In light of all the recent news about the financial crisis in our country, I thought it was rather interesting that I came across this article from June of 2004 that reported that Freddie Mac had adopted a new logo in order to “reflect the company’s renewed focus on its vital housing mission”
[http://www.freddiemac.com/news/features/stories/newlogo_061404.html]
That logo featured the tagline “We make home possible”. Over four years later, most of us would conclude that their logo, while it may very well reflect their intended mission, doesn’t reflect very accurately what has actually occurred over the last four plus years.
I’m praying that our church’s logo, which contains the tagline “Connecting with God, Connecting with Others, Caring for our Community” is a much more accurate representation of what we actually accomplish as a body of believers. Those three phrases represent our calling as followers of Jesus Christ to “go and make disciples.” Our first goal is to help people connect with God through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The next step is to help us develop relationships with others in the body. Jesus made it quite clear that the way the world will identify us as his followers is by the way we love one another:
By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
John 13:35 (NIV)
But the ultimate goal is to develop disciples that will have an impact on those outside the church by caring for our community. I believe that this is what Jesus had in mind when He spoke to His disciples in the vineyard shortly before His death:
This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
John 15:8 (NIV)
It is that third aspect of making disciples that we want to focus on for the next four weeks. We all know how important it is for the body of Christ to reach outside the walls of the church. We’ve seen how it is God’s plan for the church to be the means by which the manifold wisdom of His ways and His plan of salvation are to be made known to the world. Otherwise there would really be no reason for God to leave us here on this earth after we committed our lives to Jesus Christ.
And in an effort to reach out and care for the community around us, a lot of well-meaning churches have tried to develop all kinds of ministries and programs to try to meet the needs of people outside the body of Christ. We’ve certainly done that here at TFC and there is nothing wrong with that approach. But, largely as a result of our journey through Ephesians, what I’m beginning to understand much better is that we’re already caring through our community through the lives of the people that God has drawn to our church.
It is amazing how well this follows up the message from last Sunday morning at the end of Ephesians where we looked at the life of Tychicus as an encouragement for all of us to be heroes of the faith. Although much of what we looked at last week applied primarily to how we relate to others in the body, those same principles can also be applied as we interact with those outside the church as well. As we’re faithful, trustworthy, involved in the lives of others and we encourage others, all of us have opportunities to care for our community.
I’m convinced that everyone in this body is caring for the community in some way. So perhaps rather than trying to initiate a whole bunch of new programs and ministries, we would be much more effective in caring for our community by coming alongside each other as partners in the work that is already going on in the lives of our church family.
For me, this began to come into much clearer focus a few months ago when Rita Ponzo shared with the “Connections” class about how she ministers to the needs of special needs students in a public school. And since that time many of you have partnered with Rita in that ministry by praying for her and by providing resources that she can use in her ministry. To me, that is so much more effective than if we decided as a church to minister to special needs kids and try to develop some program or ministry to do that.
But Rita’s situation is not unique. All of us here at TFC have some kind of opportunity to minister to those outside our body in our everyday lives. So what if we as a church could partner with all of you who are already caring for our community in some way? Over the next four weeks, we’re going to see if we can’t at least put that process into motion. As part of the messages during these four weeks, Dana and I will be sharing the personal stories of how all of you are already involved in caring for the community and encouraging others to support you in what you’re already doing.
But I also want to share with you some foundational Biblical principles that will help guide us in that process. We’re going to look at four aspects of the process of caring for the community:
• Permeation
• Participation
• Partnership
• Perpetuation
We’ll begin this morning by looking at the first aspect – permeation. We’re going to look primarily at the words of Jesus from two different passages in Matthew that provide the Biblical principles we need to follow.
Let’s look first at one of His parables:
The principles of the leaven:
He told them still another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough."
Matthew 13:33 (NIV)
This is a very interesting parable. First of all, it’s very short – only one sentence long. Secondly, unlike with many of His other parables, we don’t find Jesus’ commentary or explanation of the parable in the Bible anywhere. Lastly, this is the one example in Scripture where we find Jesus using yeast, or leaven, as a positive illustration. Everywhere else He speaks of leaven, he is illustrating how sin can permeate our lives.
As he often did, Jesus told parables that were based on things that were very commonly known by his followers. The leaven that Jesus is describing here was actually more like a sourdough starter. Every time that a woman would bake bread, she would save a small piece of the dough to be used the next time she baked bread in order to make the dough rise. And when Jesus is describing “a large amount of flour” here, he literally uses the term “three measures of flour”, which would be about 30 pounds of flour. Just as an aside, that seems to be a common Biblical recipe for bread. When the Lord and two angels visited Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18, Sarah used three measures of flour to make bread. In Judges 6, we also find that Gideon used three measures of flour when he made bread.
The overall picture here is pretty obvious. The purpose of leaven is to permeate the flour and influence the flour. And as citizens of the kingdom of heaven, our lives are to permeate and influence the world. Let’s briefly look at three ways in which that process is to operate.
1. We are to permeate the world, but not let the world permeate us
In order for the leaven to work, it has to be mixed into the flour. I have a jar of yeast in my refrigerator that I use whenever I make bread. But as long as the yeast remains in the jar, it doesn’t do anything. But when I take it out of the jar and mix it with the flour and liquid to make bread dough, that yeast causes the dough to rise. And when that occurs, what I find is that the yeast actually changes the nature of the flour, but the flour and the other ingredients don’t change the nature of the yeast.
If any of you have ever made sourdough bread, you have observed this quite clearly. You begin with the sourdough starter, mix in some other ingredients and then you save some of that mixture to be the starter the next time you make bread. The starter that you take out is essentially the same as the starter you put in, but all the rest of the ingredients have been transformed by that starter.
The same thing is true for us as followers of Jesus. If we isolate ourselves from unbelievers, we just can’t be effective in caring for our community and having a positive impact for Jesus in their lives. That’s why Jesus, right before He went to the cross, prayed for His followers, and for us, that we would be in the world, but not of the world.
When Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about the problems of immorality within the body, he wanted to make it clear that the believers were not to isolate themselves from the world around them:
I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people - not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.
1 Corinthians 5:9, 10 (NIV)
At the same time, however, we need to guard against allowing the world to change us. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.
2. A little goes a long way
It only takes a little yeast to make a large batch of bread dough.
The same thing is true in our interactions with the world around us. We often wonder if our efforts are making any difference at all. But even something very small can have a tremendous impact for the kingdom of God. We saw that last week with Tychicus. Most of us probably never even heard of him before last week, but we discovered what a tremendous impact he had on the 1st century church.
3. The results don’t come immediately
Notice that Jesus didn’t say that the kingdom of God is like baking soda. I could take some baking soda and mix it with some kind of acidic compound like vinegar and we would have an immediate reaction, but it wouldn’t last long.
On the other hand, yeast takes a long time to work, usually several hours. But the results are also much longer lasting.
I can’t think of any invention in the history of the world that has made us such an impatient people as the microwave oven. I can still remember when ours was broken a few years ago and we actually had to use the oven or the stove to cook our meals.
And that impatience often spills over into our ministries. We all want to see immediate results, but the results often take a long time and we may never see the results in this lifetime. In fact, we’re not even responsible for the results. We’re just to be faithful with what God has entrusted to us:
So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor.
1 Corinthians 3:7, 8 (NIV)
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke even more extensively about the principle of permeating the world around us by using two more familiar objects to illustrate these principles:
The principles of salt and light
"You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men. "You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5:13-16 (NIV)
Before we get to the specifics of salt and light, let me first point out a couple of principles that are applicable to both pictures that Jesus gives us here.
1. Being salt and light is a corporate responsibility
After spending nearly two years in Ephesians, I’ll guess that you’re not surprised that the “you are” phrases are plural. In other words, Jesus is literally saying “You all are the salt of the earth” and “You all are the light of the world”.
None of us are capable of being salt and light apart from the body. That’s why I’m so convinced that the key to effectively permeating the world around us is working together with other followers of Jesus, supporting and encouraging each other as we minister to people in our community.
None of us say, “pass the salt” and then just pick out one grain of salt to put on our food. Salt only functions in concert with other grains of salt to flavor our food. And even with his illustration of light, Jesus is speaking of lighting an entire city. One light won’t do that – it takes a number of lights, all burning at the same time to light an entire city.
2. God’s children are His only means of influence in the world
Salt and light are a bit different that the picture of leaven we just looked at. We saw that leaven actually combined with and changed the flour without being changed itself. Salt and light on the other hand, while they come in contact with the world around them, they don’t actually become part of that with which they impact. So they are actually more a picture of influence than anything else. I think we’ll se that more clearly as we think about salt and light individually in a moment.
The “you’s” in this passage are not only plural but they are also what is known in Greek grammar as the emphatic position. Without giving you a Greek grammar lesson, what that means is that those pronouns have the effect of meaning “only you”. In other words, those who are followers of Jesus are the only sources of salt and light in this world.
Jesus is clear that we are indeed salt and light. That is part of our new nature as the adopted children of God. But if we are not effective in carrying out those roles in our world, then God has not made any other provision for the influence He expects us to have..
Before we can get to our final principles this morning, we need to take a moment to think about the nature of salt and light. Most of us are pretty familiar with light, but there are some things that Jesus said about salt that require us to have a little more background.
In Jesus’ day, salt was a very valuable commodity. In fact, Roman soldiers were often paid with salt. So if they were a lousy soldier, someone would say that they weren’t “worth their salt”. Salt was important because there was no refrigeration, so people had to use salt in order to preserve their food.
One of the main sources of salt, both in the 1st century, and still today, was the Dead Sea. But that salt was mixed with a lot of gypsum. Pure salt never loses it saltiness, but since that salt was mixed with impurities after a while it would become stale and lose its ability to preserve and flavor. They couldn’t throw it on the fields, because it would keep anything from growing there. So they would take and throw it on the roads where it would be trampled.
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With that background in mind, let’s conclude with a couple more principles that we can learn from these pictures of salt and light:
3. We are to influence without being influenced
This is pretty much the same lesson that we learned from the leaven, but it is so important that it certainly doesn’t hurt to repeat it again here. We need to be in contact with the world around us without letting the world change us.
In order to be effective, salt actually has to come into contact with the food. And when that happens, the salt, which has a completely different character than the food, impacts the food without actually becoming part of the food. But on this side of heaven, all of us are impure salt and there is always the danger that we’ll be contaminated and lose our saltiness. So we need to make sure that we guard against the things of the world that can contaminate us even more.
Light is also completely unlike the darkness, but in order to dispel that darkness it must shine upon it. There is no danger that we’ll lose our light. If Jesus lives in you, He is the light of the world and His light lives in you. But the danger is that we’ll allow His light to be covered up by the bowl of fear, or of wanting to be accepted, or wanting not to offend. Once again, we need to guard our lives from those outside influences that might cause us to cover up our lights.
God has changed us from being part of the decaying, foul-smelling meat of the world to be the salt that can preserve it. He has taken us from the gloomy midst of darkness and transformed us into light that can expose that darkness. We must not allow the things of this world to draw us back into that dark, decaying world because then we lose all our influence.
That leads us to our final principle:
4. The purpose of permeation is to glorify God
The reason that we must permeate our world as leaven and salt and light as we care for our community is that it glorifies God. God has created us for the very purpose of becoming His children, gathering together with other believers in the body of Christ and then together making known His manifold wisdom in the world around us. And when we fulfill God’s purposes for our lives, we certainly benefit by having an abundant, joyful life. But ultimately that is not to be our motivation. Our entire motivation in caring for our community is to be that we are to bring God glory.
Over the next four weeks Dana and I are going to be sharing with you how our church members are already being leaven and salt and light. The purpose is not to bring attention to these individuals, but to give glory to God for they way that He is using them to permeate this world.
Today, Dana is going to begin by just giving you a brief overview of all the different areas where God is working through the lives of the members of TFC.
