Striving For Excellence—The Present
Glenville 9/2/2012 Nehemiah 6:1-4 2 Corinthians 9:6-14
How many of you watched the Olympics last month? to me one of the most exciting races is the 400 meter relay in which some of the fastest people in the world run with a baton in their hands with the intent of passing that baton on to the next runner. The winner of the race is determined by two factors, the speed of the runners running, and the handing off of the Baton.
If you mess up handing off to the next runner, you may lose the race. If you hand it off outside the boundary lines, you’re disqualified even if you win the race. It is something to watch in slow motion as the runner coming from behind is striving to place that baton in the next runner’s hand.
The average age of a church before it disappears off the scene is about 40 years. At some point the baton was no longer able to be passed on to the next generation. We are celebrating 50 years of ministry for the cause of Christ. 50 years of proclaiming that Jesus is Lord. 50 years of declaring there is hope for you in Jesus Christ for a better life.
50 years of praising, of worshiping , of singing, and of dancing. 50 years of homegoing services and funerals. 50 years of fellowshipping and coffee hour. 50 years of bible study and youth ministry. 50 years of giving, of serving, of reaching out, of feeding and helping. 50 years of preaching, teaching, baptizing, and sharing in the Lord’s supper. 50 years of inviting others to church and inviting them to give their lives to Christ. 50 years of making a difference in Glenville and beyond for social righteousness.
We are where we are today in the present because of the baton that has been passed on to us from those who came before us. If the baton is passed on every 10 years, we would be coming off our 4th exchange looking for the next runner to pass it on to. Are we running at top speed giving it all we have, striving to get it to the next runner, or are we starting to coast in this race we have been called to run? Even more dangerously, have we picked up some unnecessary weights as we run our race.
When we look at where we are today, in some ways we have some very impressive numbers. We have people here today that have been with us since the very beginning. Others have come along and have been a part of the team for years. We have been blessed with your talents and gifts in so many remarkable ways. We have great voices, great musicians, great givers, and many hard workers for the Lord. We have people who genuinely love Jesus Christ, and are eager to help bring others to a knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We have people whose hearts are full of compassion and will not hesitate to help someone who has a need. We have a pastoral staff which is ready to serve the Lord and to serve you. We have a history of people who were once a part of us, but have taken what they learned here to grow ministries in other churches. We have testimonies of people who proclaim how we as a church have been there for them in their hour of need.
As a church, we present you with opportunities to make a difference in people’s lives here and abroad. Our 50 year journey has launched us to touch people around the globe in a matter of seconds with our worship. You can be in India and watch our broadcasts just as clearly as your were on Ingomar down the street from the church. I was blessed to be in Ga on my mother’s exercise machine, and with her Roku box, her bedroom was turned into Glenville’s worship space as I pulled up the praise team and the choirs and had my own service.
We care about people whether they join our church or not. Together with Calvary we feed almost a 100 people each month. Five of the hundred have made their way to church a couple of times, but we are grateful for the 95, because they provide us with the opportunity to be servants in Christ’s name. Because of your generosity, we make our sermons, our broadcasts, and our materials free to those on the internet.
If you have a smart phone, there is no reason for you to miss the sermon, when you miss church. The sermon is available to anyone ready to download on your smart phone or computer with three simple clicks. The same is true for the praise and worship songs. College students you have the word at your fingertips.
If we gave in to the temptation to compare ourselves to others, we could look real good and be ready to give ourselves a lot of high fives. No church in our presbytery uses the internet and technology like Glenville does to get out the message. There are other churches who would love to be in the place where we are and are even envious of us. Our building is definitely one of comfort and beauty, and we worked hard to make it that way. We do have something to show for 50 years in terms of brick and mortar but even more importantly in terms of lives touched and changed by the power of Jesus Christ.
But God does not call us to compare ourselves to others, but rather to compare ourselves to what we can be today in Christ if we were truly striving for excellence. When we are looking at the baton to pass it on, what are we really passing on to those who are yet to come?
One of the greatest challenges for a church is to pass on the faith to the next generation. We can have our kids in great choirs, in liturgical dance groups, in praise groups, in teaching programs, in drama and think we have passed on the faith, when we may have only passed on the church culture.
If they do not give their lives to Jesus Christ, in the midst of all we are providing, then they do not claim the faith in their hearts. When they leave us, they do not take Jesus with them, and they falter outside the culture. They are tempted to think, there is this great life of fun out there with no consequences and little need for Jesus except in emergencies. They are reluctant to return to the life of the church as young adults.
As we come closer to the Lord, God often blesses us spiritually and materially. The challenge for us is to how to keep God first in our lives without letting materialism and the call of this world slow us down in the race. I preached a message in July on “What’s caught my eye.” Do you remember Achan, and how the spirit of materialism caught his attention? It put a drag on the whole group of God’s people’s ability to move into excellence.
Nehemiah had a vision to go and rebuild the walls of the city of Jerusalem. The city had been destroyed at least 70 plus years earlier and the walls were broken down. Nehemiah just had a burden on his heart, because he connected the rebuilding of the walls with giving glory to the name of His God.
But there were those who cared nothing about God, and they did not want to see the walls of the city rebuilt. They were Sanballat, Tobiah and Geshem. They sent a message to Nehemiah one day, saying take a break and come and meet with us on the plains of Ono. They were secretly planning on killing him. But Nehemiah replied to them, “I am carrying on a great project, and I cannot come down.”
When Jesus Christ issued the invitation to us to come and follow Him, it was the same as an invitation to come be a part of the greatest work in history which is the building of the kingdom of God. That project restores broken relationships between people and between God and people. It keeps people out of hell on earth and out of hell itself in the afterlife. It is a work that lasts for all eternity.
It is a work with an eternal reward. It is a great project from which the devil wants us all to stop doing and get involved in things that ultimately are not going to matter and are going to pass away. The only thing in this world that will last forever are people. If your life is going to count, its got to involve investing in people for the cause of Christ.
Jesus Christ died and gave his life because he loved people. God raise him from the dead and gave him power over death because God loves people. Each of us have been allotted a certain amount of time. We convert our time into producing things for ourselves or producing things for the kingdom. I was looking at the chairs in our family room, and it dawned upon me that those chairs represented a certain amount of hours of my life that I had given in order for those chairs to be there.
Then I recognized that everything in the house represented an investment of my life into accumulating them. I then thought, should I die today, would I consider those purchases of my life as a wise investment of the time God gave to me to make a difference for him.
We as a church have been given a certain amount of time from God. As we run the race, there are voices clamoring for our attention, insisting that we either get off the track or don’t run as fast so that we can be blessed. Our race is being hindered by the call of materialism as we are coming to a halt in our ministry because of our finances. It is not that God is being unfaithful to us, as much as it is we have chosen to be less faithful to God. We cannot be generous in ministering to others, if serving our own needs first have become to high of a priority in our lives.
Our New Testament reading told us that if sows only a little bit, should only expect a little bit in return, but whoever sows generously should expect to receive a lot back. We are today a generously sowing church. We are not like the insurance company in which if you need help, it does not matter how long you have been a customer, the first thing they check is to see if your policy is paid. No, we are going to try to help you whether your last offering was last week or five months ago. We will help you whether you carried your share of the load or you’re just freeloading or are giving at a huge discount, whereas others give 10% you give 2%, 1% or nothing.
We have really poor people outside this country depending on our generosity in Christ to make their lives easier. Right now in the present we are that part of the body that God is using to meet their needs.
We are often tempted to hold back on what belongs to God, because we are afraid we may not have enough for our desired lifestyle. We think we need more money. No what we really need is more grace.
2 Corinthians 9:8 says, “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need will abound in every good work. 9) As it written, “He has scattered abroad his gifts to the poor; his righteousness endures forever. “ Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion and through us you generosity will result in thanksgiving to God. This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people, but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanksgiving to God.
If you truly want to grow in God, then God says to give, for in giving we receive grace and grace produces in us righteousness. During the 80’s our church was looking at closing as a church. The future did not look that great. Few thought we would be where we are today. Our fortune as a congregation began to turn in the early 90’s when we became a giving church and people started to tithe. For the past 5 years we have been stuck where we are. As more of our tithers have died off, and those coming up the ranks have been satisfied with giving a lot less our progress on the track has slowed down.
The baton we are passing off is not as full of the grace and the mercy of God that it once contained. Although we may look impressive if we compare ourselves to others, when we compare ourselves to what we could be in Christ, we are not striving as we once were in our giving and in our service. Too much of just doing something to get by is in our midst.
There are individuals who are excelling at their tasks and doing it well, and I want to acknowledge that, but there are too many who have no ministry, too many who do not show up when they are called to minister, and too many who serve with a lazy spirit. Too many of us have been willing to come down from the great work, and give ourselves to lesser things.
It’s been kind of hard identifying us at the end of 50 years in looking at the churches in Revelation. We seem to be a cross between the church at Laodicea and the church at Ephesus. The church at Laodicea was identified as the lukewarm church that was neither hot nor cold. Although it boasted of having acquired wealth and did not need anything, Jesus told them they were wretched, poor, pitiful, blind and naked. But he was eager to heal them if they would open the door and let him back in.
The church at Ephesus was strong and true in upholding the truth of the Scriptures and being willing to make sacrifices for Jesus, but they had left truly loving Jesus above all else. They went through the motions, but their hearts were not fully in it. Jesus invited them to remember what they use to do when they first loved him that he might allow them to eat from the tree of life.
Nothing robs us of our love for Jesus quicker than the spirit of materialism. Jesus told us that we cannot serve God and money. Remember when we say I can’t afford to tithe, what we mean is that I can’t afford to tithe and have all that I want to have right now. The decision to tithe doesn’t start in the church.
It starts with where we choose to live, what car we choose to drive, what clothes we choose to wear, what entertainment we decide to have, what phone plan we want to have, and what food we choose to eat. If we make those decisions before we tithe, there will never be enough left to tithe. If make the decision to tithe before we make the other choices, there will be more than enough to tithe.
It pains me that we’ve been running for 50 years as a church and still are afraid to trust God. Pastor Toby and I have been generous in our giving, because we know a generous church is a church that is filled with love and filled with God doing the unexpected. How can you look at Jesus and not know that God wants even a 50 year old church to be generous?
We love being the hands of God in ministering to those who have so little. There’s nothing wrong with you enjoying things and getting, but why not let God give them to you instead of robbing the church to get them yourself. The world is always going to ask us to slow down and strive for excellence later, because right now it has this new item, this latest gadget, this incredible fashion, this guy or this girl for us to consider.
The reality is, the more we strive for excellence in the present, the brighter our future is going to be, because the gracious hand of our God is going to delight in the outpouring of his favor. I just believe that God really does love us. God really does delight in doing good on our behalf. How thankful are you to God for what the Lord has done for you in the present? What have you been blessed with already this day? The thing is we do not even know how much God’s grace has played a role in us arriving safely at church today.
Have you ever not been paying attention while driving, and at the nick of time, you avoided an accident. You know what almost happened, but the other person you almost hit had no idea of just how close their lives came to being changed at that moment. Was it because God loved you or the other person or both of you that the accident did not take place.?This is why 50 years should teach us to be thankful everyday, because we don’t know, just how good God has truly been.
Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins. God raise him up from the dead by giving him life and as proof that God accepted Jesus’s death as payment for your sins. God has kept this church around for 50 years to give you that news. Why not let God give you life that is truly life today. You are investing your life into something. You may as well make it count for all eternity. There is no better time to serve the Lord than the present.
