God of All Game Changers
11/28/10
podcast.nhcoc.com
VIDEO: TERRY FOX
Fox was a distance runner and basketball player for his high school and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His right leg was amputated in 1977 after he was diagnosed with bone cancer, though he continued to run using an artificial leg
In 1980, with one leg having been amputated, he embarked on a cross-Canada run to raise money and awareness for cancer research. He was forced to end his run outside of Thunder Bay when the cancer spread to his lungs. He ran 143 days and 3,339 mi. His hopes of overcoming the disease and completing his marathon ended when he died nine months later. Though the run ultimately cost him his life, his efforts resulted in a lasting, worldwide legacy.
Fox originally hoped to raise one dollar for each of Canada's 24 million people. The annual Terry Fox Run, first held in 1981, has grown to involve millions of participants in over 60 countries and is now the world's largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research; close to $500 million has been raised in his name.
I wish someone would have asked Terry Fox somewhere along the way, would you do this all over again? If you had a choice about the cancer and the leg, would you give it up for 500 million dollars worth of life saving research?
There’s something about seeing the results first that makes the journey worthwhile isn’t there?
In case you haven’t picked it up, we are in a series we’ve named Game Changers. It’s a reference to the type of event in the sports world that creates enough of a chain reaction that the whole trajectory of the event is altered.
This isn’t a series about sports though. It’s really about dealing with poverty and injustice in 2011 like we never have before in the history of this church. It’s about time. Did you know that there are almost 2000 verses in the Bible that deal with poverty and injustice?
If you want to know where an individual’s priorities lie, look at their calendar. In the same way, if you want to know where a church’s priorities lie, look at its bulletin. Look at the sermon topics. Look at the activities planned. Look at the amount given.
What if 96% of the American church actually decided they would stop robbing God and tithed? (only 4% do so nationally) It would literally change the world.
• It is estimated that it would take about 65 billion per year to lift the 1 billion people who live on less than $1 a day out of extreme poverty. That’s less than 5% of what the world spends on the military.
• Let’s be honest. We have been far more apt in this congregation to focus on honoring the military in our worship than honoring the poor. I’m not saying honoring the military is bad, it’s just not what Jesus emphasized.
When’s the last time you’ve heard a sermon series on poverty and injustice here? It’s been too long.
We need a game change. “We have shrunk Jesus to the size where He can save our soul but now don’t believe He can change the world.” The game has changed. We want to see Jesus change the world some in 2011.
It’s what Jesus set out to do in the first place. Jesus’ mission was described like this in…
Luke 4:16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
It’s interesting that he used that specific phrase from Isaiah “the year of the Lord’s favor”. That’s a very specific event in the Old Testament that Jesus is referring to. It was also known as the year of jubilee.
We read about it in
Leviticus 25:10 Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan.
13 “‘In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own property.14 “‘If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other.
23 “‘The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. 24 Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.
The year of Jubilee was God’s way of protecting against the rich getting too rich and the poor getting too poor. I believe God was 98% capitalist, but every 50 years God went communist and redistributed the wealth of his people.
When Jesus was proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor, he was using the practice of Jubilee to illustrate a deeper charity that was spiritual in nature. Jesus would become sin so that our sins would be forgiven. He would redistribute his spiritual wealth.
If he used redistribution as a way of teaching people, why can’t we?
The gospel is not just about right beliefs, but it also is the power to change the world. We are praying for much more than personal change when we pray “Thy Kingdom come” We are praying for a social revolution. This is the whole gospel. “
We are so concerned about saving people for the next life, we forget to save them in this life. Salvation is not a means for leaving the world it is a way of redeeming it. What’s ironic is that the more we deal with poverty and injustice in this world, the more people respond to our invitations to the next world.
Evangelism vs. social action has always been a debate in the church. In my mind, it’s ludicrous to separate the two.
• Church is not a retreat from a hostile world, but an agent of change throughout it. We are the salt of the world, not a spiritual spa.
Jesus often used the farming analogy of “Harvest time” to illustrate evangelism. This seems like a good time of year to mention it. So let me mention it. Harvest time.
• What goes into a crop before the harvest? (describe all the back breaking work that goes in before a harvest even appears.)
• “In our instant gratification culture, we would prefer to go directly to the harvest.” (19)
I guess what I’m saying is that we are not focusing on social issues despite evangelism, we want to focus on social issues for evangelism.
If you will remember from last week, we didn’t want to just throw statistics at you and make you feel guilty with this sermon series. We actually want to make these three weeks intensely practical for you. Action oriented…
The best way to do this is to break things down into steps. So far we’ve only covered one step. Which was? (remove your plank)
Let me go on a tangent for a minute then David’s going to come and give the practical stuff and clean up my mess.
This plank step is an allusion to Jesus’ little illustration of how we tend to see someone else’s problems before we see our own. We applied this to our topic by admitting to the fact that we tend to blame poor people for being poor. Now that the shakiness of material possessions has literally hit home for many Americans in the last year, we are realizing that sometimes people are poor due to no fault of their own.
When we understand this along with the realities mentioned in the first week about the fact that most of us in here are richer than 99% of the world. We start to get a game changing perspective on our faith. We want to do something about poverty and injustice instead of just believing that it exists and feeling bad about it.
What we do counts more than what we think or feel or even say. Frederick Faber said, “Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence or learning.”
Remember when we looked at Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25? This was a picture of the final judgment. Notice that the criteria for salvation here was not that the sheep confessed faith and the goats did not, it’s that the sheep had acted on their faith in tangible ways. God’s ears are tuned to action, not words.
Let’s drive this home with a paraphrase of that passage…
He will say to the goats on his left. Leave my presence forever. “For I was hungry, while you had all you needed. I was thirsty, but you drank bottled water. I was a stranger, and you wanted me deported. I needed clothes, but you needed more clothes. I was sick, and you pointed out the behaviors that led to my sickness. I was in prison, and you said I was getting what I deserved.” (Richard Stearns)
God forbid we become goats with his gifts.
I’m done whining and complaining we finally get to some practical strategies for Northampton in 2011.
DAVID
Step One: Remove your plank
Step Two: Pick up your shovel
“Don’t fail to do something just because you can’t do everything.” (Bob Pierce)
Do heroes know when they are heroic? Rarely. Are historic moments acknowledged when they happen? You know the answer to that one (if not, a visit to the manger will remind you). We seldom see history in the making, and we seldom recognize heroes. But we’d do well to keep our eyes and hearts more open. Tomorrow’s great person might be mowing your lawn. And the hero who inspires him might be nearer than you think. Maybe right in your mirror.
“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try spending the night in a closed room with a mosquito.” (250)
What we can or can’t do by ourselves really doesn’t matter anyways. Why do we always think we’re alone when we decide to respond to the overwhelming need in our world? We’re talking about a revolution that can move mountains!
Matt. 17:20 He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
What makes us think Jesus wasn’t talking about millions of people putting their faith into action by grabbing a shovel?
I would imagine the estimated 2 billion Christians in the world with a shovel in hand could move a mountain pretty quick.
Here’s the amazing thing… Christians are not the only ones with a shovel!
When I hold a basketball in my hands, it’s merely a basketball, but when you place that same basketball in the hands of Michael Jordan, it turns into collegiate and professional championships. Put a golf club in any of our hands, and it’s merely a golf club, but when you place that same golf club in the hands of Tiger Woods, it turns him into one of best golfers in the world. (Insert joke about putting a golf club in his ex wife’s hand here.) ; )
What happens to mountains of need when God’s holding the shovel?
I’ll show you what happens with the only miracle that’s actually recorded in all four Gospels…
John 6:5 When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do. 7 Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!” 8 Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, 9 “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?” 10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). 11 Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.
That little boy had very little to offer, but out of what he had, Jesus found the building materials for a miracle. The way this story reads seems to indicate that if that little boy had not come that day or if he had withheld his lunch when Andrew asked for it, Jesus would not have fed the 5,000, because no one else had thought to bring lunch.
A critical truth in the Christian life, is that Jesus needs what we can bring. We may not have much to bring Him according to the world’s standards or even according to our own, but He needs what we have. It may be that the world is denied miracle after miracle because we will not bring to Christ what we have and who we are.
God does not call those who feel equipped, he equips those He calls.
God didn’t expect that boy to have enough to feed the 5,000. He only expected the boy to place it in his hands, and leave the rest up to God. It is not enough to say, "Well, I'm doing the best I can." The truth is you are not doing the best you can until you bring God in on it.
At this point, let us imagine that we are among those disciples passing the food out. We start handing it out on the front row. Just a token piece. But at the end of the first row we sort of notice that nothing in our hand has gone away. We still have a much as we started with in our hand. As a matter of fact, it seems to be even bigger. As we get to the second row we're starting to give out bigger pieces. We're getting bolder now because the food in our hand is not diminishing. By the time we get to the third row, we're doing everything we can to get rid of the food and we can't get rid or it. By the fifth row we have given away more than we could have carried, but we still have bread and fish in our hands. So we go back to the first row again and start giving everybody all they can eat. Suddenly, we realize that we hold in our hand a miracle piece of bread and fish, for we can feed as many as we want and still it won't go away. All we have to do is to get rid of it to make it stay. It multiplies in our hand as we give it away. (Bill Lobbs)
This is not really that impressive though if you think about how much food God provided for the Israelite in Exodus…
Someone in the logistics section of the army was once asked how much food it would require to feed Israel each day in their travels from Egypt to Canaan. (Logistics is the moving of something from one place to another and figuring out all that is needed to get the job done.) The answer was that it would take 12 million pounds of food daily. This was an unbelievable amount of food to come up with each day. The source of Israel's food was not themselves, but God.
As soon as the Israelites tried to hoard the manna, it rotted. You get the point I hope.
Step Three: Measure your results
John 6:12 When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” 13 So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
The disciples picked up 12 baskets full. It’s significant that Jesus wanted them to pick up the extra and it’s also significant that each of the 12 disciples had their own basket full of extra. I think God was trying to tell them something in their results.
He can do the same for us.
A speaker was addressing a large group, when he took a large piece of paper and made a black dot in the center of it with a marking pen. Then he held the paper up before the group and asked them what they saw. One person quickly replied, “I see a black mark.” “Right,” he replied. “What else do you see?” Complete silence prevailed. “Don’t you see anything else?” he asked. A chorus of no’s came from the audience. “I’m really surprised,” the speaker commented. “You have completely overlooked the most important thing of all—the sheet of paper.”
When you place your life in God’s hands, expect incredible things to happen, but don’t concentrate so narrowly on the black dot that you overlook the piece of paper. God can and will surprise you in the way he brings incredible blessings into your life.
**** I am indebted to Mr. Richard Stearns’ book “The Hole in Our Gospel” for much of the content of this sermon. The quotes and page numbers you see here are mainly from this book. It’s well worth the read.
