Becoming a Community: Barriers
This morning we’re going to wrap up our look at becoming a community. We’ve been looking at the early church found in the book of Acts as a model for the kind of community that God would have us to become here in this place.
READ Acts 2:42-47
Before we move on, I want to look back for a moment at what we’ve already covered. These Truths are so essential for this ministry that I want to make sure that we’re all on the same page before we move forward. 2 Weeks ago, we started with a look at the benefits that becoming a community offers. If we are going to stress the importance of community, I wanted you to get a good look at some of the needs that being a part of a community will meet. Community gives us: 1) A Sense of belonging, 2) A Sense of Support, and 3) A Sense of Wholeness. All of these are basic needs that everyone has in their lives and that everyone will seek to fill. The church, a relationship with God and with His children, is the only place to find perfect fulfillment for each of these needs. Last week we talked about the building blocks of community. For us to see the benefits, we have to follow the model of Acts 2:44. First, we have to spend time together. Community does not happen on its own or by mistake. It is a choice that we make and it begins with togetherness. We need to experience togetherness in our church, at those times where we all come together to celebrate and worship. But, in a setting with this many people, there is a limit to the kind of real connections that we’ll make. What built that group of people in Acts into a community was that they took togetherness outside of the physical walls of the church. They hung out together. They ate together. They opened their homes to one another. That is where the relationships will begin to deepen, that’s where the intimacy and accountability and support will begin to grow. And when we see that happen, when we have togetherness in the other aspects of our lives, not just in that compartment that we set aside for church, these times (when we all come together) will be even sweeter and the Spirit will be able to move and work with greater freedom, and our worship together will grow to new heights. It starts with togetherness. Secondly, we have to have common ground. We need to recognize and understand those things that we have in common, those things that bind us together. When we understand our common ground and our ministry flows from that, many of the conflicts and differences that seem to plague the majority of churches today will no longer be an issue because we are focusing on what we share instead of what could divide us. Christ is our common ground and through Him, we all share a common story. We are all sinners saved by grace, all of us, without exception. We all share a common calling. Each of us is called to know Christ more and to make Him known to others. We may have different thoughts and ideas on how that should take place but we have the common ground of God’s calling in these areas of our lives. And we all have a common goal. We desire to grow spiritually and we desire to introduce others to Christ because we share the goal of seeing God’s Kingdom grow on Earth. What a privilege to have a part to play in that! When we have our eyes on this goal then it won’t matter what our personal tastes or preferences are, all that will matter is seeing that Kingdom grow and expand. We have the same goal. Christ gives us all these things in common.
So, we’ve looked at the benefits and we’ve looked at the building blocks and I think that everyone in here would share a deep desire to see community happen in this place. Today we are going to look at those things that will keep us from becoming the kind of church that we were created to be. We’re going to look at the barriers to becoming a community.
People often e-mail me jokes and other things that they find funny. Most of these have to do with pastors or the church. I get a lot that start with a pastor, a priest, and a rabbi were… A while back I received a list of bulletin blunders from someone. These are actual announcements that were printed in church bulletins. Each one has a misspelling or an awkward phrase that completely changes the intended meaning.
~ When parking on the north side of the church, please remember to park on an angel.
~ Jean will be leading a weight-management series Wednesday nights. She’s used the program herself and has been growing like crazy!
~ This evening at 7 P.M. there will be a hymn sing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.
~ The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.
~ The Board would like to thank all those who donated ovulating fans while the Air Conditioner was being repaired.
~ Please remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community.
~ This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Jackson to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.
Each of these announcements had a legitimate and good purpose, what you see here, however, is that when altered slightly, the result was far from what was intended. Even minor variations change things drastically. The same thing has happened when it comes to church and community. The purpose of the church is clear but when we alter things, when we change it from the way it should be, the results rarely reflect that purpose. Satan has twisted things just enough, he’s changed things that may have seemed trivial but they have altered the results from what was intended and have driven a wedge into the community that the church is called to be. As the early church continued to grow and as more and more people became a part of the movement of Christianity across the world, it became harder and harder to maintain a sense of community. By the time you have the letters that Paul and Peter write and books like James, you see many little rifts beginning to form and many different conflicts that have arisen. People have bent the Truth and reinterpreted it in ways that are beneficial to them and that justify their behaviors. Does that sound familiar today? There is verse after verse in those books that implore the people to stand firm and not to be taken in by the lies that were being presented.
The attacks that the church has withstood from the outside; the persecution and the ridicule, from the early days until today, have only made the church stronger, so Satan has attacked from within. If there is not unity in the Body, ministry falters. If there is not unity in the Body, our testimony is undermined. If there is not unity in the Body, the love of Jesus is not truly being manifest in us. If Satan can destroy community, Satan can render the church ineffective. So he has taken many of the attitudes and actions that were present in the early church and tweaked them and twisted them into the attitudes and actions that are present in many churches today and these things are the biggest barriers to becoming a community that we will face in the coming days.
As I prepared this message, I spent a lot of time on my knees before God asking Him for help and wisdom in each of the areas that we’re going to look at. As we go through these, I want you to be open to the Spirit’s voice and to be honest with yourself to see if there are any changes that God wants to make in you.
The first barrier to community is Sin:
1) Sin
Sin is something that all of us struggle to deal with in our lives. We are born with a natural inclination towards sin and an innate ability to make unwise choices in our lives. All of us have sinned.
1JN 1:8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.
None of us is perfect. For most of us, one of the first words we learned was “no” and one of the first attitudes that we displayed was rebellion. Sin comes naturally. When we begin a relationship with Christ, our struggle with sin does not simply go away. We have to desire growth in our relationship with God and we have to be willing to discipline ourselves to think and act differently, to no longer let sin rule our lives.
As we look at this barrier of sin, I am not talking about occasional sin, slipping up and making a mistake. All of us are going to do that on occasion, none of us will go through even a day without some measure of sin rearing its ugly head in our lives. I am talking about habitual sin, a willful choice to live in disobedience. An area of your life that Satan has control over and that is keeping you from deepening your relationship with God. There are some of you who know exactly what I’m talking about. There are some of you whose minds immediately went to an area that you have seen no victory in in your life and maybe you’ve given up, maybe you’ve given yourself over to this sin and conceded defeat. It’s time to stop. It’s time to get things right with God and to understand that not only is this sin a barrier between you and God, but it is a barrier to achieving community here and being able to minister effectively and see God bless this place.
In the book of Joshua, as Joshua was leading the Israelites into the promised land, they had just come off an incredible victory, the battle of Jericho, only to be defeated by an insignificant and weak country. It was obvious that God had withdrawn His blessing from them. They didn’t just lose, they were humiliated. As Joshua was prostrate before God and seeking His face, God commands him to stand up and reveals that Israel has sinned. Someone had willfully violated God’s commands and tried to cover it up. God’s blessing was withheld to the community because of the willful sin and deception of an individual.
The story is summed up in Joshua 22:20
“When Achan son of Zerah acted unfaithfully regarding the devoted things, did not wrath come upon the whole community of Israel? He was not the only one who died for his sin.” Joshua 22:20
It makes sense that if a community is connected together,like those redwoods that we talked about last week, then the sins of individuals effect the community as a whole. It hinders intimacy, it hinders the ability to build relationships and it hinders the way that we can minister. Satan is looking for any chink in the armor of a ministry so that He can gain a foothold and destroy the good work that God wants to do. Satan has taken the way it should be, that we should hunger and thirst for righteousness, and twisted it into a very casual view of sin and its consequences. But there is hope in the area of sin.
But 1 John goes on to tell us that:
1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we are going to experience all that God has for us, If we are going to keep the lines of communication open with God, and if we are going to build meaningful and lasting relationships inside this community, each of us has to be willing to deal with this issue of sin in our lives, to confess it and come clean, and to recognize sin’s effect on us and on the community as a whole.
2) Selfishness
Now, the first barrier, sin, shows a large degree of selfishness and every other barrier we discuss is certainly selfish on some level, but I want to deal with this on it own. Selfishness, simply put, is always putting your wants and needs first. In a community there is no room for selfishness, there is no room for self-centered thinking. If you are here for the sole purpose of what you can get out of it, then you have missed the point. Christ is the center. That is a non-negotiable Truth. All that we do and all that we plan revolves around Christ and what He desires for us and what He desires from us.
Selfishness, along with pride which we’ll get to in a minute, is the root of most of the conflict in the church. James 4:1-2 says:
JAS 4:1 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.
You want something but you do not get it and so you quarrel and fight and all of the time and energy that could be used to build and grow a ministry is wasted on complaining and arguing. It’s the church version of a hissy fit! When children don’t get what they want, their natural instinct and course of action is to throw a fit. They are unable to concentrate on anything else but what it is that they want and why it is that they can’t have it. We’ve had some very impressive fits in our home! How do you break a child of this habit? You let them kick and you let them scream and you hold your ground. When they see that their fit accomplishes nothing, most kids have the common sense to move out of that phase. The ones who continue to throw fits are the ones that know that eventually they’ll get what they want. It seems like every time I go to Wal-Mart, there is a child throwing a fit and 9 times out of ten, the poor mother is hurriedly trying to give the kid whatever they want just to shut them up. So many ministries give in to the fits of their people. They bend over backwards to satisfy the whims of those who make the most noise. They plan programs and services that are designed specifically to please certain people with little or no thought as to what pleases God. That cannot happen here. Many churches are not experiencing community and are not seeing God’s blessing because of the level of selfishness that can be found among the congregation with each one demanding that his or her tastes and preferences be catered to.
Community exists when selfishness is replaced with selflessness. All of us are going to have to put the needs of others and what’s best for this ministry before our own personal agendas and ideas. Selfishly, we’re never going to all be on the same page, but when all eyes are focused on God and on the best that He has for us, we can selflessly move forward and accomplish the vision of life change through this ministry. Selfishness is a barrier to community.
3) Pride
Pride goes hand in hand with selfishness and with self-centered thinking. It’s been said that pride is the only disease known to man that makes everyone sick except the one who has it! Pride cannot exist in community. Over and over in the Scripture we are called to humility. We are called to put others first and to care for the needs of others. Community is grown through the humility of each individual, there is no room for pride. Pride is a tool that Satan has used to split apart many a church, its one of His most effective tools. When conflicts arise, and they will, if the church attacks those conflicts with humility, there may be cuts and wounds, but they’ll heal and the ministry will be stronger. If the church attacks the conflict with pride, parts of the body will be lost. Cuts heal, when parts of the body are lost, they don’t grow back. Pride has caused many people to leave a ministry and it creates discord rather than promoting unity .
Prides also keeps several things from happening that are essential to ministry and to building community.
a. Keeps us from growing.
When pride is evident in our lives, we feel that we have all that we need. We are not gong to take instruction from anyone. One of the benefits of community that we talked about is a sense of support, of seeing others step in to help us out when we need it. One of the ways that we support each other is to hold each other accountable and to help one another grow. Pride convinces us that we don’t need any help.
PR 13:10 Pride only breeds quarrels, but wisdom is found in those who take advice.
There is growth and learning that can only come through humility and accepting the advice and instruction of others. When we can admit that we don’t know everything and that there’s room for improvement, we will see our spiritual lives blossom and our sense of community deepen.
b. Keeps us from serving
One of the marks of community is service, in a community each one does what is needed so that the big picture can take shape. When we serve in pride, we are serving with the expectation of approval and recognition. When you serve in this ministry, those things aren’t always going to happen. We try very hard to recognize those who make this place go but there will always be someone who is overlooked. If your motivation for service is a pat on the back, you’re not always going to get it. Or if your pride demands that you be approached and all but begged to help before you’ll serve, that may not happen either. If you are not currently serving somewhere, don’t wait to be asked. If you see a need, fill it. If you have an area that you’d like to serve in, come and talk to us. There are those who have filled out surveys and cards and indicated where they would serve and because they didn’t receive a call, they have never served and they are offended, their pride is hurt, and they would withhold their service as a means of punishment for those who overlooked them. When we serve, we do it out of humility and in obedience to Christ.
Ephesians 6:7 Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, 8 because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does.
Don’t let Satan render you ineffective for service because of your pride and don’t serve for the recognition and praise of men, do it for God and your reward will come from Him.
c. Keeps us from being served.
I am one of the worst when it comes to this. It is hard for me to let others serve me. It is hard for me to accept help sometimes. If anyone else is in need, sign me up, I get great joy from serving but being served is uncomfortable. This is a pride issue. Somehow I feel as though I should be just fine and not need anyone’s help. The truth is that God works in our lives through service and when I deny someone a chance to help and a chance to serve because of my pride, they may miss out on what God wants to do in their life. When we become a community, that means we grow together and we serve one another and we allow others to serve us. All of these things can be sabotaged by this issue of pride and will only happen when we learn the kind of humility that Scripture teaches and become “others-centered.”
4) Self-Doubt – this is one that may get overlooked sometimes. Satan loves to convince us that we have nothing to offer. He makes us ask the what if questions.
The question, “what if?” can be a great question to ask. There have been many inventions and innovations that are the result of this question. This same question can paralyze some people with the fear of the unknown or of the what might be. What if I fail, what if I mess up a prayer, what if they don’t like me, what if they see I’m not perfect, if one of those things happen, join the club. A community is a place where you can make mistakes and still find love and acceptance. Satan loves to plant the idea that you have nothing to offer or that you won’t be loved or accepted and rather than risk opening up, there are those who will withdraw further into themselves. This is also one of the reasons that people don’t serve or don’t share their faith. Satan has convinced them that they aren’t good enough or that they’ll be laughed at and rejected. To be a community we need to have an attitude of Christ-confidence. Not self-confidence, because we get ourselves in trouble when we rely on self, but when our confidence is in Christ, all of those doubts and those nagging insecurities are exposed for the lies that they are.
2 Timothy 1:7 For God did not give us a spirit of timidity (fear), but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.
The self-doubt comes from Satan, but from several Scripture verses we have the great promises of God. Here “We are precious and honored in God’s sight and He loves us. He says: I have loved you with an everlasting love…I have engraved your name on the palm of my hand. That’s how important we are to God and our confidence comes through knowing this and placing our trust in His promises. Don’t let self-doubt keep you from being a part of the community here.
When I was younger, I loved to play the Atari game Donkey Kong. You had to jump over all of these barrels and avoid all of the different barriers between you and your goal, to rescue the princess. You could hurdle them, and sometimes you could smash them, but you knew they were coming and you were ready when they did. These barriers to community, and many more, are coming, some are already here. We have to be ready to get past them and to accomplish our goal as a ministry. The Acts 2 church was a community that was marked by righteousness, selflessness, humility, confidence in Christ, and eternal thinking. Over time, these traits have been twisted and the church has seen the barriers of sin, selfishness, pride, self-doubt, and short term thinking keep her from becoming what God intends for her to be. If we are going to take the next step in our ministry, if we are going to become a community and develop intimacy and dependency on one another, so that God can change the lives and hearts of those in this ministry and of those around us, we have to recognize these barriers. We have to be honest with ourselves if one or more of them apply to us, and we need to ask God to help us to avoid them, or to smash right through them as we head towards the common goal of seeing God’s Kingdom built here on earth. This is God’s ministry that He has entrusted to us, becoming a community means that we all take ownership for it and that we are committed to whatever it takes for God’s purposes to be accomplished through us.
