"Pit Crew”

Intro: You ever have one of those moments when everything just seems to come together and you step back from your life and everything makes sense? We call those light bulb or ah ha moments. It’s like when I get something that says “some assembly required”. When it comes to putting things together my perspective is to get the job done as fast as possible. So reading the instructions seems to only slow me down – I just want a picture of the finished product. But after about my second attempt I’ll usually get out the instructions and have one of those “ah ha” moments.

I’ve had many of those moments when studying my Bible or talking with someone about spiritual things. When I’ve realized that there is something more I never knew about or never utilized my spiritual life in such a capacity. So let’s go to God’s instructional manual the Word of God and see what God says about going to church. Here are God’s instructions for churchgoers. This is the classic Scriptures on church attendance found in Hebrews chapter 10 beginning in verse twenty-four.

Notice that these verses are not directed to the preacher or the pastor or the person on stage but look at the pronouns – us and we; this is directed to everyone in attendance. We have taken on this whole mentality of this Christianity being between God and me and it doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else. We reefer to our Christianity as a personal relationship and rightly so but we must be careful not to exclude the importance of the church. To fulfill God’s purpose for your life you must understand the value of your church relationship. This is not about one guy (the pastor) who stands in front of you and feeds you and runs the show. It’s an entire team or family of people (the church) that gets involved in your life.

Illustration: Picture for instance the Indy 500 when those cars pull into the pit. And out comes this uniform wearing color coordinated pit crew and they surround this car and all start working on it. Now picture a car that pulls into the pit and doesn’t have a pit crew, kind of a self service pit, he has to get out of the car and washes the window, fuels it up himself and changes the tires all alone. He’s not going to be efficient or win a race that way. Or lets say that the guy who owns the racecar employs only one guy to be his pit crew. And this guy knows all there is to know about formula one race cars. None of that makes sense! Or worse yet picture the owner of the race team looking down from the sky box and seeing a pit full of people he is paying and only half the crew came out and worked on the car and the other half stayed in the pit and examined their figure nails? What do you think that owner would do, he would fire them because he wants his car and his driver to pull into a pit were everyone is going to get involved.

I wonder how comfortable our owner is with pulling lives into our church? Does He see it as a one man pit stop were one man does all the work to equip and encourage someone? Or does he see an entire team of Christians surrounding a person saying; “how can we help you, how can we encourage you, how can we get you moving forward in the Christian life? How can we spur you on to love and to good deeds in your life?

It amazes me that if the church is like a team and we’re all team members for the Lord that so many church members are satisfied to just sit and do nothing. People join a team to get in the game and play to get involved to participate. I have seen people who have joined their kids in pewee baseball and say; “well, he’s not very athletic or he isn’t very coordinated so I’m hoping this will bring it out of him”. You know as a coach in trouble then. But all in all most people join athletic teams to participate. I’ve never known of a high school athlete going to his coach and saying, “Coach, I’ve been starting all year and getting to play just a little too much, let someone else play and I’ll watch”.

It’s a team effort but the problem today is that so many Christians are going to church without even a thought as to what they can do to help other people in their walk with Christ. Sometimes we think of it as all one sided and one directional and totally forget about our responsibility to spur one another along. Spurring one another on is what we are supposed to be doing. To spur is a negative action with a positive result occurring in the one being spurred. Spur might be a positive action if you’re the cowboy but not if you’re the horse. You don’t want to be spurred today; no one wants a set of spurs digging into their rib cage.