the years the locusts had stolen.

The promise continued that they would once more praise God. My favorite promise is found in verse 27 where Joel wrote,

²⁷Then you will know that I am in Israel,
that I am the Lord your God,
and that there is no other;
never again will my people be shamed.

The people are supposed to know that God is present with them and that He is their God and there is no other God than Him. God’s primary concern is and always has been that He would be known and that He would be the only God His people would worship. The people will know that God is in Israel. The other nations always asked to see Israel’s God and they couldn’t point to a physical depiction of Him and at times they doubted if He was with them. God wanted them to know He was with them.

Then in verse 28 Joel said,

²⁸“And afterward,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your old men will dream dreams,
your young men will see visions.

²⁹Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days.

The event we call Christmas began the Last Days. People, especially people who love to study End Times prophecy like to tell us that we’re living in the last days. They’re right we are living in the last days. The thing they don’t usually tell us is that we’ve been living in the Last Days since Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

In the Last Days God sent His Son, born of a virgin in Bethlehem, who grew up and preached the good news that the Kingdom of God had become flesh and lived among us human beings. This Son of God was crucified and three days later He rose again. Forty days after Easter Jesus ascended to Heaven where He reigns, seated at the right hand of the Father. Fifty Days after Easter an interesting phenomenon took place in Jerusalem. There was a sound as the rushing of a great wind and the Spirit of God descended and rested on those who were in the room and it looked like tongues of fire on their heads. Everyone spoke in foreign languages and the the people from across the known world who were in Jerusalem for the feast days were able to hear the gospel in their own language.

Peter stood to preach and when he preached he quoted the prophet Joel but he changed the first words and said, “In the last days I will pour out my Spirit…”. Christmas was the first of a series of events that culminated on the Day of Pentecost. Christmas is the time we celebrate that God became human and lived among us. Pentecost is the day we celebrate that God chose to live within and empower all human beings who choose to follow Him. Pentecost is Christmas made permanent in each believer, God with each of us.

We celebrate Advent and Christmas as that time when we get ready to receive Jesus who was physically born in Bethlehem all those years ago. Advent is like the earlier part of Joel chapter two where we repent and prepare ourselves to receive this gift like the people of Joel’s time were invited to gather and repent of the sin that had been part of their lives.

God really wants to live with His people. He is unlike any other God of any other faith. In other faiths god or the gods are distant and they don’t speak to their people and they certainly don’t become human and live among them. There’s never a sense that the gods of other religions love the people. In fact in other faith persuasions people try to appease the gods, that’s the best they can do.

In Christianity we believe God loves people. We believe God wants to live with people and be part of our lives as He was with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. That’s what God wants. He made covenants with His people so that we could have a relationship with Him. He provided a way that we could cover our sin before Him through sacrifices. He sent the prophets to tell His people when they weren’t living according to the covenants they had made and how they should come back to Him. He sent the Psalmists to give us words to speak when we speak to Him and when we worship Him. He said through the prophet Isaiah,

¹⁴Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Immanuel means, God with us. That’s what God wants - to be with us. That’s why Jesus came, so that God could be with us. That’s why God sent the Holy Spirit to live within all people. If you look back at that verse from Joel chapter 2:28, the Spirit was promised to be poured out on all people, old and young, male and female, slave and free. There would be no discrimination on God’s behalf - everyone would have God living within them. That’s a Christmas message about God being with His people. That’s the Holy Spirit living within us - God with us all the time.

As we eat the Communion meal today we remember Jesus’ death and resurrection and what that bought for us. We also remember that Jesus is God with us - Immanuel- and that by the Holy Spirit God continues to live with each one of us all the time. This started in the Last Days. Christmas begins the Last Days.

What Does Idle Mean?

2011-10-23T07:51:00.000-06:00

Sermon Summary:

Toward the end of the book of 2 Thessalonians Paul, Silas and Timothy discuss the value of productive work versus just being busy or being a busybody. The apostle treats being a busybody as very serious because of its harmful effects on the church. He offers how we as a church should respond to the busybodies among us.

Questions for Reflection:

What have you learned about work and from whom have you learned it? How has your view of work shaped your life?
Do you know anyone whom you would categorize as a busybody? What are the characteristics of a busybody? What is the effect that a busybody has on the people around him/her?
Have you ever been a busybody? Why did you do it? Why did you stop being a busybody?
How could you help someone who is doing the right thing to not grow tired of doing so?
How can you insulate your life from the effects of busybodies? What are the tangible steps you can take to limit their effect on your life?
How can you steer conversations in which you find yourself to a more redemptive purpose?
How can you go about loving the busybodies in your life?

Sermon: What Does Idle Mean?

My dad tells the story of a Mennonite farmer who was wound up a little bit too tightly. He was reputed to have gotten agitated on a Monday morning that work was not progressing at a quick enough pace. He said it in Low German but, he lamented to his sons, on a Monday morning, that the day after tomorrow would be Wednesday already and they hadn’t done anything yet this week. As a Mennonite people work is a value we hold onto very firmly.

I grew up on a farm with parents who loved me, in fact I’m quite sure they still love me, and who taught us many of their values. My parents had lived through the era in history they choose to call the ‘dirty thirties’. Two of the things the ‘dirty thirties’ taught my parents was thrift and hard work. Those values were absorbed by us as children. We learned to work and we learned that waste was a bad habit at best and at worst maybe even sinful, depending on what was being wasted.

What’s happened with that in my life is that I’m pretty good at working hard and I learned to be thrifty, some would even call me cheap. What I didn’t learn very well was how to do nothing. When we’re on vacation it’s a discipline for me to tell myself that it’s okay to accomplish nothing more than to move my lawn chair from one side of the campsite to the other so I can be in the shade as I’m reading a book. That takes discipline for me. I should be working, or, at the very least accomplishing something, anything I could mark on a checklist and say I did something besides just sit.

The passage of Scripture in 2 Thessalonians that we want to look at together today is one that talks about work and idleness and how to respond to those among us who might be idle. If you’ve got your Bibles I would invite you to turn with me to chapter three of 2 Thessalonians.

In chapter 2 Paul, Silas and Timothy spoke about the Second Coming of Christ and the fact that it had not yet happened despite what some of the Thessalonians had come to believe. In the first verses of chapter 3 Paul, Silas and Timothy requested prayer that the message of the gospel would spread rapidly just as it had among the Thessalonians. Starting in 2 Thessalonians chapter three beginning with verse six there’s another shift when they wrote to the church,

⁶In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us.

There are a four things I think we need to notice in this verse to help us understand what Paul, Silas and Timothy wanted the Thessalonians to get from these words. The first thing is the word ‘command’. Paul, Silas and Timothy were not suggesting or recommending they were commanding. It’s the most bluntly authoritative language they use in either of the letters to the Thessalonians which tells us that this is not a side issue which is kind of added at the end of a letter. It’s a big deal, maybe even as big a deal as the Thessalonians wrong beliefs about the Second Coming of Christ.

The second thing that I think is important to notice is what the Thessalonians were commanded to do. They were to avoid people who were part of their church. This is drastic action in Paul, Silas and Timothy’s thinking. Paul, Silas and Timothy were all about the church needing to be united and to stick together and to help one another. When they talked about people who believed the wrong things about the Second Coming there was no command to avoid anyone. There were people in the church who were a problem and needed to be avoided. That’s drastic action.

The third thing that we need to notice is what these people were doing. They were idle. That word ‘idle’ is key when it comes to understanding this passage and how to apply it in our lives and in the life of the church. We’ll look more at the word ‘idle’ and what it means when we get to verse 11.

The fourth thing that is worth noticing in this verse is the last phrase of the verse which is the second reason why the Thessalonians were commanded to avoid these people. In addition to being idle they do “not live according to the teaching [they] received from” Paul, Silas and Timothy. Verse seven,

⁷For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you,

⁸nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you.

⁹We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow.

¹⁰For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”

¹¹We hear that some among you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies.

I want to go to verse 11. Paul, Silas and Timothy wrote that they had heard that some of the Thessalonians were idle. In verse 6 they told the Thessalonians that they should avoid those who were idle. In verses 7-10 Paul, Silas and Timothy wrote about how they were the models of working so that they would not be a burden on the Thessalonians while they worked among them. As apostles and spiritual leaders they had the right to ask the church to feed and house them in exchange for their service. The Scripture speaks about spiritual leaders being looked after by those whom they serve. For his own reasons Paul, Silas and Timothy chose to earn their own way while they ministered among the Thessalonians.

We read that and we assume that when Paul, Silas and Timothy spoke about some of the people being idle they meant that people weren’t working. In verse 10 they said, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” The key is that Paul, Silas and Timothy didn’t say if a man can’t work, they said if he will not work. The idea they are conveying is that the attitude of the person who is not working is important.

Some people would love to work but poor health keeps them from working. Some people would love to work but they can’t find work. Some people would love to work but they’re limited in some way and it’s hard to find work or to find work that pays enough for them to support themselves. Those are not the people Paul, Silas and Timothy are saying shouldn’t eat if they don’t work. I get the distinct impression Paul is speaking about those who could work but couldn’t be bothered or are too proud to take work that is ‘beneath them’ or who think the world owes them a certain standard of living. Paul, Silas and Timothy are saying that such people can go hungry rather than deplete the resources of the church.

Helping other people is a very high priority of the church in Paul’s theology. In Paul’s theology there are several reasons why we work. First of all in Paul’s thinking we work to provide for ourselves and our families and not be a burden to others (3:8). Secondly, we work so that we will win the respect of those who are watching our lives (1 Thess 4:9-12). Thirdly, in Paul’s theology, we work so that we have something to share with those who are in need (Eph. 4:28). All three of those things are part of the reason why Paul and the Scripture he wrote think it’s important for people to work. People who could work but don’t violate God’s intention for human beings that we should work.

There’s more to the word ‘idle’ than just the opposite of work. We get that from verse 11 where Paul, Silas and Timothy used an interesting play on words to say that the people who are idle are not busy; they are busybodies. Being a busybody is different than being idle isn’t it? These busybodies were busy but they were not busy with work that would provide for their families because they were still relying on the church to help them with necessities for life. They were busy but they were not busy with work that would win the respect of the community in which they lived. Busybodies never really earn universal respect. They were busy but not with work that would help them share with those who were in need. They violated every tenet of Paul’s theology of work.

These people were busy with work that was at best irresponsible and at worst it was destructive. It’s not enough to just be busy. We are also to be busy with something that provides for our needs, builds respect in the community and helps us help others in need.

Paul, Silas and Timothy described what these people who were idle and busybodies should do to fix this situation in their lives. Verse 12,

¹²Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat.

There’s two things these people who were busybodies were supposed to do. Notice once again that Paul is giving them a command - that very stern language. On top of the command, they are also urged in the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul, Silas and Timothy care so much about this that they apply as much pressure as they can - commanded and urged in the Lord Jesus Christ. These busybodies are supposed to settle down. They were busy but they were not busy with useful things. That had to change and they were supposed to get busy with useful things. The second thing they were supposed to do was get to work and earn their own food and stop being a burden on the rest of the church. For this to happen there needed to be a huge shift in their attitudes and in the pattern of their lives.

What do we do with this? What do these verses mean for us as a church, for people who live almost 20 centuries after the Thessalonians who received this letter? What could we possibly have in common with them?

We’re all busy. How many times a week do you hear from someone when you ask them how things are going and they say, ‘busy.‘ It’s like we have to say that in our culture or if we don’t say we’re busy we can say it’s slow but we have to say it’s slow in such a way that communicates we’d be a lot better if it was busy. We’re busy. If you ask someone who serves on the Gift Discernment Committee in our church they will tell you just how many busy people they encounter trying to find volunteers for the work of our church. We’re all busy, but are we all busy with things that are productive?

There are probably among us people who are busybodies. Busybodies are busy with things that are not helpful. They’re busy with things that are irresponsible and harmful. Busybodies are the chronic complainers, gossips and critics of the church. Don’t misunderstand, all of us are entitled to have a different opinion and we don’t all have to agree all the time with what the church is doing. We have the right to voice our disagreement in the appropriate place to the appropriate people. But there comes a time when having voiced our opinions and having been heard we have to work along with the direction the church has set whether we agree with it or not. Anything else, whether that’s passive aggressive resistance or a chronically contrary spirit is harms the church.

There are some people who elevate the art of having a different opinion to entirely new heights especially when things don’t go their way. These people never seem to have anything positive to say. They’re like a jukebox; put in a quarter, ask a question and you know the song they will play. It’s chronic. These people almost never get involved and volunteer in the ministry of the church. They’re too busy. Actually they might very well be busybodies.

Some of these people populate the coffee shops on a daily basis. Some of them have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Some of them meet in the parking lot after the meeting. Probably all of us are busybodies at some point. Paul’s call to those of us who are busybodies is to stop and instead become useful to the church. Those who are working hard in the church don’t need those who are doing nothing heckling their efforts. It’s demoralizing and the only one who wins through that sort of activity is the enemy of our souls.

Those who are busybodies are commanded to shape up. Paul, Silas and Timothy also have some words for the rest of the church. We find those beginning in verse 13 where we read,

¹³And as for you, brothers, never tire of doing what is right.

The first thing the church is encouraged to do is to never grow tire of doing what is right. You see busybodies, those who are idle, they grind at those who are doing the right thing. They’re like a weight you have to pull in addition to the effort your work requires. It takes almost as much energy to pull that weight as it does to do the work you are doing. Eventually busybodies wear down those who are working and those who are working get tired of the criticism, the cynicism and the complaining and they give up and they follow the path of least resistance or they quit and say they don’t need that hassle; someone else can do it.

Some of you who have been doing the right thing for a long time and you know what I’m talking about. You’ve done the right thing for a very long time and you know the drag and the extra effort you have to go through because of complaints, gossip and criticism and you’ve been tempted many times to quit or just give in and do what the busybodies want even though it’s not the the right thing and it’s not the call of God on your life. It’s easier if you just do what they want and then you don’t have to face those voices. Paul, Silas and Timothy’s call to those of us who are doing the right thing is to never growing tired of doing what is right no matter how much the busybodies chip and pick. Don’t quit. Keep doing what is right.

Then Paul, Silas and Timothy went on to speak to the larger church. Verse 14,

¹⁴If anyone does not obey our instruction in this letter, take special note of him. Do not associate with him, in order that he may feel ashamed.

¹⁵Yet do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother.

How do we as a church handle busybodies? The first thing we do as a church with busybodies is recognize who they are and what they are. We probably know who the busybodies are among our circle of friends and acquaintances. We need to take special note of them. I believe that means that we recognize their behavior for what it is: a busybody; someone not involved in helpful but in destructive behavior. Recognize who they are and what they are.

Then Paul, Silas and Timothy went on to say that we should not associate with them so that they would feel shame. In the culture of the Thessalonians shame was a big deal; losing face publicly or being publicly embarrassed was a big deal. We live in a different culture; a culture that doesn’t use shame in a disciplinary way. In our culture shame is a negative tactic and the people who use it are usually not respected. In the culture of the Thessalonians shame was useful and effective. It’s different now, what do we do?

I think avoidance is still useful but instead of avoidance to produce shame the avoidance is used to insulate ourselves from the influence of busybodies. We keep busybodies at arms’ length so that we can avoid being infected by their attitudes and by the harm they spread.

In the past some churches, including some Mennonite churches, practiced shunning. When a person’s entire world revolved around the church community and only one church community at that shunning could apply a lot of pressure. In our culture and our time if we were to shun someone, they would simply go down the street to the next church and carry on their merry way and it wouldn’t be effective at all. Even when there was only one church community shunning may have gotten outward compliance but I don’t think it always produced inner transformation. Plus, I don’t think shunning is a proper interpretation of the Scripture; but that’s another issue I don’t have time for today. It’s another Zesty Cheese Doritos and Coke issue. Shunning is probably not going to help the situation with busybodies.

In addition to avoidance and insulating ourselves from the influence of the busybody, in verse 15, Paul, Silas and Timothy said that while we avoid the busybodies but we don’t treat them like enemies. It’s not a total shunning where we have nothing to do with them and don’t speak to them. We avoid their influence, but keep a measure of contact in order for us to be an influence in their lives to restore them to useful service.

Finally, we need to love them enough to confront them and warn them as a brother or sister in Christ. The most loving and caring thing we can do for busybodies is call them on their behavior and let them know it’s not acceptable.

What might this look like? Well, suppose a group of you are having a BBQ in the summer or sitting around the fire during a camping weekend and the conversation turns to church. It’s my experience that often in these settings conversations turn to church so that we can complain away from proper places. Someone at the BBQ or sitting around the fire might say something negative about the church or a decision the church made or about someone in the church family and the work they are doing. This is the pivot point of the conversation; it’s the point at which the conversation can become redeeming or it can become a conversation dominated by busybodies.

If someone brings up a complaint the way to send the conversation down the busybody path is to agree and to pile on - add more details and our own frustrations, like fuel to a fire. On the other hand, the way to guide that conversation in a redemptive direction is to say, “You know what, I’m frustrated by the same thing. Tomorrow, or next week, let’s talk to whoever’s leads that segment of our church life and see what’s up. What were they thinking? Maybe we could help steer this thing in a less frustrating direction. Maybe they could explain it more fully and we could get on board.” If the person who brought up the complaint has no interest in your suggestion they are a busybody, insulate yourself from their influence in your life because they are without even thinking about it aiding and abetting the Kingdom of Satan. If the person agrees with you the conversation you will have will have a redemptive effect on your lives and on the church and the Kingdom of God will prosper.

One of the most satisfying meetings I’ve ever had in my office was the day two men came to my office to talk with me about something I had said, that they wished I hadn’t said. Instead of being busybodies these men came and we talked about it. We came to an understanding and when they left I held them in higher regard than when they came; and I want to believe the same was true of them toward me. Taking the non-busybody route builds the Kingdom of God. Our culture has turned gossip and busybody into an industry with television shows and internet websites and all sorts of glamour around it. That glamour is a lie. If we choose to not be busybodies we will be very counter cultural.

If you’re doing the right thing, never grow tired. If you’re a busybody, Stop! If you know someone who is doing right, encourage them and help them wherever you can. If you know a busybody, insulate yourself from their influence in your life and seek to be redemptive in your conversations with them.

Living Until Christ Returns

2011-10-16T07:05:00.000-06:00

Sermon Summary:

In 2 Thessalonians 2 Paul, Silas and Timothy write a very confusing section of Scripture. The section includes figures we don't understand and inferences that don't make sense to us because we're not told what they mean. Some of the Thessalonians believed that Christ has returned and they had missed it. Paul wrote to them to assure them that Christ had not returned and left them, they hadn't been forgotten and that it was still important for them to continue to follow Christ.

Questions for Reflection:

What ideas about the Second Coming of Christ have you carried at various points in your lifetime? How did those attitudes affect they way you lived your Christian life?
Have you ever thought that you might have missed the Second Coming of Christ? What feelings came to you at that time?
If you read 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 do you come away more confused or less confused about the Second Coming of Christ? What are you focused on that leads to your confusion? If you focus on what you do know instead of what you don't know does your confusion dissipate somewhat?
What does it do for you to know that Christ has not yet returned? How does that affect how you live your Christian life?
What does it do for you to know that there is one who seeks to replace God in our lives? How does that affect how you live your Christian life?
What does it do for you to know that Jesus wins in the end? How does that affect how you live your Christian life?
At which of the three stages are you in your life? What might be most helpful to you when you enter a time of struggle? How might your brothers and sisters in Christ help you to persevere in times of struggle? Will you let them help you?

Sermon: Living Until Christ Returns

As you look back on your life as a Christian what are the different ways in which you have thought about the Second Coming of Christ? I’ll tell you about some of my attitudes and then I’ll give you some time to share some of your attitudes or thoughts.

I can think of three different attitudes I’ve had about the Second Coming of Christ over the course of my life. Actually there have been more than three but I only want to share three with you this morning. If you really want to know some of my other thoughts on the Second Coming of Christ you’ll need to bring a 2 liter of Coke and a bag of Zesty Cheese Doritos to my office some day and we can talk about the Second Coming.

One of the strongest memories I have of my feelings toward the Second Coming of Christ is fear. In 1973 a film was released called “A Thief in the Night”. It was a movie about how the rapture had come and a woman was left behind while her husband and children were taken. She refused to take the mark of the beast and the police were out to get her. Back in the 70’s we didn’t get out much and movies weren’t available like they are now - and I sound old when I talk like that - so when our youth group brought in a film or a movie you could be assured of a good turnout. Well, I saw this movie and I had dreams and times of intense fear for a long while afterward. When that movie was combined with an End Times hysteria that seemed to be sweeping across the church at that time I went for years living in fear that the Second Coming would happen and due to some clerical error I would be left behind. Throughout all this time I was a Christian and I knew I shouldn’t be afraid but fear does not make sense. Anybody remember fear as one way you’ve thought about the Second Coming of Christ?

The second attitude I remember having in the middle of all this fear was one of Procrastination. The prevailing attitude of that time seemed to be that the Second Coming was imminent - maybe not today but within the lifetime of many people who have died since that time. In the middle of that time, I remember thinking and perhaps even praying that God might delay the Second Coming until some momentous event in my life had passed - till I was able to go to youth or till I got my driver’s license or till I got to go away to MCI.

I was pretty sure I would be okay if the Second Coming happened, but somehow I didn’t quite grasp that heaven would be better than youth, or driving legally or living in residence during high school. If God would just procrastinate to suit my desires that would be good, I thought. Anybody ever think like that?

The third attitude I remember having about the Second Coming of Christ in my lifetime is one of an escape route. I remember hearing about the overwhelmed Bible College student who was faced with exams and papers and was overwrought by the whole ordeal and stood up from his seat in the library and called out in a loud voice, “Papers, assignments all due the same week and all my exams next week; Oh Lord please come now.”

That was my attitude at times. I might have done something bad - it could happen - that I needed to own up to with mom and dad, or I might have an exam or test in school on which I might do poorly or that would be quite hard I would wish that the Second Coming would happen and through it happening I could escape my hardship. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

The one attitude I don’t remember really ever having about the Second Coming of Christ was one of comfort. The way I learned about the Second Coming and the way it was taught in my early life the Second Coming of Christ was never a comforting thought for me. Some of that makes sense. It should never be a comfortable thing to realize we are going to be in the presence of Almighty God. But, I believe the biblical literature about the Second Coming of Christ was originally written to bring comfort to the first readers, not fear. Something seems out of whack to me when we’ve changed the spirit of the Scripture in such a fundamental way.

What attitudes or thoughts have you carried in your life toward the Second Coming of Christ? Has it been something you didn’t think about much if at all? Has it been something you avoided thinking about? Were thoughts of the Second Coming of Christ a great comfort to any of you? Does anyone want to give voice to any of those thoughts?

You might remember that back in September we began a look through the small New Testament book of 2 Thessalonians. At that time we looked at Paul, Silas and Timothy’s prayer of thanksgiving for the Thessalonians. They were thankful that the Thessalonians’ faith was growing more and more. For all the thoughts they had about the Thessalonians the one thing they always seemed to come back to was to give thanks that the Thessalonians’ faith was growing more and more. In addition to that was the fact that the love every one of the Thessalonians had for each other was increasing.

When we looked at that passage I made the connection between choosing to love or not and the effect that decision would have on either growing or shriveling our faith. When we decide to love our faith grows because faith is living God’s call on our lives and loving is God’s most basic call on the lives of all believers. When we choose not to love our faith shrivels and we lose ground because we are disregarding that most basic call of God on our lives. When we choose not to walk according to God’s call we choose to shrivel our faith.

This week we want to rejoin the Thessalonians and look at what Paul, Silas and Timothy had to say to them in the first 12 verses of 2 Thessalonians chapter 2. If you’ve got your Bibles with you I would ask you to turn there at this time. The passage we’re about to read is one of the most confusing passages we have that Paul wrote. Having said that, I think there are lessons to be learned from this passage for how we might live as we wait for Christ to return.

2 Thessalonians chapter 2 beginning with verse 1,

¹Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers,

²not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by some prophecy, report or letter supposed to have come from us, saying that the day of the Lord has already come.

³Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way,...

In these verses we come to Paul, Silas and Timothy’s purpose in writing the book of 2 Thessalonians. There were some people in the Thessalonian church who had come to believe that the Second Coming of Christ had already happened and that for some unexplained reason they had missed it. As you can well imagine, especially if you’ve ever seen “A Thief in the Night”, the movie of my childhood and youth, the Thessalonians were devastated by the thought that God might have forgotten them and Christ might have returned and not taken them with Him. I don’t know what they thought, we’re not told, but I can imagine the panic that must have set in within these people the church.

On top of all of this the persecution which they had begun to experience when Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians had intensified. They had been left behind, so they were told, and they were being persecuted. No doubt they were discouraged and had begun to wonder if they had made a mistake when they had chosen to follow Christ. No doubt there was also a goodly amount of wondering how they could somehow get out of the struggle in which they were mired. Might there be an easy way out for them? The way out that looked the easiest would be to abandon their faith.

Paul wrote to tell them that these people who’d told them that the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred had lied to them and they had been deceived. Paul wanted to assure them that the Second Coming had not yet happened and that their faith was not futile.

Verse 3,

³Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.

⁴He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

⁵Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things?

⁶And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time.

⁷For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.

⁸And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.

⁹The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders,

¹⁰and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

¹¹For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie

¹²and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

What makes this section the most difficult of all Paul’s passages to interpret is the fact that Paul, Silas and Timothy and the Thessalonians knew some things that we don’t know. For example in verse 4 Paul said,

⁴He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

Paul assumed that the Thessalonians had some idea who the ‘he’ was that Paul was talking about. Paul assumed that the Thessalonians had an idea about what those things were that were called God and Paul assumed that the Thessalonians had a fairly good understanding of what he meant when he referred to the Temple. We need to remember the Thessalonians were a long way from the temple in Jerusalem so there is no guarantee that the Jerusalem Temple was what Paul had in mind.

In verse 5 Paul told the Thessalonians that he used to tell them about these things while he was among them. The Thessalonians knew what it was he was talking about so Paul, Silas and Timothy felt no need to explain it to them all over again.

We assume that Paul and the Thessalonians both knew what all these things plus all the other inferences and inside language in the rest of the verses meant, but we don’t. Because we don’t know what all this meant we’re not sure what the passage is really saying to the church. It’s confusing to us and we can get frustrated because there is a bunch of stuff here we don’t know. However, having said that there are several things we do know which teach us how to live until Christ returns.

The first thing we know is that Christ has not yet returned. The Thessalonians were convinced by someone or some group that Christ had come and gone and they had missed the bus. We’re more likely to see people in our culture making wild predictions of when the world will come to an end or when Christ will return than we are to find people who believe it has already happened. You may remember that May 21, 2011 was supposed to be the day Christ returned - according to radio preacher Harold Camping. He is just the latest in a long line of predictors of the end times that stretches throughout history and goes back at least as far as the Thessalonian church.

We do know that Christ has not yet returned. Therefore, the great commandment and the great commission remain in force. We are to be, like the Thessalonians were, a people who love God with our whole heart and love each other and the world in which we live as much as we love ourselves.

Because Christ has not yet returned we are still mandated to be a people who love the world in which we live enough that whenever possible we will be about spreading the good news of the possibility of human beings having a relationship with God through Jesus Christ - and as St. Francis said, if necessary, we will use words to communicate the message of Jesus Christ. Paul very clearly assured the Thessalonians that Christ had not yet returned. Because Christ has not yet returned we are to be about the business of the great commandment and the great commission. That’s the first thing we know from this passage.

The second thing we know from his passage is that there is among us one among us who seeks to push God aside and take His place in our lives. We are continually tempted to give up our faith in Christ and follow this imposter who seeks to set himself up as God in our lives. That person is described by Paul as the man of lawlessness in verse 4. He is the enemy of our souls who seeks the destruction of all who name the name of Jesus in their lives.

While faith in Christ is the call to walk unswervingly in the direction in which Christ has called us the enemy seeks to tell us that there are shortcuts to be taken which will make the trip much less arduous. We’re invited by him to just fudge a little here or just cut this corner there. He tells us that we can still call ourselves obedient even while we disobey Christ’s call on our lives. He will seek to convince us that we can disobey and stop loving and be self-seeking and still please Jesus Christ. He seeks to be the one to whom we will listen first when seeking direction in our lives. When we listen to him first, he has successfully taken the place of God in our lives. We know that Satan is real and that he wants to replace God as the voice to which we will listen.

The third thing we know is that Jesus wins in the end. Verse 12 said that all those who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness will be destroyed. Jesus wins. Those of you who are fans of gospel music might very well remember the song that the Cathedrals made famous called “I’ve Read the Back of the Book and We Win”. That’s what Paul, Silas and Timothy were saying to the Thessalonians and what we can know as well. That’s the message of the book of Revelation and it’s the message of Daniel and all the other literature that speaks about the End Times. It’s designed to show the people of God that no matter how bleak things may look, we can know and we can rest assured that there is a time coming when God will emerge victorious. Jesus wins; our faith is not misplaced. Stay the course.

How do we live while we wait for Christ to return? As the Thessalonians found out living the Christian life is hard. For them it was persecution from an external source, the Roman government. For us it’s the temptation to give in to the subtle voice that calls us to put ourselves first and pursue our own gain and comfort ahead of Christ’s call to love. Both external persecution and internal temptation make it hard to live the Christian life. Much of our culture in the last decades has been enamored with how to make life easier. Most of the comforts we enjoy have been sold to us because they will make life easier and usually when life becomes easier it also becomes faster or more efficient. We lament that life is so fast-paced and despite all of these things that make life easier we still speak about how life is hard and how we don’t have time. We long for an escape from the difficulty of life. Then the subtle voice of the enemy of our souls whispers in our ear that he has an easier way if we would listen to him. How do we live our lives while we wait for Christ to return?

At our Winkler Ministerial meeting this past week Walter Enns shared with us part of his story. He talked about a book he read - I think it was called You Don’t Have to Quit by Anne and Ray Ortlund. Walter told us that in the book he read the author talk about three phases that can come into our lives. The first phase is the phase where life is good and the living is easy. Our job is going well. Our Christian life is without crisis. Our relationships are all smooth sailing. Life is good and the living is easy.

The second phase is that phase that comes to all of us at some point where life is no longer good nor easy. In fact life stinks. It might be that our job has become unfulfilling or difficult or very demanding. It may be that God seems absent in our Christian life or that we have a crisis of faith where we’re not sure what is right or wrong or what it is we believe anymore. It may be that one or more of the relationships in our lives has entered a crisis phase. We may have been hurt or betrayed by someone we love. We may have hurt or betrayed someone we love. There is brokenness in that relationship. The end result of any of that is that life is no longer good nor easy; it’s hard.

Now what do we do when life becomes hard? Our culture tells us to look out for number one to place our needs and desires first. If we’re in pain or in a struggle we should get out and get to a place where life is once again good and easy. If someone has hurt us we can’t trust them and we should end that relationship. If our job is not fulfilling us at this point we should find a different job. If we choose the path of leaving when the going gets tough, according to the authors of the book, we will never grow up and we’ll never grow to the next stage of maturity that God has for us. If we bail in the middle of hard times we will never acquire the skills or life lessons that God requires us to have for what He might want us to do in later stages of our lives. If we leave and go back to the first stage of life where it’s easy and good we will never grow up.

I see a lot of people doing this in our culture and I have often done it myself. There is no need for the divorce rate to be as high as it is. Often, not always but often, it’s self-centeredness and lack of courage and lack of commitment to work at tough stuff, on the part of one of the people in the marriage - it only takes one to mess up a marriage - and it’s a desire for life to be good and easy and to not have to experience or work through hard stuff that leads to many divorces. How often don’t we hear that someone got a divorce partly because they found the marriage to be unfulfilling or hard? I’m not talking about staying in an unsafe place or with an abusive spouse - please don’t hear me saying that. I’m talking about a challenging but still safe environment which leads to most divorces.

I’m often tempted when things get tough to bail and take an easier path and anything looks easier when times are tough. What I’ve found is that when I’ve persevered through the hard times and when I’ve gotten out the other side of the tough stuff, life actually becomes better than it was before the hard times. That’s the third phase that Walter Enns told us about. He said when you get through the hard stuff you find yourself equipped for things that you would have never been equipped for had you turned and run from the challenges and difficult times. We acquire skills and abilities in tough times that we’ll never get in easy times. In the third phase life becomes good once more and the living is easy but it’s actually better than it was before because we have grown and we are more than we used to be.

Last spring Dave Currie was in town for a marriage seminar and on an evening before the marriage seminar he met with pastors from our area to talk about how to help people who struggle with pornography and how to help those who have to work through marital unfaithfulness. He said something that our culture will never tell us because our culture is committed to the easy, quick and seemingly painless fix and the conviction that life should always be easy and good. He said that in his 20 years or more of counseling experience couples who hit a significant problem in their marriages - like the unfaithfulness of one partner - and who walk away from the marriage and refuse to do the hard work, five years later 20-25% of those people report that life is good and they are happy. On the other hand, those who work through the hard stuff and re-learn trust and love and intimacy, five years later 80-85% of them report that life is good and they are happy - in fact life is better than it was before the hard stuff started. Our culture never tells us that if we work through struggles and avoid the easy exit that we can be happier than if we bail. That’s the voice of the one who seeks to replace God in our lives.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said it very well when he said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity that exists on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity that exists on the other side of complexity.”

How do we live as we wait for Christ’s return? We live faithfully to the call of faith - to walk the path to which Christ has called us. We stop looking for the easy escape, whether that seemingly easy escape is the Second Coming of Christ or listening to the voice of the enemy of our souls or bailing on our spouse or throwing a hissy fit and quitting our job because it got hard or leaving our church because it looks easier and more fun somewhere else. We press through the hard times that will come in faith that the simplicity God has for us on the other side of this current complexity will be worth it.

Who am I to Give Generously?

2011-10-09T06:53:00.002-06:00

Sermon Summary:

In the book of Chronicles we come to a place where King David has collected a large treasure for the building of the Temple. As David surveyed the scene he prayed and in a part of his prayer he asked God who he and his people were that they should be able to give generously. What is generous? What does generous have to do with Thanksgiving?

Questions for Reflection:

What does the word generous mean?
Who is the most generous person you've known? What made that person generous?
How have you experienced generosity? What did it feel like to receive another person's generosity?
If generosity were the sole gauge of gratitude, how grateful a person are you?
How might generosity serve as an solution to the materialism in your life?
How can you be more generous with all that God has given you i.e. Time, Talents and Treasure?

Sermon: Who am I to Give Generously?

If you’ve got your Bibles with you I would invite you to turn with me to the Old Testament book of 1 Chronicles. How many of us have read the books of Chronicles in the past year or so? You’re brave and dedicated souls. I say that because the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles are difficult. They’re lists and genealogies of family members of Israel and other groups of people where only occasionally do you come upon a name that sounds familiar. It’s like the first 16 verses of Matthew on steroids. Once you get past chapter nine of 1 Chronicles what we find is that the books of Chronicles reads a lot like the books of Samuel and Kings. There are a lot of stories in Samuel and Kings that are repeated in the books of Chronicles. I remember being frustrated by these books side by side in my English Bible that were so repetitive. I wondered why they would be there. There must be a reason but what is it?

When I was in seminary my Old Testament professor explained it to us. He told us that the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles are written for entirely different purposes. They tell many of the same stories with a different goal in mind. The purposes of the two books become most clear when we notice the differences between the two books. Instead of looking at the stories that are told in both books we need to look at the stories that are told in one book which are not told in the other.

One difference between Samuel, Kings and Chronicles is invisible to us who only read the English Bible. The first difference is that in the Hebrew Bible the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles aren’t side by side like they are in the English bible. In the Hebrew Bible Chronicles is the last book of the Bible or what we call the Old Testament while Samuel and Kings are in more or less the same place as they are in the English Bible. Somehow it’s not as repetitive if the books aren’t side by side.

The major difference between the these books is that the books of Samuel and Kings spend a lot of time describing the sinful and and the wrong actions of Israel’s leaders. The book of Chronicles lists very few of the mistakes the leaders of Israel made. In Kings we read in fairly specific detail about the sin of David and Bathsheba. In Chronicles Bathsheba’s name only comes up in the genealogy as the mother of four of David’s children . That’s a fairly consistent pattern throughout the book. The good things are highlighted, the bad things are omitted. It points to the purpose of the books. The purpose of Samuel is to show that there is hope after the Canaanization of Israel that took place in the Judges. David the godly king is established in Samuel. The purpose of the book of Kings is Exile and Defeat - the natural outcomes of not following the covenant. The purpose of the book of Chronicles is to say to Israel or to say to God’s people that you might yet become what you already are.

The interesting this is that in the middle of this book of Chronicles, which was probably written originally as one long book that was divided over two scrolls, in 1 Chronicles chapter 28 and 29 we read about an interesting event in the life of Israel.

It’s the story of David and his part in the building of the Temple. David wanted with all his heart to build a Temple for God. The Spirit of God showed him what to build and the Spirit showed him (28:12) how to build it. However, God also said to David that he was not to build the Temple because he was a warrior and had shed blood (28:3). Solomon, David’s son, was the one God had selected to build the Temple. As I read that story I got the sense that David was very disappointed that he was not allowed to build the Temple, especially since God had given him the plans. We’re not told but I get the sense that David did obey God’s word that he wouldn’t build the Temple but he walked as close to that line as he possibly could. David didn’t build the Temple but he told everyone that Solomon was going to build it because God said he couldn’t. David didn’t build the Temple but he passed along to Solomon the plans for the Temple. David didn’t build the Temple but he specified how the furnishings should be built. David didn’t build the Temple but he donated his personal treasure to the building fund and asked the leaders of Israel to give to the fund as well. The leaders of Israel collectively gave even more than David to the building fund for a Temple that couldn’t be built until David died.

After all of the wealth was collected from the leaders of Israel David stood before the people and beginning with verse 10 of 1 Chronicles 29 said this,

“Praise be to you, O Lord,
God of our father Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.

¹¹Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power
and the glory and the majesty and the splendor,
for everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom;
you are exalted as head over all.

¹²Wealth and honor come from you;
you are the ruler of all things.
In your hands are strength and power
to exalt and give strength to all.

¹³Now, our God, we give you thanks,
and praise your glorious name.

David prayed this wonderful prayer after all the wealth had been collected. The building fund was very healthy at this point. I’m not sure if it was enough to complete the project but they definitely had enough in cash and pledges that they could go ahead with the project. It must have been a very exciting and satisfying time for David.

David prayed this prayer in which, right at the beginning, he acknowledged God’s eternity, His greatness and His worthiness to be honored. David acknowledged that God was the source of all the wealth they had collected and that God is the ruler of all things. He ended this section of his prayer by thanking God. It really is a beautiful beginning to a prayer and it would be a great prayer for us to pray at Thanksgiving. All those things are true about God to whom we give our thanks this weekend. He is eternal, He rules, He is the source of all we have and are.

In verse 14 David continued to pray,

¹⁴“But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand.

Interesting that after David had listed all the things that we can readily agree are true about God he began the next sentence of his prayer with the word ‘but’. The word ‘but’ is a word that introduces a contrast. What is there that David could say that might be in contrast with that wonderful beginning to his prayer? All of these things are true about God, but….

Are any of us familiar with a band called Sixpence None the Richer? I really don’t know anything about them besides their name and how they got their name. Does anyone know how they got their name? The band got their name from a short anecdote in C.S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity. In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis wrote about how everything we have comes from God and yet God is pleased when we give what we have back to Him. He spoke about a boy who loved his father and wanted to buy him a birthday present. The child had no money and so he went to his father and asked him for sixpence so that he could buy him a birthday present. The father gave the child sixpence and was pleased with the gift his son bought for him for his birthday. C.S. Lewis concluded the anecdote by saying that “only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.” The point C.S. Lewis was making in this portion of the book is that we often think that we are somehow making God richer by giving him our money or our gifts. That’s not true because God owns everything, gave it to us in the first place and couldn’t possibly be any richer because of anything we have given Him. He is pleased when we use our gifts to His honor and glory. He is pleased when we give Him our sixpence but He is none the richer for it.

That’s the beauty of the contrast David introduced in this verse with his use of the word ‘but’. They had collected a huge amount of wealth to be used in the building of the Temple of God and David gave thanks to God but in the euphoria of the moment he didn’t lose track of who he was and who Israel was as a people and who God was in relation to all of them. He never got all full of himself in the passion of the moment and began to think that somehow he and the people of Israel had made God richer by collecting this wealth for the building of His Temple.

Who am I and who are my people that you would allow us to be generous. Who are we that you would give us sixpence to spend on you. We often think that we are blessed when we have money to spend on ourselves. That’s not true. When we have money to spend on ourselves we are indulgent and maybe at times selfish. We are blessed when we give generously. We are a blessed people not because we’re rich. We are a blessed people if we are generous.

What is generous? Can anyone tell me what generous means to them? There are four things I think of when I think about generosity. First of all, I think generous means more than is required or more than is expected. God expects His people to tithe our money, our time and our gifts. If we’re not yet tithing, no matter how much we might be giving in our eyes, in God’s eyes, we’re not being generous. Generous begins when we get beyond what’s required and God requires a tithe. Generous is not just limited to Church and faith. Generous is an attitude and a lifestyle we carry with us through every area of life. More than expected in every area of our lives.

Have you ever gone for coffee and when the bill came left a tip that was larger than the bill? Try it sometime. It’s generous and it’s kind of fun to do that even if you don’t see the server receive what you gave them. It’s generous, it’s more than was expected.

Suppose we hear of a ministry that has a need and we give to meet that need. Others help and then we learn that the need has been met and exceeded. How would we react to that? If we react by wondering if we could have gotten by with giving less or not giving at all, we are not being generous. However, if we react by wondering what cool thing God is going to do through that ministry with the extra money or extra people or extra gifts people have volunteered, we probably are being generous.

When we are talking to God about our giving for the upcoming season of our lives and I believe we all should regularly have very serious conversations with God about our giving because Jesus said “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also” (Mtt. 6:21). If we’re talking to God about our giving for the upcoming season of our lives do we treat that conversation like we’re negotiating to buy a new car - trying to get the price as low as possible - or do we treat that conversation like we’re negotiating for a government grant - trying to get as much as possible. Our attitude in that conversation will tell us about our generosity. Generosity is more than is required.

Generous is more than money. Generous has to do with anything that comes from God and everything we have and everything we are comes from God. How we spend everything we have and are speaks about how generous we are. Generous is for people who are poor as well as people who are rich because we all have time and gifts and we all have talents even if we don’t all have money. In fact money is often a liability to us when it comes to being generous. We sometimes use our money to buy our way out of tithing other things God has given us.

Have any of you heard of this thing called Carbon Credits. I probably don’t know the full story behind carbon credits and I know I don’t fully understand how it works, but as I understand how carbon credits work it’s like this: if we use more than our fair share of energy or the earth’s resources we can pay some money to someone - I’m not sure who that would be - and paying that money somehow makes it okay that we are using more than our fair share of the earth’s resources. We can keep being excessive in our lifestyles as long as we keep buying Carbon Credits. I don’t understand how that solves the problem.

I think a lot of us have this idea that we can buy the faith equivalent of carbon credits when it comes to service or contributing our time and gifts. We might have booked ourselves a bit too full with our job or other things to be able to volunteer at church or in some other place God might call us. So to make up for our selfishness in that area, we just give extra money. We buy Carbon Credits. We can’t buy the service equivalent of carbon credits for our selfishness with our time and gifts and believe somehow we are still being generous.

Generosity isn’t just about money. God has given all of us time. We need to be giving some of the time He has given us back to Him. He might call us to start a ministry at church or in our community or to help along with an existing ministry or organization. He might call us to give our time in an organization in our community that’s not related to the church at all. God wants His people in all of society. Generosity involves more than money. God has given every Christian a spiritual gift. He never takes it away from us. Generosity is using that gift whenever and wherever we can for His honor and glory. That never stops no matter how old we get nor are we off the hook because we’re too young. It’s generosity, more than is required with what God has given us.

Thirdly, Generous is a Indicator of Gratitude. This weekend is Thanksgiving and we take time to be thankful. Generosity a way to demonstrate our gratitude all year long. I think the reason David was so intent on doing as much as he possibly could to help with the building of the Temple was because of his gratitude for all the things he listed in his prayer that were true about God. He was so grateful that this God had forgiven him and trusted him with the leadership of His people that He gave generously of his time, his gifts and his rather sizable treasure to the building fund for the temple Solomon was going to build. David wasn’t bitter that God wouldn’t let him build the Temple he was grateful to God and his gratitude was shown in his generosity.

Do any of you know another name for a tip you would leave with a server in a restaurant? It’s sometimes called a gratuity - from the word gratitude. We’re grateful for the service this person has given us, so we leave something to show our gratitude. The more grateful we are, the more generous we are. If we’re self-centered and believe everyone was put on this earth to serve us we will begrudge the server anything we might give them or we might look for excuses not to give anything because our money is so important to us.

When we think we’re doing God a favor by giving to Him we will not be generous. When we think God is lucky to have us on His team we will speak of giving or doing our fair share. Those are not signs of gratitude or generosity. David was grateful and absolutely blown away that God would bless him and the people of Israel with the ability to be generous. Generous is an indicator of gratitude.

Fourthly, Generous is an Antidote to Materialism. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as we as a church and a society become more and more materialistic we also become less and less generous. Materialism is about us and what we can get. Generosity is about others and how we can give more than is required and bless them with it. If you find materialism gaining an increasing hold in your life try to increase your giving of your time, your gifts and your money. I am quite sure that as we give stuff away materialism will lose its hold in our lives.

To close this I want to take us to one more verse, because it’s such a beautiful verse. It’s verse 18 of 1 Chronicles chapter 29.

Do you remember what I said the purpose was of the book of Chronicles? You might yet become what you already are. In this the last book of the Old Testament God seems to be laying out for the people His desires for His people. It’s a book that minimizes the failures that plagued His people. It’s a book that contains long lists of people God has chosen to be His own and to be about His tasks. It’s a book that describes attitudes and actions that are consistent with the people of God because if we follow this book we might yet become what we already are. We already are the people of God and if we live what Chronicles describes we might grow into that honor God has given us by calling us His people.

With that in mind the writer of Chronicles recorded David’s words in verse 18 where he prayed,

¹⁸O Lord, God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Israel, keep this desire in the hearts of your people forever, and keep their hearts loyal to you.

David’s prayer was that God would keep within His people the same attitude of generosity that they displayed as they brought forward their gifts for the building of the Temple. Our world notices generous people. Our world notices generous churches. David prayed that throughout history God would keep within the hearts of His people a desire to be generous and a desire to be loyal to our God.

Look to the Future; Remember the Rock

2011-09-26T08:32:00.004-06:00

Sermon Summary:

This weekend is Grace Church's Jubilee weekend celebration. In 1961 the first service was held at Grace Church and we thank God for His faithfulness over the years.

I wanted us to reflect this week on the words of Isaiah where he challenged the people of Israel to look for the new things God was going to do while they remembered the things about their God that are unchanging.

Questions for Reflection:

What are the church traditions to which you want to hold most tightly? Why?
What are some of the new things God might be wanting to do at Grace Church? What makes you think this is what God is doing?
How might we go about deciding if this is the call of God on our church?
What are some things that we should never change about Grace Church? Why?
How do we go about doing new things while still remembering the most important things about who we are?

Sermon: Look to the Future; Remember the Rock

Izzy was a Hebrew boy who was born into a devout Hebrew family. His father and mother lived before Izzy and his brothers and sisters lives that were fully engaged with and devoted to their God. Izzy was taught the Shema and other teachings of the Tanak. He was apprenticed to a rabbi at the same age as all the other Hebrew boys. But Izzy was not like the other Hebrew boys apprenticed to this rabbi. Izzy didn’t understand that the type of relationship he had with God was different from anyone else’s. He was young and innocent enough to believe that everyone heard God the way he heard God. When Izzy would share with the rabbi to whom he was apprenticed some of the things that he had heard God say, the rabbi would smile approvingly and ask questions like, “Izzy, what’s it like when Adonai speaks to you and you hear those things?”

One day, in the year that King Uzziah died, Izzy not only heard the Lord, he saw Him and the Lord was high and exalted and the train of His robe filled the palace where God lived. The train of his robe filled the palace. There was no room for the robe of God much less God Himself in the palace. No place could contain God, Izzy saw. There were Seraphs, angelic beings, flying around God. Each of these beings had six wings. With two wings they covered their eyes. With two wings they covered their feet and with two wings they flew. All these angelic beings seemed to be doing was praising God and saying, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord. The whole earth is full of His glory.”

When Izzy realized who it was that had appeared to him he was overcome with a sense of his own unworthiness and he realized that were he to speak he would be condemned by his own words. There was sin in his life, he knew it, and if there was sin in his life it would surely show in his speech. If there was sin in his speech in the presence of almighty God he knew that he would be destroyed because God is holy and no sin can exist in his presence. Izzy was sure he was ruined and he called out. God sent one of the angelic beings to the altar and this being took up one of the coals from the altar and came to Izzy and touched his mouth with the coal and God said, “This has touched your mouth, your sin is forgiven. Now go and speak to your people. They won’t hear you. They won’t understand you, but you go in my name and tell them what I tell you to tell them.”

So the prophet Isaiah went to his people with the words of God on his lips. God was right. The people didn’t hear Isaiah. They didn’t understand the words Isaiah spoke. What’s more many of the people hated Isaiah because of his words and to make sure he wouldn’t speak any more upsetting words, tradition tells us, the people sawed him in two. Before they sawed him in two, God gave Isaiah some very powerful words to speak to the people of Israel.

If you have your Bibles with you I invite you to turn with me to the 43^rd chapter of the book of Isaiah and verse 18 where God through the prophet Isaiah said,

¹⁸“Forget the former things;

do not dwell on the past.

¹⁹See, I am doing a new thing!

Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the desert

and streams in the wasteland.

One of the things that I think most if not all churches have in common is an appreciation for our traditions, whatever those might be. I think all churches struggle with change. We want to hold onto the past because the past was good. The beginnings of Grace Church teach us how difficult it can be for the church to embrace change. Change can be so hard in churches and we can resist it so long that eventually people leave because the call of God on their lives toward change is so strong that they can’t wait for enough people to die in order for the change God wants to be allowed to come.

In these verses God, through Isaiah, said to the people of God, “Forget about the former things. Stop living in the past.” The Lord went on to say, “Look, I am doing something new. Can’t you see it? If I were to show you what I am going to do you wouldn’t believe it.” God is in favour of change. God was going to do a new thing; a new thing so radical that if the people saw it they wouldn’t believe it was God doing it. A new thing, like worshipping in English so that the next generation could understand, so radical in 1961, such a no-brainer today. In our Jubilee year, a year when we spend a lot of time looking to our past, God, I believe, is saying to Grace Church, Look to the Future.

Our God is wanting to do something new in Grace Church. Newness and innovation is not limited to 50 years ago. God wants to do new stuff here, now. What was it that would have been unbelievably new to the people of Israel to whom Isaiah spoke? One of the things that would have been totally unbelievable to them would have been the notion that Gentiles could have a right relationship with God. To the Israelites they, the Hebrews, were God’s chosen people. They came to think that they were the only people whom God could love and the only people with whom God wanted a relationship. To them it was unbelievable that God would want a relationship with Englaenda, I mean Gentiles. That was the new thing that God was doing. He was about the work of redeeming all of humanity to Himself. He was providing a means by which all people, irrespective of race or nationality or the depth of sin in our lives could know and experience closeness with Him.

There are some things that God does the same way over and over again. He’s faithful and He keeps the covenant over and over again. He loves people over and over again despite our sin. He is a God of grace and mercy over and over again. God is committed to people coming into a relationship with Him by trusting in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour and that happens over and over again. But God is not committed to one program of worship or expression of worship or one language of worship over and over again. God does not speak only German, we learned in 1961. If we worship God in Spirit and in truth we can worship any way we want to. There’s more than one way to win people to Christ because we serve an infinitely creative God. God is always doing new things. The sad thing is that most of the places where God wants to do new things; we in the church tend to be committed to doing the same old things over and over again.

Why is God always doing new things? Why can’t He just leave well enough alone? Because our world, and our language and the prevailing thought patterns of our culture are always changing. Our world changes at an alarming rate. I remember when to be gay meant to be happy and nothing else. I remember when it was a big deal if someone travelled on an airplane. I can remember a time when there were no cell phones. Our world is changing at an alarming rate. We are continually living in a new world but the one thing that never changes in our world is God’s desire to have a relationship with all the people of the world. He has to do new things to be able to be known by the new world within which we are living. If we keep doing things the same old way this new world in which we live will be more and more distant from the living God. We must Look to the Future.

I believe God is saying to us, Grace Church, as we begin our second 50 years of existence as a church, the same thing He said to the people of Israel through the prophet Isaiah, the same thing He said to those very courageous Charter members. I believe that God has big things in store for Grace Church, things that if we were to see them, we wouldn’t believe them. The reason we wouldn’t believe them is because we’ve never done them here before. We have an infinitely creative God that is not limited by our tradition of how He can be worshipped. We have an infinitely creative God who is not limited by our tradition of how His message can be spread. I am convinced one of God’s words to Grace Church is, “I am doing a new thing.” Look to the future. Our God is about the business of doing something new. Look to the future.

Another word that God has for us, I believe, is taken from Isaiah 51:1 where God, through the prophet Isaiah, said to the people of Israel

¹“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness

and who seek the Lord:

Look to the rock from which you were cut

and to the quarry from which you were hewn;

Look to the Future is God’s call to us because He is doing new things. As we look to the future we need to Remember the Rock from which we were cut. Look to the Future; Remember the Rock. It’s a call to remember what it is we’re made of. It’s a call to remember who we are.

The call to remember who we are usually means that we’ve forgotten who we are. Because we’ve forgotten who we are it means we’re no longer living like who we really are. Because we’ve forgotten who we are, and we’re no longer living like who we are, we’ve been underachieving.

Who are we? We are Grace Church. Despite the background pictures for the PowerPoint this morning, this church is not a building, this church is the people who meet in the building. God says some interesting things about who we are as members of the Church of Jesus Christ. God says that we are saints, we are first born, most-favoured children of the almighty God called by Jesus Christ to be about the work of building the Kingdom of God. That is who we are.

Remember the Rock. Remember who we are. As Grace Church, we have forgotten who we are and because of that we have been underachieving. Look at the raw materials we have as a church. Look what we have at our disposal as a church and what we have been doing with those raw materials.

Reading. We have at our disposal literacy rates like few societies in the world. The vast majority of us if not all of us can read. In the English language we have more scholarship and writing and commentary about living the Christian life and understanding the Bible than any other language group in the entire world. The materials that English-speaking and reading Christians have at our disposal to aid us in growing in our Christian lives is unparalleled by any other language and culture of any time in history.

Yet having said that I hear it over and over again from pastors and church leaders that the rate of biblical illiteracy is increasing all the time. It’s like we live in grocery store but we’re dying of malnutrition. To excuse our lack of biblical knowledge I hear people claim that they are not readers. With all the love and empathy I can muster I say, Horse Feathers! We are so readers. We read hundreds, maybe thousands of words everyday. We read signs, menus, emails, letters, price tags and item descriptions, owner’s manuals and directions – well okay maybe men don’t read directions. My point is that we read a lot of words everyday. If you think you’re not a reader try and go through a whole day without reading anything. If you do that you will realize just how much you do in fact read. We read all this other stuff but we don’t read the most important book in our lives because I’m not a reader. We’ve been underachieving. Remember the Rock.

Prayer. There are hundreds of us here this morning and this weekend. If we were to have called a Grace Church Jubilee Prayer Meeting I suspect that we would have only 10% or less of the crowd at that prayer meeting than we have at this worship service. It’s thrilling that we’ve come to worship and to celebrate a 50^th anniversary but how come a worship service with regular human beings serving in it can draw hundreds but a prayer meeting featuring an opportunity to meet with Jesus Christ can’t draw flies? We’re underachieving. Remember the Rock.

Money. We have wealth that is the envy of most other cultures in the world. But in our wealth we have forgotten who we are. Remember the Rock. We have either been blessed by God with our wealth or we are being tested with wealth by our God. Randy Alcorn in one of his books says that more of God’s people fail the test of wealth than fail the test of poverty. My fear is that we are failing the test of wealth because we are not Remembering the Rock.

I don’t know the attitudes of the hearts of all of us but I know the attitude of my heart and I observe certain things in our church. I have spoken to longterm pastors and we’ve all observed the same thing: with startling regularity, when people in the church become more wealthy they become more self-centred and God get pushed to the fringes of their lives. God has given us this wealth to be used as He directs in the building of His Kingdom. But we’ve thought that this wealth is all for us. We’ve thought that as long as we drop a cheque in the offering plate regularly and sponsor other events we can use the rest of the money God has given to us to buy bigger and fancier homes, newer and snazzier cars and pickups, cottages, boats, campers and winter vacations – and if you go by our house you will see a fairly nice camper parked in our yard as well. I struggle with this as well.

We think that our wealth is ours because it’s in our bank accounts. We think that because we’ve bought off God by writing a cheque here or there that all the rest is ours. Well, as Christians, everything we have and are is God’s and He loans it to us to be used by us for the building of His Kingdom. Yes, we have to live but how extravagantly do we really need to live? I believe it was C. S. Lewis who once said, “If the amount I’m giving isn’t impacting my lifestyle, I’m not giving enough.” Unless there are some things that I would like to do but am not able to do because I have given too much money away for God’s use in building the Kingdom of God, unless that’s happening, I’m not giving enough, C.S. Lewis said. In the area of wealth and finances, we’ve forgotten who we are; we’re underachieving. Remember the Rock.

Music. Most of us are ethnic Mennonite people and one of the unique features of ethnic Mennonite people is that we have a huge and amazing musical heritage. For generations and generations we have been a people who have sung our faith. We translated hymns and gospel songs into the German language so that we could sing the great songs of the faith in German which was our mother tongue. We have produced musicians and writers and arrangers. So having said all that how could we possibly need to Remember the Rock when it comes to music. How could we possibly have been underachieving in the area of music?

In Grace Church music is the area where, right now, we are most divided over whether or not God is doing a new thing. This is the area of the church where right now we most want to hold onto the way it’s always been and we have not collectively blessed God to do a new thing. For some of us it was one thing to switch to a new spoken language for worship but the thought of switching to a new musical language is just asking too much. The former ways of praising God will always be there at our disposal but God has been doing a new thing. We have this huge musical heritage that we could have been using to grow God’s Kingdom. Instead, we’ve chosen to use our energy to fight over hymns or choruses, drums and guitars or piano and organ, praise and worship or four part. We have way underachieved in music and worship. Look to the Future; Remember the Rock. Remember who we are.

Grace Church Look to the Future. I believe that God is going to do something amazing in our world and we have the opportunity to be part of it. I don’t know what it is that God will do but I do know that whatever it is it will be different than what He has done until now. Look to the Future. Whatever God does it will have the same essence as everything else He has done because it’s cut from the same rock. It will still involve people coming into a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ. It will result in the same thing God has always wanted; people knowing and loving Him but it will be new. Remember the Rock.

I remember a story I once heard about Swiss watchmakers. In the 1950’s and 60’s and even into the 1970’s Switzerland provided the lion’s share of the world’s wristwatches. The Swiss had mastered the technology of producing high quality, mechanical watch movements. In 1962 (Wikipedia) a Swiss company developed the quartz crystal electronic watch movement. The inventors of the quartz crystal went to the Swiss watchmakers to sell them this new innovation in watch making. But Swiss watchmakers couldn’t Look to the Future. They assumed mechanical watches were the only way to keep time; that’s the way they’d always done it. Swiss watchmakers refused to buy the quartz crystal because they couldn’t see any other way to produce watches.

They also couldn’t Remember the Rock in their lives; they were watch makers. They were supposed to be dedicated to making the least expensive, most accurate time pieces possible. They were supposed to be about building better and cheaper watches but they thought they were supposed to protect a particular way of building watches; the way they had always done it to that point.

The inventors of the quartz movement went to Asia and at that time Asia was teeming with electronic innovators and the quartz crystal took off because quartz watches were cheaper, more accurate and required less maintenance. The market share that once belonged to the Swiss almost overnight shifted to Asia to the makers of electronic quartz watches. Today, Switzerland has only a small percentage of the world’s market of watch making and of the watches that they do sell, almost all of them contain electronic quartz movements. Swiss watchmakers didn’t look to the future they didn’t remember the rock. Because of that they lost their standing in the world and nobody except someone who has a good memory speaks of Swiss watches anymore.

As a church we have the opportunity to be at the forefront of what God is doing in our world. But in order for that to be the case we need to Look to the Future to the new things that God might be doing and we need to Remember the Rock, remember who we are. If we don’t Look to the Future, if we don’t Remember the Rock, like the Swiss watchmakers we will lose our place in this world. Look to the Future, Grace Church. Remember the Rock.

Who's Coming to Communion?

2011-09-18T07:41:00.004-06:00

Sermon Summary:

Paul wrote to the Corinthian church partly to correct some of their incorrect actions surrounding the Lord's Supper. He took them to task for being exclusive and elitist in their practice of the meal. To Paul any thought that humans were somehow more special than some of their brothers and sisters in Christ was an unthinkable position. He spoke about the need for Christians to beware of eating the meal in an unworthy manner lest they eat and drink judgment on themselves.

Questions for Reflection:

What is your earliest memory of Communion?
What does Communion mean to you?
After reading 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 what do you think it means to eat the meal in an unworthy manner? How might you avoid this in the future?
What comes to your mind when you think of God’s love and the fact that you can’t earn it? How does that affect you?
Who do you think should come to Communion?

Sermon: Who's Coming to Communion?

Who’s coming to Communion? What does that question sound like to you? I’ve heard from some of my pastor friends in the last while that their churches have been having discussions about who can and can’t take part in the Lord’s Supper. Some churches stipulate that only baptized believers are invited to take part in the Communion . As we prepare to eat the Communion meal together I want to think with you around the idea of who should come to Communion and who participates in the Lord’s Supper.

I talked to my colleagues here at Grace Church at least the ones who were around when I was thinking of this and asked them their first memories of Communion. There’s an interesting diversity among us as staff. For most of us as staff we grew up in a church situation where Communion was available only to those who were baptized. In my church background everyone who wasn’t baptized was actually asked to leave the sanctuary before the Communion meal would be served. I have very different memories of Communion from those who were allowed to stay and watch the meal even though they couldn’t take part. Their experience was different from those who were not only allowed to watch but were invited to eat and drink as children who had a relationship with Jesus.

If we’ve grown up in the church we have memories of Communion from an early time in our lives. What is your earliest memory of Communion?

If you’ve got your Bibles I would invite you to turn them to the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 11. 1 Corinthians 11 is probably the passage that has most shaped our understandings of Communion. This section of Scripture has shaped our theology more than the gospel stories of how Jesus began the Communion ordinance.

Judging by what Paul wrote it seems the Corinthian church was a group of people who spanned the economic spectrum from wealthy to poor. When the Corinthians celebrated Communion they seem to have paired Communion together with a feast of some sort. It seems as though this feast was a meal where everyone brought food with them and they ate together. The difference between this feast and our Mutual Munch is that they didn’t put out the food and let everyone eat whatever and as much of each as they wanted. It seems they only ate what they had brought. So poor families would eat their meager lunches and sit and watch as the wealthy people feasted and got drunk on their lavish spreads. As I understand it that’s the background to this section.

With that in mind it’s no wonder that 1 Corinthians 11:17 Paul said,

¹⁷In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good.

They were eating the Lord’s Supper in a way that was harming people instead of building them up. This meal that was supposed to encourage Christians and build them up in their faith was in fact discouraging some and making them feel like maybe this wasn’t a place where they belonged.

Paul then went on and wrote those well known words about the Lord’s Supper. He said, beginning in verse 23,

²³For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread,

²⁴and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.”

²⁵In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

²⁶For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Those are the words we usually speak in one way or another before we eat the Communion meal. Sometimes we’ll split it up and say the first part before the Bread and the second part before the cup. Sometimes, especially at SNG, where we usually go to a station to take the Communion meal we say those words all together and then we eat and drink in one event.

Then Paul went on to offer a caution. He said this beginning with verse 27

²⁷Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.

²⁸A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.

²⁹For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself.

I think I understand why the church in which I grew up asked all those who weren’t baptized to leave the sanctuary while the Lord’s Supper was being served. I think they didn’t want to be responsible for anyone eating and drinking judgment on themselves. They didn’t want anyone to eat the meal in an unworthy manner and what could be more unworthy than for a non-Christian to eat the meal. What could be more unworthy than for someone with unconfessed sin in their lives to eat the meal? I think it was those well-intentioned reasons that they asked those who weren’t baptized to leave while the others ate the Communion meal.

As I understand this section of Scripture Paul’s point is not if we are baptized or unbaptized when we come to the meal. Paul’s point isn’t even whether or not we are Christians at all when we come to the meal. I think Paul’s point is that the Corinthians all called themselves Christians and they were likely all baptized but they could eat and feast and enjoy God’s blessings while their brothers and sisters sat next to them or across the room from them and were hungry. They called themselves followers of Jesus Christ and disregarded the plight of people who were right beside them. In essence their actions seemed to say they were celebrating that God had blessed them and they seemed to assume that they were better Christians than their poor brothers and sisters sitting beside them who had less food.

I think Paul meant that we eat in an unworthy way when we think that we are really something and that God is lucky to have us instead of realizing that none of us could be at the Lord’s Table by our own merit. None of us is worthy to be here on our own. None of us can be here except by the grace of God. If God hadn’t reached out to us by the broken and bleeding body of Jesus Christ none of us would be here.

Paul was pointing out to the Corinthians that they were arrogant if they thought that they could sway God into loving and saving them because of their wealth or their inherent goodness. This table is set to remind us of God’s grace showered into the lives of people who were sinful and who had rejected God. That’s all of us.

This past summer I flew to Vancouver with my parents for a family celebration. For the trip home I had the window seat. I don’t usually like the window seat but it beats walking. As we left Vancouver and made our way east I marveled at the mountains. They were obviously majestic. They were so huge that the shadows they cast into the valleys brought night to the valleys long before it was night where we were. All the same though, as great as those mountains were they were below us.

Then we flew out over the prairies. The prairies have a majesty all their own but they don’t cast much of a shadow. I knew the prairies were lower in altitude than the mountains but it was hard to see the difference from the airplane. Every once in awhile I noticed river valleys cutting through the prairies and I knew those valleys were deep, at least when I’m on the ground and driving through them they are deep, but from the airplane they really didn’t look much different than the surrounding prairies. From an airplane at over 30 000 feet of altitude the mountains and the prairies and the river valleys didn’t look all that different. They were all way below where we were.

When God looks at human beings it must be kind of like when I look at mountains or prairie or river valleys from an airplane. There are some people who are “good” people - their lives are naturally more good than others. These are mountain people, the people we look at and say, “That person is so good. They’re way up there; so much more than me. God’s lucky to have him or her.” Then there are some people whom we see as “bad” people. These are deep river valley people. We wonder if God can even see someone so low. We wonder how God could possibly care about the deep river valley people when He could have mountain people. Then there are so many of us who are just “okay”. Not mountain people, not deep river valley people, just prairie people. Nothing special but there’s a lot of us and we stretch out as far as the eye can see. We’re okay, not special because we’re good or bad - kind of boring actually. We maybe wonder if God can see any one of us, sort of like it would be very hard to identify a specific person from an airplane.

When we think and say that we forget that from where God sits all of us whether we are mountain people or prairie people or river valley people are far below God and His standard of holiness. None of us, without Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, is able, on our own merit to come to this table. We’re here only because Jesus Christ suffered and died for us.

I’m not sure of the process by which it happened or if it’s always been this way but I like what our constitution says about the Lord’s Supper. Among other things it says, “We practice open communion by which we mean that an invitation is extended to all believers who have made a responsible decision for Christ, are at peace with God and fellow believers, who try to live a godly life, and who wish to express their faith in this manner.”

We invite all of you to this meal. If you know and believe that the only reason you can come is because of Jesus Christ and what He has done in our life, you are invited to come - whether you’ve been a mountain person, a prairie person, or a deep river valley person. If Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior we invite you to eat with us.

At Saturday Night Grace we ask that parents accompany their young children to the table. If you are in a relationship with Jesus Christ and are pursuing the life of a Christ follower and you want to eat this meal you are invited to do so.

Making Choices

2011-09-11T08:40:00.000-06:00

Sermon Summary:

In our society we value choices and the ability to make choices. However, we don't want anyone to hold us responsible for the choices we have made. This attitude has come with us to church.
In 2 Thessalonians we meet a church of people who made several choices. They chose to grow their faith and they chose to love one another with an increasing love.

Questions for Reflection:

Name the three most interesting choices you made today? What made them interesting?
Do you agree that we as a society demand more choices and refuse to be held accountable for our choices? Why or why not?
What is faith?
How does your definition of faith affect how you live your life? How do different definitions of faith work themselves out in our lives?
Has your faith been growing in the past while? How do you measure that?
Describe one instance where you chose to love someone who was difficult to love? What was that like?
How can you make choices that will help your faith to grow and your love to increase?

Sermon: Making Choices

I want you to think for a moment how many choices you make in a given day. Everything from do you hit Snooze or just get up in the morning through to whether or not these pajamas are fresh enough to sleep in one more night and the probably dozens if not hundreds of choices we make in between. Our society values choices and being able to make choices. If we in any way limit choices we quickly find out that we are infringing on someone’s freedoms.

I went to the Super Store this week and I checked how many choices we have available to us on several items that are found in every one of our homes. How many choices of milk are there at the Super Store? I’m not counting cream, or the flavored coffee whiteners that are in the dairy case, or the Soy Beverage options. Anyone want to guess how many milk choices there are? I counted 41 different choices of milk - 250ml, 500ml, 1 liter, 2 liter, 4 liter - Skim milk, 1%, 2%, 3.25%, Homo - Vanilla, French Vanilla, Strawberry, Chocolate, Dark Chocolate. There’s organic 1% and 2% milk. I was amazed. When I was a kid growing up on the farm, we had less choice in milk. It was essentially warm or cold depending on whether Dad had milked the cow in the evening or in the morning.

I moved from the milk cooler to one of the most basic products in our houses. It’s a product we all have but we’re embarrassed to talk about; in fact we try to give it more delicate and sophisticated sounding names. I’m talking about toilet paper or as the store labels the section - bathroom tissue. That new more sanitized name doesn’t help me at all, because I just translate ‘bathroom tissue’ into whatever slang comes into my depraved little brain. Anybody want to guess how many choices you can make in the bathroom tissue aisle at Super Store? 24. Can someone please explain to me why we need the choice between the double and single roll? Why do we need that? “I find I don’t use much paper and I like my paper fresh so I just buy the single roll, that way I’m always getting fresh paper.” I don’t know why there has to be two sizes of rolls. There’s a pretty big difference in price from one end of the aisle to the other. I understand how that works. The most expensive paper will be pillowy and soft and have pictures on the wrapper of kittens or clouds. The cheapest paper will have enough wood pulp left in it that we won’t be sure if we bought toilet paper or tooth picks on a roll. Why do we need three different sizes of sheets in bathroom tissue when all the sizes are within a centimeter of each other? As a society, in my lifetime, we have gone from a people who looked forward to the arrival of the new Eaton’s catalogue, because that meant the old one made it’s way out to the outhouse. We’ve gone from a people who looked forward to Christmas, partly, because Christmas oranges were wrapped in tissue paper. We’ve gone from that to 24 different choices of toilet paper, I’m sorry, bathroom tissue.

Finally, I went to the soup aisle. Care to guess how many choices there are in soup? Different flavors, different manufacturers, different package sizes or arrangements. Dehydrated or canned. I excluded all the Mr. Noodles type choices because I wasn’t sure if it was soup or pasta. Truth be told I wasn’t sure if it was food or styrofoam insulation. How many choices do you think there are in the soup aisle? Two Hundred and Eleven. Despite there being 211 choices in the soup aisle they still don’t have this one particular brand and flavor that I like. With 211 choices you would think I would be satisfied. No! I want that 212^th choice.

As a society, on the one hand, we have to have choices; we demand choices, the more choices the better. On the other hand as a society we are increasingly demanding that we not be held accountable for the choices we make.

We insist the bad choices we have made are not our fault. We have medicalized character traits, and moral choices so that it’s not our fault if we choose badly or if we are of low character; it’s our medical condition. We blame our families for our choices, either we had absent parents, or inferior parents who were present. We blame anything to avoid taking responsibility for our choices.

That attitude has infected most of us as Christians and we bring that attitude with us to church. We demand comprehensive and excellent choices of church programing to satisfy our needs which may in fact only be wants. We convince ourselves they’re needs because some other church has it and we need to have that too. However, because of the other choices we’ve made we insist we don’t have time to serve in the ministry of the church, which would allow the church to expand those choices and would help us develop our gifts. We like it that we can choose between a dozen or more churches in our city and we reserve the right to choose whichever one suits our fancy this year. No one is allowed to tell us that we can’t flit about from one to the other because we just go where we’re going to get fed. Erwin McManus once asked people who said they weren’t being fed at their former church what they were intending to do with all the food they were accumulating. He also asked them if they knew what happened to fat sheep who never exercise.

We demand the right to choose but we refuse to take responsibility for the choices we’ve made all of which has lead to our own spiritual dwarfism. The church in North America is chock full of spiritual dwarves when given the resources at our disposal it should be full of spiritual giants. Instead of taking responsibility for our condition we blame the church that we’re not growing in our faith. We may only have been there twice in the last three months but it’s the church’s fault I’m growing in my Christian life. We demand choices but we refuse to take responsibility for the choices we make.

In the next couple of months it is my plan to look together with us at a New Testament book that highlights choices the first readers of this book had made. Some of the choices were good ones and we’ll talk about some of those good choices today. Some of the choices they made were poor choices. If you have your Bibles with you I would invite you turn with me to the little New Testament book of 2 Thessalonians. You will find 2 Thessalonians just to the right of 1 Thessalonians and just to the left of 1 Timothy. Let’s begin reading at 2 Thessalonians chapter 1 verse 1.

¹Paul, Silas and Timothy,

To the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:

²Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is a fairly typical greeting from Paul to the recipients of his letters. He identified himself and who else was writing the letter with him. Like 1 Thessalonians Paul identified for the church that they were in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. He wanted them to know they were secure in Christ. This will be important later in 2 Thessalonians because some of the church people had come to believe that the 2^nd coming of Christ had already happened and they had been missed; God had forgotten them. Paul, right from the beginning assured them that they were in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Verse 3,

³We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing.

Paul confessed to the Thessalonians that every time he and Silas and Timothy prayed for them the first prayer that came to their minds when they thought of the Thessalonian church was a prayer of thanksgiving because of how good they were doing. Let’s just bring this home for a moment and ask this question, “What’s the first thing you think of when you go to pray for Grace Church?”

When I pray for Grace Church, I often give thanks for this church. However, those prayers of thanksgiving are usually not the first things I think to pray despite the fact we have a lot to be thankful for in Grace Church. I usually pray for unity, for truth and right relationships and for respect and kindness. Those things are the first things I think of when I pray for Grace Church.

Paul then described why it was that the most appropriate prayer that he and Silas and Timothy could pray for the Thessalonians was a prayer of thanksgiving. There were two things which rose to the top of the pile that made him and Silas and Timothy thankful whenever he prayed for the Thessalonians.

The first thing for which Paul was thankful was that their faith was growing more and more. In the Greek that phrase literally means their faith was growing exceedingly. Their faith was not inching along, three steps forward and two steps back. Their faith was leaping forward. They were bounding forward in their faith and Paul was thrilled to watch this happen. Because of the way their faith was growing the first prayer Paul thought to pray for the Thessalonians was a prayer of thanksgiving.

What does it mean if your faith is growing? What is faith? There have been times when I thought faith was the opposite of doubt. I used to think that if there was any doubt in my life about the things of God, my faith was weak. So I had to speak to others with complete confidence even when in my heart there was doubt. You see, if I doubted God wouldn’t answer my prayer. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that God knew every attitude of my heart and I wasn’t fooling Him for a moment and I was lying to my brothers and sisters in Christ. I don’t believe faith is the opposite of doubt anymore.

There was a time when I thought that faith was a collection of facts we needed to believe; a right theology. We sometimes speak about ‘the faith’ as a bunch of facts and truths Christians need to believe to be able to properly call themselves Christian. This means that if my theology is off in one little thing I’m less Christian or immature in my faith. That would mean the key to growing in my faith would be to know more facts about God. I don’t think I believe that. I agree we need to believe the right things about God but just memorizing facts from a theology textbook won’t necessarily lead to growing faith. Religion departments at universities are full of people who know lots of facts about God but have no faith.

I used to think faith was something I couldn’t really control and it was this sense of closeness with God. This type of faith, this closeness with God just seemed to happen or it seemed to disappear and I couldn’t do much about it. God was fickle that way. I heard guilt inducing trite sayings like, “If you don’t feel close to God, who moved?” I could practice bible reading and prayer but that was no guarantee that faith or closeness with God wouldn’t disappear. I’ve had large deserts in terms of my closeness with God, despite the fact that I was working hard at all the traditional methods of being close to God. What is the faith that was growing more and more in the Thessalonians?

In the last couple of years I’ve come to believe that most often when the Bible speaks about faith it is speaking about obeying God’s call on our lives. Biblical faith is walking unwaveringly in the direction God in which God has called us to live. Some of us may not like that because it sounds like a works salvation and we don’t want anything to do with earning our salvation. That’s not what I mean at all. A faith that grows like the Thessalonians’ faith begins by recognizing that Jesus died for our sins and believing him for forgiveness and a relationship with God. A faith that grows like the Thessalonians knows that salvation is purely an act of God’s grace in our lives. Unswervingly following God’s call on my life doesn’t undo any of those things. Instead, it gives evidence that those things have actually happened in my life.

What’s God’s call on our lives? We often think of God’s call on our lives in terms of big life-altering stuff like being a martyr or a missionary or something like that. God’s call on our lives is really just a bunch of little stuff we do every day no matter what the vocational call of God is on our lives.

God’s call is all over the pages of Scripture and we are called to walk in the direction of that call. It’s God’s call to love. It’s God’s call to speak the truth. It’s God’s call to work faithfully. It’s God’s call to be honest in business. It’s God’s call to care about justice. There are hundreds more calls of God on our lives.

The beauty of this understanding of faith is that I can have doubts and still have faith. I can have great doubts that God’s call on my life to love my enemies is a good idea when everything within me screams out at me to deck my enemies not love them with a self-sacrificing love. I can doubt it’s a good idea but I can continue to walk the path God has called me to walk.

I can doubt it’s a good idea to speak the truth in love which is God’s call to us but do it anyway. I can lovingly tell that friend that they are poisoning relationships with their actions or that their lack of respect for others is killing the credibility of Christians in the world or that their gossiping on Facebook is way out of line. I can doubt it’s a good idea because I’m pretty sure they won’t take it well and I’m going to lose a friend but I can continue to follow God’s call in my life. That’s faith.

I can believe the wrong things about God but still have faith; walking what God has called me to walk. When God corrects my incorrect belief I can adjust my walk. I can walk God’s call in my life even when I don’t feel close to Him. I don’t have to feel close to keep walking that walk; I just keep picking them up and putting them down according to God’s call on my life. I’ve spent years of my life doing that. I still build that relationship with God through prayer and bible reading and other disciplines but faith is walking God’s call on my life.

I believe that’s the faith Paul and Silas and Timothy saw in the Thessalonians and it was exploding in them and because it was exploding in them the first prayers they prayed for them every time they prayed were prayers of thanksgiving.

Does that concept of faith make sense to you? What do you see that’s wrong with what I’ve just said?

Not only was the Thessalonians faith growing more and more. The next part of the verse says that the love every one of them had for one another was increasing. Paul, Silas and Timothy could see that the Thessalonians’ faith was growing because the love every one of them had for one another was increasing. Growing faith produced increasing love within the Body of Christ.

How does that work? How can we increase love? How can we manufacture love? The word that is translated as love in this verse is the Greek word agape - which is a word that describes God’s love. Agape is a word that describes a love that sacrifices for the benefit of the person whom we love. The Thessalonians were increasingly sacrificing for one another. This kind love has nothing to do with the way in which the object of our love behaves toward us. This is the love Jesus said we’re to have for our enemies. The Bible says that God loved the world so much that no matter what we did He sacrificed His son for us so that we can have a relationship with Him. This is not a love that you feel your way into. This is a love that we choose to do or choose not to do. Every one of the Thessalonians was choosing to love and to sacrifice for everyone else in the church. Their love was increasing. This love was part of their faith, it was God’s call on their lives and they were choosing to walk God’s call on their lives and their faith was growing more and more.

Absolutely amazing. No wonder Paul said the first thing that came to mind to pray for the Thessalonians was Thanksgiving. I have never heard of a church anywhere where every one of the people loves everyone else in the church with an ever increasing love. It’s not happening here, but it was happening there.

We live in a society that has 24 choices in Toilet Paper, 41 choices in Milk and 211 choices in soup. For the life of us we can’t quite believe that we only get two choices in our faith; to believe and obey God’s call on our lives or to reject His call on our lives and that if we choose to obey God’s call on our lives our faith will grow and if we choose to reject His call on our lives our faith will wither. We think and our society has encouraged us to believe there must be a spectrum of choices between those two polar opposites. The Bible says no. That doesn’t stop most of us from trying to choose something in the middle, to mix and mash some sort of tailor made faith together that will be easy and still give us what we want out of life together with heaven after we die. Because we mash together a faith like that the North American church is full of spiritual dwarves where it should be full of spiritual giants. Because we as Christians try to mash together some sort of faith of our own making and because we don’t live God’s call on our lives every day, people in our society might still like Jesus - although that number is trending steadily downward - but our society really doesn’t like those who call themselves Christians - our approval rating is at an all-time low. People don’t like the church because Christians don’t obey God’s call on their lives.

We have an excuse for that. We say, “It’s so much harder to live in the 21^st century than it was in the first century.” Let’s look at verse 4,

⁴Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.

In 1 Thessalonians we read that the church was experiencing a measure of persecution. Between 1 & 2 Thessalonians that persecution has increased and intensified. Despite the increase in persecution the faith of the Thessalonians had exploded in growth and their love for one another was increasing. External circumstances only control if our faith will grow or shrivel if we allow them to do so. We have choices to make about whether or not our faith will grow or not and about whether our love for one another will increase. We make those choices dozens of times every day.

We make choices to grow or shrivel our faith when we decide what we text or Tweet or Facebook or say about someone in the coffee shop. We make choices to grow or shrivel our faith when we decide to pay our bills or not. We make choices to grow or shrivel our faith when we decide what kind of customer we are going to be. We make choices to grow or shrivel our faith when we decide if we will tell the truth or not.

In the last year or so I have become appalled at how much untruth there is in the church. We are so addicted to niceness and so we don’t love each other enough to lovingly tell each other the truth. So we have issues that fester and remain because we won’t deal with them because we won’t name them and we won’t tell the truth about them. We choose to believe Satan’s lie that untruth is more profitable and better in the long run than truth because it’s easier and more comfortable. We reject God’s call on our lives to speak the truth in love and we wonder why the church struggles with issues.

A year ago I heard a crusty businessman named Jack Welch who really didn’t make a profession of faith in Christ at all say that the number one priority of his leadership while he was CEO of General Electric was to have a culture of telling the truth; candor he called it. I was ashamed that a man who really didn’t make a profession of faith had a stronger commitment to telling the truth than the church of Jesus Christ. We make choices about whether or not our faith will grow when we decide to tell the truth or not.

It’s about making choices. We will choose to grow our faith or not by the choices we make. We will choose to increase our love for one another by the choices we make. External circumstances only control whether or not our faith grows if we let them. We make those choices in every little decision we make every day to follow God’s call on our lives.

One Last Thing

2011-07-31T07:57:00.001-06:00

Hello all: This will be the last message I will be posting here until September 11, 2011. Have a great summer vacation!

Sermon Summary:

We arrive at the final section of the book of Galatians. Within these verses the Apostle Paul indicated by his own handwriting that he was the author of this book. He pointed out to the Galatians 4 characteristics of the Judaizers that nullified their message for the Galatians. Two of these character traits are the main focus of this message - their use of force and their pride in being able to take credit for what the Galatians were doing. We conclude by hearing Paul's challenge to boast in the cross of Christ and only in the cross of Christ.

Questions for Reflection:

What has been the highlight of your summer to this point? What's the most interesting/unusual place to which you ever travelled during a vacation?
What are the most common ways you have observed that writers ensure their readers know that what they are about to read is important? What methods have you heard for ancient writers to use to ensure their readers know that what they are about to read is important?
With which group in the book of Galatians do you most readily identify? Paul? Galatians? Judaizers? How does the group your choose affect how you read and are changed by this book?
Describe one time when you observed the church or Christians using human force to accomplish God's work? What was the longer term benefit of that use of force?
How much is your pride a factor when choosing where to spend your time serving?
How have you heard "bang for your buck" used in ministry settings?
How do we measure effective ministry? What does effective ministry look like to you?

Sermon: One Last Thing

How has summer been treating all of you? I’m assuming from your silence that either your summer has gone really well or really poorly. I’m told that this weekend - August Long Weekend - is the most poorly attended church service of the year. That could either be discouraging for you in that you had nowhere to go and church was your only option. Or, it could be encouraging for you in that you are so committed to Christ and His church that long weekend or no long weekend, you’re here. It all depends on how you look at it.

One thing that’s been interesting about our summer this year is that a couple people have been to places where they have encountered things having to do with Herb - my name - and they have taken pictures and given them to me. I want to share some of my good fortune, my Herb pictures with you today. The first one comes from I believe, somewhere in Saskatchewan. It’s Fran’s House of Herbs. I know you’re all nervous at the thought of a house of herbs but I think the other Herbs and I are pretty sure that wouldn’t be all bad.

These next two pictures come from folks who were traveling in Wisconsin when they came upon the town of Herbster. Relax you’re in Herbster. I’m thinking with a name like that, Herbster must be a wonderful place. Wikipedia has a page on Herbster and it tells me that the population of Herbster is 104 - you could know everybody in town. Google Maps tells me that Herbster is right on the south shore of Lake Superior - water front property on the largest fresh water lake in the world. This next picture tells me that there’s a church in Herbster called Herbster Community Church. If I ever leave Grace Church, I’m thinking the Herbster Community Church might not be a bad fit. Those are just some of my summer highlights.

Do any of you remember the TV show called Columbo? The actor’s name who played Columbo was Peter Falk - I don’t think he was from the Mennonite Falks and I’m pretty sure he didn’t speak Low German. Incidentally, Peter Falk passed away just this past June. Columbo was a detective and no one took him seriously because he wore the rumpled rain coat and he looked so foolish. Columbo always seemed to be distracted by something and he asked seemingly silly and irrational questions. He would usually go through a scenario that seemed very silly and illogical to the rest of the cast except that the guilty person kind of began to squirm the further along he got. He always seemed to stop just short of an iron-clad solution. The criminal thought he or she had gotten away with it and Columbo would walk away several steps and then turn back and say, “just one more thing.” Then would come the clinching piece of evidence or some other bombshell would drop and the show would proceed to a conclusion. “Just one more thing.”

If you have your Bibles with you I would invite you to take them and turn to Galatians chapter 6. The section we want to look at today sounds a bit like Paul’s version of “just one more thing.” The difference is that unlike Peter Falk’s character Columbo, Paul didn’t introduce new evidence. What Paul did was circle back and re-emphasized what it was he’d previously said in the book of Galatians. Like the introduction to the book in which Paul told us what he was going to tell us; Paul’s conclusion tells us what he has told us. In the conclusion Paul told the Galatians the most important lesson he wanted them to get from the book.

Verse 11,

¹¹See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!

In ancient times when someone wished to write a letter they would often hire a scribe or a secretary to write for them. Some people chose this method because they were unable to write. That wouldn’t have been Paul’s reason for having chosen a scribe because scholars believe that Paul was highly educated and was undoubtedly able to read and write.

Some people when choosing to write a letter would use a scribe because their eyesight was so poor that they couldn’t see to write the letter themselves. Some scholars read the words of verse 11 where Paul speaks of writing in his own hand with large letters and they put that together with his words chapter 4:13-16 where Paul speaks of his illness and that the Galatians would have given their eyes to him and they conclude that Paul used a scribe here because he was going blind and that when Paul did write his own conclusion he used large letters so he could see them.

I don’t think that’s why Paul wrote with large letters. Many scholars believe the best way to understand 4:13-16 is that in ancient times a common phrase to describe the depth of commitment within their friendship was to say they would give their eyes for one another. Eyes were and still are a precious commodity.

There’s another explanation for why Paul wrote with large letters that I actually prefer. Some people when choosing to write a letter chose to use a scribe because scribes would be able to write more quickly and neatly and economically than the person themselves would be able to. Scribes could legibly cram more letters into a smaller space and use less writing materials which were very expensive in ancient times. Scribes would be able to write quickly as the person dictated. Then at the end of the letter the actual author would write in their own hand to authenticate that the letter was in fact from them.

Paul wrote with large letters for two reasons. One reason was that he couldn’t write as neatly in a small print as the scribe and by comparison his letters were large. The other reason Paul wrote in large type would be the same reason we use italics or bold print - to emphasize the importance of the point being made.

Paul wrote in large letters to assure the Galatian Christians that this letter was in fact from Paul himself and to emphasize that what he was about to write in the following verses was the most important thing to remember from the letter.

Verse 12,

¹²Those who want to make a good impression outwardly are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ.

¹³Not even those who are circumcised obey the law, yet they want you to be circumcised that they may boast about your flesh.

There are four things Paul mentioned in these two verses to remember about the Judaizers. He mentioned they used force to get the Galatians to comply with their wishes - “trying to compel you to be circumcised.” He said that the motivation for the actions of the Judaizers was fear of what might happen to the Judaizers themselves if the Galatians didn’t comply - “to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ.” Paul said that the Judaizers themselves didn’t obey the entire Law as they were trying to force the Galatians to do - “Not even those who are circumcised obey the Law.” Finally, Paul said that the goal of the Judaizers was that the could brag about what they had done and point to the Galatians as their prize - “that they may boast about your flesh.”

One of my fears when I preach from the epistles of Paul and particularly this book of Galatians is that I will choose to identify myself with the wrong people. In the book of Galatians I’m too ready to identify myself with Paul, the apostle and pastor who wrote to this group of churches to magnanimously, although strenuously, correct them for their errors. If I identify myself with Paul I become the expert who is trying to explain to these silly people how they have gone wrong and how they should listen to me instead. If I identify myself with Paul I miss the growth God wants for me.

Or if I identify myself with the Galatians themselves as the people who received the letter and who had been taken in by the false teachings of the Judaizers. If I identify myself with the Galatians too readily I can dismiss much of the book because I’ve never been tempted to believe what the Galatians chose to believe. I’ve never been tempted to insist on circumcision as the final indication of our commitment to Christ. I’ve never been tempted to associate only with people of my stripe of Christianity, despite some of our Mennonite tendencies in that area.

The people in the book with whom I find I need to identify myself in order for this book to be most helpful to me are the Judaizers. If I think of what the Judaizers were doing among the Galatians, it’s really not that hard to draw the parallel to what we as the church have done or have blessed that others have done with our support.

I want to pick up on two of those faults that Paul found with the Judaizers - the ones with whom I believe we need to identify ourselves with in order for this book to be most effective in teaching us. We’re guilty of all four faults as a church but I only want to take the time to look at two today.

The first fault that I want to look at is the use of force to accomplish what we believe God wants to do in someone’s life. As Mennonites we think that we would never use force for anything because we’re pacifists and we don’t do that. We may or may not use physical force but we are quite adept at emotional or mental force. We use wonderful motivators like shame. We have said, “If you continue in this it will paint your entire family in a bad light.” Or, “What will people think when they find out what you’re doing.” Force. We use it all the time.

Have you ever been at an evangelistic meeting when the altar call is given. There’s nothing wrong with giving a clear presentation of the gospel and giving an invitation to respond. That’s an excellent thing to do. People should hear the gospel and should be given a chance to respond. Have you ever been at an evangelistic gathering where few if any people responded to the invitation when it was given? In my experience it’s rare for an evangelist to give the invitation and if few or no people respond to simply close the meeting in prayer. Most often, when I’ve seen it that few people respond a form of panic sets in with the evangelist or pastor that maybe no one will respond. Surely someone has to be here who should respond so they ratchet up the force. If you won’t respond to a polite invitation we’ll play to your emotions and your fears - “if you were to die tonight why should God let you into His heaven?” It’s force; it’s manipulating people to get them to do what we want them to do and what we have convinced ourselves God wants them to do.

Protest marches happen because we are not getting the results that we believe we should be getting and that we believe God wants and so we apply the force of public embarrassment and a show of numbers to force something to happen. It’s force to manipulate people to ensure what we want happens. We can usually find some justification in the Word of God to support our use of force.

For the life of me I cannot figure out why Christian, church publications have a Letters to the Editor section. If I disagree with something you have written, by the principles of Jesus in Matthew chapter 18, my first reaction should be to seek you out and speak or write to you directly. If I feel strongly enough about it and we can’t come to an agreement I should broaden the circle and invite others to join the conversation. If all of that fails, then and only then, do I have the freedom to, in the words of Jesus, “tell it to the church”. In a Letter to the Editor I apply force to the writer of the article I didn’t enjoy. If it’s dialogue I want pick up the phone and call, or ask for their email or their mailing address and write to them directly. Letters to the Editor are about force not about dialogue. If I care about the MCC store I should talk to the people who are elected to give leadership to the MCC store. The Winkler Times is not the leadership body of the MCC store. Letters to the Editor are about force not about caring.

When we apply force, it reveals the Judaizer that lives in all of us. Someone has to do something because we have determined it’s the right thing to do. What really gets me is when we ask God to become a Judaizer as well.

I remember one time being in a prayer meeting with a group of pastors and we were sharing about concerns for a certain person in our community. As we prayed for this person one pastor prayed that God would make that person completely miserable until they surrendered their life to Him. I read the Old Testament prophets and I know that God has exerted force on people many times throughout history but to ask God to inflict misery so that someone will come to Him seems somehow wrong. I would rather think that it might be better to ask God to overwhelm the person with His love and mercy and win them over to Himself.

The use of force comes from the conviction that we know what God wants and when God wants it. Maybe we’ve even convinced ourselves that if we leave something up to God it might very well never get done. If we rely on God to do it He might choose not to do it. We can’t have that so we apply force. God’s work cannot be done by human force. When we are faithful and we pray God applies His divine force and His work is done.

I’m not arguing against using human force in any and all circumstances. There are times when human force needs to be applied. Parents and children there is an appropriate use of force. Police and law breakers there is an appropriate use of force. Teachers and students, employers and employees there are appropriate uses of force. I’m speaking about is the use of force when we’re attempting to do God’s work. God’s work can’t be done using human force. God’s work is so much greater than we as humans that any use of human force pushes God out of it.

We have to believe that God wants to have a relationship with all people more than we do. We have to believe that He is able to invite any person and draw any person to Himself and dare I even say it, seduce any person to Himself in a much better way that we might be able to force them into a relationship with God. We don’t save anyone; Jesus does. When we use force we demonstrate that we don’t believe Jesus alone won’t get it done and we become just like the Judaizers.

The second thing I want to talk about regarding the Judaizers is the motivations for their actions. Paul said at the end of verse 13 that they were motivated so “that they may boast about your flesh.”

We have an incredibly strong “bang for your buck” mentality when it comes to ministry in the North American church. We want to support ministries that are demonstrating effectiveness in ministry. We say that’s good stewardship of God’s money. The way that we have chosen to measure effectiveness and “bang for your buck” is by the use of numbers.

The pressure is on for ministries to be able to report numbers that will keep Christians satisfied with the “bang for their buck” their contributions are making, which will continue the flow of support. One of the ways we as a church measure the church’s support for the decisions we’ve made is by our giving to the budget and our attendance at church events.

We in the church love ministries that report big numbers and we love to be associated with those ministries who report big numbers because it makes us feel effective and important and that we’re involved in something bigger than us. We are often told it’s not about the numbers just before numbers are quoted to us. It’s not about the numbers but here are our numbers. If I remember correctly King David got in trouble when he looked for numbers where God said he had no business knowing the numbers.

Do you know how hard it is to raise support for missionaries who are called by God to parts of the world where it takes years of relationship building before one person will come to Christ? Not much bang for your buck in those places. Not a lot of real sexy stories you can regale your friends your church with as you try to raise support. Just a lot of faithfulness and obedience and diligence and sweat and tears.

Do you know how hard it is for pastors whose churches are declining in numbers to justify why they should stay in their role? It’s easy when things are going well to modestly say that God is granting the increase while in your heart you’re saying that you’re pretty good and that you’re a pretty major cog in this wheel. But when the numbers turn, it must be because I’ve lost it, I’m not obedient enough, I’m not dedicated enough; it can’t be because God has this in mind for His church.

So we have evangelists who because they need to show “bang for the buck” force people in their invitations. We have church paper editors who can’t resist the juicy story because it will produce many Letters to the Editor which in turn means that they’ve been effective. We have Christian organizations who organize protest marches because prayer just doesn’t seem to work the way we want it to and we want to be able to boast that we were a force that changed the world. We have missionaries and pastors who inflate numbers so that they can boast in what God has used them to do. I must build my legacy that can be boasted of because it’s not enough to just boast about the cross of Christ and to live a life surrendered to God. I have to have more. I have to have numbers that support my legacy.

You see, I need to identify with the Judaizers and the correction Paul offered them in this book if I’m going to be molded by God into the man He wants me to be.

One last verse from this section and with this I’ll close. Verse 14,

¹⁴May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

The one thing in which I can boast is the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross which is foolishness to the world but life to us who believe. The cross which symbolizes the great love of our God for a world and a people that turned their back on Him. The cross where God paid it all so that I can have a relationship with Him. The cross which is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe - not force applied by me or any other speaker. The cross, now that is worth boasting about.

Life in the Spirit

2011-07-07T13:42:00.002-06:00

Hey all,
Sorry it took so long to get this posted. Truth be told I forgot about it until today.

Herb

Sermon Summary:

Are we more controlled by the various laws under which we live or by the Holy Spirit? Paul challenged the Galatians to yield to the Spirit rather than to the traditions of Judaism which they were being taught by the Judaizers. He listed the qualities of the Sinful Nature as well as the Fruit of the Spirit. He concluded the section with a challenge to not become conceited in our faith.

Questions for Reflection:

What's you score on the quiz? Which question did you answer which way?
How do you feel about the Law being part of the sinful nature? How does that make you feel about following the Law rather than the Spirit at points in your life?
How does the time you spend with attitudes of the sinful nature compare with the time you spend exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit? What does that tell you about yourself? When you pray do you and God talk about this?
Are you in danger of becoming conceited because you are further along than some other people you know?

Sermon: Life in the Spirit

Paul’s main point in the book of Galatians is to point up the difference between living under the direction of the Law and living under the direction of the Holy Spirit. As I’ve worked through this series and as I’ve read the commentary I’ve been reading on Galatians I’ve been led to wonder how much of my life is directed by a law of some sort and how much is directed by the Spirit. The writer of the commentary said that he knows of only one person since the Apostle Paul who believed and lived out in his life that reliance on the Holy Spirit was the only thing a believer needed to live a moral and upright life before God. I thought that maybe I could be the second person he would ever know. I could write him an email or letter and educate him. Before I began to look for his email address I thought I should maybe do a little quiz of my life to determine if in fact I was living by the Spirit or by some other law.

Here’s my quiz. I’d invite you to take the quiz with me and keep score. You won’t need a pen and paper for this quiz, it’s only got four questions. You can use one hand to keep track of the Law side and the other hand to keep track of the Spirit side.

Question #1: You are in the Wal-mart and you see a small item that you think is really nice. It’s a frivolous little thing and the price seems too much to spend for something that frivolous. The item is small enough that if you pick it up to look at it you could easily close your hand around it, fake putting it back on the shelf and slip it in your pocket. I know that none of you would do that. Question number 1 is: Why would you not do that? Is it because of the laws in our country against shoplifting and what might happen if you got caught? Or, is it because of the direction of the Spirit of God in your life? What’s the first motivator to keep you from stealing?

Question #2. This question assumes that you have a valid driver’s license. You are driving down the highway and you are about five minutes late for an appointment in Winnipeg. You know that if you were to drive at 130 km/h you could get to your appointment on time, maybe even a bit early. Again, assuming that you decide not to drive 130 km/h, the question is why not? What keeps you from driving 130 km/h, the high cost of speeding tickets which in this case in Manitoba would be $431.75 or is it the Spirit of God directing you? What I’m after here again is the first reason that led to your decision.

Question #3. This question takes us back to school, whether school was last week for many of us or last century, like it was for me. You are writing a test in school. You come to a question where you are a little unsure of the answer. As you are puzzling over the answer you happen to glance to your right and you notice that your neighbor has been quite sloppy in placing guards around his test paper. This neighbor is also about to finish the page on which the question you’re struggling with is written. Again, assuming you decide to do the honest thing and not cheat on your test why do you do that? Is it a fear of the trouble you would get into if you were caught or is it because the Spirit of God directed you? I’m not after the root cause of your decision, what’s the primary motivator?

Final Question. At the Fall Membership meeting of Grace Church the Deacon Board brings to the congregation for discussion a request by a baptism candidate to be baptized by immersion. On what basis would you, assuming you were at the Membership meeting, make your decision? Would you ask that the constitution be read and based on what our constitution, or the Law of our church says, make your decision? Would you wait to see what the majority of the people in the discussion say and base your decision on which way the wind is blowing - which is the Law of the Mob? Would you, in the quietness of your spirit pray and seek direction from the Spirit of God and allow Him to direct your response?

Now, it’s answer time. Everyone who answered all four questions by saying they would be directed in every situation by the Spirit of God, I want you to raise your hand. Everyone who answered all four questions by saying that they would would be directed by the Law in all four situations raise your hand. Everyone who had a mixture of Law and Spirit raise your hand. I’m probably three or four out of four Law. The only one that is a bit of a mix is the question of baptism in church. I’d probably consult the constitution to see what we’re up against before answering the question. So I’m probably at least 3 ½ Law in my answers. I didn’t bother looking for the commentary writer’s address to write him. What’s that say about my Christian life?

If you have your Bibles with you this morning I would invite you to join me in the book of Galatians chapter 5. In verse 16 of Galatians 5 Paul said,

¹⁶So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

For Paul this question is way more black and white than it would be for me. Paul simply says, “If we live our lives directed by the Holy Spirit, we will not, guaranteed, give into the sinful desires of our sinful nature. Guaranteed.”

If that were me I’d list a bunch of qualifiers and make allowances because I know I can never live completely directed by the Holy Spirit - the quiz proved that. From the conversations I’ve had with people across the age spectrum of our church, I believe that never changes no matter how old you get or no matter how young you are. Children are born in sin and they exercise that rebellious nature from an extremely early age. I’ve visited with godly people on their death bed in old age still struggling with questions of forgiveness and bitterness and anger. I would argue that we can’t live completely under the direction of the Holy Spirit. We’re too human. As Martin Luther said, “Even in baptism the old Adam is a powerfully good swimmer.”

Paul says that if we do live by the Spirit, we will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. Jesus agrees with Paul. Jesus said, “You cannot serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other or you will love the one and hate the other.” That doesn’t stop us from trying. We try to walk the line of living by our own moral compass and the law of the land and good business sense and a bit of the guidance of the Holy Spirit mixed in for good measure. We try to mix it all up and live by that hybrid. But by the starkness of Paul’s comparison it seems to me that anything that’s not of the Spirit or the leading of the Spirit, is of the sinful nature. We want that third option but there is no third option. It’s either Spirit or sinful nature, there is no third option.

Verse 17,

¹⁷For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.

There is a great battle that we as believers who take our faith seriously will wage for the rest of our lives. It’s the battle between being controlled by the Holy Spirit or being controlled by our sinful nature. Those two forces that battle within us struggle to lead us closer to or further away from our relationship with God.

Paul talked about a similar concept in the book of Romans chapter 7 verse 19 where he said,

¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

For many years the Winkler and District Ministerial Association has wrapped up its year of meetings by inviting pastors to meet on the golf course for a round of golf. This is a very entertaining time. We enjoy being out there. Many of us the only time all year that we golf is during that outing. After my first year out with the guys I thought to myself that what the event needed was a trophy presentation. What self-respecting tournament doesn’t have a trophy presentation? This being a group of pastors who meet to golf the presentation would need to have a sort of biblical and theological slant to it. Then I thought of this verse. “For the good I want to do I do not keep on doing; no, the evil I do not want to do this I keep on doing.” That about sums up 15 pastors on a golf course.

We’ve had some memorable winners. One year a pastor hit his ball over the water hazard on the 9^th hole, over the green and over the boulevard. It bounced off the street narrowly missed a car in the parking lot and came to rest in the hedge of the apartment building across the street. One year each of four golfers hit their ball directly into the water on the 9^th hole. One after the other, like Lemmings off a cliff. One year a pastor hit the cart shed with his tee shot on hole number one. He did this with 15 pastors laughing and praying for him at the same time. One year a pastor hit a tree about the size of my thumb and the ball ended up behind him. One year, before we gave the award, a pastor landed his approach shot on hole number 18 on the roof of the clubhouse. This year’s winner fouled a chip shot off his ankle onto the green. It’s amazing what can all go wrong when you put a golf club in a pastor’s hand. There are things we pastors have done on the golf course that Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy have never dreamed of, even in their worst nightmares. Just to clarify, by the grace of God, I have never won this award; not that I would not be a deserving recipient.

To me golf illustrates the great battle that wages within each one of us. I have the best of intentions when I line up a golf shot. Very rarely do I say, “Well I’ll just flail away and see what happens.” Usually I have a plan but with shocking regularity I’ll swing the club, hit the ball and watch in complete horror and disbelief at what happens. How could that have happened? I meant to do this other thing that would have been good. Occasionally, because even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time, something goes exactly right when I swing my club at the ball. That’s part of the attraction of golf - the mystery. I have no idea what’s going to happen.

It’s the same way in our spiritual lives. We intend to have the right outcome. We might even have convinced ourselves that we are following the Spirit by our actions. But what happens is we think it’s okay to try to take a short cut thinking that if everything goes just right this will be better and it will make it easier down the road. We don’t quite listen to the Spirit, we don’t really do what God calls us to do. When it all goes wrong on us, then we pray and we plead that God should make it right and fix this mess we’ve made. If we didn’t consult God going into this mess, or we ignored the direction of the Holy Spirit in our lives, how obligated is God really to fix our mess? Not that much but startlingly because He is a God of grace He fixes our messes way more often than we deserve.

The great conflict is within us is to follow the sinful nature or the Spirit of God that lives within every believer. Our actions show who it is we are following.

In verse 18 Paul said,

¹⁸But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.

The first word of verse 18 is very important. It introduces a contrast to the previous verses. In contrast to the battle that wages within each one of us, if we are led by the Spirit we are not under the Law. The words ‘led’ and ‘under’ are corresponding words. To be “under” someone or something, in the sense the word is being used here, means to be subject to them or to be directed and governed by them. Paul is saying that either the Galatians are led by the Spirit or they are led by the Law. Paul connected the Law to the Sinful Nature which battles against the Spirit.

What that tells me is that the Galatians were being taught, by the Judaizers, that the Law was a product of the Spirit and that if they really were subject to the Spirit they would keep the Law. Paul is contrasting the two -the Spirit and the Law. Either we are led by the Spirit or we are under the Law and subject to the sinful nature.

That seems a bit extreme to people like me who so often will follow a Law when making life decisions. I believe that is what Paul is saying.

Beginning with verse 19 Paul listed the acts of the sinful nature that were most pertinent to the Galatians. This is not an exhaustive list. It’s a list that seemed most appropriate for the Galatians to know about. Verse 19

¹⁹The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery;

²⁰idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions

²¹and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

That’s quite the list isn’t it? Fifteen things that are signs of the sinful nature at work in our lives. Let’s just take a few seconds to read that list again to ourselves. As you read, just check off in your mind how many you’ve been guilty of this past week. To those of us who take our Christian walk seriously and who actually thought about this exercise and didn’t dismiss it as a silly exercise, those were just a very sobering few seconds, weren’t they? If we were to be honest before God we can all say, by that list, we have lived by the sinful nature at points this past week.

It’s good news for us if those times when we lived by the things of this list were moments or hours of our lives this past week. I don’t mean to excuse or minimize those times we were there with those attitudes and actions in our lives; they’re sinful and we need to confess and repent of that sin in our lives. I’m going to say that we probably didn’t spend the majority of our time demonstrating these attitudes this past week. Maybe you did. If you did, you already know you’ve had a tough week and you know the hold that sin has on your life. If this list is you, I want to tell you that God wants to talk to you about that sin in your life. He doesn’t want to berate you or mock you nor does He want to pretend it’s not serious. If you want to change the trajectory of your weeks and of your life, away from this to something that honors God, I want you to know that He wants the same thing for you more badly than you do and He stands willing and ready to help you. This list of sin is a problem that comes to us no matter what age we are. We never outgrow the sinful nature and its attempts to ensnare us.

I’m going to hope that most of us didn’t spend the majority of our time in these attitudes. But I hope we’re bothered by how much time we did spend there. Paul said that those whose lives can be described by those verses will not inherit the Kingdom of God. We are not of the same Kingdom as God if these are the predominant characteristics of our lives; no matter how many good causes we support or how many Sundays we spend in church or how often we read our bibles. If these are the predominant attitudes of our heart, we are not of the Kingdom of God. Those are not my words and they’re not me being judgmental; those are the words of Scripture speaking God’s truth to those of us who will hear.

Verse 22,

²²But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,

²³gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

Same exercise here folks. Let’s just take a few seconds to read that list again to ourselves. As we read, just check off in our minds how much of our lives this week have been characterized by these attributes. Those times in our lives this past week that were characterized by these attributes those were times when we were living by the Spirit.

I think it’s important to note that Paul calls these the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus said that the fruit of a person’s life determines what kind of life it is. He said, “By their fruit you will recognize them” (Mtt. 7:16). If the fruit of our lives is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control our lives are led by the Spirit. If the fruit of our lives is envy and hatred and jealousy and fits of rage we are led by the sinful nature.

I look around at people in our city and in our church. After 11 years here I know some of us and I know some of the people of our city. I see people who are grumpy and difficult and they make me sad. I’m not sad just because of the disposition of their lives; I’m sad because they infect those around them. It’s my observation that it’s very unusual for consistently pessimistic parents to raise optimistic children. It’s unusual for an envious and divisive boss to have joyful and unified employees. It’s unusual for people who are given to dissensions and factions to be a united and unifying part of any place where they find themselves - whether that’s church, family or workplace.

Verse 24 Paul finished this section when he said,

²⁴Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.

²⁵Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.

²⁶Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

Just briefly to bring this to a close. Paul wanted to make sure the Galatians didn’t miss his point. His point is that as Christians our call is the live by the Spirit. Living by the Spirit, in my experience, is not a one time decision. It’s more like bidding on something at an auction sale. It’s unusual to be able to buy something at an auction sale with one bid. Usually we bid and we have to decide to bid again and again. With each bid it costs us more and more.

Living by the Spirit is a series of decisions that we make every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of the rest of our lives. With each decision to follow the Spirit there is a cost. There is no magic formula to living by the Spirit - no three easy steps that we can have done by Tuesday morning before we move on to the next challenge.

The Christian life is hard work and when we represent it as anything other than hard work we misrepresent the life to which God calls us and we lie to those who hear us. How could a life that was made available to us by Jesus Christ at such extreme cost and as a result of such strong resolve and such herculean effort on His part suddenly be magically easy for us. If this life was hard for God to live when He was human, it will be hard for us as well. The Christian life comes to us without a price tag but it costs us our lives. Living by the Spirit is doggedly day after day deciding to be controlled by the Spirit and deciding to honor God with our lives. It will cost.

Verse 26 is a wonderful caution for those of us who might be further along the road than some of our brothers and sisters. Let us not become conceited and think we are better or more important or more loved by God than those who might not be where we are. When we become conceited about our spiritual position we will begin to produce the acts of the sinful nature; provoking and envying.

Choosing to live by the Spirit cannot be done in a split second decision. It can’t be done this week. It’s a matter of picking them and putting them down and just step by step following Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives and submitting our wills to the will of the Holy Spirit who lives within us. It’s an every day for the rest of our life task.

Experiences Matter to Our Faith

2011-06-26T07:11:00.000-06:00

Sermon Summary:

Paul continued to argue with the Galatians regarding their having abandoned Jesus Christ in favor of returning to the practices of Judaism. In this passage Paul argues with the Galatians from their own experiences with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Paul helps to validate experience as a valuable tool to help us grow in our faith.

Questions for Reflection:

What have you learned about the value of experience and emotion in our Christian walk? What was the reason you received for the evaluation of experience in emotion?
How much of your life is dictated by reason and logic compared to being based on experience or the testimony of an authority?
Describe your most dramatic experience with the Holy Spirit. How has that experience shaped your faith?
What experiences do you look to as significant building blocks in your faith?

Sermon: Experiences Matter to Our Faith

Bob was a straightforward kind of guy. He was no frills, with not much emotion in his decision-making processes. He preferred logic and fact to opinion. This was Bob’s preference in both his personal life as well as in his life as a Christian. Bob had once heard and had come to believe quite strongly that emotion and experience in his Christian life were unreliable and could harm him and lead him into error. So Bob had come to mistrust emotional displays during worship. He had come to distrust preachers who showed emotion about what they talked about. He had come to distrust speakers and authors who relied on experience and stories more than logic and verifiable fact to support their arguments.

It’s not that Bob wasn’t led by the Spirit or uninvolved with Christian work that involved emotion and experience. He had been part of significant mission trips and evangelistic efforts as part of his ministry with his church. He had been there and had prayed for and counseled people who had responded to an invitation to receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. He had been there and together with church family and the elders of the church had prayed for someone to be healed and they had been healed. Despite all of that, Bob preferred logic.

It happened one day that Bob met someone who had a different theology from his. This person had received the gift of speaking in tongues. This fellow described his gift to Bob. He quoted Scriptures from the book of Acts and he began to put together a case that all true Christians received a second blessing in the form of the Holy Spirit from God and the sign that a Christian was Spirit-filled was the gift of speaking in tongues. Bob had ample experiences to draw on which would show that he was in fact Spirit-filled but he distrusted those experiences and wouldn’t share them. In his mind, his experiences were just that, experiences, and because they were only experiences they were less trustworthy in Bob’s mind than the logic of Scripture which his new friend freely quoted for him.

Bob began to agree with his new friend that he might not be a real Christian because he had never spoken in tongues. So one day he and his new friend prayed for an extended period of time that Bob would receive the gift of tongues, so that, in Bob’s mind, he could be a real Christian. They prayed and prayed. Bob wanted the gift so badly he began to make up gibberish syllables and speak them out loud in some ecstatic fashion so that his new friend would agree and allow that Bob was, in fact, a real Christian.

If you have your Bibles with you today I would invite you to turn with me to the book of Galatians chapter 3. A number of weeks ago we began a bit of a tour through the book of Galatians. The first week we were in Galatians we looked at the introductory words that Paul wrote to this collection of churches in the region of Galatia. In the introduction Paul emphasized his authority as an apostle. He emphasized his apostle-ness in such a way that the Galatians were to understand that they were not receiving a letter from a friend - they were to believe they were hearing from God Himself. Paul went on to say that the Galatians had believed a different gospel. His argument was that either Jesus is enough by Himself for us to gain a relationship with God or He is not. Nothing can be added to the gospel which Paul preached; as soon as something is added to the gospel it becomes a different gospel. If Jesus wasn’t enough then the Judaizers were right.

The second time we looked into Galatians we talked about the Rule Books by which we all live. We say we are saved by faith in Jesus Christ alone but we always seem to add rules to that gospel. For Peter and the Judaizers the Rule Book was the Law of Moses and the social customs of Judaism, like not eating with people who were Gentiles. We all have a Rule Book and that’s not all bad - holiness matters. But when we take our human Rule Book and use it to determine whether or not a person is part of the Kingdom or not our Rule Book has become our gospel; it’s become our Scripture and it’s replaced Jesus.

We talked about the freedom that comes with living our lives consistently - consistently obedient to the Holy Spirit. If we choose to live by only one pattern or code of behavior we will become legalistic and inflexible. We may call it consistency but it can easily become legalism particularly when we expect everyone else to live by our code. If we choose to live consistently in obedience to the Holy Spirit, the Word of God and the Son of God we may change our patterns of behavior as we move through life and as the Spirit moves us to new places of service and ministry but we will enjoy a freedom from the legalism of our Rule Book and live in the freedom which the Spirit of God gives.

In Galatians chapter 3 Paul continued to argue with the Galatians against the Judaizers. Beginning with verse 1 Paul wrote,

¹You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.

What Paul began to do in verse one of chapter three was he began to argue with the Galatians, not with logic or even from the Scripture, he began to argue from the experience of the Galatians. What I often heard in my younger years and in my years in college was that experience was at best an untrustworthy basis on which to build my faith. Book people will tell you that if it’s not found in a book it’s not reliable. I heard of and observed people who had experiences that led them into error and all sorts of pain. Some people believed that if something felt right it must be right and had thrown away marriages and all sorts of valuable things in their lives because they allowed those experiences to guide them.

We tend to minimize personal experience in our Christian lives. We don’t quite trust that experience won’t lead us astray. The one exception seems to be on Baptism and Membership Transfer weekends. Then we are tremendously blessed and encouraged by hearing the experiences of those who are being baptized or transferring their membership to our church. We love hearing of their experiences as they confirm and as they strengthen our faith.

The curious thing is that in the rest of our lives we are usually not that persuaded by logic. In the rest of our lives we trust experience almost more than anything else. A world famous logician once said, “You will discover, in real life, that people change their views, not as a result of logical reasoning, but as a result of arguments from authorities or as a result of appeals to experience” (NIVAC - Galatians p. 147). What that logician was saying was that in our lives most often we are persuaded not by pure logic but by some recognized authority who will tell us something. That authority could be a parent, a teacher, a pastor, a friend or an authority we don’t know - “if Billy Graham says that it must be true.” Or we are persuaded by personal experience and I would add the personal experience of some other person. TV advertising rarely appeals to logic - they appeal to personal experience. To get us to buy their detergent they will quote a normal suburban mom whose son ground in grass and dirt stains into the knees of his new pants and this detergent did the impossible, it got them clean. Well, if that detergent can get those pants clean maybe it can get our little Jimmy’s pants clean as well. Or the commercial will show a pickup truck towing an impossible load up a hill past a semi-truck and then leaping a tall building before it crests the hill. In the rest of our lives those two things - authorities or personal experience - will convince us much more frequently than logic.

Then we come to our faith and we expect that logic should be enough. I’m not suggesting that our faith is illogical; it’s not. I think, in the church, we’ve come to discount personal experience too freely. Paul didn’t quote personal experience often but he did on this occasion in this passage from Galatians.

Paul said the Galatians were foolish. That word means they were without knowledge. Because of that lack of knowledge they made a bad choice. He went on to ask who had bewitched them. I’ve heard that at one time there was a show on television that was called Bewitched. Did any of you watch it? I know it’s going a long way back, before the world was in color, to the 60’s and 70’s. Does anyone remember Bewitched. The research I did told me that a mortal man married a witch. Of course since this was the older era of television this witch was good and loving. But at times she and her family would manipulate the world and cast spells on her husband which would lead him to do strange and usual things that he was powerless to change until she could be convinced to undo the spell. That’s the sort of thing Paul talked about here to the Galatians. Who had put them under a spell so that they could no longer see what, at one time, had been so very clear to them.

Paul had clearly and plainly shown the Galatians who Jesus was. He had portrayed Jesus as crucified and risen from the dead. He had clearly shown how they could come into a relationship with God through trusting Christ to forgive their sin. They had come into that relationship with God. They had experienced the Holy Spirit in their lives. The Judaizers had presented a different version of who Jesus was and Paul argued with them about which portrayal was more accurate.

Beginning with verse two Paul asked questions about the Galatians’ experience in their faith. Verse 2 says this,

²I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?

Paul did not argue from abstract theology which the people wouldn’t know. Paul was a theologian and he would argue the theology at other points but at this point Paul simply wanted to know, “How did your faith experience with the Holy Spirit start? Think through your testimony. How did it happen? Did you begin to observe the Laws of Moses one day after which the Holy Spirit came to you and empowered you for life and service or did you believe in Jesus Christ at which time the Holy Spirit became active in your life? Tell me your experience. How did it all start for you?”

Paul asked the Galatians to answer from their experience when they had noticed the Holy Spirit start to be active in their lives. He asked them how their life in the Spirit all got started. Paul knew the answer to this question. It was undoubtedly the same answer for the Galatians as it was for Paul. Paul had been a hero among Judaism but the Holy Spirit only became active in his life when he chose to follow Jesus Christ.

When did the Spirit become active in our lives? Or, have we always been so frightened of the Holy Spirit that we’ve never really allowed Him to move in our lives. I would argue from my experience that the Holy Spirit has never been active in my life or in any ministry I was part of whenever they have relied on the Rule Book approach to faith. The Spirit has always started to work as we sought the face of God and prayed and pledged obedience to the Spirit of God and the Word of God and the Son of God.

Verse 3,

³Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?

In verse 2 Paul asked how, in their experience, they had started their walk of faith. Here Paul asked, if they were to play the movie of their lives and watch how it would end, how would they suspect they would best finish their lives of faith? Based on previous experiences, how would they think they would best attain the goal of a continuing, eternal relationship with God. Having begun that life with the Holy Spirit, would their experience tell them that there might come a time when they wouldn’t need the Holy Spirit? Paul is asking how their experience tells them they might finish their walk of faith. Will observing the Jewish laws help that or will the Holy Spirit help that?

Verse 4,

⁴Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing?

When the Galatians came to faith they experienced a measure of suffering. This verse leads me to believe there was some pretty significant suffering. Having gone through that suffering were they now prepared to say that they were wrong and all their suffering had been for nothing. Was their experience with Christ and the blessing of the Holy Spirit in their lives not worth suffering for after all?

I once heard the story of a family who had joined a different religion. They were supposedly Christian but the Rule Book of this group told them among other things that they couldn’t celebrate Christmas with family and friends. It meant their kids couldn’t take part in the gift exchanges in school and couldn’t go to Christmas parties at school. All that sort of stuff. Well, eventually the founder of this particular faith group died and the next generation of leaders moved the group to a more orthodox expression of Christian faith. Now the family was free to celebrate Christmas and they did. But the children had to deal with bitterness. “Do you mean to tell me that we went through all that teasing and ridicule in school all those years for nothing?” The parents of this family had to talk long and with great remorse for what they had led them into as a family. Their suffering, it turned out, had all been for nothing.

Paul asked the Galatians if based on their experience with the suffering they had endured, were they prepared to say that they had suffered for a faith that amounted to nothing.

Finally in verse 5 Paul wrote,

⁵Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?

Finally, Paul asked the Galatians to think of their experience with the miracles that God had done among them. How did those happen? Was it because they played by the Rule Book of Judaism or did the miracles happen because the Holy Spirit had been given to them when they trusted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Miracles had happened among the Galatians. We’re not told here what the miracles were. I suspect that people were probably healed miraculously. I suspect that amazing things happened in their communities and cities that could only be explained as miracles. Maybe people had food where no food had existed before. Maybe people were miraculously delivered from severe injury or even death. Jesus said His people would do even greater things than what He did (Jhn. 14:2) and those were the miracles that were happening in Galatia. Paul’s question to the Galatians was to get them to think of these experiences and examine how they had happened. Had they happened because they’d all been circumcised and remained ritually pure or had they happened because the Holy Spirit had come upon them when they believed in Jesus Christ.

This was not a Mennonite Church. In most of the Mennonite Churches where I’ve been there is a sort of unwritten policy about the Holy Spirit. The policy says that the Holy Spirit is free to move whenever He wants, so long as He’s gotten approval from Church Council first. Just come to a meeting, tell us what you want to do and we’ll more than likely be happy to get on board with most anything God wants to do. We’re freaked out by the things the Spirit does, sometimes, and to avoid being freaked out by Him we just sort of stop looking and waiting and wanting Him to act in any sort of significant way - especially in any way that may get a little out there and out of control for us. We’re okay with the internal nudge of the Spirit but not the external, demonstrative displays of the Spirit. I’m trying to learn to listen to the Spirit and I’m trying to learn to allow Him to move us and to move freely among us so that we would allow Him to do miracles here among us as well. We can fall off both sides of this roof - I know that and we’ve all seen that. We’re in no danger of falling off the Charismatic side of the roof. We need to loosen the reins and let the Spirit move more freely among us.

Paul’s point in these verses is that the Spirit comes to us when we place our Faith in Christ. He does not come to us from obedience to the Law or the the Rule Book we may have learned in our lives. The Holy Spirit does not come to us when we’re good enough or when we’ve prayed hard enough. The Holy Spirit comes to us when we trust in Christ.

I think a secondary point of Paul’s in these verses was to communicate to the Galatians as well as to the church that our experiences with Jesus and the Holy Spirit are a valuable part of our faith. Experience matters to our Faith. Experiences, if we use them correctly, can strengthen our faith. That’s partly why sharing our testimonies at baptism and membership transfer are valuable experiences. Sharing our testimonies allow us to think back on our experiences and interpret them and see what they have meant to our faith.

There are a couple of things I want to say about experiences in closing to help us use them as a valuable tool in our lives.

The first thing is this: Every experience we have is valuable. Don’t waste them. I’m often embarrassed by the really dumb things that I have done in my life. I want to just forget those dumb things I’ve done and move along so that I can get over that embarrassment. What I need to learn is to see that experience, however embarrassing it might be, as a valuable experience, an opportunity to figure out something about life or about my Christian life. Some of us are experience junkies and I’m a bit that way as well. There are certain experiences I really enjoy and I’d like to have those experiences over and over again. I once rode the highest roller coaster in the park 20 times in one day and every other major roller coaster in the park 5 times that one day. Why? Just to say I had - for the experience. What’s the value in that experience? I don’t know but it sure was cool at the time.

There’s a danger of being an experience junky when it comes to the Holy Spirit. If the Spirit moves in a significant way one week we think we can re-create that experience again the next week and so we manufacture and manipulate but nothing happens and we become frustrated. We have to allow the Spirit to move however He wills. He’s the Spirit and He does that. Sometimes we’re so insecure that unless we get a significant experience of the Spirit in a certain way we start to wonder about our faith. Even that experience of seeming non-activity by the Spirit is valuable.

Often I’ve had tough times come my way and I want to just get through that tough time and get on to what’s next, because what’s next has got to be better than this tough time. If you’ve had Kidney Stones you know what I’m talking about. They never pass too soon. Never. I find I waste those tough times. I’m learning to reflect on them and to treat them as valuable because whether I admit it or not those experiences have shaped me. All experiences shape us and, if, for no other reason than that, they are valuable.

The second thing I want to say about experiences is this: Every experience is a positive or a negative example. I have a cousin Henry, who I’m told, once said, “Everybody is a good example. Some people are a good example of what not to do and some people are a good example of what to do; but everybody is a good example.”

Every experience we have is valuable. Every experience is either positive and we can look back at it and say it was a good thing to do and we should continue that pattern - at least until the Spirit moves in a new direction. On the other hand one of our experiences might be a good example of what to never do again. If we forget and move along from a bad experience and don’t value those experiences we risk repeating mistakes over and over again.

Especially in our Christian lives we need to see our experiences with God as valuable because they can be positives that affirm a direction in our lives or they can be negatives that steer us away a direction in our lives.