Love Overflowing: Rally Sunday
Sept 12, 2010 Phil 1:3-11
Intro:
I really don’t know how many pastors in the world today really, honestly, genuinely tell their congregations how they feel about them. Today I’m going to do that. I really do know that most pastors in the world today regularly and persuasively tell their congregations what they should be doing. Today I’m going to do that also.
But first, I notice (with some dismay) that many of the trees are turning yellow. The sun goes down earlier. The mornings have been crisp and cool. Joanne and Thomas and I went to hear the symphony under the sky last weekend in Hawrelak park and by 8:30pm I could see the conductor’s breath. Our kids are back at school. All are unmistakable signs that fall has arrived. And while I am somewhat melancholy about the end of summer, I am also invigorated about what lies ahead. I’m excited about the next season of ministry God has for us, what He has been stirring up among us, and what He desires to do through us as His Kingdom comes and His will is done.
Fall, Life, Where Are We Now?
In the rhythm of our culture, fall tends to be a time of re-starting. And with that re-starting comes decisions about what things, outside of our basic requirements, we will engage ourselves in. Sometimes that is reactive – “oh! There is a cheap course on Tuesday nights where I can learn how to weave baskets, that sounds like fun, I think I’ll sign up.”; or “well, that phone call from my friend on the parent advisory council at school or the nominating committee at church sounds like they are pretty desperate for help, and I feel guilty about saying “no” so I guess I’ll do it…” Sometimes it is restarting things we value – piano lessons or sports teams, Bible studies or coffee buddies. And sometimes it is just by default, like a new TV series starts that is appealing and so we don’t want to do anything Monday night because we might miss Bristol Pallin and David Hasselhoff on “Dancing with the Stars”…
But there is another way to head into the fall and make decisions about what to engage yourself in: a more intentional way, a more deliberate way, that involves some questions that might be a little bit uncomfortable. Questions like this: am I where God wants me to be? Are the things that fill my life and my time the things that God wants to be filling my life and my time? Am I vibrant and alive because I am using the gifts God has given me and I know the joy of being used by God to make a positive impact on the lives of others around me? Do I have a healthy balance of time spent with God and time spent with people, so that I can sustain a rhythm of receiving from God and giving to others? Is my life the “life to the full” that Jesus said He came to bring?
I can see our lives as a continuum. We are born, we grow, at some point we met Jesus. In those seasons, we determined to make Jesus our Lord, we were excited to obey, we were eager to follow, we were enthusiastic and engaged – we read the Bible, we prayed, we looked forward to worship and learning with other Christians, we found ministries to be involved with that were meaningful, and above all we felt alive in our spirits. And in painting that picture I am not limiting it to times when life was going smoothly and easily, but I am including in that the times when it maybe was difficult and we struggled but we were alive in our spirits because of our active, obedient, purposeful connection to Jesus and to His Kingdom.
So the big question – does that describe your life today?
If not, what happened and more importantly what are you going to do about it? Jesus had an explanation for what happened: Matt 13:20-23. “20 The seed on the rocky soil represents those who hear the message and immediately receive it with joy. 21 But since they don’t have deep roots, they don’t last long. They fall away as soon as they have problems or are persecuted for believing God’s word. 22 The seed that fell among the thorns represents those who hear God’s word, but all too quickly the message is crowded out by the worries of this life and the lure of wealth, so no fruit is produced. 23 The seed that fell on good soil represents those who truly hear and understand God’s word and produce a harvest of thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times as much as had been planted!”
The more important question is what are we going to do about it, as we head into a new fall season together? See, on my continuum it progresses to today, and the question is where are you at the moment, and where do you want to be? Are you “good soil”, producing fruit for the Kingdom of God by the way we choose to live on a day-by-day basis?
I’m going to pause here and give you some space to consider that question just between you and the Holy Spirit.
Philippians 1:3-11
With that all as introduction, let me return to the things I began with, and chart a course into the fall. And to do that, let me borrow Paul’s words from Philippians 1:3-11.
3 Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God. 4 Whenever I pray, I make my requests for all of you with joy, 5 for you have been my partners in spreading the Good News about Christ from the time you first heard it until now. 6 And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.
7 So it is right that I should feel as I do about all of you, for you have a special place in my heart. You share with me the special favor of God, both in my imprisonment and in defending and confirming the truth of the Good News. 8 God knows how much I love you and long for you with the tender compassion of Christ Jesus.
9 I pray that your love will overflow more and more, and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding. 10 For I want you to understand what really matters, so that you may live pure and blameless lives until the day of Christ’s return. 11 May you always be filled with the fruit of your salvation—the righteous character produced in your life by Jesus Christ—for this will bring much glory and praise to God.
I said a few moments ago that I don’t know how many pastor’s tell their congregations how they really feel about them – Paul does that here. He is in prison in Rome, writing to a church he started and served and who have just sent him help and encouragement, and it is a tender message. Now I’m not Paul, you aren’t the church at Philippi, but I feel the same way. “you have a special place in my heart… God knows how much I love you with the tender compassion of Christ Jesus… you have been my partners in ministry…” I’m almost 40, I’ve spent my entire adult life, more than 20 years, more than half of my entire life, as a pastor at Laurier. And honestly, I’ve had seasons of discouragement, times when I want to quit, times when I look around and think “I’m a lousy pastor”, times when I look around and think “do these people get it, do they want to grow, do they want to be closer and more alive in Christ and more engaged in really serving Him?”. And every time I’ve gone to Jesus with those feelings, I’ve heard the same response: Jesus says, “those are my children, and I want you to love them like I love them.” And when I ask God if there are other places for me or other things He wants me to do, I’ve heard the same response, God saying “you are where I want you, love my people like I love them.” And as long as I feel God is saying that, and as long as you discern the same thing, I will obey. I genuinely feel it is a privilege to serve God with you.
Now, in all honesty I must also say this morning that I love you all enough to not let us stay in the same place. I love you enough to ask uncomfortable questions like I have already, I love you enough to push and pull and ask together, “are we really living as Jesus intended?” I see this also in Paul’s love for the Philippians, he wants them to keep growing. There are some familiar verses here, like verse 6: “6 And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns.” That is comforting to us – God started us, God will keep working on us, and one day God will finish us. But we’ve mis-read the verse. It says, “God, who began the good work within you” – and we’ve read that through self-centered eyes and made it about us. God is going to heal me, God is going to fix me, God is going to make me complete, God is going to forgive all my sins and heal all my diseases. But that is not the “good work” Paul is talking about, back up to verse 5: “for you have been my partners in spreading the Good News about Christ from the time you first heard it until now.” The “good work” is the “spreading of the Good News about Christ”, which God began in them and is completing through them. It is not an internal “me” focus, it is an external “world” focus, and I think we’ve lost that and followed our culture so that even the truth of the Gospel becomes about us instead of about the Kingdom of God.
And that takes us to Paul’s prayer for his dearly loved brothers and sisters at Philippi. “9 I pray that your love will overflow more and more, and that you will keep on growing in knowledge and understanding. 10 For I want you to understand what really matters, so that you may live pure and blameless lives until the day of Christ’s return. 11 May you always be filled with the fruit of your salvation—the righteous character produced in your life by Jesus Christ—for this will bring much glory and praise to God.” There is so much there that I’m going to leave a detailed examination of it to next Sunday, but notice the general sense, and notice it again from the perspective not so much of what God wants to do in us, though that is definitely there and probably what we notice most, but rather what God wants to do through us. The idea is of love “overflowing”, of us growing so that we pursue what “really matters”, and that ends in “fruit” which is “righteous character” that brings “glory and praise to God”. The context from the entire passage is about how all of these things contribute to “what really matters” which is the spreading of the Good News – if you don’t believe me or see it in vss 9-11 then study all of chapter 1 together and I’m confident you will agree.
And so… like Paul, my prayer for us is that our love would “overflow” in the pursuit of the “spreading of the Good News”. Because I believe, deep down, that this is the way to the fullness of life that Jesus came to bring.
Introducing Wednesday Nights:
How do we do that? Well first and foremost is the reality that we must all live that way every day in our homes and in our work or school or wherever else we spend our time. We are children of God, ambassadors of Jesus, and that mindset must permeate everything we do.
With that in mind, though, this fall we are starting something new as a corporate expression of our working out of this “overflow” of love. It is our new Wednesday night ministry, which we’ve been talking about together since May and which is set to begin this week. I want to take my remaining time to talk about that together, so that we can together understand “what” and “why” and “how”, and so I can encourage you to see it as an opportunity to move from wherever you might be on your continuum towards where God wants you.
I can sum it up fairly easily: Every Wednesday night, you are all invited to dinner here at church at 5:30. We’ll eat healthy, fresh, simple food, share conversation around the table, and be God’s people together, and we’ll pay for it with an open basket only wanting to recover our costs. By 6:30 we’ll be cleaned up and have a short time of preparation for the rest of the evening, and by 7pm we will be out of our building to serve our community in the name of Jesus. Those are the broad strokes: dinner together, then going out in Jesus’ name.
Now for the specifics. I sat down early this summer, intending to map out all the Wednesday nights till Christmas, line up places to go and serve and projects we might do together as experiments to see where God wanted us, and the Holy Spirit stopped me in my tracks with a simple question: “are you going to ask Me first?” And then Scripture spoke to me, where Jesus commanded his disciples “wake up and look around. The fields are…” (John 4:35), I recognized that even though I wanted to run ahead and plan the next 3 months, God only wanted me to plan week one. So this Wednesday we are going to eat (and eat well!), and then we are going out our doors to “wake up and look around” and try to see what God sees, try to listen to what God says, try to discern together where God wants us to go and bless our world in Jesus’ name. Randy is going to teach how to do that around 6:30, we’ll go and look from 7-8pm or so, and then gather back to talk about what we see, what God is saying, and what the next steps will be. I have a TON of ideas, the problem will not be “what could we do”, but rather “what does God want us to do”. And I am really excited to see what God says!
Related details: this is for everyone. Kids can come, and can either join in the ministry or maybe will have one of their own – this week my wife Joanne is willing to take elementary kids to the park until 8, and they can play and ask what God sees there and what it means for them to be children of God at the neighbourhood park. Others of you might have commitments on Wednesday evenings – I still want you to come for dinner (you have to eat!), and then we’ll pray for you at 6:30 or so and send you as a representative of Jesus into whatever other activities you have that evening. If you are a student and need to spend Wednesday night studying, come for dinner and be sent to learn and understand this world of God’s. If you are a senior and not up to whatever actual activity/project we end up pursuing, come for dinner and then sit and cover us with prayer as we go in Jesus name to bless our world (we will REALLY need that!). Hopefully most of us will be able to participate in the whole evening, but you are all welcome and even urged to come and help shape this together.
Conclusion:
At the beginning I said I wanted to tell you how I feel about our church and also what we should be doing. I’ve done the first – I love you – as for the second, some things need to change.
We’ve tended to say “come to church”. God says, “Go into all the world”.
We’ve tended to look at ourselves. God says, “wake up and look around”.
We’ve tended to say “God will complete a good work in me!” God says, “that “good work” is the spreading of the Good News about Jesus.”
We’ve tended to love those who love us. God says, “love your enemies” (and that means in action, not in feeling).
We’ve tended to say, “Lord, bless us!”. God says, “I want to bless the world through you.”
God says, “whom shall I send?”. Isaiah responded, “here am I, send me!” Now it is our turn to respond.
