Power to the People
Slowing Down, part 3
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
October 25, 2008
In last week’s message I posed the question, “How do we pursue God in ways that do not end up doing spiritual/emotional/psychological damage to ourselves and others.” Remember how I answered that question at the end? I answered it with the words, “I’m not gonna tell you.” And I didn’t. So this week – I’m still not gonna tell you. Seriously.
Remember a few weeks ago I talked about how I have never really felt any inclination to follow most of the rules for giving tight 3-point sermons? A tight 3-point sermon typically begins with a question, and then goes on to either give you three answers to that question, or to give you one answer and three ways to apply it. Now think about what this presumes. This presumes a few things we really need to look at.
It presumes first of all that the greatest problem in your life is what you don’t know. It presumes that if you could just somehow come to know what you currently don’t know, your life would be better. Although this is unquestionably the case for some people at some times, I think a much bigger problem most of us are dealing with is how do apply in our lives the things we already do know? After all, Jesus said that there’s something more important than information, and that’s the extent to which we are capable of receiving it. Jesus said:
Matthew 13:13 (MSG)
13 That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it.
Boy, we all know what that’s like, don’t we? How many things do you know right now that just haven’t come alive to you yet? Jesus understood this distinction between hearing and receiving.
Let’s think right now of some things that nearly every one of us has heard, but maybe not all of us have received for some reason. Every one of us in this room probably knows that it’s healthy to take a multivitamin every day. Multivitamins are fairly inexpensive and easy to come by. Can I see the hands of everyone here who took a multivitamin every day this last week?
That’s what I thought. What else do we know? We know that we should exercise 4-5 times a week for 30-45 minutes each time. By show of hands, how many people were consistent in this practice THIS WEEK?
That’s what I thought. What else do we know? We know that that unfinished project at our house is driving us or our spouse crazy and we probably need to finish it. How many, by show of hands, went to work on finishing that unfinished project at your house this past week?
That’s what I thought. How about basic morality?
James 1:19 (NIV)
19 My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry,
No one in this room would disagree with that, right? Christian or not, we all know we should try hard to be good listeners, watch our words carefully, and hold our temper. Okay, ready to get real honest? By show of hands, how many people in this room struggled with one or more of these things this week? That means you didn’t listen very well, you used words you now regret, or you let go of your temper.
That’s what I thought. Your greatest problem in life usually is not what you don’t know. Your greatest problem in life is receiving/applying the things you do know. We often act in the American church like the reason people aren’t living the way they should live is because of a lack of information. And then each week the preacher gets up and gives you more information. But since the problem is not lack of information, but lack of application or receptivity, the information in most cases just becomes more stuff you will have to add to the heap of things you know but haven’t applied yet. As John Maxwell says, “We are educated far beyond the level of our obedience.”
So that’s the first assumption about traditional preaching, is that your biggest problem is what you don’t know. The problem with that is that in most cases (not all), it’s not true. Your biggest problem (and mine) is all we know but have not yet been able to apply for an infinite number of reasons.
The second assumption behind traditional preaching (trust me, I’m talking about this for a reason) is that whatever this thing is that you don’t know that you need to know is best learned from a preacher. The preacher, after all, is wise. He/she is gifted. He/she is called. He/she labors in God’s fields 24 hours a day. In a church gathering, the food isn’t really blessed unless the preacher prays for it. If someone’s in the hospital, that person hasn’t really been prayed over until the pastor has come and prayed. If someone is hurting, the pastor must know best how to help. I say this not to disparage myself or any of my awesome pastor friends, but the deference (I don’t mean appreciation, which we appreciate!) shown to pastors sometimes is a little over the top. There’s this assumption that pastors are learned people who can show you best how to live your life. Now we’d better have something to contribute, or else even now you’re all wasting your time, but the most important thing we have to contribute is not what most people think it is. It is not education or knowledge or insight or preaching skills or leadership skills. One of a preacher’s most important contributions is standing at the front of rooms like this all over America and reminding God’s people that they are God’s people, living it out daily in the communities we lead, and showing how faith in God makes your life different, not just so that non-Christians will want God, but so that Christians will keep wanting him. So this assumption that what we need in our spiritual lives is more answers, and that to get those answers, we turn to the answer man or the answer woman – just a lot of times that’s not on the mark.
The third assumption behind traditional preaching is that the answers are more important than the questions, and this position is supported in our society that just wants to get to the point and fix whatever the problem might be. But let me ask you something. Have you ever suffered in your life? I mean suffered so much that you kept asking God, why, why, why? Did he tell you? Did you get an exact reason? Most of us would say no. But did you grow from that experience? Did you learn from it? Did you maybe even come to have deeper faith? Of course, that’s not an uncommon response to suffering. Suffering is proof positive that the most important things we learn in life are not things we learn from packing our heads full of information, and getting the answers right. The most important things we learn in life come from bearing up under hard times, from having to live without answers to the questions that bother us the most, from accepting the challenge to commit to one person and love them for a lifetime, from slowly and carefully doing our duty to God, to our children, and to our employers – and from all the ways we fail at those things. From those long and painful goodbyes we occasionally have to say at the bedsides of people we love. From our stupid mistakes. From the steady examples of friends who have been faithful. From the wounds we have suffered and the apologies we have had to make with heads bowed low.
That’s where we learn what matters most. And you know what? The stuff that matters most is stuff that we don’t usually have to struggle to apply. If you have lost someone you love, you didn’t have to say to youself, “Self, take note to hold your children a little bit closer tonight.” Or “Self, make a resolution to live in ways that you know would honor the one you loved.” We don’t have to struggle to apply that stuff, we just do it because it matters.
And then, to make things even worse in this over-educated, under-obedient condition we are in, we heap guilt on ourselves for all the things we’ve been told we should do that we’re not doing, and in the church we often misinterpret that guilt as the voice of God, telling us to “get motivated,” or “pull it together.” We think of God like a spiritual Richard Simmons, shouting at us to work those spiritual muscles – “get to church, do your small group, say your prayers, control your temper, do your lessons!” Can we drop that idea right now? No one knows better than God how not together you are, even at times that you might manage to fake it for a while. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be making progress in the spiritual life and that it shouldn’t show in the way we live day to day. All I’m saying is that we’re often coming at it from the wrong direction.
The Apostle Peter wrote the following words, not to pastors and priests and church workers, but to the church – farmers and tailors and butchers and shepherds and blacksmiths.
1 Peter 2:9 (MSG)
9 But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you—
Have pastors been called and chosen by God? Of course! But you – YOU, CHURCH – you schoolteachers and customer service specialists and mechanics and students and engineers and homemakers and computer programmers and veterinarians and confused folks who might not even know what you are but you know that you’re the church – YOU are the ones chosen by God for the high calling of priestly work. You – painters and plumbers and preachers and postal workers and politicians – you are God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him. You children, adults, men, and women, you are called to tell others of the difference God has made in your life.
We live in a society that exalt us for being specialists. Modern life is so complex that we have to split up into specialties in order to keep the wheels on our society. That means everybody has an area where they are more special than everybody else. Dr. Joe knows more about cats and dogs than most of you. Christy knows more about reading. Jaime knows more about music. Dan knows more about electronics. Most of us have an area where we specialize, where we get to be superior to everybody else. Most of us who don’t wish we did.
We don’t even realize we do this, but we bring this “everyone’s a specialist and we defer to the specialists” attitude into the church, where we see the pastors as specialists and we have these notions that “regular” “laypeople” are the ones who ask questions, and the chosen ones (the professional Christians among us) are the ones who give the answers. And of course since we are conditioned to believe that answers are superior to questions, we take a humble backseat to our spiritual leaders. We often see them as somehow “better” than us at this whole “Christian” thing. We put them on pedestals many times not for the way they live their lives but for their learning, their leadership skills, or their supposed advancement in the ways of God. I have avoided getting personal here and I won’t speak for the other pastors here today but I will say that for me the chasm between who I am and who people see me to be is a distance I know to be unbridgeable. And one of the most awesome things about the body of Christ, in my opinion, is that…
Galatians 3:27-28 (NLT)
27 …all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on the character of Christ, like putting on new clothes.
28 There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.
In the kingdom of God, there are no “specialists.” There’s not two separate categories of Christian, one of which does this Christian thing for a living and are “hardcore” and “super serious” about it and God smiles on us because we teach about and try to practice spiritual disciplines and are responsible for leading others and are up front a lot and God has really come alive to us and given us an extra helping of his Holy Spirit, and then another category of people who have real jobs and real lives and work in the marketplace and therefore can’t be as committed or as “hardcore” as the professional group, so God just kind of allows them to grope around in darkness. There is no such division. If you have been baptized into Christ, if you belong to Jesus, if you are counted among those who have turned over the keys of your life to him and are now looking to him to learn how to conduct your life, then distinctions are not recognized. YOU are chosen. YOU are called. YOU are priests to one another and to a needy world. YOU!
This passage talks about two kinds of unity. In verse 27 it talks about each of us being united with Christ.
In verse 28, we see that as we are individually united with Christ, the boundaries between us begin to crumble. And when there are no longer barriers between us, what happens? We are united with one another! So there is no reason, and no room, for you to place yourself below anyone. You may be new on the spiritual journey, but if you are baptized into Christ, you are called and chosen! You can learn from your spiritual leaders and accept counsel and direction from us, and support us as leaders, without feeling like you take a backseat in the kingdom in any way.
Earlier I mentioned starting a revolution today. What if the people of God took their place as the people of God? What if we simply made a decision to cast off our ideas that the pastor’s prayers are better than our own, or that an encouraging note or email from the pastor is more spiritual than the same thing from someone in our small group? What if no one ever again in this church ever said, “I’m just a layperson,” as if that’s not every bit as holy and chosen a calling as pastor or missionary.
And that, my friends, is why I asked you a question last week but didn’t answer it, but instead told you to ask God for the answer. It’s time we believe in the church that God wants to talk to all of us, that God has something to say to his people. I mean, I know we SAY that. In fact frequently the preacher will say it just before he stands up and tells you everything that God has told him that you need to know for your spiritual well-being.
I don’t want to get stuck in any ruts or create formulas out of any certain approach, but expect that from time to time I will stand up here and engage the people of God with a question and then encourage you to ask God for the answer. Not all of you are struggling to embrace your identity as people chosen and called by God for his service, but for those of you who are, this will help you come to think of yourself as someone God wants to speak to and put to work. God wants to speak to you – clearly – in a way you can understand and know to be God – and in a way that will change your life.
It would be a revolution in the modern American church if we destroyed the boundaries between pastor and laity and if the entire “community of the baptized” were to begin to grasp the full significance of what it means not to sit under the teaching of a pastor, but to be called to be priests. I might be up here, and you might be out there, but we’re in this together.
You’re getting response cards passed to you right now and these will give you an opportunity to give us some feedback on the journey you are on. Our commitment to you is that if you indicate on this card that you have a need – a need to commit your life to Jesus, a need to ask some questions, a need to be baptized, to join a small group, to connect to the church, to get a counseling referral, to be prayed for – whatever it is – we will respond to you and do all we can to meet that need. Churches are not assembly lines, they are hospitals. Only without the long waits and the bad food! So please tell us how we can help you. If you write down an email address or phone number, please write clearly so we can contact you. There will be people at the door to collect your cards as you leave today.
To close I turn my attention back to those who have not committed their lives to Jesus. I want to tell you that I respect the journey you are on. You are sitting in a room full of people, I being chief among them, who could recite many experiences of being hurt and alienated and frustrated with the church. But our approach at Wildwind is to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. We don’t decide that the teachings of Jesus aren’t worth following simply because we know people who have followed them poorly. To greater and lesser extents, won’t we all?
God loves you. God created you with dignity, with a need for him, and with a need to connect to him through other people. Wildwind may be the place you can do that, or maybe you could do it better in some other church. We want you to be where you need to be, wherever that is. But I want you to know that coming to Wildwind is not just about finding good music or good preaching or a good program for your kids and then sitting and soaking.
Because I believe that just like all the Christians here today, you have been called. You may not have responded to that call yet, but it doesn’t mean you haven’t been called. God has called you to a life of passion and purpose and ever-increasing freedom from the things that are dogging you right now and choking joy out of your life. I don’t know what those things are, I just ask that you look into your own heart and see if those things are there, and ask yourself if you would like a life that is free of those things. Because that life is available to you and is what Jesus offers to each of us. That is the life we are pursuing together. Will you pray with me?
Jesus, would you begin to break us of our information addiction? As we follow you, would you teach us not to listen to voices in the world that tell us that we are spiritually inferior to others, that we have nothing to offer, that you have called others more clearly and value others more highly than us. May we learn to see ourselves the way you see us. Amen.
I have modified one of our texts a little bit and want to ask you to recite it with me as we close the sermon.
Galatians 3:27-28 (paraphrase)
27 …all of us who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on the character of Christ, like putting on new clothes.
28 In the pursuit of Jesus there is no such thing as expert and novice, worthy and unworthy, professional and amateur. For we are all one in Christ Jesus.
