For my preaching class I have to give a 20 minute sermon on Monday on a passage that I was assigned. In order to help me prepare, I manuscripted out what I plan to say. I’ve included it here. I hope it makes sense. Please let me know if it’s unclear or if you have ideas for stories, verse references, etc. Enjoy!
————————-
What do you think is the biggest hindrance to the church’s successful witness to the world? What is the number one reason that missionaries come back from the mission field? What it the single most common thing that destroys ministries and drags pastors out of the pulpits? It isn’t a lack of doctrinal purity. It’s fighting. Conflict. Backbiting. In a word–Disunity.
[Share briefly about family member who had cancer]
What I’m here to tell you today is that the church has cancer. I have a personal passion for the local church. She is God’s idea. She’s sick, yes, but we can’t give up on her. But if the church cannot get along, how can we possibly reach a lost world? What I’m asking you today is to close your laptops, forget, just for a moment, about how much you need a coffee, or that you’re ready for a nap. Come with me for a moment and consider this cancer and the remedy in the Little Way.
–
Turn with me to Philippians 2:1-4, and we’ll read it together. 1If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. 3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.”
Sometimes this passage gets overlooked because it comes right before the famous kenosis passage. But it’s packed with power, and contains a message for us today, a remedy for this cancer that’s draining the life from our churches. In it we find four Ps, if you will, which will help us understand the remedy, which is found in the Little Way.
First, in verse one, we see the Premise for unity. A Premise is something on which a line of argument or way of thinking is established. In order to understand how we can have strong, unified relationships in our churches, we must first understand our relationship with God. All our horizontal relationships flow from our vertical relationship. They are inexplicably linked. We must first understand that we belong to God and are secure in our relationship with Him. The conditional clause if here expresses certainty and can be understood as since. Since God is, we can be. Since God has given us encouragment from being united with Christ, since we have comfort from His love, since we have fellowship with the Spirit, since we have tenderness and compassion from Him. We have all these things! We must take a spiritual inventory of our riches in Christ, if we have any hope of having healthy relationships with others. We cannot invest deeply in our relationships with others until we have a firm understanding of who we are in Christ. We see this play out in relationships all the time. Confident, secure people make good friends because they are able to freely give of themselves. Needy, insecure, and emotionally incompetent people cannot give of themselves. We must understand who we are in Christ first. The Premise for our ability to give ourselves humbly to each other is an understanding of the depth of love God has for us and the riches we have received from Him.
When we understand how we belong to God, we can then belong to others.
Secondly, in verse two, we have a Picture of Unity. Since we have these riches in Christ and acceptance in Him, we are commanded to three things. To be 1) like-minded, 2) having the same love, 3) being one in spirit and purpose. What do all these have in common? Like, Same, One. There is a togetherness, a solidarity, a unity of mind, love, spirit, and purpose. So what does really mean? There have been so many well-intentioned pleas for unity that are nothing more than an abandonment of God-created differences. What does this really mean?
There are several things that unity is not. Unity is not being color-blind. I apologize if any of you have this t-shirt, but 15 years ago or so everyone was wearing these “God is colorblind” t-shirts. I understand the idea, but I’m sorry, God is not colorblind! That is an insult to God, as if He had a handicap! He created color. He loves the nations of the world, the races, the differences. He loves that you have black hair and I have blond and that some of us have none.J Look at the glory of creation. The beauty of nature. Look at the tremendous joy we get from eating—I love bright fruits and vegetables, sweet chocolate, cool water. God created diversity, truly. Unity is not uniformity.
Unity is also not something we can manufacture. Hopefully all of you have now read The Search to Belong. In it we read of the circles of belonging, and how healthy it is for people to function and move within all four of those spheres. Unity does not mean that we must all crowd ourselves into the intimate circle of our lives. It does not mean we are best friends with everyone. Unity cannot be forced. Unity and belonging develop and grow as we cultivate the right environment.
But what environment is that? Let’s look at verse 3.
Verse 3 provides us with a Path to unity. 3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. The path to unity has a steep downgrade. The road goes down, and down and down and down. At times it’s windy, at times narrow, but always always down. The amazing thing is that this downward path takes you to the mountaintop. The summit of the Christian life is experienced on the mountaintop of humility.
In my life, the answer is always humility. We joke here in seminary that the answer is always Jesus. Well in my in my life, the answer is always humility. Christine shared in her sermon that she found it humorous that God would give her the topic of being free from anxiety. Well I found it equally humorous that God would give me the topic of humility. I’m sharing as a fellow sojourner on this journey because I certainly haven’t arrived. My two favorite books of all time, which I have read probably more than a dozen times, are AW Tozer’s The Pursuit of God and Andrew Murray’s Humility. I cannot read them enough. Their pages always draw me downward, back to Jesus’ feet, back to a position where I can consider others better than myself. I borrow much of what I share with you here from them.
Just as we did with unity, let’s look at what humility is not. Humility is not simply self-deprecating. It is not pretending that you lack talent or skills. It isn’t acting sad all the time. It doesn’t mean you have to be an introvert. It doesn’t mean you lack dreams and ambitions. False humility takes on these forms, but is only just another form of pride.
Andrew Murray says humility is the sense of entire nothingness which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all. Humility is losing oneself in God. It is a total lack of concern for self, which sets us free.
While there are many facets to humility, this verse is focused on one in particular: humility before others. Andrew Murray says that humility toward men will be the only sufficient proof that our humility before God is real. We cannot be humble before God unless we are humble before eachother. So we are told to do nothing out of selfish ambition—Lord, what are my motives for doing this act of service? Do I want to be seen? Appreciated? Applauded? Do I consider others better than myself? This doesn’t mean that we pretend that we don’t have gifts or talents, but we willfully choose to place ourselves as the bottom priority. Jesus never pretended to be less than what He was, and yet He placed His own needs below those He came to serve.
So how does this path of humility produce unity in our churches? Let’s look at verse 4.
Verse 4 sends us on a Pursuit of unity. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Our humbling of ourselves before others is not a passive thing. As we follow the downward path, we pursue each other’s good. We turn our eyes off of our precious selves, and look to see how we can lift up, bless, edify, help, encourage, and selflessly love our neighbor. Tozer explains how this path of humility frees us from three things which hinder our pursuit of unity.
First, we are freed from Pride. Tozer says, The burden of self-love is a heavy load indeed. CS Lewis said, “The pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch; but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither but have everything else (God, our fellow humans, animals, the garden and sky) instead.” Humility, then is forgetting our precious selves. When we do this, we are freed to gain true fellowship and unity with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Second, we are freed from Pretense. This is the idea of “putting your best foot forward.” We constantly strive to look our best for others. We fear that our clothes or car or house are too cheap. We tell stories in a certain light to make ourselves look faultless. We respond to “how are you doing” in a certain way, highlighting hardships or exaggerating how fatigued we are by our service for Christ. This is no small thing. These burdens are real and they are killing the life of the church.
Finally, we are freed from Artificiality. That is living in the secret fear that people will find out who we truly are. We fear that some moment we will be careless and someone will peep into our empty souls. It will be found out that we are not as deep and spiritual as we portray ourselves to be. Humility enables us to be loved for our true, ugly, raw selves. This is why humility truly is the most freeing quality of life. When we can forget ourselves, we cease to worry about messing up, looking dumb, being rejected, failing. We cease fearing what others will think. We quit backbiting, snubbing, and gossiping. We lay down the burden of self and freely give ourselves to the betterment of others.
So you may be wondering, how can I cultivate this? Understand the Premise—we are accepted and loved by God. Gaze at the Picture—Love, Unity, Like-mindedness. Follow the Path down to humility. And lay down your burden of self for the Pursuit of one another. Do you want the secret to this? It’s found in the Little Way. Therese of Lisiex devised a prayer-filled approach to life that is deceptively simple. Seek out the menial job, welcome unjust criticisms, befriend those who annoy us, and help those who are ungrateful. Lay down your burden of self and Live the Little Way.
Isn’t it interesting when everywhere you look you seem to hear the same message, and you begin to wonder, “Hmm . . . perhaps God’s trying to tell me something.” I’ve felt like that the past few days. In our current situation, I feel like I’m constantly evaluating and re-evaluating what we’re doing. From a worldly perspective we must look crazy: We left Jeff’s very successful line of work in Civil Engineering to go back to school, get rid of our belongings, and plop down about $50,000 on graduate school so that we both can have degrees that literally
guarantee that we will make less money than we have ever made before. Even as I write it I kind of have to shake my head. It sounds crazy. Of course, we must not think it’s crazy or we wouldn’t have done it. But I waver. Sometimes I
do feel crazy, and I start to panic and think what have we done?! When I have times like this, Jeff always seems to have a word of encouragement. On Sunday, he forwarded me an awesome devotional, entitled “
Remember why you sold everything — keeping the treasure in view during the long wait.” I’d encourage you to read it (click anywhere on the title and you’ll go there).
So that was a shot of perspective for me, considering that yes, that man in the parable probably seemed crazy to others, but he knew more than them; he knew the great value of the treasure he was obtaining, for which he sold all that he had. Now, please hear me in this also: I’m not saying that just because we’re shelling out lots of money for a seminary degree necessarily means we are laying up treasure in heaven. Anybody can squander money on education and not lay up nothin’ in heaven! It’s not a simple equation like that. I believe the reason it’s the right thing to do is that in prayer and in our times with God we’ve sensed this is His call on our lives. This does not make us any better than someone who’s call is to serve in the military or flourish in the business world. The key is that we’re responding to the specific call God has on our individual lives.
So, anyway, what’s difficult for me is that I’m having trouble keeping this all in perspective because so much of me just screams out that I want a normal life with a big house and preferably a nice retirement plan and maybe just a teeny bit of sacrifice, enough to make life adventurous, but not enough to really hurt. You see, I don’t want to really sacrifice I just want to sacrifice enough so that I can feel good about having “sacrificed.” Oh my ugly heart! This is the truth, though–isn’t it gross?!
So, after reading that article, I open up my BIble for morning devotions and I read the book of Philippians. I practically fall into a trance while I’m reading Paul’s words, how he literally counted everything that used to be gain to him, he counted it as loss, “for the excellence of the knowledge of CHrist Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ” (Phil 3:7-8). The part that really struck me was his exhortation that our citizenship is in Heaven. He is appalled by those who “set their mind on earthly things. For our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:19-20). Oh I am such an American! I need God to help me to set my mind on treasure above, the perspective of heaven, and to appropriate that truth–that I am a citizen of heaven.
So today, I sit down for morning devotions and read the book of Colossians, and once again see this same theme: “Seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you will also appear with Him in glory” (Col. 3:1-4). Christ who is my life. Christ is my life. Heaven is my home. I have a job to do here on earth, to glorify God by enjoying Him and drawing others to His marvelous light. I need to remember why I’m here.
And so, I’m asking God to daily renew my mind, renew my heart, help me to keep my eyes on the prize, on the treasure, on the goal. This isn’t a dreary thing–the result is glorious! The less I am tied to the things here on earth the freer I will feel, the more joyful and content my heart will be. God, help us to seek the things above. Show us what that’s like; change us from the inside. Give us heavenly perspective. THank you, Lord.
Literally every battle that we face in our Christian walk is a battle against unbelief. Every battle against unbelief is an attack on our faith in God, which is an attack on His character. The oldest temptation in the world is the temptation to believe this lie: “God is not good. God is keeping something from you that is good. God doesn’t want you to have the best. God
is not God.” When Adam and Even sinned in the garden, they believed this lie. They believed that God was somehow keeping them from something good.
And so it is today. We know that. When we struggle with impatience we are struggling with believing God is good, that He’s God, and that He is in control of every situation and will use it for our good and His glory. This is true whether we’re stuck behind a slow car or dealing with dashed dreams. When we can finally grasp this, and daily learn to walk in it, we will find ourselves patient people.
I was feeling very content. Surprisingly content. For the first few months of living with Mom and Dad I had really been struggling (even though they are wonderful), but I’d begun to sense God bringing me contentment and joy, and I was praising Him for that. Then, three temptations came. Now, please, hear me in this: None of these things were bad. We were actually blessed that they arose, because they encouraged us in our calling and our future. But, they still posed a temptation for us. First, Jeff was asked by a pastor friend to consider becoming their new associate pastor in a nearby town. What an honor! Second, Jeff was asked by another person to consider becoming their new associate pastor in the town we just moved from, where we still own a house, still have friends, etc. Double honor! Third, my dream house, the one I’ve been secretly eyeing for four months, is being offered this weekend only for $40,000 under its market value. This was, mind you, the very day after Jeff had made the off-handed comment about that very home: “That’s a great deal; I say if it drops some ridiculous amount, say, $40,000 then we buy it!” My eyeballs about fell out of my head when I saw the advertisement the next day. All three of these things screamed at us–”Come! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! If you don’t do this now you’ll never have these opportunities again! Act now!” Our dreams–becoming a pastor (paid!) and having the home of our dreams, seemed right within our grasp.
Jesus battled three temptations as well, as He was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, fasting for forty days (Matt 4). His three came directly from Satan, tempting Him to use His divine power to usurp God the Father and do His own thing, taking control of the situation rather than yielding humbly to the Sovereign will of God and the purpose for which He was sent. He refused to do this. Instead, He used the Word of God to rebuke Satan. He stayed the course. At any time, Jesus could have called down fire from heaven to consume his enemies, He could have changed the course of events so that He wouldn’t have to go to the cross, He could have fled from the painful fate that awaited Him at Calvary. But He stayed the course. Essentially, He was patient. And how could He be? Because His gaze was fixed on something far greater than the “momentary trials” He endured on earth, even though they were far more ghastly than anything we will ever experience. Because He had His eye on His purpose, He stayed the course.
While I was contemplating these three things our life, I read these word’s of Jesus during my quiet time, “Therefore My Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father” (John 10:17-18; emphasis mine). Jesus, by his own free will stayed the course, obeying the will of the Father and laying down His life. I am not Jesus, I recognize that. But in the same way, we have the power, by our God-given free will, to determine whether we will lay down our life and stay the course God has for us. Yes, probably we will end up someday with a home and Jeff will (God willing!) probably end up teaching God’s Word as a pastor somewhere. But, to get to that end before God’s appointed time is to succumb to impatience and short-circuit the work that God is doing in us. So, we decided . . . to wait.
“My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” James 1:2-4
1 “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser.
2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away;
[a] and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.
John 15. 1-2.
While we lived in San Jose (ok, secret’s out–the story took place in San Jose rather than Santa Clara–don’t tell!), I painted a picture (I’m not a painter, so it was purely for the sake of self-expression, not creating art) entitled “Pruned”. It was of a grove of trees, beautiful and lush, with blossoms and branches and green growth. Then, in the middle stood an ugly stick of a tree, cut and hacked up so it just stood and looked bare. That was how I felt. I felt as if all the beautiful, fruitful, lovely things in my life had been stripped away. Even my personality. I felt like my personality had changed. Instead of always feeling upbeat and optimistic, I had to constantly battle feeling depressed, discouraged, and defeated. A part of me was scared that I would never come back to be the “real Kari” again. AMazingly, when we moved back to Oregon, I felt like I came back to life. Once again I felt the joy and energy and enthusiasm for life that I’d lost. I’m not saying that I was being ruled by circumstances (although of course we all are to some degree), I’m saying that I feel that God pruned me while we were there. He, if you will, hacked me to pieces and took away all the things that I thought were fruitful and beautiful. But He did it for a purpose, just as His word says in John 15–that I would bear more fruit. His logic and method certainly is baffling to me because at the time it certainly doesn’t seem like fruit will come from a stick of an ugly tree. But He knows. Any vinedresser would know that that is how it works. And what amazed me was that it was true. When we moved to McMinnville I could see fruit in my life, my walk with Jesus, my marriage, and now in my relationship with my son.
I once again feel pruned. The circumstances are different (and much much better!), but the inward feeling of stripping away is the same. This time it’s smaller things–things like having my own place to call home, that I long for with every ounce of me no matter how wonderful my parents are (and they are!). I long for a “normal” life again, even though I know that’s not what we’re called to live. I long for some clue about what the future holds for us, but God asks me to trust Him. Sometimes I just want to be normal, just live a normal life with jobs and cars and a house and kids and I’d even say a dog if I didn’t dislike them so much. But that’s not the life we signed up for, we signed up for more. As much as I’d like that life right now, I want God most. I want more of Him. I want more of Him even if it means that He’s hacking me to pieces and cutting off all my beautiful foliage so that I can produce more fruit and know Him more. And I don’t say this is a dreary, dutiful, martyr sort of way. I say this knowing full well that knowing more of Him will be the most joyful and satisyfing experience on earth because He is the more joyous and satisfying Person on earth! Like Jim Elliot said, He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
I’m not a very strong, brave, and courageous person. Christians around the world are risking their necks, giving all their worldly goods, and sacrificing their very lives, for the sake of Christ. I’m sacrificing very little. But the altar sactifies the gift–my life is given to Him. Help me to be brave, God, when You prune me. Help me to see the unseen future, when my season to blossom comes again.
