I have had this idea for a sermon illustration rattling around in my brain. Today seemed like the perfect day to use it. A few weeks ago now I referenced the beginnings of this illustration. It actually began with new siding and windows on our home. That meant a new deck. The old one was an eye sore and failed to meet code also. Then there was one more thing. A new barbecue. At first, Elaine said that she would be happy to assemble it. I thought that sounded like a great idea. I am worse than terrible when it comes to putting things together. So we went out and bought one. Really, of all the things that I mentioned, this was the most glaring need. It came unassembled, in a box. For several days, maybe weeks, it sat on the deck, in the box. Things like that are sources of conviction to me. I come home for supper and I see it there daring me to take it out and try to put it together. Finally I responded to the challenge and decided that Elaine and I would put it together. She would read the directions and I would do exactly as she said. I thought that this was a great character building project and hoped that the barbecue would be put together and the marriage would stay intact. We did it! We still love each other. Even through the minor mishaps where we put together something out of sequence and it had to be taken apart so that we would not run into an impasse later. I don’t think I complained even once. And she was great as always. And now we have a fully functioning barbecue on the back deck.
What I wanted to do was to buy a barbecue and bring it on the platform this morning in the box. Now if you could use your imagination from here. I wanted to put my apron on and throw a steak on the box and pretend to cook it. There is no imagination required to know that you can’t cook a steak on a barbecue that remains well packaged but in pieces in the original container. It’s ludicrous to think that a person could do this or that they would even try. But it might serve today as a visual picture that would direct our thoughts relative to faith.
For most of us, faith comes in a box or some sort of package.
First of all, for most people, faith comes in some sort of package. I have packaged my faith for my own kids in the best way that I know how. Much of that has been to try to help them avoid the negative aspects of Christianity that I have encountered along the way.
To be honest, I never found that coming to Christ was a very freeing experience at least not in the way that I imagined. The faith box was a constricting one. It had to do with people’s expectations. And they were so diverse. I think that people in my church loved me more when I was making no profession of faith than they did when I jumped through the hoops.
The big hoop for me was to respond to the “altar call”. When the preacher gave the invitation at the end of the service, people walked down front while everyone else sang and then bowed at the front pew, which no one sat in. I was just nervous in front of people and it wasn’t as some suggested that I was ashamed of God. I was ashamed of me. We were poor. In my mind we weren’t as good as the other people there in one way or another. I loved God and feared Him at the same time. If someone had told me that I could have accepted Christ without ever having to do that, I would have done so a long time before I did.
Religious hoops that we set in front of people are detriments to the gospel of grace. I would imagine that there may be people who never find their way to heaven because of things like this that we lay on people’s shoulders. Little traditions that we develop and we assign inherent spirituality to their practice. People come to believe that in resisting the practice or the hoop that this places them in opposition to God. But this is symptomatic of the “boxy-ness” of our beliefs. The idea is so silly when you think of it. To think that we give people the impression that God is so limited or confined that He must meet us in front of the church like this.
Now I have become accustomed to this practice. As a matter of fact, so have many of the rest of us. When we say that we long to see the altars filled, we are confessing that we see this as measurable evidence to the moving of God. Do you know what? I look back to points of spiritual advancement and growth that are centered around a trip to the altar. I also want you all to know that the altar in our church is a place for you to symbolize your desire for God or your dependence on God as you come to pray with people or for people. So don’t hear me say that I think that there is no value in coming here to pray. I am just saying that you can come to know Christ as your Savior without walking down this aisle and kneeling at these altars. If you are here today and you’d like to have someone talk to you about a spiritual need that you are sensing, there are many here this morning who can help you. The pastors of course, but you know, any person who has accepted Christ as their Savior can help you as well. It doesn’t require any special training, . . . really.
When I became a Christian, I heard other messages that I now question – actually I reject them. In the box, these things worked well, these unassembled pieces of faith were just fine in the box.
I had people tell me that I needed to forsake my friends. I do think that discernment is important in friendships. There are people who have a negative impact on our lives and there are people who impact us in positive ways. Obviously we can never have too many of those “positive” relationships.
What are the things that cause us to begin to “unpack” our faith?
There comes a time though when every follower of Christ begins to “unpack” their faith. And once it is unpacked it never fits back in the box again. Every once in a while I like to quote from the “Cowboy’s Guide To Life”. Texas “Bix” Bender says: “Lettin’ the cat out’a the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in.” I suspect that no one here is quite like me I this way, but it would require a real emergency for me to take the rubber doughnut out of the trunk of my car to replace a flat tire. It’s not that I mind changing a tire. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is putting everything back in there the way that it came out. It just doesn’t work for me. For most of us here today, God is “pressure packed” in our lives. He is being held back to some degree. Maybe you are afraid of what might happen if you allowed Him to have His way in your life. You are trying to cross all the bridges and to put together a predictable “Trip Tic” so there are no surprises. Do you know something; there is nothing that takes the adventure out of the Christian life like predictability. The more you try to chart your course, the less satisfying a relationship with God becomes because you are trying to choke the faith out of it.
Let me just highlight a few of the things that cause us to dig in to the box and begin to pull stuff out:
• A realization that things are not working they way that they are meant to work. You may interpret what you are feeling to be something that is negative. Questioning, doubt, . . . you are currently dissatisfied with your experience of God. Perhaps you are in the midst of some kind of adversity and you just feel like throwing in the towel and walking away. Or maybe you are just tired of the “same old same old” answers and you are convinced that there has to be greater meaning. I know that I have experienced this as a pastor on most of these fronts. I have been afraid of some of the more charismatic elements of faith and so I have left them in the bottom of the faith box. Like the power adaptors that come in electronic devices for going overseas. I have just told myself that I would never need them and they are there in the bottom of the box. So I have not prayed for healing for people as I should have because I have been afraid that God would not answer my prayers and then I would have to explain why. There have been “prophetic” words that people have uttered over my soul and I have been almost afraid to imagine that some of that might actually come true. The boxy-ness of my faith has constricted the free movement of God in my life and I have given in to it. I want you to know something. I am done. I want everything that I can know of God in this life regardless of how that makes me appear to others.
• A “hunger” for the fullness of God. I guess I have just illustrated this in some ways . . . but this is more than experiencing what God would like to do. It is knowing the very heart of God and having my wants melt into His wants and my plans and purposes morph into His until my ambition becomes His ambition. Until my successes and failures all serve to bring Him Glory. Yes I said my failures as well. In my weakness and my helplessness, His Power is displayed.
• A desire to impact others. This is the determination that my life will be fruitful. Someone else will come to a relationship with God because I have played some bit part in their process. You might ask how this causes a person to unpack? In my opinion this more than anything else causes us to go to the bottom of the box to search for missing or unused pieces. Show me a Christian who feels that they have all the answers and I will show you a Christian who spends little time trying to communicate eternity to earth-bound creatures. When Elaine decided that she wanted to learn to use the computer I had to decide how I could help her of if indeed I could help her. There were so many things that I did on the computer that made perfect sense to me and they made absolutely none to her. It occurred to me that my son was better equipped than I was to teach her. He was somewhere behind me in process and so thrilled to be able to teach his mother something. Truthfully, she learned more from him and with a whole lot less pain – for her and for me. I discovered that I forgot what it was like to be where she was and I was out of touch with what “newcomers” knew or didn’t know. I wanted to simply “fast-track” her and skip the sequential and experiential learning that is so critical in all of life and particularly spiritual life.
• A willingness to wrestle with the real-life issues that other people were facing. Why does a man fight so fiercely to stop smoking and fail repeatedly when another Christian brags about kneeling to pray and gets up delivered? Did he or she experience that the other did not? One tries so hard and the other seemingly required no effort in particular. Why is one person born with “same sex attraction” and another never faces this issue? It was easy for me at one point in my life. I just decided that it was purely sinful and perverted. Then I got to know people up close and I could see the agony in their souls and how in truth that few if any of them would ever have chosen what their sexuality brought them. I still have no answers except that God’s grace is sufficient. These types of things and many more sent me head first to the bottom of the box once again for missing or neglected pieces. I do know this brothers and sisters, if we cannot find sufficient love for others in our faith box, in our relationship with God then we need to go back to square one – we need to dismantle an impotent faith and start building again on the real foundation – Christ and His limitless love. You see, what you think about anyone is not going to usher the transformational love of God into his or her lives – as a matter of fact, it may hinder the working of this Great love. If you want to reach people you have to get down into the arena of their struggle and allow God to use you for their good and His Glory.
What about “faith assembly”? How do we put the pieces together?
• First of all, there is a necessary sequence.
When Elaine and I assembled the barbecue, her role was to read from the manual and to tell me what came next. My role was not to argue, it was simply to listen and follow the directions. She would occasionally help me to hold something as well. I decided from the start that this was going to be a good experience for us. A couple of times we made mistakes, got the sequence messed up and sure enough we could go unimpeded to a certain point and no farther. It was at the impasse that we discovered that we had done something out of order according to the designer and builder. There are no shortcuts in the faith. I remember in Bible College the guys who scoffed at the need for education and some even quit early to head into the ministry because there were people who needed to hear the word. In their minds we were wasting our time. Do you know what? It was a necessary part of the sequence. Many of the guys who sprinted into the ministry are no longer involved and perhaps even shipwrecked spiritually. The more mainline denominations required not only an undergrad experience but graduate school beyond. I know understand that. I was 20 years old when I went into the ministry. I had all kinds of unrealistic expectations about the church and the role of a pastor. The best thing that I can say about those years when perhaps I should have been in a graduate program is that I did not damage to the church. I brought her no shame. Perhaps the opposite? If the mainline academic requirement did nothing more than to keep young men out of full time ministry for a few more years of growing up, then it might be valid for that reason alone.
• It is God’s work in you.
“8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:8-10)
You see, you are not a machine. God didn’t create you as an engineer might a robot in a large assembly plant. Yes, the scripture tells us that He has something for us to do. That is part of what it means to be created in His likeness. Adam was created with a task to take care of the Garden. But before you are anything else, Paul tells us that we are His workmanship. You are the work long before you are the worker. You are cherished by God for relationship with Him.
• The essence of effective relationship is “trust”.
God is always at work from the beginning to the end. He sees the end product and we don’t.
“6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)
I have made a decision to trust my doctor. Everyday these people work with sick people to make them better and healthy people to keep them that way. They have made it their life’s ambition and practice to help people live longer and healthier. Now if I like my dear father, decide that with a cursory reading of some Readers Digest Condensed version of some health publication, I am more qualified than my doctor, then that is dangerous and perhaps fatal. True, doctors are human, but no more or less than I am. They make mistakes . . . so do I. And yes, there are times in our country of overworked heath care workers, that I may need to push strongly for something that I feel to be necessary for my health and well-being. If I don’t I will suffer. Still, somewhere along the line we have to trust and follow directions regardless of whether they would be our first choice or whether or not they fit with our instincts. My Dad read some fine print on a bottle of medication that he
Was using and determined that sunlight might be harmful to him. He stayed indoors largely in the latter years of his life with the shades drawn and the windows tightly shut. He created a perfect place for black mold to grow and ultimately breathing issues were a large part of his death. He couldn’t trust someone else’s judgment over his own and their good intentions. The thing that haunted him throughout his life became his undoing in the end. Am I willing to trust and submit to a greater authority? Could it be that there are other people in this world who at times have a better idea of what is best for me than I do?
• The on-going nature of relationship is “likeness”.
I am married for 32 years now. My wife knew from the start that she was smarter than I was but she allowed me to believe the opposite in patience and love. You’ve heard me say before that she was my wife when we started, my better half soon after that. My better ¾’s and most recently my better 13/16ths. We started out two very different people. So unlike one another. Today we look alike or so they say. We think alike. The similarities are predominant, not the differences. We are a package deal. We have been working our way forward spiritually in those years, becoming more like Christ as well I hope. The on-going nature of relationship is likeness. You see, you cannot exist in relationship to Christ without becoming like Him. If people tell you that, don’t shrug off the compliment. Tell that person that this is your greatest desire and aspiration. If that is coming true shout Hallelujah! But don’t receive it as a compliment to yourself, something that you have produced. It is the continuing work of God in your life. I am my father’s son you know. That man whose life gave me birth has also contributed in many ways to my life today.
