How much is it worth to you? I was asked that question one time by a dear friend when I tried to buy his truck. He knew what it was worth, and I was hoping to get a good deal on it. His response caught me off guard, because I have never heard that asked of the buyer in a negotiation. I know that Bobby was trying to get a fair price out of the truck, and he did (from someone else).
What a valuable question to ask ourselves in life. What is it worth to you? Far too often I think we are not asking that question enough. In today’s world we have everything at our fingertips. Satisfaction, or at least a small pretense of it, is always a click away. Most things aren’t worth much anymore, because it’s all disposable and we can always just buy more, right? We are so consumeristic that this mentality has bled into areas of our lives that it never should have. What about friends? Most people have hundreds of friends online. We usually have several real and honest friends beyond Facebook that we actually care about. But what happens when we get into a serious argument with them? I have seen first hand numerous times, and even felt this way myself, that it’s their loss and I will just find new friends. We treat people like commodities and are willing to just replace them if need be! A great question to ask here, is what are they worth to you? Are your relationships worth anything? Is there any substance to them? Or are you willing to just find new friends if you don’t like the ones you have? I hope that this concept is somewhat shocking to you. If it isn’t…… I’m talking to you. Stay with me, it gets worse. Not only do we treat our stuff rather flippantly, not only do we treat our relationships without much care, but we treat our religion the same way. I recently heard a person say they were shopping around for a church. I had to bite my tongue. This angered me. When we don’t like a church, we just walk away and look for another. In Gallia County alone there are hundreds of churches. Hundreds. I haven’t done the official research, but I will bet money that a significant portion of them exist because of a split. Because someone or a few people got upset, left, and started their own church. Is this really what the kingdom of God looks like in the Bible Belt? In rural America? Groups of people that are supposed to be unified under the greatest cause that transcends every other identifiable trait of a person giving up because they got into a disagreement and running off? If this isn’t clear to you, let me illustrate it. When I was a kid I played a lot of ball at recess. One boy always brought the football, I’ve long forgotten his name. Everyday we would split off into teams and play touch football. When he was on the losing team, he would get mad, take his ball, and go somewhere else on the playground. I don’t want to oversimplify things here, but that is what happens. The people of God, who are unified under the forgiveness of sins by a just and mighty God refuse to forgive each other! Do you see the irony? Do you see what’s wrong with the picture??? In my opinion, this all results from one single issue. Jesus just isn’t that important to us. You can give all the lip-service you want, you can put on the good show, but when your actions fly in the face of who founded the church and how he founded it, don’t tell me he means the world to you. You just hurt the very thing he gave his life for. So again I ask, what is it worth, to you? What will you do for the church? What will you pay to be a part of the body of Christ, to know true fellowship, a community of love that surpasses all others? Is it worth taking up your cross? Been on the internet much? Then you have probably seen this very gif (read: gif, not jiff. this ain't peanut butter). Normally, you see it when a couple is arguing about where to eat and the stereotype that women can never decide on what they actually want. If you have seen the movie from which it is from (it's okay guys, you don't have to admit it to me) then you know it is actually much more serious than where they are going to eat. Skipping over Allie's unfaithfulness to her actual husband, let's go ahead get right at the question Noah is posing to her: "what do you want."
Simple right? What does she really want? her unhappy life back in the city with her husband or the joy she will find living with Noah. How many of us find this question easy to answer? While the movie makes you side with Noah (yes, I have seen it and I can admit that, I think?) it really isn't an easy question to answer. What do we really want it life? At the risk of being too general, I think I can answer this question for every person on the planet. We want to be fulfilled, satisfied, and a daily dose of Joy. But how do we get that? Allie wrestled with whether she could actually find fulfillment, satisfaction and joy with Noah while leaving her husband. Sure, the movie portrays it like she did. We find out they lived happily ever after with many kids, but c'mon. Anyone married for more than a year knows it ain't that pretty. It never is. Anybody that has been married said length of time will also admit (if they are truly honest) that their spouse is not the source of their satisfaction and joy. Check that, their spouse can be a source of joy and satisfaction, but not the source. So what am I getting at? We are all searching for those three things: Fulfillment, satisfaction, and joy. That manifests itself in numerous ways, and we try to find it in everything from movies and tv to relationships, money, status, careers, skills, and everything in between. Here is the problem with that, we aren't wired to be fulfilled with created things, as we are created beings ourselves. Cast your mind back to Sunday School when you learned about Adam and Eve in the Garden where they had a personal, intimate, real life relationship with God. He literally walked in their midst! So what went wrong? They sought fulfillment and satisfaction in something else: their own knowledge found in the fruit of the tree. If they had simply left the fruit alone, they would still be in perfect communion with God and we wouldn't be mired in death, sickness, and sin. We would all be satisfied and fulfilled and joyful, always. What does that tell us? That we are meant to be fulfilled and satisfied in the creator and not the created. We are meant to be in relationship with God. So I will wrap this up with a question. What do you want. What do you really want? What does it mean to be a Christian? In the early days of the church the term Christian was actually used in a derisive way to describe these people and it was taken on as a common name. If memory serves me, it literally means little Christ. I don't exactly get why that was an offense, but I digress.
If you do a study in the New Testament of what “Christians” are labeled as, you will find that it is not what we call ourselves inside the church. Yes, there is the collective singular noun “the Church” but there is also another label by which followers of Jesus are called. Paul was very fond of this particular nomenclature, as he used it heavily in his Epistles. What is this label you ask? “Those who are in Christ Jesus.” How is that any different from being called a Christian? I hope that there is no difference at all practically, but the implications of these two different labels are great. Christian, as it has come to be used today, often implies something somebody can be, or become. It is as if someone adds another characteristic to their life. Like mason, or boy scout, or marine. Can you be any one of these and be a Christian? Yes. But our modern understanding and use of the term implies that being Christian is no more than being in a club or belonging to a group. Do you pay your dues? Attend a meeting here and there? Do you look and act like everyone else in the club? It is a great misfortune that this claim could be levied against the church today. Are we not more than a social club? Paul’s label, those who are in Christ Jesus, implies a much more accurate picture of the Christian life. To be in something is to be consumed by it, to be fully immersed and involved. There is nothing of you that is outside of what it is that you are in. Consider this, if you are in a car, there is no part of you outside of the car. Sure, you can stick an arm or a leg out the window, but how many of us really want to do that? Don’t we ride around with out windows up and the air conditioning on? While this metaphor might be somewhat lacking, it conveys the simple idea that if you are in something, that’s what you are. You cannot be both in and out of a vehicle. In the same way you cannot be both in and out of Christ, there is no middle ground. Why does this matter? Both of these labels influence how we see ourselves. Is being a Christian something you limit to a night or two a week? That you pay your tithe and call it a day? Or are you so fully immersed in the grace of God that every moment of your life is affected and directed by the Holy Spirit? Which do you think is of God and pleasing to him? In my time at Good News Baptist Church, it is my hope and desire that we shift our view of ourselves from being a Christian to being fully immersed in the goodness and grace and mercy of the Lord, radically shaping the world around us through the power of the Holy Spirit. What sounds more like the church to you: social club or radical agent of change? Oh Christian, in what do you put your hope? Is your salvation secure in your attendance record at church? What about the good deeds you do going the extra mile for those in need? What about your excellent and upstanding reputation as a faithful and loving man of God? Is it your baptism, your deep understanding of complex systematic theology, or your ability to teach lessons on the Bible well?
I have bad news for you. None of those things can save you. If your hope for salvation is in any of these things, you have completely missed the point of the cross. For 1500 years God gave Israel the law and they failed to live by it in nearly every generation. It could not save them. If you want proof of this, read Exodus as the Israelites are fleeing Egypt and see how they responded to God's miraculous work bringing them out of slavery. Or read in Genesis as God continues to reveal himself and bless the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) and the drama the came from their sins. This same pattern continues throughout the entire Old Testament as God works towards the cross through human history. What is it about the presence of God's mercy and grace in the lives of sinful people that makes them want to go on sinning? This is what I want to get at today: if the most righteous examples in the Old Testament, some who had seen God and his great miracles would not be saved by their actions despite living under the law, why do we who are living under the covenant of grace try to place our salvation in something other than the free mercy and righteousness earned by Christ on the cross? There is no salvation apart from justification by faith alone. Paul writes in Romans that Abraham was justified by his faith because he believed in God so much that he was willing to act on that belief. Many like to point to James chapter 2 that says faith without works is dead in order to say that we are justified by our works. Consider the context of this passage compared to Romans 4. Paul and James are writing in two different contexts to two different audiences. This is not to say some are justified in their works and others are not, but to say their purpose in writing is very different! Paul was writing to a church split over the issue of works between Jews and Gentiles, a church divided over what was necessary to be saved. It was important that the Jewish believers understand that salvation is by faith alone and not by works of the law. James is writing to a Gentile audience that had become lazy in their faith, sitting back and ignoring all of the commandments God has given to his church.Their lack of works was evidence of no faith at all! Paul is talking about justification before God, James is talking about evidence of our Justification before men. To boil this down and risk being too general, we can understand this by knowing that true belief creates true actions. If we really believe something, we will act upon it. If you believe the world as we know it will fall into a zombie apocalypse tomorrow then you will gather up supplies and weapons and find safe shelter. If you don't really believe a zombie apocalypse is coming, then you will go on living normally. If you really believe that you are a bad person, guilty of sin and breaking God's righteous law, then you will believe that Jesus is your only hope for salvation. There is no amount of good deeds you can perform to make right your wrongs. If you really believe that Jesus makes you spiritually alive by the holy spirit (as his word teaches us) then you will begin to live a life according to his will. Faith saves, and work is the fruit of that salvation. Don't put the cart before the horse and make a wreck of your soul. Salvation is by the work of the cross. "The grounds of your justification are the perfect works of Jesus Christ. We’re saved by works, but they’re not our own.” -R.C. Sproul What if every Christian in the world began sharing the Gospel once a week? This is one of my favorite hypothetical questions, because it isn't hypothetical at all. In our small church in a small town we talk about church growth a lot. Strategies, where we went wrong in the past, how we can grow moving forward, playing the blame game and numerous other rationalizations. All of these, while they help us understand the situation, fail to really answer the problem we have.
As those who are in Christ, our great commission from Jesus himself is to go, making disciples. Are we fulfilling this one command? This past Sunday my sermon from Amos 2 left us with a challenge, to share the Gospel once this week. Of the 44 in attendance, I would suspect that all but handful are truly born-again believers. Which means about 40 people profess Christ as their savior and are qualified to evangelize Gallia County. Jesus taught us that sometimes the seeds of the Gospel will fall on deaf ears and hard hearts (Matthew 13), and yet some of it will fall on hungry hearts and desperate minds, eager for salvation and satisfaction that comes only from the cross. What if 60 people all shared the Gospel once this week? Even if it is a numbers game, would five of those people accept the Gospel? What if even one of those five becomes a faithful member at Good News? All of a sudden, God has added another faithful laborer to our community! And now we have 61 that share the Gospel each week. What if, of those 61 Gospel conversations, just one is converted? Before you know it, a year of faithfulness has doubled our number! People ask me how I am going to grow Good News Baptist Church. I just smile and say "I'm not, but God is." God did not call pastors to be the sole evangelist in his churches, he has called all of us that are in Christ to be disciples making more disciples! We all have the holy spirit that leads us in this. What if... we were all faithful in this? Will God not honor that faithfulness by changing hearts? If we continue to plant seeds and water them, will God not give the growth? If that's the case, let us be faithful in sharing the Gospel! |
Pastor MorganMorgan has been writing since middle school and worked for a year writing professionally as a news journalist for the Daily Tribune in Gallipolis. This blog is a chance for him to express his love for the Lord and all church related things through writing. Archives
December 2019
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