“Follow Me,” Where?
The Shape of Things to Come, prt. 5
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
October 4, 2008
Today is the last in our sermon series called The Shape of Things to Come where we have been looking at what Wildwind Church will be doing this year. I want to review because I have intentionally couched these messages in straight-on Biblical sermons so by now you may have forgotten what I have said about Wildwind!
First and most important, we’ll be not just telling you that you should be a disciple of Jesus, but showing you how. We’ll learn how to pray for those who persecute us, how to love our enemies, how to root lust and greed out of our lives, how to give generously, how to pray. We’ll learn about the obstacles that are keeping people from connecting to God. Perhaps most important, we’ll focus on ways that our current lives will have to be reshaped and restructured in order to be obedient to Jesus. Our goal for this year is to help people create conditions in their lives where Christ can be obeyed, then teaching them what Jesus said, and then teaching them how to do what he said. Pretty simple, huh? Pretty clear, huh?
I also have told you in this series that since there is no clear pattern for how the church is to teach discipleship to Jesus, each church must decide for itself. So last week I shared with you some of the community rhythms we have established to make sure we are on the same page. In our community those rhythms are:
1. Every member learning and practicing the means of grace
2. Every member serving God with their talents
3. Every member learning to love others in a small group
4. Every member making a financial commitment to their local church
Last week I threw open the doors and invited you into membership and many responded. I can’t wait until our next membership service. We’ll be bringing in quite a few of you it looks like!
I want to close this series today with a sermon I’ve entitled Follow Me Where? Jesus’ call to us is follow me. It’s that simple and sometimes that difficult. And in response to that call, some of us want to know, “Follow me where?” If I follow you, what will happen to me? How will my life change? If the purpose of the church is to make disciples of Jesus, what is a disciple? Tonight I’m going to tell you what I believe a disciple of Jesus is. I’m going to tell you this clearly and right up front so you know that this is our goal for every single person in our church. Young people and older people. Teens and little children and young adults. Men and women. This is what we believe makes a disciple of Jesus and we want to see every person making progress along these four lines. If Jesus said Follow me, the question is follow me where? If our goal is to make disciples, what do we expect to see happen? Well, from everything I can tell, a disciple of Jesus is a person who:
• Structures life around God through intentional practice of spiritual disciplines and bears spiritual fruit (personal)
• Seeks to overcome obstacles to wholeness/holiness (emotional)
• Cares deeply for others (relational)
• Engages in a mission to introduce others to Christ (missional)
That’s it. You might say, “How come prayer isn’t on there?” Pursuing spiritual disciplines. Or “How come you didn’t mention serving people?” If you truly care deeply for others you will serve them. Or “Where is involvement in world missions?” When we get active in world missions, we engage on a mission to introduce others to Christ. Or “What about controlling your temper and loving your spouse and children? Take your pick – that falls first under overcoming obstacles to wholeness/holiness, and is expressed in how we care for others. I can’t think of a single important aspect of following Jesus that is not somehow covered under one of these four areas. Let me take each of these individually and break them down a little for you. Remember here, we’re not talking about some fancy program that Wildwind made up yesterday. We’re talking here about Jesus’ age-old command follow me and this is an answer to the question, “Follow me, where?” If we follow Jesus we should expect our lives to change and I believe I’ve come up with a simple and clear way to communicate four essential areas of life change.
First, a disciple of Jesus is a person who structures their life around God through intentional practice of spiritual disciplines and who bears spiritual fruit as a result. What are spiritual disciplines, you ask? Anything you practice regularly as a way of getting to know God can be considered a spiritual discipline. Prayer. Meditation. Scripture reading and memorization. Silence and solitude. Celebration. Fasting and feasting. Worship. Confession. Sabbath. Those things cannot save us, but when used regularly and prayerfully, they can lead us away from worship of self and toward worship of Jesus.
A disciple of Jesus realizes that the life Jesus has called them to is different than the life they were called out of, so they understand that they must live their life in a different way. What we wanted to do here was get away from saying that a disciple of Jesus is one who has committed their life to God and asked forgiveness for their sins. Certainly something amazing may begin there, but a person who has said a prayer is nothing more than a person who has said a prayer. But if they are restructuring their lives around the life of God, doing things that help them live in his presence and by his grace – now THAT’S something.
And as a result of this way of living, their lives are being transformed. They are experiencing a deepening life of prayer and communion with God. That’s what it means to bear fruit. Their lives are changing. Those who know and love them can see it happening.
2 Corinthians 3:18 (MSG)
18 …Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.
This leads to our second statement about what a disciple of Jesus is.
A disciple of Jesus is a person who seeks to overcome obstacles to wholeness/holiness. Wholeness is related to holiness. To be holy is to be completely whole. It is to have all your faculties geared completely toward God. That is why when asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus said:
Matthew 22:37 (NIV)
37 …"’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
That’s holiness! That sounds good. But there’s a brokenness deep down inside many people that prevents them from doing that, no matter how much they may want to.
In November 2006, A Christian research organization surveyed a region of the FMC.
46% reported negative on relationship with spouse specifically
29% ongoing problems in sexuality—porn, extra-marital affairs, uncontrollable lust, fantasies, masturbation
58% emotional or stress management—anxiety, depression, fear, worry, anger, loneliness, insecurity, discouragement
46% spiritual dryness/emptiness
60% concern over not growing in love for God
52% concern over not growing in love for others
75% concern over not practicing spiritual disciplines
48% concern over degree of personal transformation
64% concern about hearing from God
Need I say more? (I’ll leave it to you to figure out whether that’s the last time this year that you’ll hear me give some or all of these statistics.) Christians are broken and when Christians are broken, the church is broken. Huge numbers of those in the Free Methodist Church (that’s you) who profess to follow Jesus are mired in sin, struggling chronically with these things I just mentioned. Sure they said the prayer, but they’re not growing. There are barriers and obstacles in their lives that are keeping them from growing. They might be learning more about the Bible. They might be absorbing ever more sermons and small group lessons, but they are not growing in holiness. They cannot say in any meaningful sense, the words of the old hymn, “It is well with my soul.” In fact for many it is not well at all. The transforming power of God is missing. My friends, if you have ongoing problems with sexuality – porno, affairs, uncontrollable lust and masturbation, that is not normal in the Christian life. There’s a barrier in your life that is keeping you from receiving God’s grace. You need help!
If you have chronic problems in your marriage – constant fighting, or resentment, or bitterness, or alienation – you need help! You cannot receive God’s grace and grow in holiness and wholeness with this issue looming large in your life!
If you suffer from frequent anxiety, depression, fear, anger, loneliness, insecurity, discouragement – that is not to be accepted as par for the course in the Christian life. You need help. What has happened is that we have come to accept as normal all of these abysmal dysfunctions in our lives and then when a pastor or some other spiritual leader fails/falls, we say, “How on earth do you think that happened?” It happened because we have normalized in the church a life of pathology – we have somehow accepted this broken, weak, desperate, angry, lonely, lustful life as the best we can hope for under God. I know – I’ve been there. I’m as guilty as anyone else. For years and years of my Christian life, up to January 16, 2008, I lived most of my life without a sense of God’s presence and power, assuming that I would continue to be mired in various sins all my life and that therefore the good Christian thing to do would be to admit it and just create a whole community of the broken, weak, desperate, angry, lonely, and lustful so we could encourage one another to keep trudging through our miserable and totally broken lives. That wasn’t quite on target, but I don’t regret it, because now that we’re assembled here I have the chance to say Let’s Move On. Let’s not accept these things as the default conditions of our lives. Let’s not live any longer assuming that our role in one another’s lives is solely to encourage one another to keep trudging, but also to remind one another that transcendence is possible; that we can overcome if we are willing to use the tools God has placed at our disposal. Books, counseling, spiritual practices, friendships, personal renewal, confession, maybe for some people even medication – whatever it takes! Let us not be a church full of people who have prayed some prayer for salvation but live crippled by sin and its horrible effects. Disciples of Jesus are people who seek to overcome barriers to wholeness and holiness, not people who accommodate, appease, entertain, indulge and dance with sin.
Hebrews 12:1 (NIV)
1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
Next, disciples of Jesus are people who care deeply for others. If we are going to take this seriously, we must combine it with #2 and start removing some barriers that are keeping us from doing that. For some of us it’s a deeply-embedded racism. Racism breaks the heart of God and has no place in the life of a Jesus-follower. Some of us have a barrier of fear and that produces hatred for people whose skin is different or for people who are of a different religion – especially the Muslim faith in the time we live in. For some of us it’s politics. Some so-called Christian conservatives harbor a near hatred for liberals and some so-called Christian liberals harbor a near hatred for conservatives. The way of Jesus is not to tolerate this in our lives. It is not to hide behind politics and examples of how America was wronged by this group or that group, or we were wronged by this or that person. Disciples of Jesus will not try to squeeze in a smidgen of hate or contempt with their daily scripture readings. Instead we will look at our tendencies to hate people, to have contempt for others, to be dismissive of people, to withhold forgiveness, and we will allow the healing, cleansing Spirit of God to bring true transformation to those sinful attitudes and ideas.
1 John 1:5 (NIV)
5 This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.
If we want God in our lives, we must move to the places where God is. Hatred, lack of love, contempt, disdain – all of those things come from darkness and God has no part of them. Disciples of Jesus will move through and beyond these kinds of obstacles and into true love for all human beings regardless of their race, religion, point of view, sexual orientation, or anything else. This will not create perfect harmony and we’re free to disagree with people in this life – but as followers of Jesus we are not free to not love them. Disciples of Jesus are people who care deeply for others and are growing in that caring and love every day. They are not making excuses for lack of love. Sin gets no quarter. That caring, by the way, will come out in specific acts of service and love. On that note, let me say that I think the church needs to completely abandon the notion of hating the sin but loving the sinner. I believe God does want us to despise sin, but let’s despise the sin in our own lives and then just focus on loving people. I’m not suggesting we should love sin in the lives of others, I’m just saying that Jesus is a perfect example for us to take here – Jesus, who we can assume always hated sin, nevertheless loved the daylights out of sinful people, and they knew he loved them. That phrase “hate the sin but love the sinner” isn’t in the Bible and I can’t imagine that phrase could ever even have been invented by a person who truly loved sinful people. Jesus never said it and I can’t image that he ever would have said it. And I have never heard that phrase escape the lips of a person who I believe was actually a loving person and I’ve heard it only from people who seem to hate both the sin AND the sinner. It takes way more maturity to hate sin and love sinners than most Christians actually have, so as we talk about caring deeply for others, I think we need to hate our own sin, love sinners, and let God do whatever hating of sin needs to happen in the lives of others.
Finally, disciples of Jesus are people who are engaged on a mission to introduce others to Christ. What do you think that means? It doesn’t mean that you are standing on milk crates at your office and preaching the gospel. It doesn’t mean you are engaging your friends in vicious debate every day. In fact most of what passes as introducing others to Christ accomplishes exactly the opposite in our cultural context.
Jesus was God, right? I mean, he could have spread the gospel any way he wanted. Interesting that Jesus chose to stand in boats and shout to the people on the shore, or shout from the top of a hill to people seated at the bottom when he could have snapped his fingers and had a PA that could have made his voice heard for two miles around. But he didn’t do that, did he? Jesus worked to spread the gospel in his cultural context. A PA works for us in our culture, but people in his time would have found it mystifying and thus distracting. So just like Jesus worked within his culture, we have to work within ours. In our time, people find door to door cold-calling highly offensive and thus distracting. They would close their ears to you and to everything you had to say if you suddenly stood up on a crate and started preaching. People don’t like being hit over the head with someone’s faith. What works in our time is personal relationships and serving in love. That’s it. Other than that, the toolbox is empty. But this is something we can all do. We can all serve and we all have personal relationships and if we’d just relax and stop letting guilt and inferiority set the agenda for the way we share God, we’d find ourselves just naturally telling people what matters most to us and leaving the rest to God.
Determine today that you will never again think to yourself, “I can’t share my faith.” Yes, you can. Some of you who say that probably already do in ways you don’t even realize. What you can’t do is share your faith in front of 200 people a week like I do. Maybe that’s not yer thang. Or maybe you aren’t outgoing and can’t just invite a hundred people a month to church. But if God created you, then he created you for a mission. And if God created you for a mission, then he just wants you to be YOU for HIM. He doesn’t need you to be Billy Graham or Joel Osteen or Rick Warren or Joyce Meyer. Billy Graham is my hero but one day I realized that I have strengths and abilities Billy Graham has never had, and if I spend my life trying to be Billy Graham, I will waste my life! Now that’s a trip, isn’t it? If you spend your life trying to live just like some other Christian you respect or admire, or you decide you have to share your faith the way they do, or make the same kind of impact you think they do, you will waste your life. God wants you to be you, for him.
Romans 12:1 (MSG)
1 So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.
When you embrace what God does for you, instead of running around doing for him, sharing God will be as natural as breathing. The only reason it doesn’t seem natural to us is because so many of us are convinced that sharing God requires something other than whatever it is we are gifted at.
I am convinced that these four things are the essence of living a life that comes not from ourselves and our limited and shabby resources but from God and his infinite and splendid resources!
A disciple of Jesus is someone who:
• Structures life around God through intentional practice of spiritual disciplines and bears spiritual fruit (personal)
• Seeks to overcome obstacles to wholeness/holiness (emotional)
• Cares deeply for others (relational)
• Engages in a mission to introduce others to Christ (missional)
This is what I believe Jesus calls us to when he says Follow Me. This is the life we want to see every person at Wildwind pursuing, because it is a life that leads to holiness and happiness and knowing God.
So there you have it. What do I want to see you doing, from now on, forever and ever? I want to see you learning to structure your life around God through the practice of spiritual disciplines that will help you become like Jesus. I want to see you confronting and addressing emotional roadblocks in your life that are keeping you from growing in your faith. I want to see you living a lifestyle that rejects coldness and hatred and embraces forgiveness and love and service, and I want to see you learning to be you for Jesus and embracing God’s mission for your life. Wildwind’s ministry, from now on, will focus on those four things – that’s what a disciple of Jesus looks like. Next week we’re gonna stop talking about this stuff and start doing it. Jesus says follow me. This is where.
