What is Important?

Amos 5:6-15; Psalm 90:12-17; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

Today we will answer the question of what is important.

As many of you know, I grew up on about 2 acres on the hilltop above St. Marys, WV. When my parents moved there and built their home, it was simply another pasture. In fact, the place was still fenced and actually divided into two by barbed wire and locust post fences. Old Man Wilson grazed cattle on half the land and Dad mowed the other half. When you crossed the fence about a hundred feet outside the back door of the house, you were in a 50 acre cow pasture on a hillside that sloped down to a run that had been dammed up to form a small pond. Across the road in front of the house was an overgrown field, with about a hundred acres, mostly of multiflora rose.

Beside the house, there was about a half acre that was ideal for playing softball or kickball. You know, there are special challenges to playing soccer or kickball in West Virginia.

We’d take a soccer ball or a dodgeball and kick it around using baseball rules. But there was one very important rule that we played with – If you kicked the ball foul, you chased it. Because if you kicked the ball too far foul, it began to roll downhill, bouncing faster and faster, jumping over the barbed wire fence and down through the pasture, hopping over cows and calves, hitting everyone of those parallel cow paths as the ball bounced down, down, down a quarter of a mile to stop on the edge of the pond. If you kicked the ball foul, you had to chase it, and everybody else waited and watched while you jumped down the hill from cow path to cow path, dodging cows and cow patties, and eventually disappearing from sight below the curve of the hill and then five minutes later, your head would appear as you slowly climbed back up the hill, and fifteen minutes later, you climbed across that barbed wire fence oh-so-carefully, lifting each leg high over the top line of wire so you wouldn’t get caught, and then, finally, the game was ready to begin again. We got very good at kicking those balls in fair territory, because that was important!

Years later, I was trying to explain this to some friends in Atlanta. You know, they just didn’t get it, because they had always lived in subdivisions on flat land and played on baseball fields that were several acres in size – once again on flat land. But I knew you’d understand.

In our Gospel story today in Mark 10, Jesus and His disciples had traveled in their regular journey from Caperneaum in the region around the Sea of Galilee to travel south a hundred miles to the area near Jerusalem. They had walked in the towns outside Jerusalem, the area known as Judah, and they had gone down in the Arabah, the great valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and spent time on the other side of the Jordan, in what is today known as Jordan. And then they started on their way back across the Jordan toward Jericho, which lies at the foot of the road which leads up thousands of feet to Jerusalem.

As they started toward the Jordan River, “a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Now, a normal man would have addressed the question before him. But Jesus was no ordinary man and liked to call our attention to details that most people would just skip over. “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.”

This statement sounds almost like a joke at first reading. But Jesus makes two deeply profound theological statements with this point. “No one is good – except God alone.” Jesus answers. People aren’t good, Jesus is saying. Only God is good. The Apostle Paul would take up this theme in the Book of Romans, and 1500 years later Martin Luther would also take up this theme, and the other Reformers such as Zwingli, Calvin, Menno, and Jacob Amish, all of whom established Switzerland as the center of the Reformation, and it has become one of the core principals of Protestant Christianity – as Paul put it: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”.

We are all flawed – only God is perfect. For the rest of us, in our natural life, we only do good things accidentally, or for selfish reasons. The natural person is not good – a child is not good – an infant is not good. All of us are selfish creatures, damaged by our contact with other people and the world which has been damaged by those people. The rot that began with Adam has spread to all humanity, and “No one is good—except God alone.” And because of this alone, we should all bow down in humbleness before the God who made us.

And the second deeply profound statement was made at the same time. “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.”

“Why do you call Jesus good?” Is it because you recognize that Jesus was indeed good? And if you think Jesus is good – then Who are you claiming that Jesus is? If you think that Jesus is good – and you already know that only God is good – then you must be claiming that Jesus is God – which is exactly what Jesus claimed repeatedly. Jesus is not just a particularly wise man – Jesus is God Himself walking upon this earth! And if Jesus is God, than everything He says and does is particularly important for us to listen to – and when Jesus says to do something, it is truly the Word of God speaking!

“And the Word was with God and the Word was God.” “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” as the Apostle John put it in the beginning of his Gospel.

After this powerful beginning, Jesus finally answers the man’s question – the question of “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Oh, what a question. Entire books have been written on this question throughout the ages. Movies and television shows have been filmed on the question – and you’d heard and seen and read the answers:

The movie and tv shows Highlander – the movie starred Sean Connery – says that immortals dwell among us, but if they are beheaded, they will die.

The movies Armageddon, Saving Private Ryan, The Magnificent Seven, the book “The Greatest Generation” all say that we live eternally through the memories of those people who remember the sacrifices we made for them.

The Buddhists and Hindus believe that everyone naturally lives an eternal life, that every life IS suffering and the goal of every soul is to stop living eternally. A rather sad outlook, in my view.

Existential philosophers say that this question of eternal life is the most important question of existence – How can I be certain that I will continue to exist?

Jesus answered practically:

19 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’”

20 “Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”

And Mark tells us that 21 Jesus looked at him and loved him.

Can you imagine that look! Can you imagine God looking at you with those eyes that have seen everything, Him holding up the hand that would soon have a nail hole in it, His clean brow and clean hair that would soon be filled with blood, the look of love and compassion that Jesus gave to that man? Can you imagine Jesus looking at you with that same look of love?

But the look was tinged with a bit of sadness, for Jesus knew what was coming next as He spoke once more to the man, knowing the man’s innermost heart, his pride, his arrogance:

“One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

22 At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

The man had been honest every since he was a boy. The man had been kind ever since he was a child. The man had been exceptionally good about following the rules and he had become rich and wealthy and successful and he had a name he could be proud of. He was known far and wide as a particularly good man, a man that you could trust, a man who could give you good advice.

But he was not willing to do the last thing he needed to do to follow Jesus, and he was very sad, for following Jesus is the way to eternal life.

The man was like many of us.

Because our parents and Sunday school teachers taught us the Ten Commandments in church growing up, we often think that following those commandments or other rules are the key to becoming a good person. But Jesus tells us that no one is good, except God.

Perhaps following those rules are the key to success in this world. Perhaps this is true. But Jesus told the man, His disciples, and us that no matter how good you are, no matter how successful you are in this world, no matter who you are – this is simply not important.

What is important is to follow Jesus. Just like kicking the balls in fair territory is important when playing kickball in West Virginia, following Jesus is what is important in life.

And following Jesus does not mean that you take a walk with Him every Sunday. I follow my little dog Brownie several times a day around the parsonage and around the church, but this is not what Jesus meant by following.

Following means that you are focused upon the actions of Jesus and you imitate Jesus and you do what Jesus did that is in your power to do. Like the Twelve, who left everything behind, their boats, their homes, their tax collections, their wealth, their families – a follower of Christ follows Christ – daily, even hourly. They rearrange their lives to become more and more able to do what Jesus asks. They listen closer and closer to the Holy Spirit and to what the Spirit says.

My pastor when we lived in Atlanta was Doug MacIntosh. When he was in seminary, Doug and his wife lived in a high-rise dormitory in Dallas with other seminary students. As graduation approached, one particular man became troubled because he could not discern what the Holy Spirit wanted him to do with his life, and so about 11 o’clock every evening, he would start praying in his dorm room – loudly. “God, what do you want me to do with my life!” he would shout.

After a week or so of this, one evening Doug, Cheryl, and some friends were in the room above the man’s room, and one of them got the bright idea to shout back in a deep, God-like voice: “Go to Switzerland!”

“What’s that Lord? You want me to go to Switzerland?”

“Yes. Go to Switzerland!”

The man went to Switzerland as a missionary and was very successful in his ministry, for he was committed to following the Holy Spirit, Who spoke through some godly friends.

But it is difficult to truly follow Jesus. Even Jesus recognized this and said as much:

“Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Now, there are some people who argue that the eye of the needle is a Jerusalem gate that was a bit of a tight fit for camels, but I don’t buy this. Jesus was not in Jerusalem, and He wanted to make a point about how God needed to act – and how wealth makes something which is difficult even more difficult.

26 The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?”

In the ancient world, the general understanding was that those who are wealthy are those who have been blessed by God because of their goodness. Those who are poor have been somehow cursed by God because of something they have done. And though we intellectually think today that the poor are preferred by God over the wealthy, our hearts and our actions toward each group of people do not agree. Although we may believe in our hearts that the most wealthy people must be evil, we still believe that the well-off, the upper middle class, if you were, are doing the "right" things in front of God, and the homeless, the poor, the poverty-stricken are doing something wrong and that God has punished them for their actions. The crime which keeps people out of our living rooms is the crime of being poor, for in our hearts, we "know" that they have sinned.

When He talked about the camel and the eye of the needle, Jesus was saying that God needs to act for anyone to make it into God’s kingdom. We need the Holy Spirit to draw us into the kingdom before we are even interested. That’s why it’s so hard to talk people into coming to church – most of them aren’t Christians, they don’t have the Holy Spirit, and they don’t understand why they need to be here. And so you look at me the same way the disciples looked at their leader and you say, “Who then can be saved?” "How can anyone be saved?"

27 Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.”

And thus I tell you to pray for help with the dozen or so people you are trying to lead to Christ. Pray for God to melt their hearts. Pray for God to give you the words that need saying. Speak to them of the Gospel, but pray for God to save your friends, neighbors and family.

You know, in every crowd, there is always someone who wants a pat on the back. You may feel like you’ve done a lot for God. You may feel like you are well on your way to being God’s pet, like a good student is the teacher’s pet. I may feel like I’ve been working hard and following Jesus very well. And we want to say so, like Peter did:

28 Then Peter spoke up, “We have left everything to follow you!”

Once again, Peter has confirmed that Jesus is God. Jesus called each of the Twelve disciples. God, in the form of Jesus Christ, has saved them. The Holy Spirit has called me to be a pastor and writer. Christ has saved me. And God is calling you to minister to people also, perhaps full-time, perhaps part-time, perhaps in the church, perhaps outside the church, perhaps in a ministry of works such as Food pantry, perhaps in a ministry of caring such as being the listening friend who leads people to Christ, perhaps being the prayer warrior who goes onto your knees every morning and every evening and prays wonderful prayers that God listens to as a music lover listens to a symphony. Whatever it is, you can be sure that you are called, for God does not waste a willing heart. If you want to serve God, God will find a calling for you.

And what is the reward for turning over your life completely to your God, to following Jesus wherever He leads you, to leaving behind all your possessions, your family, your fields, your jobs, your homes?

29 “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel 30 will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. 31 But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
The rewards will be there – a hundred times – and persecutions – and also eternal life in the age to come. Jesus Himself, God who is good, walking upon this earth has promised this.

And it does not matter whether you are the poorest, least educated, most miserable, most ignored, most hated human being in the world – or whether you are a billionaire politician who owns entire cities and has a hundred personal servants – God will reward all those who follow Jesus, for as Jesus said:

31 But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
So what is important?

How strongly do you follow Jesus? Is Jesus the center, the core, the everyday purpose of your life? Or is Jesus just on the outer edge of your life, a boundary which keeps you from stepping over the cliff edge of despair and evil-doing?

Keep your eyes upon Jesus. Look to further God’s purposes every day. Be clear for Whom you work – is it yourself, your family, or Your Lord? 

The answer to this question is important.

The Integrity of Job - Praising God in Times of Trouble

Job 1:1 - 2:1-10; Psalm 26; Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16

This is World Communion Sunday. Today, we share Holy Communion with Christians around the world – and remember the martyrs whose bodies were broken and blood was shed that our God might be glorified. In particular, we remember the martyrs of Oregon today who had the integrity to answer “yes” when a weapon was pointed at them and they were asked, “are you a Christian?” – and therefore, I am dressed in red and the Communion Table is decorated in red in their memory and in memory of all persecuted Christians around the world.

This is the fourth of 8 sermons on a series Entitled “God Solves our Problems”.

We’ve heard how the promise of eternal life changes our perspective on problems, allowing us to see problems with an eternal, godly perspective instead of an urgent, human perspective. And we saw how, with our permission, God puts us into a training program to help us learn to live godly, holy lives. Then we saw how God’s model of the servant leader drives us to help other people rather than look upon others as our servants. And last week, we saw how understanding our relationship to God keeps us from becoming arrogant, and how prayer keeps us humble.

And today we will talk about integrity.

What is integrity?

When I was single, I bought a kitten. After a year or so, that now-grown cat had several kittens. I kept one and gave the rest to the local pet store to sell. About a year later, Saundra and I married and we made the first of what now add up to thirteen moves. And, of course, we had problems finding apartments and houses over the years because of the cats.

At any time, we could have given the cats – and later, the dogs – over to the Humane Society. It would have saved us much money, it would have been easy, it would have made finding homes much simpler and cheaper – but it would have broken an implied contract that I made the day I bought that first cat, which was to take care of that cat until she died. That cat lived 16 years until I had to have her put to sleep. And the last few years, she was not a very pleasant beast. But integrity meant that I had to honor my contract with her.

A long, long time ago, before Moses led the people out of Israel, there lived a man named Job. Job was a man of perfect integrity, blameless in all of his dealings – a good man who could be completely trusted. He even conducted a burnt offering sacrifice after the birthday parties of each of his children in case they had sinned or cursed God in their hearts. Just in case. Job was fully committed to God – not 50% committed, not 90% committed, but Job had figured out how to trust God completely and yet he worked as a livestock owner. And, largely because of his integrity, everything had gone right in life for Job – he had great wealth, he had a large family, and many servants.

In the first chapter of Job, Satan comes to heaven and talks to God. God points out Job and praises him. But Satan says that “of course Job loves God, because God has blessed him.” And so, to teach Satan a lesson, God allows Satan to take away all of Job’s wealth.

In the course of an afternoon, Satan has raiders steal his livestock, kill his servants, and sends a tornado to destroy the house where his children are having a party, killing them all. Job is left with his wife, four frightened servants, and his health.

Job’s response was not very satisfying to Satan. Job said,

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.”
And Job did not say anything against God.

A while later, there is another gathering in Heaven, and Satan again shows up. God once again points out Job and how Job has kept his trust in God.

This time, Satan says, “Yeah, but if he were sick, he’d curse you.”

And God says, “fine do what you want – just don’t kill him”

And so Satan puts a disease on Job like smallpox or chickenpox. He’s completely covered with painful, itchy sores.

And so Job goes and sits in some ashes and scratches himself with a piece of broken pottery. (There is actually some medical benefit to this – older folks will remember that ashes are used to make strong lye-based soap, and the dried ashes would probably reduce infections in the sores.)

Job’s wife is very helpful. 9 His wife said to him, “Are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die!”

Job replied, “You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”
And the Bible tells us that “In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.”

Job’s time of trouble did not end that day. In the Book of Job, Job’s four friends come over to visit and console him, but their conversation is the sort of conversation from friends that you’d rather not have. You see, his friends are all convinced that Job must have done something evil and wrong or he wouldn’t be in the shape he’s in. They talk about how God hates evil people and torments them. And for over thirty chapters, they take turns examining different possibilities of what Job might have done wrong – and Job patiently answers them by saying, in effect – “No, I didn’t do anything wrong. And God, who is always good, must have had a good reason for doing what God did.”

And we still do this today, don’t we? When someone has a heart attack, we immediately assume it is because they smoked, or ate too much pork, or too much butter. If someone has skin cancer, we assume it is because they went out in the sun too much when they were younger. If someone becomes addicted to pain pills, we assume it is because they have a moral weakness. And if someone is killed in a bar fight, we assume it is because they went to those bars too frequently.

We are particularly strong about assuming that when a person loses their job, it is because of some laziness or moral problem on their part.

Yet sometimes, you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve seen an entire factory get shut down just because the company sold the division at to another, more efficient company who could make the products at their own factory more efficiently because they were ten times larger than the shut down factory. It was no fault of the people in the shut-down factory – they had succeeded for years despite their small production volume because their product designs were that good.

Our text – and the remainder of the Book of Job, though, tells us that sometimes God lets Satan attack us – and it has nothing to do with us. It appears that God let Satan attack Job to teach Satan a lesson. But what happened in the end?

Near the end of the book, Job says that he wishes God would speak to him and let him know what he has done wrong.

(“Oh, that I had someone to hear me!
I sign now my defense—let the Almighty answer me;
let my accuser put his indictment in writing.
36 Surely I would wear it on my shoulder,
I would put it on like a crown.
37 I would give him an account of my every step;
I would present it to him as to a ruler.)—

Job’s fourth friend, Elihu, cannot take this. Job’s three older friends have condemned Job – yet Job persists in claiming he has done nothing wrong. Yet Elihu is convinced that the situation demands that either God or Job must be in the wrong. So Elihu states that :

“So listen to me, you men of understanding.
Far be it from God to do evil,
from the Almighty to do wrong.
11 He repays everyone for what they have done;
he brings on them what their conduct deserves.
12 It is unthinkable that God would do wrong,
that the Almighty would pervert justice.

A storm builds up and approaches, and out of the storm, God speaks to Job:

Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

After pointing out the many things that God knows that no other person knows,

The Lord said to Job:

2 “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?
Let him who accuses God answer him!”

God, when God answered Job, had a different answer for Job – and for us. God said, in effect: “I, who created this Universe, don’t need to answer to you, whom I created.”

Isn’t that an answer that is difficult to take? God has just allowed Job’s life to be wrecked, God has allowed Job’s friends to mock him, and God has allowed Job’s wife to speak to him with zero respect. And through it all, Job has maintained his confidence in God’s goodness. Job holds his faith together and does not falter. Job continues to trust God.

And so, after God has finished chewing out Job, God says: “Don’t dare question me, for I am God – and you’re not!” It is a difficult message - one that is difficult for us today in a land where we feel everyone is equal - perhaps even our God?

Job got the message, the message that Job was the created person and God was the Creator. Job understood just how small he was compared to God.

Then Job replied to the Lord:

2 “I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.

5 My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
6 Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”

Job knew how small he was compared to God. And Job had the integrity to say so. But do we? Do we truly see how we compare to God? Or do we still want to demand answers from God for what God has done?

And so what should we take away from the story of Job’s integrity?

First of all, believe in the goodness and love of God with all your heart, and keep on believing through good times and bad times. Hold onto that belief – that faith – with everything you have no matter what your friends may say to you. Remember that your very existence is proof positive of God’s love for you and God’s goodness. Elihu was right - it is inconceivable that God would do wrong.

Second, hold onto your own goodness. If you have done evil in the past, pray to God to forgive your past evil and move forward, changing your ways and doing nothing but good as you move forward. You will mess up! But if you truly focus upon doing good, on being in God’s will, on becoming holy, and daily ask for God’s help in this, you will grow better and better until you, too will have the integrity of Job.

Jesus’ teaching on divorce in Mark 10 is related to this: According to Jesus, there are some very adverse consequences to divorce. If you have married, and decide you want to divorce your husband or wife, you need to consider that just because divorce is legal, just because Moses allowed a certificate of divorce to be given, just because you can legally walk away, you will need to recognize that more people than yourself are affected. Integrity demands that we work through the consequences, never taking divorce – or marriage – or even what we would call today “intimate relationships” lightly. Integrity demands that we hold onto our vows, even when things get difficult. Do we never get a divorce? No, there are a few sound reasons to get a divorce – abandonment, adultery on the part of the other, consistent abuse, when your life is in danger from your spouse, and a few other circumstances. But even then, the consequences to all involved – yourself, your spouse, your children – need to be considered. What are you promising when you first become close to another? What are you promising when you become engaged, when you say, “I do”? Your integrity is on the line, and your personal integrity is nothing to be considered lightly. God commended Job for his exceptional integrity. Integrity is important to God.

And finally, let us learn from Job to recognize that sometimes evil will be allowed to come your way. Bad things do happen to good people. But just as in Job’s case, not everything bad that happens to you is about you. Job’s troubles were largely because God wanted to teach Satan a lesson and God had tremendous confidence in Job. Sometimes, you see, the troubles in your life are merely a shadow of the great spiritual warfare that is constantly going on between the arrogance of Satan – and the love of God for all people. Trust in God’s goodness always, for hell happens when the evil of this world exceeds our belief that God can stop it!

You may want to read more about Job – I encourage you to do so. I try to reread the Book of Job once a year, and every time I do I get more out of it.

Our integrity is involved in almost everything in our life. One part of it is in our call by Christ to love others. Because God loved you so deeply that God forgave all of your sins and allows you into Heaven, if you have integrity, you recognize your debt to God and are grateful for God’s love. Christ has asked us to tell other people about God’s love, to bring people to baptism, and to teach them everything He commanded. Our integrity tells us that following this command is a reasonable response to our debt to God. And so we begin to turn our life’s focus from what we want – to what God wants.

As you go about your life this week, remember to pray for your twelve people on your list. And as you visit them or speak to them over the phone, remember to praise the God who is always good. Always praise God to your friends, your neighbors, and your families.

And so we come to the final questions to ponder for our self-examination.

Do you have the integrity of Job? Why not? If not, perhaps you might ask God for help in keeping your integrity from this day forward.

Do you trust in God completely and keep that trust through good days and bad days?

Do you trust in God’s goodness and love for all people? Or do you attribute evil to God and other people? Why? Is it perhaps because you often have evil thoughts or do and say evil things?

Jesus Christ so loved us and God that He walked to the Cross where He died. His integrity was perfect, as He sacrificed His body and His blood for us. And this past week, others, including some people in Oregon, also had the integrity to sacrifice their bodies and blood for the glory of God. They stood strong despite their fear, despite their innocence. There is urgency in what we do, my friends. We must work to share the Gospel widely, lest the evil overwhelm us in this country.

Today, we will have the opportunity to share the love of Christ among us. We will have the opportunity to remember what perfect integrity can do. We will have the opportunity to take the spiritual nourishment which is the body and blood of Jesus Christ within us, letting Him spread throughout our body and soul, changing us into a more perfect image of Him.

Take this time to pray for your twelve people you are leading to Christ. Take this time to pray for them to come to know Christ and His love for us. Take this time to pray for God to save their souls. Take this time to pray for the martyrs and to thank God that you have not had to show the same integrity, the integrity of Job, the integrity of Christ.

Combating Arrogance in Your World - Arrogance and Humbleness

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

This is the third of 8 sermons on a series Entitled “God Solves our Problems”.

We’ve heard how the promise of eternal life changes our perspective on problems, allowing us to see problems with an eternal, godly perspective instead of an urgent, human perspective. And we saw how, with our permission, God puts us into a training program to help us learn to live godly, holy lives. And last week, we saw how God’s model of the servant leader drives us to help other people rather than look upon others as our servants.

This week, today’s readings are so rich, concern arrogance and humbleness, and involve two separate episodes between the Old Testament and the Gospel.

The first episode in Numbers 11 involves Moses and the people in the desert. The Israelites had fled Egypt and crossed the sea to the desert. And now, two years late, the Israelites are moving back and forth between the Sinai Peninsula and the desert in western Arabia. During all this time, for the last two years, God has provided everyone with enough manna to eat, miraculous bread that appeared every morning on the ground. The people have had enough, though.

4 The rabble with them began to crave other food, and again the Israelites started wailing and said, “If only we had meat to eat! 5 We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. 6 But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!”

The people were tired of C-rations. They were tired of Power Bars. They were tired of Granola every day. They wanted hamburgers. And they whined and complained about the way God had kept them alive.

Don’t we still do that? Don't we still complain about the manner in which God has kept us alive. We have a comfortable home, but don’t have a Jacuzzi, so we complain. We have a car, but it isn’t a Lexus, so we complain. We have a 32 inch television, but it isn’t a 54 inch, so we complain. We have a freezer full of venison, but there’s no shrimp so we complain. We have a social security check that comes every month so we don’t have to work in our old age, but we complain because there was no cost-of-living increase and we can’t eat at the steak house this week. We are alive and able to make it to church, but we complain because we have trouble hearing the speakers from the back row of the sanctuary.

It is in the nature of people to complain, but some people take it to excess. When I was in Atlanta, we attended a church which had some rather wealthy people in it, and by our standards, several of them spoiled their children. The issue wasn’t whether or not the 16 year old got the oldest family car to drive, but whether the new car they would receive was a Mercedes convertible or a BMW convertible.

One night I listened as several members of the youth group were bragging. “I just got my 100th CD”, one said. Another quickly explained that he had 200 and a third said he had 400 music CD’s. And for the next half-hour, these wealthy kids, who had the ability to drive all over Atlanta, had pocket money that allowed them to eat out at a different restaurant every night – and Atlanta has so many restaurants that you truly can eat at a different restaurant every night – these spoiled, arrogant children, who lived in a city with major league baseball, major league football, major league basketball, theatres, concerts, and multiple major amusement parks – these arrogant teens complained for a half-hour about how there was nothing to do in Atlanta.

The Israelites and the Atlanta youth group both were arrogant. Arrogance is best described as the opposite of humble. Arrogance is assuming that things are owed to you because of who you are. In particular, arrogance toward God is an attitude that demands certain things from God and assumes that you are equal enough with God to negotiate.

Now I do not know about you, but I do not negotiate with fleas when our dog Brownie brings one home. And in the scheme of things, God is far, far, farther above us than we are above fleas. There is no equality here, we have no rights in front of God, the Lego-man has no rights in front of the boy who built him, the Barbie doll has no rights in front of the girl who owns her, and we have no basis to demand anything of the God who created the Universe. Job once demanded that God show Job what Job had done wrong, and God said, in the 38th chapter:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. “

And all around us we have people questioning God’s motives. “Why did God let the earthquake happen? Why does God let ISIS do evil things? Why does God allow disease and death to happen?” Perhaps we should be asking a more fundamental, a more basic question: "Why does God bother to allow ME to exist?"

We have the wrong image of God and ourselves. We think that God sees us as a little fly hiding in the corner of the Universe, so small that God rarely even knows we exist. We assume that God would have track us down, to look intently for us, to swat us to wipe us out, that it would take energy for God to find us and destroy us. But we misunderstand. A better, more accurate image is that of the juggler who has 52 fine crystal wineglasses in the air at once. All he needs to do if one of the wineglasses offends him is to stop worrying about that particular glass and it will quickly shatter because the juggler isn’t constantly saving it from destruction. We are the wineglasses and God is the Juggler. The only reason we exist is because God chooses to keep us going every second – if God merely forgets about us, we are lost forever. But God loves us and pays attention to us so that we continue to live.

Arrogant people can wear you out. And the arrogance of the Israelites was wearing out Moses. So he went to God and asked God why God had stuck him with the burden of dealing with all the Israelites. In fact, Moses was so upset he asked God to grant him a favor and strike him dead so he didn’t have to deal with the arrogance of the people any longer.

And so God had Moses pull together 70 leaders, and God took some of the Holy Spirit that was on Moses and put that Spirit on the 70 leaders, and they began to prophesy. They began to speak on behalf of God. They began to lead Israel in a godly fashion and handle the burdens of leadership, pointing people to the good things God had done for Israel, forming Israel into a God-fearing group instead of a Moses-hating rabble. And each of those leading people grew closer to God, and the army of Israel began to form into something more than a random mob of people.

But there was a problem. It seems like two men were not invited to the leadership meeting and they began speaking with the power of the Holy Spirit. Eldad and Medad had not gone to the classes, they had not received the certificate, they didn’t have the diploma – but God spoke through them.

Naturally, a couple of busybodies decided that this wasn’t right – a leader has to be properly checked out, properly approved, properly anointed and consecrated by the important powers. Eldad and Medad must be stopped!

29 But Moses replied, “Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!”
Moses understood this principle: If you have enough people who listen to the Holy Spirit and speak what the Holy Spirit says – the world would be a much better place.

In our worldly experience, leadership is a rare and protected jewel. After all, we can only have one principal, one President, one CEO. There can only be one teacher in a class, one supervisor in a team, one general in a brigade. You can only have one person conducting, one person playing first chair violin, one lead surgeon. And so in the world, we try our best to stop people from becoming leaders, for fear that there will be too many leaders and not enough followers. It is how we decide who is better than the next person, and how we justify our arrogance, because we were selected and (ha, ha!) you weren’t.

And so we require degrees and certificates and coursework and senority and such. We put barriers in front of people who want to be leaders. But Moses simply wanted everyone to have the Holy Spirit, to listen to that Spirit, and to tell others about God.

And Jesus also had this different idea for the church. Mark tells us that one day some of the disciples came back and said,

38 “Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”

39 “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, 40 for whoever is not against us is for us. 41 Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward.
Jesus understood that people who follow Jesus are following Jesus, whether or not they went through the approved channels. Jesus didn’t care if you were part of the official Three-Year Disciples Course – he just wanted people to speak to other people about His message of love and forgiveness.

And so, there is no course that certifies you to speak to your friends, neighbors, and family about Jesus. There is no official requirement you must pass to allow you to set up a Bible study in your home. You already have permission and encouragement from Jesus Himself.

Now something happened though, over the centuries. As the original Twelve disciples died and new leaders came to teach in the church, over the centuries some people who were good teachers – but not necessarily good students – began to teach odd ideas about Jesus. And the bulk of the teachers and leaders had to decide how to make sure that Christianity remained focused upon the original teachings of Jesus.

And so the idea of ordination came about, where a leader of a congregation must not only receive the backing of the congregation, but also be approved by several leaders from nearby congregations. It was a form of quality control. And in various forms, this continues today, as a form of quality control, a way to ensure that arrogant, yet charismatic teachers do not teach false ideas to people who do not know any better.

And so today, in the United Methodist Church, we have several levels of certification which ensure that those who teach are at least teaching Methodist ideas when they teach in a Methodist church, for although 90% of what we teach agrees with the Baptists and the Catholics and the Presbyterians and the Church of Christ, there are some ideas which make us a Methodist Church, just as all cheeseburgers have hamburger and cheese and buns, but a Big Mac isn’t a Big Mac without that special sauce.

To spread the Word of God, to start a home Bible study, to lead people in prayer, to bring your friends and neighbors and family to know Jesus better – you only have to learn to read and interpret the Word of God, and to listen to the Holy Spirit, while trying your best to live a holy life yourself. As a baptized Christian, you are encouraged to do this as soon as possible.

However, to deliver a sermon in your own church, you must have passed the Basic Lay Servant course at the District Lay Speaker Academy, and this course is also recommended for everyone who leads a significant class inside the church. You also have to have the recommendation of your Staff Parish Relations Committee and your Charge Conference and the pastor. And we’ll be looking for evidence of the Holy Spirit moving in your life and your understanding of God. You see, you are now teaching within our walls and we want to be sure you meet certain basic standards.

To be a substitute speaker at other churches, you must have taken advanced courses from the Lay Speaker Academy, as well as the previous requirements.

To go on to be a part-time pastor, you must pass a Licensing Course and undergo background checks a psychological exam, and some other requirements. You must have various recommendations and spend several weekends with a group preparing for the job. Now that you have become an employee of the church, there are certain standards to be met to ensure you meet certain legal requirements and we meet legal responsibilities.

To be a full time pastor, you must pass most of a set of 20 courses or have a seminary master’s degree, and serve a while as a part-time pastor.

To be a Bishop or District Superintendent, you must have a master’s degree in Divinity from a Methodist-associated seminary, be ordained as an Elder, and have served as a full-time pastor.

Notice – as the responsibility grows, hopefully the quality control grows more and more stringent. And while this system has its flaws, it mostly works to put godly, wise people in positions of leadership and responsibility.

It is good and humble to learn from others. It is good and useful and helps us spread the Word when we sit weekly in a Bible study group with other Christians, for they will open up our ears and hearts to new ideas and tell us when our own ideas are out-of-line with historic Christian ideas, when we have brought an idea from the world into the world of the Spirit which is not good, not good at all. And in the same way, some of those ideas that we find or are given by the Spirit will be helpful to others. And we should listen, for we do not want to make others – particularly young people – stumble because we are teaching ideas that sound good at first but which have not stood the test of being discussed by holy, godly people who listen to the Holy Spirit.

And there is more. We have to maintain a true balance in our lives. On the one hand, we have to guard against becoming arrogant, thinking that we have learned all there is to learn about God and Christ and the Holy Spirit, and that we don’t need to really learn any more, because we will be going to Heaven and seeing Jesus soon enough.

Yet on the other hand, we should recognize that what we have already learned, whether it be from years of intense study or from a few weeks or months of sermons – is valuable and should be passed onto those who know less than we do. Properly speaking, every Christian believer should be both master and disciple, both student and teacher, devoting time every week both to learning new things about Christ – and teaching others about Christ.

Recently, I asked you to make a list of twelve people you would have as your small group, a group of people mostly outside the church that you would pray for and lead to Christ, and all the way until they asked to be baptized and even beyond, helping them to understand what you’ve learned about Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit and what it means to be a follower of Christ.

And if you teach to the twelve people on your list – they will learn the love of Christ, they will come closer to God, and one day, you’ll be delighted and blessed to join them as a sponsor for their baptism, having helped them open God’s gift of forgiveness and grace which allows them to spend eternity with you.

Arrogance is in this world. And arrogant people are those who either think they know everything – or who think that they are too good, too high and mighty – too busy to help others. Which is your sin?

Do you know enough about God? Are you sure?

Are you too busy and important to spend time helping other people come to God?

And then there is the issue of prayer. James said:

3 Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. 14 Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven.16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Notice that prayer is not just limited to the leaders of the church, All are to pray “so that you may be healed”. Prayer is effective because it shows God that we are humble. As a person said, “Why should we pray? God knows what is happening.”

And the answer – I believe attributed to C.S.Lewis – was simply. “Sometimes, God simply likes to asked.” For it is only the supremely arrogant who never ask for help in this life. If you do not pray, is it because you don’t think you need help? And if you don’t need help, is it because you think you can handle everything – or is it because you aren’t growing in your walk with Christ, and aren't being stretched enough because you think that you've learned everything there is to learn about God?

Sometimes, I hear that one of you has been to the hospital ER and back home and I did not find out about it until days later. I suspect that for many of you, asking for prayer is the same as admitting that you are in deep trouble, and if you don’t ask for prayer, the trouble can’t be very bad. It is a form of denial, a form of self-delusion.

We had a sign in the teacher’s restroom at Parkersburg Catholic High School. It said, “If it is important enough to worry over, it is important enough to pray over.”

Ask for help from God and each other, early and often. It is another way to combat arrogance – our own arrogance, for the humble ask for help, while the arrogant do not ask.

Finally, when you have a deep, deep problem that you are ashamed of, the natural, worldly tendency is to say, “I will try harder to handle the problem”. Once again, we become arrogant. And what happens? The smoker keeps smoking, the drinker continues to drink, the porn watcher keeps watching, the gossip keeps on gossiping.

To stop any deep problem, we must resort to prayer – we must tell God that we cannot handle the problem, that we believe that God CAN handle the problem, and we humbly ask God to handle the problem. Just as Moses decided that he could no longer lead Israel by himself, we must turn over our deep, deep problems to God and ask for help.

And it is then that God acts. For God never acts against your deepest will. If you want to try to solve your problem yourself, God will let you try. But when you truly are frightened or disgusted with your problem, and honestly tell God this, God will step in. But you have to give God permission first.

As you work with your twelve names, the twelve people that you have decided are your small group you will lead to Christ, keep this principle in mind – the greatest barrier to coming to Christ is our own arrogance that tells us we don’t need help.

And that arrogance, that self-sufficiency, that pride is responsible for more evil in the world than anything else we do, for being arrogant is an attitude that makes us believe we know better than everyone else, than even God. Arrogance is actually a claim to being a little god, standing alone in the Universe, being the only person who is right.

And that leads to all sorts of trouble. Trouble that coming to God in humbleness, bowing the neck and bending the knee will begin to cure. What is more important in the world – your agenda or God’s agenda? When we bow to God and follow God’s agenda, our humbleness allows God to better work in and through us, and our life improves, and God’s power then can improve the world around us.

So sometimes, when I speak to someone who is arrogant and considering Christ, I tell them:

“I have seen with many people that the biggest barrier for them to come to God is this feeling that if I bow to God, I will lose my independence. I’ve seen people who know this, deep down, who know that God exists, but who subconsciously know that if they admit God exists it will mean that they must admit that there is a Person who is greater than they are, who might call them into account one day, and who has the power to do so. And so that becomes a barrier for them following Christ and God. ”

For those of you who weren’t here last week, following in the pattern of the early church, each of you should have a small group of a dozen people in the world that you are leading and influencing. You may not have recognized it before, but they are there. They may never, ever set foot in a church, but your task is to be their small group leader, teaching them about God, praying for them, checking up on them every week or two. The names on the list are twelve people you know – family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, waitresses, check-out operators, and other people you see and talk to regularly. Take seriously your role as salt of the earth, that rare person that gives life a good flavor – work to lead these twelve people to Christ this year by praising God to them, listening to their problems, telling them what you have seen God do, and generally acting like the older woman in the movie “War Room” – which you should see if at all possible. We can and will change the world – if God wants us to.

Take this time to pray for your twelve people. Take this time to pray for them to come to know Christ and His love for us. Take this time to pray for God to save their souls.

Lifting Each Other Up - Christian Leadership

Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13 – 4:8; Mark 9:30-37

This is the second of 8 sermons on a series Entitled “God Solves our Problems”.

Last week we heard how the promise of eternal life changes our perspective on problems, allowing us to see problems with an eternal, godly perspective instead of an urgent, human perspective. And we saw how, with our permission, God puts us into a training program to help us learn to live godly, holy lives.

This week, we see biblical models of leadership which solve many of our problems.

In our first reading, we see the ideal wife – a woman who is strong, caring, wise in the ways of business, hard-working, and leads her children and her household servants. She is able to earn money from her skills and with it buy land and start additional businesses. She takes care of her family with beautiful clothing – and gives to the poor. She respects God and her husband, and partially because of her, her husband is well-respected in the community. She rises early and goes to bed late.

And her reward? Her husband and children love and respect her, praising her to all. And the neighbors also praise her and her works.

It is worth noting a couple of things which are not mentioned. This woman has not been torn by making the modern decision between family and career – she has them both, for she has decided to not only work in the home, but to work from the home. She is there for her children and she is a strong financial contributor to the family, finding a career in her business pursuits which she runs from the house because it keeps her near her husband and children. She truly has it all, and her life is in balance. Children, husband, God, and business are all mentioned in her life.

There was a time when having it all was more common than we like to believe. The farm family worked together. The store owner’s family worked together. The smith and the carpenter and the pastor’s family all worked together on the same plot of land instead of traveling a half an hour twice every day to spend 8 hours apart.

And then, there was a time when we decided as a society that this ideal simply could not be followed – a woman simply had to make a decision between career and home, between the office and the kitchen, her family and her employer.

But you know, in the last couple of decades technology has amazingly enough become our friend in this area. The Internet is full of people who are selling home-made craft items or services while working from home. Even Facebook allows you to set up business pages from which to sell your products and advertise them. I have a friend in Georgia who sells model car kits over the Internet and makes a good living. I know another person who sells wooden moose carvings – still another sells cheap New Testaments, and another works from home as an AT&T inbound telemarketing agent – the company routs calls to her between certain hours, she makes $15 per hour, and she never has to leave her home, working as many hours – or as few hours – as she wants to. I know of a woman who earned $100 per hour worked with her online business. And for 10 years our entire family worked from home. It takes a bit of courage and willingness to experiment a bit, but it can be done.

But back to the woman in Proverbs. Did you notice that her joy, her rewards, her income comes from doing things for others. First and foremost, this woman is focused on other people – her husband, her family, her neighbors, her servants, and her God – she is not focused upon demanding things for herself but assumes that she will find joy and meaning and love by providing for other people.

This is perhaps the key lesson to be learned from the Proverbial woman – and from our James reading – The lesson is that when we focus upon what we want and desire and need and must have – things go wrong. Our life wilts and dies, but when we focus upon what others want and desire and need and must have - our life blossoms into a wonderful, fulfilling, joyful time!

James wrote: What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.

In other words, when we focus upon our needs, trouble brews, fights happen, arguments come forth, and divorce stalks our families.

So how do we get what we want?

James continues:

You do not have because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
The flip side is to ask God with good motives. Do you need a job? You might want to try doing what Saundra did many years ago.

One day, years before I met her, my wife Saundra needed a job. She heard about a job selling advertising at the local newspaper, but she delayed in going to the office, and when she finally applied she found out a woman much more qualified than her had been given the job the day before. Many people would have prayed for another job, or for something to happen to the woman who got the job.

Instead, Saundra prayed for the woman to receive an even better job. An hour or so later, the newspaper called up Saundra. It seems as though that other woman had been offered a different job at another company making considerably more than the newspaper was offering, and would Saundra like the job?

You see, God understands when you need help. For example, God knows when you need a new car, but God also knows when a used Ford Focus will get you there, and God knows that you don’t really need a BMW, even if you’ve been asking for one for the last five years.

In our story with Jesus and the disciples, the disciples were arguing about who was in charge. You can almost imagine Jesus rolling his eyes, so he sits down and says: Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

But what does this mean? 

Are you willing to give up your prerogatives, your place in society? If you have been listened to for years, are you willing to be ignored in the next meeting? If you’ve had your way, are you willing to let someone half your age have their way – and help them succeed even though you know the better way? If you were the best, can you help the worst become the best?

In modern leadership training, the subject always rolls around to types of people. Everybody works differently. And the human resources types, the personnel and staffing managers always tell us that there are people who are focused upon tasks – getting the job done – and there are people who are focused upon people – having good relationships with the people around them. And so the human resources types and the staffing managers tell us that we have to hire the right people for the job, with enough task-oriented people that the jobs will get done and enough people-oriented people that there won’t always be fights.

And we sometimes see that in the church. The church wants to have a fellowship dinner and there are some people who are very focused upon the most efficient way to serve a fellowship dinner, they’ve done this for 30 years, they have the process down to a science, they know what is efficient and works and gets the job done! Get ‘er done!

And then there are people who want to talk. For them, working at the fellowship dinner is a time to find out just whatever happened to those grandchildren, to talk about Sally’s mother’s cancer treatments, to hear the stories about the dog that ran away. It drives the task-oriented people crazy!

Or we have a clothing closet and there is a particular, best way to find used clothing, a particular process we must follow to be efficient, a time-tested method that works and works and we only give 2 suits and 3 pairs of pants to a person every 2 months and that’s the rules, the rules were made to be efficient and not waste time or resources.

And then there is the people-oriented person who knows that this man needs 5 pairs of pants because he’s working five days a week and he’ll need matching pants in his job and so they give away two extra pair of pants and the paperwork never is right when that person works the clothing closet.

Perhaps we have a music ministry, and the musicians know that the key to a great performance is practice, practice, practice. And it kills some musicians to listen to our music, because it isn’t as good as the Gaither Family, our vocals aren’t as strong as Taylor Swift, our instruments aren’t as good as the New York Philharmonic. And we talk a lot during choir practice and could probably practice our pieces twice as much if we didn’t gab so much.

But as the church, as members of the Body of Christ, we should recognize what the task of the church is. Unlike Wendy’s or McDonald’s or Oliverios, our job is not to be a restaurant. Unlike JC Penney’s, or Sears, or Old Navy, our job is not to sell clothing. Unlike Kroger’s or Walmart or Aldi’s, our job is not to sell groceries. And unlike the Social Security Administration or DHHR or WIC, our job is not to be an efficient government agency, dispensing aid in a crisp, efficient manner. Unlike the American Music Theatre or Taylor Swift, our job is not to offer wonderful musical performance each week.

Our task as the church is to help people connect with God through Jesus Christ, to help people understand God’s will by teaching them to read the Word of God and to listen to the Holy Spirit, to help people accept God’s grace and live an eternal, abundant life!

We will never be as efficient at feeding people as Ryan’s and McDonald’s are. We will never offer a clothing selection as broad as JC Penney or even Gabriel Brothers. We will never move as much food to people as Kroger, Walmart or Food Lion can, nor anywhere as efficiently.

But we can pray with people. We can stop and listen to their hurts and fears and stories, and we can tell them what God has done for us. We can reach out to people and boost them to the point where they can soar past us in their relationship with God. We can change the world for the better because we have access to the mighty power of God whenever we stop for a moment to pray our hearts out for some hurting soul!

You see, the church often doesn’t operate very efficiently because, when it comes right down to it, our task IS the people. Everything we do in the church is for the purpose of developing the people in the church and the people we run into outside the church. The task IS the people!

And so, that extra talk during choir is what helps people understand God a little bit better. The time spent during the fellowship meal preparation talking about each other’s relatives is how we lift each other over the fears and obstacles of life. The times the slide is just a bit late to flip on the overhead, the time the microphone squeals or is too quiet – those times are the times when some teenagers learn responsibility and focus and other skills which will help them in college and on the job and in their families one day.

For the purpose of the church of Jesus Christ is:

• to connect people to God through Jesus Christ, 
• to help people learn God’s will through the Word of God and listening to the Holy Spirit, and 
• to help people achieve an eternal, abundant life with God.

And so our leadership is to be different from the world.

Most of us learned our leadership from elementary teachers, from sergeants in the Army, or from supervisors at work. But there is a key difference between leading in the church and leading in school, in the Army, or at work. In school – you can’t leave. At work, if you leave you lose your salary. In the Army, if you leave you end up in jail. But anyone can leave the church anytime and drive down the road to the next church – or even stay home.

And so Jesus told us that we would need a different form of leadership. A humble leadership. A leadership which is the servant of everyone else. A leadership which understand that their purpose is to lift up and develop the other people in the church and outside the church, to show them God’s love, to help them, to love them, to serve them, and to even love them to the point of cutting them off when they become too dependent.

In ancient times, the children watched the little children. The teens watched the children, and the women watched the teens. In a social gathering, the men were too busy talking with other important people – the other men – to worry about the women or the teens or the children – and they definitely stayed away from the little children and infants. So Mark reports that:

36 [Jesus] took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, 37 “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”

Do you welcome the little children? Perhaps you do, for our society is far more open to this action by adults than the society of first century Palestine was. And so I’ll phrase it a different way for our culture:

Do you welcome the foreign visitor? Do you welcome the dirty, the smelly, the heavily tattooed? Do you stand at the door and greet everyone who walks into this building, guiding them to where they need to go, sitting beside them because you know they are new visitors, eating supper with them on Wednesday evenings even though your friends are here? Do you help the woman with her three little children, the man with his wheelchair, the woman with the headscarf at Walmart or the man with the turban? Have you struck up a conversation at the Chinese restaurant with the young man who is waiting on your table, did you greet the woman at Hardees by name, have you asked the teenager sitting alone “what’s wrong” and listened to them?

This is what it means to be a leader in the church.

“But I don’t want to lead in the church,” you say.

Tough. You are part of the church, a disciple of Jesus. And Jesus expected His disciples to lead in the world. The church is just where we happen to meet a couple of times a week. Our ministry – your ministry is in the world.

Everyone here has the opportunity – and the command – to bring people far enough along in their knowledge and understanding of God and Christ that those people are ready to be baptized. And after they are baptized, we have the responsibility and opportunity to teach each other every command that Jesus taught the original Twelve disciples. Read the very end of Matthew’s Gospel if you need proof. (See Matthew 28:16-20).

It has been my practice to ask you to each attempt to lead one person a year to Christ. Each of us should attempt to lead at least one person a year to the point where they desire baptism. In this charge this year, we have seen 10 people come into full membership in the church, either through baptism or confirmation. Of course, what is sobering is that two of those people who were baptized this year have already gone to be with the LORD. What we do here is important, absolutely critical for people’s eternal souls.

Many years ago, a man in Palestine assembled and taught a small group of twelve men about God. Those men each taught others about God, and over the centuries, that one man and his followers have grown to be over a billion people strong. Of course, I speak of Jesus and the original twelve disciples, the first small group.

And so, if you are willing, consider that you are today appointed the leader of a small group of a dozen people. Write down twelve names. These names are the people in your small group. Some are in your family. Some are in the church. Others work with you, others are your neighbors, and still others are the people you see every week or so in the community – Sharon at the bank, Tim at Walmart, Sara the teacher, Gene the Little League dad. Harry, who works at Home Depot. Put their names on a list and treat them as you would treat the people in a small group you led and taught inside the walls of this church.

Every week or two, check on them. Praise God to them. Tell them what you’ve learned about God this week. Pray for each of them. Lead them to Christ or help them listen more to the Holy Spirit if they are already Christians. Take on the responsibility and be their servant leader. Act just like the older woman does in the movie "War Room." Pray for God to help you and give you the words to say each time you talk with your group. And God will grant that prayer, for it is a prayer of humbleness and, as James wrote:

“God opposes the proud
but shows favor to the humble.”
7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.8 Come near to God and he will come near to you.

Our James reading this week ended with a call to action, a call to physical action.

“Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.”

We all are sinners. We all are of two minds toward God – both loving Him and loving the things of the world. Let us all wash our hands, and say a prayer asking God to purify our hearts today.  Wash your hands so you can go to work for the Kingdom. Let us wash our hands lest our sins harm others.

“Come near to God, and He will come near to you.”

How God Helps us Fight our Problems

Proverbs 1:20-33; Psalm 19:1-4, 7-10; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38

This is the first of 8 sermons on a series Entitled “God Solves our Problems”.

The recent spate in Kentucky has brought to us once again the question of the separation of church and state. Which should reign supreme? The law of the United States, which is that homosexual couples now have the right to marry in all states – or the right of a woman who is dedicated to her God and her understanding that God has decreed marriage to only be between a man and a woman?

And we see that both sides in this issue have used the tools at their disposal. The county clerk’s supporters appeal to religious and moral arguments to persuade people – the state’s judge has used coercive force and tossed the woman into jail.

Regardless of which side you take in this dispute, this debate has gone on a long, long time and this particular round is only the latest in a 3000 year old fight between the powers of the king and the powers of the priesthood.

But even this long running feud between King Saul and Samuel, between King Ahab and Elijah, between Jesus and Pilate, between the Pope and King Henry VIII is just part of an even larger debate. That debate is the debate that each person has between the call of the invisible God upon their life – and the call of the visible world, between material reality and spiritual reality, between the spirit and the flesh. It is the question of the concerns of God – and mere human concerns. Does anything exist beyond what we can see and touch and feel and taste and smell?

Jesus and his disciples had now been together for a couple of years. He had already called the Twelve and they had formed into a group of men who understood each others fairly well. They had walked from Galilee to Jerusalem and back several times, a hundred miles each way. They had recently traveled to Tyre, the ancient capital of the Phoenicians, near where Beirut, Lebanon stands today, a land which in that time had huge cypress trees that were famous around the Eastern Mediterranean. They came back to Galilee and traveled to the towns on the southeastern side, the Decapolis, the Ten Cities. And then they walked almost due north to the town of Caesarea Philippi, which was located in what is today western Syria, North of the Sea of Galilee. And wherever they traveled, Jesus healed people and preached his sermons about all people being valuable, about all people being good enough for God, about all people being loved by His Father God.

And so, in Caesarea Philippi, Jesus stopped with His disciples and asked them a key question: “Who do people say I am?”

28 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
“Some say John the Baptist”, the strange cousin of Jesus who lived in the wilderness, telling people that the Kingdom of God was coming soon, and baptizing people to wash away their sins. John had recently been arrested and beheaded by Herod, the king of Galilee.

“Others say Elijah”. Elijah was one of the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, a man who stood up to Ahab and Jezibel, the rulers of the Northern Kingdom of Israel after the kingdom split soon after Solomon’s death. Elijah had held the great contest of the gods on top of Mt Carmel, and God had sent fire from heaven to light the water-soaked wood of Elijah’s sacrifice, and ignored the priests of Baal, and the people had killed the priests of Baal, Ahab and Jezibel’s minions, in the brook at the bottom of the mountain.

“Still others, one of the prophets”. A prophet was a man or woman who spoke for God, someone who God talked with and gave messages to that they spoke to the people and the rulers of Israel. This was indeed a mighty compliment paid to the young preacher from Nazareth.

And then Jesus asked an even more pointed question: 29 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

You can almost imagine the disciples looking around at each other to go first. They had talked among themselves – they had seen the miracles, they had helped the lame leap up, heard the mute speak, watched the blind see the world for the first time. They had seen demon-possessed people become sane and calm, and they had tasted wine that Jesus had made, not over the course of 6 months like normal people, but in fifteen minutes, controlling the processes of nature like a man who could walk on water – and they had seen that also. They had even seen dead people brought back to life. But most of all they had seen the terrible wisdom and knowledge that Jesus had. And so they looked around at each other, urging each other with their eyes to speak first.

Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”

There – Peter had said it. The Messiah. A title loaded with meaning. Messiah was a Hebrew word which literally meant “the anointed One”. In the speech of the Greeks, the word was Christus, in English “Savior”. The Messiah was to be a high Priest and King, the one who would bring all of Israel back together, the man who would establish the kingdom of God once more, bring global peace and rebuild the Temple of God. The Messiah was to be a descendent of David and Solomon, and would restore the holy line of kings – and be a high priest, joining together church and state once more.

“Don’t tell anyone,” Jesus told His disciples.

And then, Jesus told them the flip side of being Messiah. He told them that He would have to suffer greatly, be rejected by everybody who was anybody, be killed, and then, that he would rise up again after three days. And Peter did not want to hear all of this. He loved Jesus, he would follow Jesus anywhere, but Jesus was now talking crazy, because everyone knew that the man who became Messiah would lead a victorious people to retake their kingdom and toss out the hated Romans, and everyone would love him! And most especially, he would live to rule – he would not die, for glorious leaders rule for 40 or 80 years – they do not die before they rule and that talk about coming back to life was just crazy!

And so Jesus took his star pupil, the big fishing boat captain who had followed Him from the beginning, the man that Jesus had name “Rock!” because that’s what Peter means, and turned His back on him in front of the other disciples, and said:

“Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Jesus called Peter “Satan”, meaning “liar” or “deceiver”. And he drew Peter’s attention to the real issue: “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

And this is still the issue today.

When we look at our problems in life, there are two ways we can look at every single problem we ever face. We can look at the problem with the concerns of God - or with mere human concerns.

The normal way, the way of the world, the human way, is to look at our problems in a world which only contains those things we can see and hear and taste and feel and smell. It is a world filled with objects – cars and boats and rocks and trees and people and hot dogs and cats and flies and snakes. This is the material world, a world composed only of those things we can see and hear and taste and feel and smell.

We look at the material world and we soon lose hope. For in the material world, the material world is clearly stacked against most people.

Studies have shown that the best way to predict how much money you will make in your lifetime is to look at how much money your parents made. The most certain way to become wealthy is to choose your parents well because wealthy parents usually mean wealthy children, and poor parents usually mean poor children.

Other studies have shown that educated parents have educated children, uneducated parents have uneducated children. Children of abusive parents become abusers, children of alcoholics become alcoholics. Etc. Etc.

It seems that in a material world of hungry people, the hungriest simply fade away and those who are born fat and happy stay fat and happy. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor and the middle class fight to pay their taxes and stay where they are.

But there is another way to look at the world. It is to recognize that this Universe has more in it than just those material things. Besides all those cats and hot dogs and rocks and mountains and buildings, there are also ideas.

I’d like you to imagine a perfect triangle.

Now I know that when you went to high school, you had a geometry teacher who told you that a perfect triangle has 180 degrees spread among the three angles. But tell me, can you draw such a triangle? Can you actually draw a triangle that has exactly 180 degrees spread among the three angles. Could you even draw one angle that is exactly 90 degrees? Or would you draw an angle that that is 89 degrees or 91 degrees or 89.999 degrees or 90.0001 degrees?

You can’t draw a perfect triangle. No one can. You can’t even draw a line to be exactly 5 inches long – you can come close, but you’ll be off a thousandth of an inch or a millionth of an inch or the width of an atom.

But still, in our Universe, we have that idea of the perfect triangle, the perfect 5 inch line, the perfect dog, the perfect cake, the perfect steak, the perfect husband or wife, the perfect day, the perfect President.

And those ideas are real, just as real or even more real than that almost perfect material triangle that we tried to draw, that line that is almost 5 inches long, that almost perfect day, because a idea lasts forever, while a material object soon decays, rots, or erodes and is gone. The idea of the perfect day lasts forever, while the almost perfect day lasts no more than 24 hours. Which is more real? I'll take the perfect, eternal idea over the ephemeral, fading material world.

And then, we can imagine the perfect President, the perfect King, the perfect ruler, the God who is powerful, able to bring justice to our world, to defeat any enemy, any evil, never be corrupted, and always do the best for the people, making perfectly wise decisions. And so, in a world of perfect ideas, why do we suddenly say that this perfect God does not exist?

For look around you. The world away from the destructive acts of people is beautiful. The mountains are covered with beautiful forests, filled with wonderful flowers and birds and mountain streams that gurgle and spray, putting the scent of clean water into the air, telling us that there is hope and wonder and beauty in this world.

And there is Beauty itself. I can tell you why a rainbow has color, I can tell you why the colors are in the order they are, but if our world is only made of material things, then there is no reason for Beauty to exist, yet a rainbow is beautiful. A coral reef is dangerous and yet beautiful. A mountain in full fall splendor is fabulously beautiful even though it tells us that a cold, dark winter is on the way. So why does Beauty exist? Because there is something more than the material world – there is something beyond nature, there is something beyond what we can see and taste and touch and smell and hear – there is the supernatural. Ideas are not material – they are not natural – instead they are supernatural.

If anything supernatural exists at all – then God must exist, for the supernatural can not be created by the natural. A perfect triangle cannot be created by an imperfect protractor, a perfect 5 inch line cannot be created by an imperfect pencil and imperfect ruler, and a perfect God could not be created by imperfect people. Imperfect people create imperfect gods, like the anger-prone gods of the Greeks who were little more than powerful, overgrown twenty-year olds.

But perfection can create imperfection.

And a perfect God can create imperfect people.

And so, the second way of looking at the world is to recognize that more than the natural material world exists, that perfect ideas and a perfect God do exist. And then, it might be time to find out what that perfect God has said to us imperfect people.

Jesus Christ claimed to be the Messiah. But He also claimed many times to be God Himself walking on this earth. “I and the Father are One” Jesus said as reported in the Gospel of John 10:30. And Jesus taught us totally new ways of living our lives, some of which are now accepted by most people, others of which are still not accepted.

Jesus taught us that the poor are just as important to God as the rich. He taught that the rich should be fair and just and show mercy to the poor. He taught that every person is tremendously valuable to God and therefore should be valuable to each of us. He taught us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

And because he claimed to be God, he was killed for blasphemy against God. He was killed for claiming to be God. And the Romans made sure He was dead by beating him with a whip, by putting him on a cross to bleed and suffocate to death, and by stabbing Him in his side to make sure He was dead, dead, dead.

And then, three days later, He came back to life and was seen at least eleven different times in different places by different eyewitnesses, including at least once by over five hundred people, and he ate and drank with them and taught them and scolded them and cooked for them and touched them. And so at least eight of those witnesses put pen to paper and wrote about what had happened – Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, Jude.

And what does the Resurrection of Jesus prove? Only that Jesus was exactly who Jesus said He was – God  walking upon this earth – and that everything He said should be trusted as the actual Word of God.

In particular, Jesus said that those who follow Jesus will gain eternal life with God. If you choose to follow Jesus, you will live forever. As the actual Word of the real, eternal, perfect God, this is a promise that will be kept.

And that changes everything. Living forever changes your view of what is important.

You see, if you will live forever, who cares about the merely human concerns of the material world? Does it matter about the fight you’re having with your landlord, with your neighbor, with your ex? Does it matter if you have a long life or a short life when you will live forever?

Many times, I’m sure you’ve thought that children around you were fighting over something trivial. Because of Jesus’ promise, almost everything we argue about as adults becomes trivial. Will it matter in ten thousand years?

And so, the first way that God helps us fight our problems is to put an eternal perspective of the problem, and in my experience, this means that almost all problems disappear because they aren’t important.

The second way that God helps us is God begins to train us. God has a training course ready for you to help you become the wonderful person that God knows you can be. You’ll need to break some bad habits first, but God will be there right beside you, like a drill instructor that will not quit, working to make you into a leader among the people of the world, giving you hope where you had despair, life where you saw death, wonder and joy where you way dullness and sadness.

God is about to break you free from the habits that have been holding you in slavery, your addictions, your stinkin’ thinkin’, your self-caused troubles.

But God is polite. Unlike your mother, God will not peel the bandaid off your knee without your permission. Before God starts to work on you, you have to give God permission.

You have to give God permission to break you of your bad habits. You have to give God permission to lift you from your despair. You have to give God permission to change your heart and change your ways of thinking and you have to give God permission before God will break the chains of addiction to sin that hold you back. It is your choice to follow Jesus ... or not to follow Jesus.

Long ago, I chose to follow Jesus. And that has made all the difference in my life. Is there something in your life you want to get rid of, to break free of, to walk beyond? Is there a problem that is holding you back, tearing you down every time you start to climb, throwing you into a hole of darkness?

Choose to follow Jesus and ask God for help with the difficult things in your life.

And God will step forward and break you free.

For the truth is that most of our problems are caused by our own habits, our fears, and our choices. 

• God’s training program – the teachings of Christ - allow us to break our bad habits and develop new ones. 
• God’s promises – the promise of eternal life – allow us to remove our fears. 
• And God’s guidance – working through the Holy Spirit that we receive at baptism – helps us to make good choices. 

And this three-fold path – the Teachings of Christ, the promises of God, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit - are how God helps us fight our problems.

How to Talk to an Addict

Isaiah 35:4-7; Psalm 146; James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37

About thirty years ago, I was a newly hired marketing engineer for Texas Instruments, working out of Johnson City, TN. My job often had me fly around the country to support the local salesmen with our line of industrial control computers. And to get home, I always had to change planes in either Pittsburgh or Charlotte. One evening, on the way back to Johnson City, I found myself stuck in Pittsburgh because of some bad weather or equipment problems. They put me up in an airport hotel, it was a Friday night about 8 pm, and so I called up my old college roommate Jordan who lived about a half hour away in Washington, PA. I had to catch my plane at about 6 am.

Jordan was watching the Twilight Zone TV episodes with his sister and another old college friend. He said that they’d be delighted to come over as soon as they finished the tape, which would be about another hour. And then we hung up and I sat down to wait, in a hotel on the edge of a city. And I waited. And I waited...As the night wore on, I entered…The Twilight Zone…

Now I had known that Jordan and Scott loved The Twilight Zone. But I hadn’t really realized just how addicted they were to that show until that night when I waited for three hours for them to finish watching several episodes on a video tape they had recorded, that they could have stopped at any moment! And so they finally showed up around midnight, we talked for a few minutes, and then I had to kick them out because I needed sleep before I flew home the next morning.

Addiction is a huge problem in our world today, and it isn’t just addiction to heroin or painkillers or alcohol. Addiction is anything which damages a person’s health or relationships because of an unhealthy need to perform the action, take the chemical, or otherwise get the physical or emotional high from that action or chemical.

And in today’s society, addiction usually means two things. First, that a person becomes financially poor. Many of our addictions today lead us to prefer the addiction to working or even to holding onto money. And secondly, because most addicts are financially poor, they receive a double-discrimination – they are discriminated against because they are addicts and because they are poor. And this starts a vicious cycle which keeps addicts poor – and the poor addicted.

In my life, I have known people who were addicted to various drugs, to alcohol, to various sexual thrills. I have also known people who were addicted to video game playing, to email-checking, to exercise, to chocolate, to coffee, and to food. Furthermore, I have known people who are addicted to thrill-seeking behavior, to gossip, to stirring up trouble, to negativity, and to back-biting.

In general, addictions are bad – both for us and for the people around us. Addictions are those things which we love more than God in our lives. They have become idols to us, which need to be fed, protected, and even worshiped. And this is the primary problem with being an addict – our addiction keeps us from being close to God. And therefore, addictions are sinful, because they keep us from approaching God.

Do you know an addict? Is that addiction harming them, is it harming you or other loved ones near the addict? If so, you’ve probably tried to talk with your addicted friend or relative about their addiction, and it hasn’t really worked. And so you may have given up.

Back in the early years of the 1900’s, two men in Akron, OH became friends because they shared an addiction to alcohol. Together, with help from others, they began to put their lives back together. And then, they began to put together Alcoholics Anonymous, the first Twelve-step Program to help people with an addiction. It is still the most successful program in the world. It has become the model for many other Twelve-step Programs that help addicts recover from addictions of all kinds. And AA is based upon helping addicts have a spiritual change, for it is only through a spiritual change that addiction can be handled.

Perhaps you know an addict who may need help, and you want to help. To understand how to talk to an addict, we must first understand why an addict is an addict. There are two common things which you hear when you listen to addicts talk.

First, there are the addicts who are attempting to avoid something painful. Perhaps they are avoiding their feeling of failure, perhaps they are avoiding physical pain. Perhaps the addict is trying to avoid certain frightening thoughts, perhaps some bad memories – we all know the stereotype of the veteran who drinks to avoid remembering the sights and sounds and smells of the battlefield. Still others try to avoid their tremendously sad thoughts, their loss of their loved one through death or divorce, their diagnosis of a terminal illness. They are avoiding a slow death because they have emotional holes in their hearts, and they try to fill that hole with their video game playing, their Facebook postings, their gossip, their drinks, their heroin. And for a little while, they avoid thinking.

On the other hand, there are the addicts who are looking for life and feel like they get it when they get a high from the cocaine, from the whiskey, from winning the videogame match. It is no accident that many addicts feel like dancing when they are happy and high. Exercise addicts live a bit when the “runner’s high” kicks in and gossip addicts feel good when their friends laugh at a particularly good “put-down” where they insulted a mutual friend who wasn’t there to defend herself. Coffee addicts live when the coffee picks them up in the morning and they feel alive for an hour or two, and food addicts feel great at 9 pm when they have that big bowl of chocolate ice cream. There is an emotional high that their addiction gives them and they feel alive for a little while.

But when you look at both types of addicts, you see that they are really both filling the emotional holes in their hearts – the one uses the addiction to pile a nice soft mound of dreaminess over the hole, and the other one uses the addition to jump up out of the hole for a few minutes. But for both types of addicts, the hole in their heart is there, waiting for something to fill it. There is a hopelessness, a desperation, a tremendous need that fills the addict’s every waking existence, for that hole is so very demanding and needy and commanding. We bleed out through the holes in our hearts and so we try to stuff something, anything into that hole to stop the pain, the bleeding, the emptiness.

And this is a hole in our hearts that we are born with, for we all start with a dead spot in our hearts, a dead spot called “sin”, a dead spot that feels like that hole and becomes that hole. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans, chapter 5 that “sin entered the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people…” He continues to explain that sin puts us into a master-slave relationship to that sin - and we are the slaves.

And therefore, the root problem of addiction is the slavery to sin that is the root of all human problems. In God’s eyes, there is no significant difference between the man who is addicted to heroin and the woman who is addicted to gossip. Both are hurting themselves and others with their addiction, and both are outside of God’s will. After all, the root meaning of the word “sin” is “outside” or “without”. Outside God's will. Without God.

And so before we talk to any addict, we must recognize that each of us has had certain addictions that have held onto us from time to time, each of us has been a slave to sin. And the only cure for a slavery to sin is to surrender your life to Jesus Christ and let Him fill that dead spot in your heart with the permanent life of the Holy Spirit. For not having the Holy Spirit is the real problem.

When we left the Garden because of Adam’s sin, in every heart a particular spot that had been filled with life went dead, because we no longer walked with God every day. And our children inherited that dead spot. And that dead spot is exactly the size and the shape of the Holy Spirit, and this is why every Twelve Step Program includes God explicitly in six of those steps.

So when you need to talk to an addict, recognize that it is more or less the same as talking to someone about Christ.

An addict will not change unless they recognize to begin with that they are powerless over their addiction and that the addiction has made their lives unmanageable. Some people call this “hitting bottom”, and it is the first step of recovery. Hitting bottom is a good thing, for it is only with that understanding of our lack of power that we will truly ask for real help from the One who can truly help us.

Perhaps the biggest thing that prevents people from recognizing their powerlessness are their friends and loved ones who give them far too much help with their addictions and keep them from recognizing their powerlessness, who rescue them from the consequences of their addictions, who make the phone calls to tell the boss they are sick, who buy the next video game, who pay the bills for the drugs, who cook the high-calorie meals or who pay the credit card bills for the clothes. If you have been helping an addict, you have to stop so they can face the consequences of their addiction and ask for help. For it is only when they admit their addiction that recovery can begin. And so if you have a friend who is addicted, the best way you can help that addict is to stop rescuing them! Your in-action is what they need – not your action! You can't help an addiction through action - only through inaction.

It is not until the second and third steps that you can help an addict through your actions and words.

For the second step is for the addict to come to believe that God could help them. You need to reassure them of God’s almighty power – after all, look what Jesus and God have done for you!

And when they believe that God can help them, help them decide to turn over their will and their lives to the care of Jesus Christ, following Him as their leader and master INSTEAD OF their addiction, which is what they were following.

It is at that point that you will begin to see an improvement in the addict. It is at that point that they may want to join a twelve-step program such as AA or Narcotics Anonymous, or Weight-watchers or Celebrate Recovery! or any of the other specialized groups that have arisen to support addicts. It is at that point that a person is willing to find a church and attend that church regularly.

And it is important when you are talking to an addict that you remind them – and yourself – of this one very important point. Everyone who follows Christ had to make the same choice, to give up an addiction to sin in order to follow Jesus Christ and His way, the way that leads from death to life. Everyone here was once an addict, even those who were baptized at birth, and so no one should boast except in the power of Jesus Christ to save us from sin and death.

Amen?