Sermons
“PRIMED: INTENTIONAL"
PRIMED: INTENTIONAL
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: PHILIPPIANS 3: 12-14 NRSV
12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ. †
FAITH: All is Response
This is the kicker
Our text follows a passage wherein Paul reminds the Philippian Christians that he was a fine and very advanced Jew in his former days, yet he counts his high pedigree as garbage compared to being found in Christ. Verse 12, which reads,
“Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”
We can imagine Paul’s readers thinking, “But you’re the Apostle Paul! If you haven’t obtained it, then who has?” Paul’s point—which is evident and constant in all his writings and, therefore, the biblical standard—comes from the question, “Who obtains whom?” Who does the obtaining? Is it our work—as in Paul’s former Judaism—or is it God’s work?
When Paul says he considers his Jewish accomplishments as garbage (the actual word is cruder—excrement), he does so because of his concluding statement, that “Christ has made me his own.”
Every proper understanding of salvation in Christ must emphasize that God is the agent of salvation and never we ourselves. As common jargon, we talk about becoming Christians by “accepting Christ,” but this never appears in Scripture. Not once. Nowhere in the New Testament do the Apostles tell anyone to “accept” the Gospel of Jesus. Not once. We can safely paraphrase our text, hearing Paul say,
Not that I have accepted Christ, but that I have been accepted by Christ
as central to Paul’s proclamation. This we find everywhere. American Christianity, for the past 200 years, has put the trailer in front of the truck. In short, you are going to Hell unless you accept Jesus into your heart (again, found nowhere in the Bible) in the particular way we think you should, be it the Sinners’ Prayer, re-baptism, or any of the other forms of human-invented procedures to make oneself right with God.
Yes, there are calls to repentance—many—which means to think differently and turn away from sin. But this turning is not itself the means of salvation; it is a response to the message of salvation. The gospel of salvation precedes repentance; it does not follow it. Paul in Romans 2:4 says:
Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?
God’s kindness in Christ is first—it is the substance of our proclamation—repentance follows that good news. To put it the other way around—as we’re probably used to—is to have the trailer in front of the truck.
Theologian Karl Barth called this the Gospel at gunpoint. Whatever else it may be, it is not good news but rather a threat and manipulation. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church said the same thing—serve the Church as we say or burn in Hell for all eternity—complete heresy and found nowhere in Scripture.
It did make for successful evangelism, though, which is why it is still in practice. We evangelicals like to feel that our efforts have a payoff, we invent ways to quantify our success—that’s all there is to it, and all are vanity—all are false gospels to the degree they make us and our actions the means of salvation. They are all like Paul’s former Judaism—the garbage he leaves behind—because all were based on human efforts and identities.
I know this is a hard word for many of you to hear. You may think I’m throwing Billy Graham under the bus, and to some degree, I am, but if you’ll listen closely to Graham’s preaching, he regularly reminded his hearers that Jesus says:
“No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father” —John 6:44
Scottish theologian T.F. Torrance puts it bluntly:
“You will not be saved unless you make your own personal decision for Jesus Christ as Savior” is a False Gospel.
We are not the agents of our own salvation—God is. God has saved, is saving, will yet save through Jesus Christ—and our call is to respond to that good news.
Now we can hear Paul correctly. Verses 13 and 14:
13Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
Again he says, “I have not made it my own,” but I press on toward the goal. This is word-for-word, Olympic track racing imagery. “Pressing on” is a runners’ term. Like a good sprinter, you set your eye on that goal line and do not dare to look behind you—or even beside you—as you press on. Focus! Run! That’s it.
PRESSING ON
The Trap of the Technique Bubble: Know-how
How do churches “press on”? What kind of race do they think they’re running? Do they know what they’re supposed to be doing? How a church presses on tells us everything about it, and just because a church is running hard doesn’t mean it’s running well.
Today, there are more “How to do church” books available than ever in history. And there are a lot of church developers who try to start new churches using those books.
I have a pastor friend up in the Bay Area. His church—Presbyterian—is 120 years old, and the membership has dwindled steadily since the mid-70s. Elsewhere in the Bay Area are certain “IT” churches. Do you know what an IT church is? IT churches are today’s brand for today’s people. They have crazy momentum, which means they grow like weeds and reproduce their efforts site after site. Usually, they look for older, dying-0n-the-vine churches who might like the chance to renew themselves by having a team from the IT church come in and show them how it’s done.
My friend’s church was one of those churches. Discouraged by years of non-growth and waning membership, the church leaders figured the best thing might be to have one of these hot, growing IT churches come in and pretty much take over. And by “taking over,” they meant really taking over. None of the church’s older fellowships would take place anymore; neither would their old mission projects, choir, or former programming. The serious conversion of the congregation into the new IT church was to be a complete DNA transplant.
My friend sat in on staff meetings, and though in his mid-40s, he felt very much like an old relic. He was impressed at their organization and ambition, for they expected to have 1,000 members at that location within a year. The music was loud, the dress casual, the preaching pumped in from headquarters—it was a slick operation. My friend was surprised that for all their hard work and enthusiasm, there was little talk about the substance of faith—almost none about theology—but instead, all discussion focused on church growth and organizational success. They were committed to doing church much better than other churches. They valued know-how above all and attacked every program with textbook precision. While the people were all very impressed. My friend was simply depressed.
He said, “They really knew what they were doing—what they were supposed to be doing week-by-week and month-to-month to grow into a multi-site megachurch.” At least, until they failed. That’s right, the project failed, and the IT church moved on to be the IT church somewhere else.
The problem with IT churches is that while excelling at know-how, they can fail at know-why. It is only too easy for church leaders—pastors, elders, trustees—to become so driven to succeed that they get trapped in that “technique bubble.” The technique bubble happens when a driven, high-energy church thinks that know-how is central. Their hand is ever on the pulse of culture, and they are quick to adapt themselves to whatever needs to be tried next to feed that momentum.
It is as though they say, “We don’t care what kind of church we become as long as it’s popular and successful.”
The INTENTIONAL Church
Know-why guides our strategic planning
The unintentional church knows what it is doing, but it may have lost touch with why. Know-why—not know-how—makes a Church different from a business or a country club, and know-why makes a church intentional. It means we think and act strategically.
[Strategic Thinking clip]
To be intentional means we don’t program at random—just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks—but strategically.
When I was a paperboy for the PressEnterprise in Riverside, I picked up my papers at 5:30 am on Saturday and Sunday mornings. It was, during part of the year, completely dark when I started my route. The neighborhood I served wasn’t charming. One of my first stops was an old building—a collection of apartments surrounding a courtyard—with about 8 or 9 doors. They didn’t have any lighting—none—it was as dark as being blindfolded. I couldn’t see a thing in that courtyard—it was a pitch-black abyss of nightmares and zombies—so of course, I was too scared to enter. I roughly knew the doors of my subscribers because I threw that route every weekday afternoon, so I just guessed and flung the four or five papers into the darkness, hoping I might luckily hit a porch or two. Usually, I got complaints that came back to me. “Why can’t the paperboy put the paper on my porch?” It was too dark, and there was no way I was going to crawl in there to feel around for porches!
This image returns to me often—straddling my bike on the sidewalk, looking into the blackness, and flinging the papers into the abyss, hoping to get lucky. When churches are not intentional, programming is like this. We put things out there and hope it will hit at least one or two porches. Sometimes we get lucky, but for the most part, the endeavor is foolish and wasteful. “[Flinging motion]Here’s your good news! ”
Being intentional means we don’t program at random. We don’t fling things out there to see what might stick. Instead, we program according to our mission, vision, and values.
If someone comes to staff or Session with a “great idea,” our first question is not will it work? As we value being intentional, we ask, would this program advance the mission of First Pres? How does this idea help us to grow in Christ and Make Him Known? No matter how energetic or fun the idea may be, if we can’t justify it as furthering our mission, then it is a waste of our time and energy.
There are a thousand things we can do to be active, but because we are intentional, we will reserve our resources for things that clearly align with our purposes.
DIFFERENT. BETTER.
Honoring our distinctive place in God’s Kingdom
Being intentional means we stay aware of the larger landscape around us. There are a dozen churches—perhaps more—in the one-mile radius around us. As we press on for the prize of the upward call in Christ, what makes us distinctive?
In his business classic, Good to Great, what author Jim Collins says of American companies applies to churches as well. He says that for a business to flourish, it must be either different or better than similar businesses within its circle.
As we plan and strategize, we should regularly consider what things we can do that distinguish us from other churches. What makes us different? What can we do better than other churches? If you have ideas along these lines, know that we are always eager to consider them.
And finally, being intentional means that we live for the gospel, and we live or die for the gospel. I’m sorry to say there are still churches that believe that the gospel exists for the Church—that the good news is there to bring life and flourishing to the Church—but that, too, puts the trailer in front of the truck.
Like martyrs, missionaries, and apostles, many congregations have given their lives to the gospel. Some of them die for remaining faithful while refusing to sell out to culture. But this is the calling of the Church—every Church and every congregation—for we are called to be faithful. We are not called to be successful. In the balance between successful and faithful, we must—and will—choose faithful every time.
. †
Questions
- Paul “presses on” toward “the heavenly call.” What does that mean?
- What is the “technique bubble” and how does it hurt churches?
- What is an unintentional church?
- How might a church transition from know how to know why?
- What is the connection between intention and style?
- What happens when a church’s style dominates over its mission?
- How does strategic planning simplify church life?
- Does First Pres have any new intentions?
- Are there differences in either style or intention you would like to see?
- Can you see how our preferences either limit or open up our mission?
“PRIMED: RELATIONAL"
PRIMED: RELATIONAL
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: Matthew 18: 15-20 NRSV
15 “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. 16 But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. 18 Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19 Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” †
All is Relational
Relationship, Relationship, Relationship
As we continue walking through the values of First Pres—which spell out PRIMED, we discussed P—prayerful—last week and today we’re looking at R for relational. In short, all that we do, say, or believe about Scripture and faith are essentially relational—about relationships. All is relational.
In our text, Jesus tells us:
“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” —Matthew 18:20
Isn’t this fascinating? He does not say that he’s not there when we are alone, but in matters of the Church—justice, redemption, peacemaking—Jesus wants us to be gathered. And the more we look at it, we see that everything making up our faith and following of Jesus is necessarily relational.
JUDGMENT: Relational
We will be judged for our relationships
I want you to imagine with me the judgment of Christ. Scripture is quite clear; once biological life ends, we shall each stand before God as our judge. We are all answerable to God; the Lord Jesus has all power to judge every soul. So imagine with me—you’ve come to the end of life, and your soul leaves your body.
Sparing initial details—tunnel of light, angelic guides, reunion with friends and family—we get to the heart this meditation when we come face to face with Christ. This will happen for each of us. We will meet the one we’ve worshipped and feel the indescribable intensity of his love. And then, telepathically, the question comes: “So, how did you do with the life that I gave you?”
Your life is displayed in graphic detail for everything you ever said, did, or thought. How might you or I begin to answer? Jesus watches our life with us, perhaps with his arm around your shoulders.
So what is your life the story of? Do you think he’s looking for religious observances? Is he watching to see if you obeyed the Sabbath and avoided bacon and lobster? Is he counting all the times people confessed their sins to their priests and took the sacraments as told? Is he concerned with what music or movies you watched, and does he give you bonus points for only listening to Christian radio? Probably not.
What about your beliefs? Is he looking to see that you believed the right things and rejected the wrong ones? Is he looking for sound doctrine with no elements of tinfoil hat extremism? Is he looking to see that you ran with the right crowd and identified yourself with the right tribe? Probably not.
What about your good deeds? Did you do any good deeds, give alms to the poor, tithe? Is Jesus counting up your good deeds? Probably not. All of these things are a kind of legalism, and Jesus is no legalist—we hear that with crystal clarity in the Gospels.
There is another light to be cast upon everything: ALL IS RELATIONAL, and everything that matters is about our relationships. Our deeds, piety, and good works mean nothing outside the light of relationships because only in relationships can there be a measure of love.
So you were religiously observant? You did your religious duties and participated in the Church and the sacraments, but why?
To cope with life and feel good about yourself?
To please the Pope, priest, pastor, or rabbi?
To feel that you were giving your best to get yourself into Heaven?
All of these—left to themselves—are vanity, and they are useless and worthless to your eternal soul.
BUT if you observed these things as a way of showing your love for God—if they were indeed expressions of your heart giving itself to the Lord—then good. God will receive these things as delivered out of love, and love can and does give them their total value.
And as to your beliefs—if you were diligent in study and driven to believe what is right and good for Christians to believe—was it all just to build yourself up? Were you trying to become an upper-crust believer? Did you believe what the Church told you to believe so you could fit in with the others and feel that you belong? Was being right more important to you than being loving? These, too, are all vanity—mere tribalism and the warmth of the herd.
BUT if you studied Scripture and theology because you wanted above all to be close to God—to know him better—then God will make himself known to you. The value of our beliefs depends entirely upon our relationship with God. Beliefs—because they are in the head—can make a believer self-absorbed. But those who love God can’t keep themselves from seeking him in every way. We stay curious, hungry, and long to know him and the joy of his presence.
And as for good works? Many people—too many—think this is the true key to salvation. Were you good to other people? Did you do good deeds with life? The real question is: “What is your relationship with the recipient of good deeds?” You may have spent thousands of dollars to help people you never met—it sounds great—but why?
Was it to feel better about yourself? One reason people give is to balance out an otherwise-guilty conscience. The Mafia has given millions to the Catholic Church over the years. Why? Because they are devout believers? Hardly. We can do the same—give to others because we feel we must balance out our sins with good works and acts of piety.
Do we secretly feel we are racking up brownie points with God? Is it a way to build ourselves up in our own minds? Are we constructing our personal value—even a sense of superiority over others—by out-giving others? All is vanity.
BUT if you give to others and help them because you love the Lord and mean to show your love to him by caring for the sick and the poor, God receives that as your love for him.
“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my brothers, you did it to me.” —Matthew 25:40
And if you do good works because you have a relationship with the one you help, and you help them out of love, that is the right stuff. The relationship matters. The goodness of a good work or good deed is evaluated relationally.
God accepts our love and mercies for others as though we were serving Him directly.
In the Final Judgment, we will be judged by our thoughts, words, and deeds by how they affected our relationships. Jesus isn’t counting up brownie points or sin-tallying so much as He is evaluating our love—how well we loved or didn’t love—and whether we amplified or diminished the love he entrusted to us in our time on Earth.
LOVE JUDGING
Love is the measure of all things
In that life review—that judgment by Christ—I think we need a different picture than the one we’ve been given by Christian art for the past two thousand years. Jesus is portrayed as the ultimate power, but the depictions have made him look too much like a militant king or vengeful judge. There is some truth in both of these—and lets’ be clear, we should not lose those disturbing elements—but every picture and painting also misses things.
I think Jesus the Judge is more like an irresistible magnet. In that moment of truth, when our soul stands face to face with Christ—and we feel unspeakably overwhelmed by that love—we will immediately know what love was and what was not throughout our life. It may be like watching our life in a movie, with only the relational scenes included—to whom you were good, who you hurt, who you rejected or befriended—all relational. This is worthy of our meditation not only this morning but whenever we consider God and our relationship with Him.
If we are to judge at all, let us not judge by piety, beliefs, or good works except as those things affect our real relationships. Rather, let’s ask relational questions:
Who have you helped only because you felt love for them?
This is the right kind of help because it is done out of love.
Who have you helped merely out of a sense of duty?
This is the case with most of our overseas mission giving. We give to causes far away because people we trust know that help is needed. Our friend—our brother or sister in Christ—may have many relationships that cry out for legitimate support, so our giving there is 2nd degree relational. There are two degrees of separation between the recipients of our care and us. Is there anything wrong with this? This would seem contrary to the idea that all is relational and that our good works get their value from love and real relationships.
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were part of a group called the Inklings. These were literary, Oxford-based, Christian men who gathered monthly to ask big questions. One night, after hearing in the London Times that children were suffering horrid starvation halfway around the world, Dr. Tolkien asked, “Are we even meant to feel compassion in this way?”
But there is a unique value to this kind of “remote” giving. It is a remote relationship because the recipient is far off, and the relationship is one of unilateral charity. In John 20: 29, Jesus says,
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
When we help downcast people we don’t know, we are believing without seeing. This, too, is love, and to give remotely is faithful giving indeed. Please remember that when we raise money for Kenya, India, Peru, or even local projects. We do practice it whenever we give to a cause we believe to be helping the poor, the sick, and the outcast. These people are remote to us, but the giving is nonetheless relational.
ENEMIES: Near and Far
Loving our enemies is the acid test of agapé love
How about the harder relationships in our lives? What about loving our enemies? To restate the obvious, Jesus has taught us to love our enemies, so we must consider this.
Who are our enemies? Anyone who hates us or wishes us ill. Those who would enjoy seeing us fail or otherwise suffer. Jesus teaches us to respond by love—wishing them well and praying for their wholeness and peace.
In short, can you support people who may despise you? This is the relevant question. You may know people who have betrayed you or belittled you—people who snub you and play superior—or people that just don’t like you and find ways to let you know it at every opportunity. How ought we to deal with them? What does it mean for us to “love” them?
The easy thing is just to avoid them—pray for them from a distance—because it is in our nature to protect ourselves and our dignity from their attacks, real or imagined. But this is weak and falls short of Christ’s command. Matthew 5:40:
“If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.”
Jesus expects us to be givers, even to the people who, for whatever reason, hate us. Love enters the major league of Christian spirituality not when it’s easy but when it’s difficult.
It may not be all warm and fuzzy, but you can still wish someone well and pray for the best for them. You can likely find something positive to say about them to others—something other than the sad story of how they mistreated you.
Loving enemies usually means forgiving people we’d rather not forgive.
When we forgive an enemy, we humble ourselves in remembering that all people are fallen and in need of God’s grace. Everyone is incapable of saving themself—we all need grace, or there is no hope. We need, through prayer and love, to get our hearts to that place where we can sincerely say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
FAITH IS RELATIONAL
There is no understanding of faith that is not relational
All is relational. Love is relational, judgment is relational, forgiveness is relational, and our faith itself is relational.
We must look at the Bible—Old and New Testaments—in terms of relationships. The Old Testament is the story of the relationship between God and human beings in general and then God and Israel. That’s it. The Torah, or Law, is given to Israel by God to have a means to that relationship between them. Abiding by the Law was the way Israel expressed its faith in relationship to God.
In both the Old and New Testaments, “righteousness” means nothing other than a “right relationship with God.” Think about it—to be righteous means only to be in right standing with God.
In the Old Testament, righteousness—or right relationship with God—was established through the Law provided instruction on everything—how to make sacrifices, how to eat, dress, wash, and worship—but all that righteousness was about maintaining a right relationship with God.
In the New Testament, righteousness also means a right relationship with God, but it is no longer established by the Law and its observances but through a faith relationship with Jesus Christ. Christ is our righteousness—our right relationship.
Faith is more than our beliefs or religious observances, but when these are put into the context of our relationship with God, all register their full value. All is relationship.
. †
Questions
- How is it true that “All is vanity” outside of relationships?
- How does a religious observance (of any kind) .find its full value with God?
- Why are good works usually suspect? What redeems good works?
- What is the value of our beliefs compared to our acts of love?
- What does it mean to love “remotely”?
- Are there prayers that God does not honor? What characterizes them?
- How can you love someone whom you cannot trust?
- Think of people you have hurt—either intentionally or unintentionally--and how you might redeem those relationships. Keep in mind: redemption may require “remoteness.”
“PRIMED: PRAYERFUL"
PRIMED: PRAYERFUL
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: James 5: 13-16 NRSV
13 Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. 14 Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. . †
Social Mobility, ULTD.
What can a person choose to be?
QUESTION: What can a person choose to be?
Historically, the answer has been very limited. One was born into a caste, profession, or culture that determined what one could and could not choose to be. Sons of cobblers tended to become cobblers. Women became wives and mothers. The poor stayed poor, and the rich stayed rich.
In America, we celebrate social mobility; it is one of our founding freedoms. We believe that it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, rich or poor, native or foreign born, but if you work hard, apply yourself, and live virtuously, you have every possibility to raise your standard of living. More than a couple hundred years ago, people never dreamed of this—certainly not of it being the normal course for an entire nation.
Today, we love to tell our children, “You can be anything!” “You can do anything you set your mind to it, so go for it—follow your dreams!” Such statements are a celebration of social mobility. There are still many places in the world where such things do not and can not be uttered—places where upward mobility is extremely rare. We use these phrases with our young people so that they will become willful, spirited in their studies, and strive diligently to become whoever they would like to be.
“You wanna be a doctor? Great!” “You’d like to grow up to be president? Fantastic!” “You’d like to become a rock star? [Pause] Have you thought about becoming a doctor?” I joke, but have people today taken this too literally?
When we say, You can be anything!, what we mean is something like, “You are privileged to live in a free society—one that allows you to work your way into your dreams and aspirations.” It means we are free to make choices that can serve and secure our future happiness. If you want to be a doctor or a wealthy entrepreneur, you can choose to become so by sacrificing other things—television, gaming, social media—and focusing on your goals. That’s a free society, and that is the path to upward mobility.
But many today hear, “You can be anything!” as an invitation to total boundlessness. No limits. “I can be anything—including a multiple-gendered, Marian unicorn!” We see this in ridiculous proportions today in regard to sexual identity—you can be whatever you choose—which translates to, “I can choose to do whatever I want and whatever I feel like.” But this is no longer about social mobility, but about choosing for oneself what is true or not true about reality.
A few decades ago, as the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s ripened into full fruit, alternative lifestyles were defended by saying just the opposite: “I did not choose this, but rather I was born this way! This is whom I have always been.”
Back then, it was not about choosing—it was more like discovering a timeless, hidden truth and revealing that truth. So is it chosen or just discovered, or chosen to be discovered? We won’t figure that out here, but we should ask, Can a person choose to be anything? And if it is true, then what ought we choose to be?
It is clear: we have choices that former generations and centuries never had. The freedoms we celebrate as Americans include the ability for one to say, “I choose to be me and to master my own destiny.” That seems perfectly reasonable at a certain level. Our Constitution enshrines life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but there are limits and boundaries to what we can be or become. There have to be; otherwise, one could say, “I choose to be superior to other people.” This runs contrary to everything we hold to be true in a democracy, but the freedom to be “anything you want to be” necessarily includes this possibility. I think plenty of Americans today consider themselves superior and believe that their sense of superiority is a perfectly legitimate right.
It seems more people grow up thinking this way today than ever before. The extremes people go to in expressing their individuality—and the laws set up to protect their rights—are at an unprecedented rise and expansion.
To deal with the question “What can a person choose to be?” we must ask, “Where is God in all of this?” Many answer nowhere--either because they have already disregarded God or they fear their liberty and self-made authority would be threatened. Without God, we can do or be whatever we like, because who is to say we can’t?
Even pagans—ancient or modern—who believe in false gods live with levels of accountability to greater powers. They are answerable to the gods or the Fates for their choices. Pagans live beneath the gods and therefore have limitations on what they can choose and whom they can choose to be. For instance, they can not choose to be gods because they and everyone else know that they are not gods but mere mortals.
For people of faith, the idea of choosing to be whomever you’d like to be is a patent falsehood. Yes, you can choose to do certain things instead of others, or pursue this or that career, but that is not the same as choosing your essential identity. People of faith, even pagans, believe in a higher authority to which humankind is accountable.
Remove God from the equation, and you have immediate, endless, boundless liberty! Without God, I can re-create myself as whatever I choose to be. Without God, I can be king of the world or even as good as God. I can account for myself alone and answer to myself alone. Remove God, and I can judge right from wrong and good from evil for myself. I can judge what is true and not true. Remove God, and you and I can play God forever (or at least until we die).
Are we seeing this?—the removal of God from questions of identity and who we can be or become? Most definitely.
In Genesis, in the Garden, the Serpent tells Eve that she and Adam can become like God, knowing good from evil on their own—that is, without having to be told by God. The Serpent says, “God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like him, knowing good and evil” [Genesis 3:4]. The implication is, “You’ll be able to judge for yourselves because you will be like God.”
This same thinking came to dominate Europe a century ago and led to its ugly conclusions in Nazi Germany. Nazis embraced the ideology that they only had to answer to themselves and their own success. Imagining themselves superior to others mobilized their twisted ambitions. As they set themselves up above all other peoples, the Nazi Aryans became the Superior men—the Übermensch— who were beyond good and evil. There is no God in Nazism, except as a tool to manipulate the masses into supporting their feverish will to power.
WHEN WE PRAY
We change and the World changes.
Okay, so you’re thinking—rightly—What has all of this got to do with prayer? In short, absolutely everything. Prayer and prayerfulness are of infinite importance for us and the world. I want to suggest five things that happen when we pray—things that make all the difference in the world.
1. When we pray, we know that we are not God. Most simply put, prayer acknowledges God is God. Anyone who prays to God takes themself out of the center of the cosmos. Prayer humanizes us.
2. When we pray, we orient ourselves under God. God is superior, and we are humbled because we know we are inferior. This works for us both individually and collectively as peoples—nations, tribes, congregations, and families. When we pray, we are God’s subjects—his lessers.
No, can’t be “whatever we choose.” At our best we become the person God has chosen for us to become.
These first two are only the first level of the value of prayer. Even these two, if revived, would change the world, for they put an end to any delusions of glorious humanism. We human beings may be at the top of the natural food chain, but spiritually, we stand under God and beneath the heavens.
We are to become who God intends us to be.
3. When we pray, we commune with God. Do we ever fully appreciate the power and privilege of this? We get to have fellowship with God Almighty! We are privileged to simply sit with him and know he’s there—hearing us, loving us—what can the world give that compares?
4. When we pray, we realign ourselves with Truth. We are who we are through our relationship with God, and our identity is created, formed, and refreshed by God alone. When we commune with God, we remember who we are—which is Whose we are. When we pray, we find proper alignment with reality. God made us, redeemed us, and sustains us. We are who we are through him.
The only identity we need is the one God gives us in baptism. In baptism, we are united with Christ and become the Father’s adopted sons and daughters. In short, all the identities we might invent for ourselves—all the things we could choose to be or become—all dissolve in the waters of baptism. What remains is Christ, as in Galatians 2:20:
“It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Once we abandon the things we choose to be, God gives us our new identity—our eternal, true name—and we live for that identity instead of any other.
In Galatians 3:28, Paul says:
“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free, male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
We can add that there is no modified Christianity—no Gay Christianity, no Black Christianity, no White Christianity, no Conservative Christianity, No Liberal or Progressive Christianities, no Catholic Christianity, no Orthodox or Evangelical Christianity—we must abandon all modifications, claim our identity in Jesus Christ, and leave it there. The rest are unimportant incidentals.
Claim Christ; forget the rest!
5. When we pray, we receive power from God. This is also unspeakably amazing. God empowers the Church—that’s us, you and me. In James, we read:
“The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.”
This is real, not merely symbolic or “spiritual” in the sense of otherworldly-but-not-here. Our prayers are powerful and effective—quite unlike human governments (like ours?)—so who in their right mind would invest greater trust in politics than in the Lord?
What to DO About Prayer
Brief. Frequent. Intense.
To apply it, I want us to take home three things:
1. Make prayer your habit. Every day—brief, frequent, and intense, just as Luther said.
2. Pray both alone and in community. Not either-or, but both/and. Right now, at First Pres, there is no better way for you to grow in Christ and make Him known than to become part of a small group. We call them lifegroups. Between 6 and 12 people covenanted to gather together regularly. You might go through the sermon questions; you might study together; you might serve at SOVA or Bridges to Home together—but whatever you do, prayer must be part of it. Praying together is part of God’s design for our growth.
And 3. Protect prayer as prayer. Lots of Presbyterians hate praying aloud with others, and that is okay. Still, you should learn how; and the best way to learn is by jumping in with both feet and just doing it.
We want our prayers to be real prayers, which means they must be Godward. When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who pray to be heard by others. When you pray, be sure you talk to God and not the people sitting around you. You talk to God—aloud—while others listen in and pray alongside your prayers. See how easy it is?
Prayerfulness makes us who we are, who God intends us to be, and it secures our identity in Christ. To be a prayerful people is to be growing in Christ and faithfulness. It is the first of our values, and it is by far the most important.
Finally, let us love and be kind to all people who do not know the Lord. Let us be generous and gracious to the self-deceived and those who remain rebellious toward God.
We can’t hate people out of sin,
but we can love them toward grace. †
Questions
- “You can choose to be anything!” Discuss pros and cons.
- Do we choose identity or discover it? Discuss.
- In what way were the ancient pagans similar to modern Christians when it comes to discerning right from wrong?
- When we pray, we know that we are not _______.
- When we pray, we orient ourselves u________ God.
- When we pray, we c___________ with God.
- When we pray, we realign ourselves with T________.
- When we pray, we receive p__________ from God.
- In baptism all secondary i_______________ are dissolved.
- What can do about prayer:
- Make it a h_______.
- Pray both a___________ and in c________________.
- Protect prayer as p_________.
“EVER SHARING"
EVER SHARING
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: Romans 12: 1-2; 9-13 NRSV
1 “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
9.Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; 10 love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. †
The Witness of Sharing
Why are We Still Turning People Off?
When we speak of “ever-sharing,” we look toward what characterizes mature Christianity. At heart, it’s about the journey from being a taker—which we are by nature—to a giver, as Christ would have us and the Spirit makes us. To be ever-sharing means we eagerly give of ourselves, our substance, and our expectations by handing all things over to God. It also means sharing with others the good news of Jesus that saves and transforms lives.
None of this is news to any of us, but it raises a question: if we—the Church—have been steeped in giving and sharing for two-thousand years, why do Christians tend to turn so many people off rather than on?
I would dare to boil it down to three things:
1. Although professing faith, we remain self-serving.
2. We live hypocritical lives—our lives display no particular signs of righteousness. Our lives look just like everyone else’s, which sends us back to 1.
3. We fail to share, fail to give.
Our text from Romans charges us to be ever-sharing. “Present your bodies as living sacrifices” gives us an image of total self-surrender. Pagan Rome knew plenty about bodily sacrifices—even human sacrifices—but the idea of “living” sacrifices would have raised their eyebrows. It’s easy to die, but you can only do it once; it’s much harder to live the life of Christian love whereby we die every day to selfhood so that we constantly give ourselves away in love to others.
Verse 2 tells us to “be transformed”(which means converted). To be transformed means to be deliberately non-conformist to the ways of the world. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed….” Notice what it does not say: it does not say, “transform yourselves.” Many try and are trying in many different ways to transform themselves. Look around us: California is chock-full of diets, workout centers, self-help seminars, and medical centers—all promising transformation if you will just get with whatever program they’re selling. Today, we see that any transformation is acceptable and encouraged, including gender fluidity, hormone therapy, and/or radical plastic surgery. But the Bible doesn’t say, “transform yourself;” it says, “be transformed.”
Transformation is a work of God upon us that we can only get to by surrendering to God and the Spirit’s work within us. The only path to transformation is one of complete surrender to God, and we must give ourselves to God in entirety if we are to have that work performed in us.
A Matter of Witness
That transformation that God works upon us is the substance of our witness, and it convinces others that our faith is real, authentic, and genuine rather than hypocritical. If that work of God is evident in us, the world sees givers rather than takers—true believers and witnesses.
Are you more of a giver or more of a taker? What would your neighbors say? What would your co-workers say? Your relatives? How can you know?
Sometimes, you just know. Ever heard of an energy vampire? [Clip: Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows]. Ever left a conversation feeling like you’ve been gut-punched? We know how this feels. Some people give us energy, and people who take energy from us. Now I am okay with people who take energy because they really need it—I’d like to think I can be generous with whatever energy I have to give—but either way, we know that to be a giver is to love beyond oneself and one’s neediness. We seek to live for others, presenting our bodies as living sacrifices. To be a sharer requires agapé love.
When our love is good—when it is agapé love—it is un-hypocritical because it is selfless. All true sharing is a matter of pouring ourselves out for one another. Verse 10 says, “Outdo one another in showing honor.” This is counter-cultural. By nature, we pursue our own honor and seek for others to honor us. The path of mature Christianity is opposite—to emphasize honoring others.
When we love by ever-sharing, we genuinely honor others and reveal our transformed nature. So let’s talk about how we do this head, heart, and hands.
HEAD: Choosing to Share
Deliberately altering our behavior
Mentally, we must make conscious choices to change our behavior deliberately. We must, as Paul says, “renew our minds” as part of our transformation. We choose to change and then act differently. This is, of course, harder than it sounds.
At the core calling of the gospel is repentance. The greek word for repentance—metanoia—is the same word used to translate words like convert, conversion, and regeneration. This convert/repent word, metanoia, literally translates to “Know Beyond” or “Think Different” (Well played, Apple Computer!). To repent is to think differently or to know things in a more significant way. The call to repentance is a call to be transformed through the renewing of our minds.
What we think matters deeply. Let’s have no talk that says, “Oh, that’s just all in our heads,” as if to diminish the role of what we think. Let’s remember that our thoughts affect our attitudes and, from there, our behaviors and habits. Our attitudes and habits define our character, so what we think about things and how we think about them are very important indeed.
Mentally, we must each resolve to live the life of agapé love—consciously, deliberately. Again, this sounds easy, but it automatically excludes all the self-serving stuff we love:
- •Living for ourselves.
- •Gratifying the flesh.
- •Spending our time, treasure, and talents on ourselves and our closest circles.
We think of the selfish man who wastes money on gambling while neglecting the needs of his children. Or a mother who obsessively smothers her adult children under the pretense of care, when in truth, it’s all about her own need to control. Or the entitled adolescent (of whatever actual age) who feels the world exists for their comforts. Entitlement—the idea that we ought to have things better than they are—has become a lifestyle with a tremendous social support network.
Therefore, Christians must consciously and deliberately choose the other path—the life of giving and sharing, the life of agapé love. That’s headwork.
HEART: Blessed by Sharing
“In all this I have given you an example that by such work we must support the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, for he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” —Acts 20: 35
It is more blessed to give than receive. Giving feels good—even great. I have been privileged through the churches I’ve served to meet some true good deed junkies—people who give and give because they love the good feelings of giving. I used to be critical of that—of chasing a feeling that I suspected of being, at heart, self-serving.
I was suspicious of a do-gooding that was about providing oneself with a warm glow of satisfaction again and again. Was it, at heart, an attempt to balance out an otherwise stormy conscience? Was it a kind of atonement or penance for one’s former, selfish indulgences? Why does it feel good? Is it a kind of whitewash over other sins and shortcomings? Something in me felt that authentic giving ought to hurt—that unless you’re giving sacrificially and in a costly way, you’re just serving your streak of good feelings.
There may be some truth in that, but I think now I was unreasonably critical, and I’ve changed my tune.
Out of all the self-seeking pleasures that plague western civilization, I would hope and pray that every person would seek the pleasure of giving, sharing, and doing good deeds. May we all become helpless addicted to those good feelings, and may they propel us to more giving, sharing, and positive actions that benefit others!
Yes, I’m calling you all to become hedonists and epicureans for the good feelings that come from giving to others. If selfless giving is to be thought of as a disease, then let us all become infected and never recover! May our love of giving become highly contagious, and may the pandemic of sharing have no end!
I still believe that true agapé giving is giving that hurts—that is sacrificial giving—BUT, if we can, through the giving that feels good, develop such a habit of sharing that we more easily grow into sacrificial giving, then all the easier giving and sharing are wholly justified.
Our motivation is simple: we want to love others as Christ first loves us. We seek the joy of giving as it gives witness to our Lord. The joy of giving—the untainted bliss of sharing—is the attitude of the mature Christian heart.
HANDS: Give. Share.
Just Do It!
What do we do to become givers and sharers?
We just give and share—just do it!
Giving is not just about money and stuff; it is about giving yourself. Give your heart—care! Caring is a choice; we can choose to care. That is something we do—we make a deliberate choice to care—rather than sit back and wait until something strikes us as worthy of our heart’s investment.
Even as we choose to care, it doesn’t work as an order. Someone may say to you, “You ought to care more about X or Y!” It doesn’t work. When giving or sharing is turned into a moral imperative, it fails. Maybe it’s just because of our sinful nature, but demanding goodness from others tends to produce the opposite.
The Baptist preacher’s nine-year-old boy was playing with one of his birthday toys at the backyard fence with neighbor kids, and their voices suddenly grew quarrelsome and raised to angry shouts. The pastor’s wife, who had been watching from the kitchen window, stepped out the back door and made her way down to the children. Addressing her son, who was still visibly upset, she said, “Now, son, what would Jesus do?” In a near tearful rage, he answered, “SHARE THE TOYS! SHARE THE TOYS! SHARE THE TOYS!”
The person doing the giving—that’s you and me—must also be the initiator of the giving.
If you’re giving just because someone else tells you to, then where is your heart? You may give, but it is likely in reluctance or mildly-reluctant compliance with the initiator.
Choose to instigate sharing.
Choose to want it, like it, and love it!
Grow hungry for the Joy of giving.
Become a junkie for the experience of God’s blessings—and by junkie, I mean let it eclipse everything else in your nature—because left to ourselves and our selfish whims, we all end up hunkering down in self-preservation.
GIVERS: Ever-sharers
We seek to become givers—risk takers and great lovers.
That we should strive to become ever-sharing is a worthy component of our collective vision. When we give, we receive. We are right to cultivate a hunger for the kind of receiving we get through giving.
When we give, we receive.
In Luke 6:38b, Jesus says:
The measure you give will be the measure you get back.
Perhaps even the Final Judgment works this way. The mercy we give is the mercy we’ll get. Those who forgive all will find all forgiven. Grace shall be given to the gracious, and generosity to the generous.
I close with a sound clip—the best, wisest words from the Beatles. It was also their final words as a group:
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you made.
May God so transform us that we become great givers and ever-sharers, giving of ourselves in every way, and may our hearts all be completely transformed to crave the Joy of giving! †
Questions
- What are the top (say three) things that turn people off regarding the Church, faith, and Christianity?
- How is conversion a form of giving or sharing?
- How can witnessing to Christ come off more like taking than giving or sharing?
- Why is “honoring others” a counter-cultural practice?
- Even though we mentally resolve to change our behaviors, change is difficult. What helps?
- What is the downside of doing good works just for the good feeling of having done good?
- How might our hearts change into passionate love for giving?
- For what does the mature Christian heart hunger?
“DEEPLY CONNECTED"
DEEPLY CONNECTED
Noel K. Anderson First Presbyterian Church of Upland 10/3/21
Text: JOHN 15: 12-17 NRSV
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
Bonding Good & Bad
What Connects us in the Depths?
The third of our four vision statements says that we seek to be “deeply connected.” What exactly do we mean by deeply connected? First, we have to notice that people connect in many different ways, then we can talk about deeper connections and consider how we become deeply connected with head, heart, and hands.
We connect with others through having something in common. It can be the simplest of things. We both like the Dodgers, share the same politics or come from the same hometown. When Americans meet other Americans abroad, say while visiting Australia, they may have nothing else in common. They can make a meaningful connection just because they’re both Americans and tourists.
Sometimes the connections form accidentally. How many of your closest friends over the years have been people who just happened to live nearby? Neighbors, classmates, polka enthusiasts—for the many ways we can make initial connections, these all begin as shallow connections. We may connect in shallow water, but we also develop deeper relationships from some of these.
Our deeper relationships are our intimate relationships. Family, close friends, and other special confidantes--all make up our inner circle. Intimacy is a kind of exclusivity.
Deep connections tend to form over secrets. If you have secrets with one or two others, that is an intimate circle. It can be a deep connection, but one that is dark and negative or light and positive.
Sin can connect people deeply, and those connections can be all about wicked secrets. We’ve all seen movies of bank heists, murder plots, and adulterous affairs—all involve two or more sinners keeping a tight, secret circle. Secrets can create a deep bond, although it can be a negative bond.
Tragedy can bond people profoundly. Survivors of a terrible storm, accident, injury, wars, and catastrophes—tend to connect people at a level deeper than usual.
Our text from John speaks of a profound, positive connection. Verse 12:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
The deepest possible connection between people or a group of people is to have Christ in common. To have Jesus in common is to share something of the same soul. All who are in Christ are kindred souls. We all share the same Holy Spirit. And we not only share the same spiritual depths, but we share a common eternity.
For us and our vision here at First Pres, to be deeply connected means acknowledging and practicing the spirituality we hold in common. We practice and share the Holy Spirit, which binds us now and eternally. We seek to love one another with a deep love indeed. Agapé love is something we can continue to grow into every day of our lives.
We seek to be deeply connected, head, heart, and hands.
HEAD: Sorting it Out
Connecting over What Matters
The depth of our connection mentally depends upon the depth of thinking we hold in common. Sharing shallow ideas provides a shallow connection; sharing deep ideas provides for a deeper connection.
Our thoughts can be shallow or deep depending upon the depth of our awareness or how thoroughly we think something through. Age and wisdom go together because of thoroughness. The more years you walk this earth, the more times you have had to visit and revisit certain thoughts. In time, you’ve searched them out from every angle and had chances to try them out in real life. A person who has lived with an idea for 20 years will have a wiser appropriation than one who has just read about it this week.
To think thoroughly can also be like using a microscope. Think of a newspaper. You can hold it in your hand and read it, but you can also put it under a microscope. At 10x power, each letter is huge, and you see the ink breaking up at the edges. Photos look like messy splotches of color. At 50x power, the letters look like inky mountains with white valleys. At 100x power, you see the fibers of the paper twisting and connecting like grass roots and rhizomes.
When we read Scripture, we want to do so with both thoroughness and increasing awareness. We want our mental microscope working at as many levels as possible—this is why we never come to the end of studying Scripture.
The world presently rides the wave of the Information Age. More basic information is available through your phone than any group of PhDs would have been able to access in a month just a few decades ago. In a matter of seconds, a 15-year-old with a smartphone can answer questions that would have sent college students off to the library for hours.
But information is not wisdom. The hard work is sorting it all out—determining what we pay attention to and what we ignore. I get a kick out of those person-on-the-street videos done by Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, or Conan O’Brien. They seem to prefer Venice Beach, and they cobble together “common knowledge” videos, asking random passersby simple questions. People may know everything about the Star Wars universe or be able to quote verbatim from directors’ commentaries of Marvel movies, but ask them who was the 4th president of the United States, or where WWII was fought, or where is Viet Nam on a map—and you get blank stares or comical answers.
We must invest ourselves in information that matters. Can we spend our time and energy pursuing more important things than what the Kardashians are up to? Of course we can. It’s fine, right, and good to have hobbies—so I won’t knock Star Wars, soap operas, and Lakers’ trivia—but we develop deeper connections when we share things that matter—matters of faith—the greatness of God, the breadth of our mission, and our movement toward eternity.
HEART: Deeper Bonds
To Share Faith is to Have Depth
It’s one thing to have a mental connection but another thing—a deeper thing—to share matters of the heart. To share deep feelings with another is a deep connection indeed.
•Romeo and Juliet—like all romances, give us a picture of deep feelings connecting people at the heart.
•Patriots singing the National Anthem—particularly at special events like the 9/11 memorial or Pearl Harbor. It can bring most of us to tears.
•Dodgers fans winning the pennant—enormous sharing of joy and victory.
As strong as these connections are, they can still go wrong. Remember, one of the critical lessons of romances is that those feelings can destroy people. Romeo and Juliet both end up dead. Even Nazis and KKK-ers share deep convictions and a kind of heartfelt patriotism. This is why we say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Feelings can be deceiving. To be deeply connected in the heart is to share in the true and the eternal. No one is closer than two or more who share in the love and adoration of God. It makes marriages deeper and more stable. It makes families closer and better, and it makes friendships deeper. To have God in common is to have all things—including eternity—as one.
The deep connection of the heart is the Holy Spirit that resides within us, and it makes two Christian strangers closer than blood brothers.
In high school, I had a best friend with whom I had everything in common. We lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same school, same church, liked the same music—we had everything in common. It was the deepest friendship I had known. Still, years ago, on a mission trip to Indonesia, I experienced a moment of epiphany when I stood beside missionary Jack Makonda in front of the Borobudur temple in Java. On the surface, Jack and I had nothing in common (except that we both lived in Pasadena). He, a black Indonesian, decades my senior, loved foods I had never tried and music I had never heard. On the surface, we had zero in common. But we were in Indonesia together, serving the Lord on a mission.
Standing there, I felt as though I were on Mars—everything seemed utterly alien to me. Jack had a big smile on his face; he went to high school nearby, and this was one of his playgrounds. In a moment, I realized that I was much closer “friends” with Jack than with any of my high school friends. Many of them have left the faith; we no longer share a love of Christ in common. But my friendship with Jack, though there were few-to-none connections at the surface level, was profoundly deep. We share the deepest waters in common—the Mariana Trench of personality—because we live by and for the Holy Spirit. Our friendship runs so deep that my former friendships were like little paper boats floating on the surface of the deepest, glacial lake.
The deep reveals the shallow; the shallow cannot reveal the deep.
HANDS: Walk Along
We can invite others into deeper connections.
What can we do to become more deeply connected? I would offer two words: reach and risk. To reach means ever inviting others into the deeper water in whatever ways we can, and it must begin with love and service. When we reach out, others may be immediately aware that we are trying to take them deeper. We become, in their minds, salespeople intent upon closing a deal, which diminishes them—turns them into a target to be evangelized.
Here’s the thing: we cannot control whom God does or does not call, and we do not know to whom God will or will not give his Holy Spirit—at least for today. As Jesus says to his disciples in verse 16a:
You did not choose me,
but I chose you.
We reach out, but we do so with love, service, and humility.
As for risk, we persist in moving toward deeper water and more important matters. We celebrate the shallow connections as starting points. It’s great that we’re both avid stamp collectors—through this connection, we build trust and friendship. Aside from enjoying that for what it is, we also risk going to deeper waters. The stamps are fun, but what is truly valuable? What really matters? We risk going there, seeing whether others can wade a bit deeper, swim further out, and perhaps take a dive into the depths.
It’s not about “saving” our family and friends—you and I cannot do that; only God can do that—but we can walk with them for a way and pray for them as we go. Walk with others along the way— invite them into what matters.
To the Table
Let’s be mindful of the depths we share with all in Christ.
What it means to be deeply connected is pictured perfectly at this table. Today we share communion with people of every nationality and most every denomination. This table is our oneness—our deep connection in Christ—and we are all kindred souls because the Holy Spirit resides in all who trust in Christ.
We are closer than blood, more eternal than the things of this world. We will be celebrating this meal and its fellowship long after our universe has gone cold. What a thing to share! We certainly ought to be sharing it. Let’s share it together this morning, mindful of all our brothers and sister with whom we share all that deep water. †
Questions
- What are some of the shallow connections you enjoy with others?
- How does secrecy factor into your more intimate friendships and relationships?
- Have you, through tragedy, grown close to someone for whom you would otherwise have had nothing to do?
- With whom do you have your deepest conversations? How deep is your connection?
- What are the dangers inherent in deep emotional connections?
- What, for Christians, stands at the heart of our deepest connections?
- How do we help connections grow from shallow to deep?
- Why are shallow connections yet to be sought, enjoyed, and celebrated ?