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January 30, 2005
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The Purpose Driven Life
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"What will be the community of your life?"
Romans 12: 9-21
Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
NIV
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Gabrielle told me there was a message on the home phone from some lady from a Board of Ordained Ministry. I was at the coast but I phoned in and picked up the message. To my shock, although I knew I had been asked onto this committee and accepted; and although I knew there would be a meeting coming up in late February, the message said the meeting would happen this coming Thursday and last for five days.
How can I do this? I wondered. I can't be gone on Sunday, I wanted to preach that message, I don't want to miss the date Karen and I have planned on Friday, oh this won't work. Perhaps I can just go to part of the meeting. I tried reaching the woman who had called me but she was already gone. Sometime later that evening I reached Karen.
Honey, you have to go to this meeting. You are on this board and you must be there. This is a very important part of your ministry. I have already talked with the girls, we have discussed a way in which we can cover the message for that week, with other testimonies. We can change our date to another night.
On and on she went reminding me that I am not alone. I don't have to find my way to figure out a problem for I am a member of a community, the family, and of a greater community, this church body. I was astounded.
- Friends, we are meant to live in community. God made you and me for one another. We are meant to incarnate our beliefs into actions that are expressed with others.
God calls us to believe something and belong somewhere. We don't just show up for "church" on Sunday morning and call our lives complete. Church on Sunday is just an opportunity to gather around Jesus and express some of that unity we have in Him. Like the fish on the front of the bulletin, at church we all face toward the cross, toward Jesus. And we find our unity in Him.
Attending church is not commanded but encouraged in Scripture. However, loving God and others is commanded, and that cannot be accomplished apart from other believers with whom we live and practice what is commanded.
As I have led many membership classes over the years, we have dealt with this idea frequently. For in that course, I teach this very concept.
This idea is underscored in the United Methodist Church Discipline, the book that describes the theology and polity. Look at the paragraphs I inserted into your bulletin. Here you read that membership in the local church is "essential for our person growth" and for deepening our commitment to the will and grace of God. We are invited to involve ourselves in many aspects of what it means to be Christian in order to grow. Let's read them aloud.
"Faithful membership in the local church is essential for personal growth and for developing a deeper commitment to the will and grace of God. As members involve themselves in private and public prayer, worship, the sacraments, study, Christian action, systematic giving, and holy discipline, they grow in their appreciation of Christ, understanding of God at work in history and the natural order, and an understanding of themselves." (2000 Discipline paragraph 217, italics and bold type mine)
So, you can hear how much Christianity is not just about attending church.
Now, let's read the second one:
"Faithful discipleship includes the obligation to participate in the corporate life of the congregation with fellow members of the body of Christ. A member is bound in sacred covenant to shoulder the burdens, share the risks, and celebrate the joys of fellow members. A Christian is called to speak the truth in love, always be ready to confront conflict in the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation." (2000 Discipline paragraph 218)
These are big statements, I know, but I remember in my classes how they impacted the members. I remember one class when we talked about how important it would be for those who are members to reread these very statements occasionally in order to remind ourselves of God's calling for us in community.
When people wish to have their names on the roles of a local church, but don't want to be involved, they are missing the point. Membership involves all of life. It is the commitment to practice love in community, and loving is no easy task!
I remember sitting with each of the girls at different times during the course of their music studies. I have been there when music books were thrown across the room, piano chords emphasized with a bit of muscle, screams raised to the skies that mom and I would "MAKE" them do this hard thing called practice. But we kept at it, and it has paid off for all of them.
Practice is not easy but it is essential.
God has given us a means to practice his call to love Him and others by calling us not to just believe in Jesus but to belong to the church as expressed through a local body. This is the community in which to live our lives. This is where we practice loving. There will be frustrations, loud chords, thrown books, and some great celebrations. Just like the garden outside, every life has its dirt. And in the dirt you will find rocks and weeds along with plants and flowers.
But this is the community. As Eugene Peterson aptly said it a few years back, "Every congregation is a congregation of sinners. As if that weren't bad enough, they all have sinners for pastors." (Under the Unpredictable Plant, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publ, c'92, p. 17, ubp)
- As such, God says: "Love Me and Love others" or as God spoke this through Paul, "Let Love be sincere…"
The word "sincere" is the word "without hypocrisy". The word hypocrite for the Greeks was synonymous with our word "actor". A hypocrite pretended on stage to be someone he wasn't. So, God is saying "don't just say you love someone" really show it to them.
If I say I love a homeless person but take no step to show that love, well, what have I accomplished? My love is insincere. I may say, "Go, be blessed, be warm and may God's love be present to you." But if I take no step to demonstrate that love to their lives, at whatever level God is urging me, then, what does my "blessing" mean?
I tell my wife, Karen, I love her frequently, but if I do not show that love in action, what good are my words? If I never bring her little gifts, write notes, find those expressions of love that mean something to her, my words will fall on deaf ears. Over the years I have learned what matters to her, and so put out effort so that she will know that I love who she is and am committed to her.
For each of us we have been given the blessing of a church community in which to live love. This is what we have seen described this week in the Purpose Driven Life study. The community is where we practice love and where we grow in relationships. It is the place we can practice all the "one another" commands of Scripture which call us to love sincerely.
- In this chapter in Romans Paul has just given a brief description of the gifts God has placed in the body, and just as in 1 Corinthians, follows that description with a call to love.
- This kind of sincere love is bold --
Hate evil, cling to what is good. The very difficulty our world is having today is to embrace evil instead of being clear what is wrong. This is to hate evil in my life, to shrink away from a hot burner. But look on in this passage, this idea of evil and good is dealt with again.
In this kind of love we don't repay evil for evil. You don't take vengeance instead you love the enemy, show care, so that you are not overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.
This is a bold love God calls us to, not a sappy love.
Don Fraizer wanted to help bridge the gap between cultures in North Portland. He grew up around heroine, crack and prostitution. His little sister at age 5 had to walk past dealers and prostitutes to get to school. She is a heroine addict today. There was a church in his neighborhood, but they did not know how to break into the culture to do something. Don used to go into that church and pray as a young boy, and today he has decided to do something. He has started a multiracial church plant in the middle of a tough inner city Portland neighborhood called New Genesis Fellowship with a co pastor who is a white man named Mitch.
One of the things Don wanted to make a difference in was his family. So he began a monthly family breakfast which is now attended by 40 members. They gather, they worship and they share together. A couple times a year they all go to church together. Last time 90 of them showed up. Many have come to Christ and are beginning to get delivered from drugs.
For me this past week at the Pastors Prayer Summit where I met Don and Mitch, the coolest thing was to hear the difference between these two amazing guys. Don is coal black, mid 40s, and hungry to see Jesus meet the need of his people; Mitch is white, nearly 60, with a long grey mustache and an amazing story of God's deliverance from suicide into ministry in this past decade. In prayer Don speaks the lingo of a man from this era while Mitch speaks a King James' English filled with the same depth and meaning.
Like the Star Trek motto, together, they boldly go where no man has gone before, and what a difference God is forging against the evil of racism and drugs and prostitution.
The love God has called us into is sincere but not stupid. It does not do what is expected. It will not always look "nice" but will always bring fruit.
- This sincere Love is also straightforward and practical --
We read a list of very clear commands which illustrate this kind of love:
Be devoted to one another in brotherly affection -
Honor one another
Share with God's people
Practice hospitality
Bless those who persecute you
Rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn
Live in harmony with one another
Be humble
Notice all of these are fueled by our passion for God. When the chair of the Pastor Parish Relations Committee brought a woman from the congregation in 2001 to talk to me because she was troubled by my messages, I welcomed it. This woman was honoring me by bringing her concern to me. That was a beginning of transformation for my life. It was an act of love to speak.
That chair and the woman and I spoke together, I heard her concerns. She said I rambled in my preaching and it was hard to follow what I said. I asked her to pray for that area of my ministry and said I would keep that in mind.
It was just a few months later the following year that the Pastor Parish Relations Committee under a new chair, Terry Bernel, began to work on church unity. They took their first all church evaluation about 6 months later and found that many were concerned about the preaching ministry. They trusted my heart but could not follow my messages. In December a year after that first meeting Dick Mock said he wanted to put my messages on the Web, which required me to change my style of preparation.
The PPR committee and embarked together on growing up a preacher. Janet Towne said she had some suggestions she could give me, if I were open. So, for 8 months I had a preaching practicum where on a weekly basis Janet would give me a sheet of paper that gave me feedback on my preaching. She was willing to sacrifice her own worship time in order to improve my work. She always found something positive and then would show me areas for improvement.
This process went hand in hand with the manuscript crafting for the website and some reading I was doing that began to lift up the need for clarity.
It was all the fruit of love. The love of that one woman who was brave enough to come talk to me. The love of the committee to walk with me through a season of growth. The Love of all of you to sit through countless bad messages in the hopes of getting to some good ones.
I know that I am the preacher I am today because some people cared enough to speak and to help.
This is the practical bold love called upon in community.
We need each other in the body of Christ.
You and I are meant for a community where we can practice and grow in what it means to love.
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