Title: Letting God Re-Create Us.
Scripture:
Psalms 51:1 -12
“1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. 3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. 4 Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge. 5 Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. 6 Surely you desire truth in the inner parts : you teach me wisdom in the inmost place. 7 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. 8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. 9 Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. 10 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. 11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
Let me read it the way I believe the Lord would have me read today.
“1 Have mercy on us, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out our transgressions. 2 Wash away all our iniquity and cleanse us from our sin. 3 For we know our transgressions, and our sin is always before me. 4 Against you, you only, have we sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge. 5 Surely we were sinful at birth, sinful from the time our mother conceived us. 6 Surely you desire truth in the inner parts : you teach our wisdom in the inmost place. 7 Cleanse us with hyssop, and we will be clean; wash The Morgandale Church of the Nazarene, and we will be whiter than snow. 8 Let us hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. 9 Hide your face from our sins and blot out all our iniquity. 10 Create in us a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within The Morgandale People. 11 Do not cast us from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from us. 12 Restore to The Morgandale Church of the Nazarene the joy of your salvation and grant us a willing spirit, to sustain us.
Main verse: Psalm 51:10
10 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
David here means he was God to completely Re-create Him, Change him not just forgive him but completely change Him.
The message today is part of what I listen when the general Church of the Nazarene sent out a devotional that was given at the District Superintendent retreat. It touched everyone and even touched me listening to the message that this DS wife gave. It is challenging and I pray that this message will challenge you not just today but for the rest of your life.
I grew up in the Church of the Nazarene I am a second generation Nazarene. My mom got started as a young adult. The church has had an impact on my life. I remember Vacation Bibles that had impact on my life, I remember a VBS teacher saying to me, Jimmy if you learn these verses they will help you in life, Proverbs 3:5& 6 “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy way acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” I remember in Jr. Church or children’s church some of the stories that the pastor wife told and about heaven and going there when we died if we are right with Jesus. It was the church that gave me my education, when we went to Nazarene Bible College and online classes. And it was through the COTN that I was to fulfill God’s call on my life. You see at the age of six is when I first felt the call to preach at a boys and girls camp on the Pittsburgh District. I know the call was as real then as it is today. In my Twenty –five years in the church as a pastor it is exciting to see what God is doing and through the Church of the Nazarene around the world.
I have seen the church change over the years, my wife loves changes. She will change the living room around if she could, she loves to change the kitchen around every so often that when you go to look for something you may look for a long period of time and finally give up and say where is such and such and you hear Bonnie say O I move that. She does that often and sometime we think it is to confess us just for her fun.
Sometime change can be painful; I have seen people in church get very upset over changes that have been made. I have even seen people leave the church or say they will leave the church because of change that are being or have been made. When you look around this plant and watch some of the Discovery Channel program and see what God has created and some things that have never been seen by people before that God has created that take your breath away in wonder and awe! People if God created all these things why do I agonize over the future of the Warren Morgandale Church of the Nazarene? Since God created this world of ours, even the hidden places that most of us will not see without thinking it was a wasted effort. God can re-create the Morgandale Church of the Nazarene for the next hundred years!
You see alone we stumble and fall, but with God’s creative power to set loose on us, we can be made into the Church He has desires us to be! You see God created us out of Chaos “..in the beginning..” God is able to do the same for the Morgandale Church today.
God’s decree from Jeremiah: “When you call on Me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen. When you come looking for Me, you’ll find Me. Yes, when you get serious about finding Me and want it more than anything else, I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed.”
We are resource-rich in every way, but we can choose to set aside all of our blessing and resources, choose to humble ourselves and fall on our faces before Him asking Him to make us new – to re-create the Morgandale Church of the Nazarene, and to begin that work with us.
God has made us stewards; He has not just made us stewards of our time, talents and money. But the Lord has made us also stewards of His message on holiness!
Ezekiel 36:22 - 28
“I’m not doing this for you, …. I’m doing it for me, to save my character, my holy name, which you’ve blackened in every country where you’ve gone. I’m going to put my great and holy name on display, the name that has been ruined in so many countries, the name that you blackened wherever you went. Then the nations will realize who I really am, that I am God, when I show my holiness through you so that they can see it with their own eyes.
24-28 "’For here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to take you out of these countries, gather you from all over, and bring you back to your own land. I’ll pour pure water over you and scrub you clean. I’ll give you a new heart, put a new spirit in you. I’ll remove the stone heart from your body and replace it with a heart that’s God-willed, not self-willed. I’ll put my Spirit in you and make it possible for you to do what I tell you and live by my commands.”
That is what is called Re-creation! The message we preach and you hear is not being prideful, because it is not about us, it is about HIM, about Him re-creating us so that He can show Himself holy through us, so that everyone will be able to see with their own eyes. That is our message! That is why God created the Morgandale Church of the Nazarene in the first place!
In years past some have been embarrassed by being part of a church where known as noise-renes. Embarrassed by our message of heart holiness, purity, and crucified and dead to sin and even holy, some of these terms people have felt they were over the top for today crowds.
But we are not stunned by crudeness and offensiveness evident everywhere. Some people in the Warren do not seem to mind if their language or dress or habits offend others. “Could it be that we have been seduced into thinking that we no longer need to “die?” Could it be the process has come to be more palatable for us than “crisis?” May God protect us from ever confusing the “redemption and lift” which we enjoy with the continued need for individual, personal transformation! We inherit sin, not salvation or sanctification. No Nazarene was “born” holy.
"Did God intend the lost be drawn to us because we look so good, or because we are truly Christ Like? God has called us to be a holy people, and it is impossible to be educated or civilized into being holy.
One of our Missionaries tells a story she said “Before leaving Africa, one of our district Superintendents took us out to dinner, and during the meal, he thanked the Church of the Nazarene for bringing them the message of holiness. He then recounted how their culture, their equivalent of a witch doctor would go out into the wilderness for a period of time and stay there until he “died” and was filled with evil spirits. Then he would return to his village to do their work. The DS
Said nobody else told us that we too, needed to die and be filled with the Holy Spirit. We need to die until we are filled with the Holy Spirit
Kenneth Collins from Asbury say “People around us need to see in us, not just the possibility of being free from sin, but the reality of it.” Obviously, grace and process are at work in the hearts of unbelievers as well as the oldest saints, but just as salvation is an act of God that requires our confession, repentance and acceptance of His free gift, so it is with sanctification. It is work, making us holy, but it also requires our death to self, a once –and – for-all relinquishment of our will to Him. The carnal mind has a bent towards self that infect even good, long time Nazarenes and can only be corrected by God Himself. Some of us grew up in the church in the days of stern faces, bad hairdos, and “saved, sanctified and petrified,” but the fact that the message was imperfectly modeled by some does not invalidate the truth or change, God’s call to us to BE HOLY! What that looks like today is up to God.
"History tells us our problem is that too often the church has tried to live the doctrine without the work of God to make us holy, so then we try to rely on rules alone. Doctrine can remain the same, but doctrine is not transformative – God is! If we follow rules without transformation it soon leads to doubt that such life is possible.
What kind of church do we want to be? Do we want to be a good church, great church or a holy people? I have a question I want to ask you today, Is God’s arms too short??" Can He not make the Morgandale Church into a holy people? "Can He not do for us what he promised in Ezekiel- do it for Himself, for His holy Name? Does He not still desire to show Himself holy through us so that the people of this sin sick Trumbull County, Warren Ohio can see with their own eyes? Oh, that He will pour pure water over us and scrub us clean, give us a new heart and put a new spirit in us! May He remove our hearts of stone and replace it with a heart that is God- willed, not self- willed, putting His Holy Spirit in us and making it possible for us to DO what He tells us and LIVE by His commands…for His name’s sake."
Oh Yes! God needs to re-create us, and not just our structure. We don’t need yesterday’s outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Morgandale Church of the Nazarene; we need what our Creator God has for us TODAY! Oh we need this fresh outpouring of His Holy Spirit in our Church, I cannot bear the thought of us missing it! I find myself asking, if we don’t much care, if we are too busy to notice what’s missing, will the Holy Spirit still fall on us? My prayer is don’t pass the Morgandale Church of the Nazarene by!”
There is a song I believe that we have song a few time here that says “Change my heart, O God, Make it ever true, Change my heart, O God, May I be like You. You are the potter, I am the clay, Mold me and make me, This is what I pray”
It is a song about allowing God to re-create us, But the question come to us do we want really want to change or do we want just to be the same. There are those here today that need to experience the change that only comes by God. There are those who have not seen what God can really do because of their age.
We need to pray God give us the courage and strength to continue to pray that the people of the Morgandale Church of the Nazarene will not be cheated out of what God wants to do for us and though us, so that the lost and spiritually hungry around us will see His holiness through us, because He has fallen on us in the newness and freshness of His Holy Spirit.
Let us stand:
"Lets bow our heads and listen to Daniel’s prayer from Chapter 9 as he might have prayed it if he were with us today.
“So listen, God, to this determined prayer of your servant. Have mercy on the Morgandale Church of the Nazarene. Act out of Who You are, not out of what we are. Turn Your ears our way. God, and listen. Open Your eyes and take Your eyes and take a long look at the Morgandale church, our church named after You. We know that we don’t deserve a hearing from You. Our appeal is to your compassion. This prayer is our last and only hope:
Lord, listen to us!
Lord, forgive us!
Lord, look at us and do something!
Lord, don’t put us off!
Your Church and Your people are named after You:
You have a stake in us!!
Oh, God, we say again, for Your sake, do not delay, because Your Morgandale Church and Your people bear your Name.
Amen.
“Change our hearts, O God, Make it ever true, Change our hearts, O God, May we be like You. You are the potter, We are the clay, Mold us and make us, This is what we pray”
Allow God to Re-Create you:
*Part of this mess is from Linda Seaman devotion on Feb 11, 2008
