Sermon Date 02-24-2013 Becoming An Authentic Christian (Chuck Gohn)
Well, good morning. I don’t know what to do without technology. This is making me nervous. I really don’t. You guys are going actually open your bibles today. Amen. I got a quick question, though. How many of you attended private school as a child, like a Catholic school, parochial school. Anybody? Quite a number of you. And the rest, I assume, attended some sort of a public school, correct? And I actually attended both. I attended a public school, I think, kindergarten and first grade, and then second, third, and fourth I went to Catholic school at St. Ann’s and then I went back, so I was really kind of a mixed-up kid. Consequently, I had kind of a limited view of school. In my mind, there was basically Catholic school or public school. And that limited view of school carried out into kind of a limited view of religion, at least until somebody corrected me. I remember one day I was at a store, and I think I was about 10 years old, and somebody was talking about religion or something like that, and I, seeking to expound on my knowledge, I basically asked somebody, “So what are you, are you Catholic or are you public?” At that point, the person proceeded to tell me there is more than Catholic and public out there. She wasn’t public, she was Protestant.
Anyways, as we know, there are a lot of different denominations. Many, many denominations. In fact, we just look around this community, we see quite a bit. We can see the Presbyterians obviously, the Methodists, the Catholics, and the Baptists, and once in a while you will see a group of Lutherans walking by or something like that. So they are all over the place here, many different denominations. The problem with denominations, as some of you know, is that it tends to put up walls between us. The walls between Christians. As we think about what God wanted, I think he is in the process of beginning to come up with a new type of church, a church that is not bounded by walls. In many ways, a church that reflects the desire of Jesus as expressed in what is referred to as Jesus’ high priestly prayer that is found in the Book of John Chapter 17, Verse 20. So if you want to open your bibles to John 17:20. As many of you know, if you have been here for a while, we are going through the core values of worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. Today, we are swinging back around and talking about community. Again, when I refer to community, I am not talking about the larger community outside, I am talking about the community that we call the church. A community that is made up of what we call the Global Church, the Big Church, the Church made up of all Christians everywhere, as well as the many, many, many local manifestations of the Church. There are many, many denominations. I recently read there was like 41,000 denominations. I couldn’t believe 41,000. I mean takes in a count of a lot of different smaller denominations. But anyway, I suspect that that is not what Jesus had in mind when he began to think about the church starting following his resurrection. The church that Christ had in mind was one church, a unity of church, one church fully submitted to the Triune in God in worship. A church that may be diverse but also a church that is united in submission and worship to the one God. That is what we are going to look at today.
Looking at this particular passage, starting in John 17:20. A little bit of background. Now this is referred to as Jesus’ high priestly prayer, and it really starts at the beginning of Chapter 17, Chapter 1. It is a very long prayer of Jesus that he gave on the night before his crucifixion. It is really broken down into three parts. The first part is often referred to as Jesus’ prayer for himself. So the first five verses, Jesus is actually making a prayer to the Father for himself. And that prayer is really quite simple. It is just that he would be glorified just like he was glorified before the world began. In other words, as we know, if we look at the Book of Philippians, it speaks to the idea of how Jesus through the incarnation, through taking on flesh, set aside his heavenly glory and took on human flesh. He became a man. While he was down here, he did work for the Father. His work was that he would begin to let people know about the Father and specifically that there is no way through the Father but through Him, and it talks about that in John 14:6, I believe, that “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” and no one goes to the Father except through him. And so his work was being completed, and so basically what he was saying, let me have the glory back that I had before the world even began. So that is Jesus’ first request.
His second prayer request that he had was a prayer for his disciples. You know, he had been devoting like three years to the lives of these disciples, spending a lot of time with them, training them. They were ready but probably not quite ready enough to know what to expect in the coming weeks and months and even years. So what he prayed for in this second prayer was he prayed for the protection of the disciples that they would be protected from the Evil One.
The third prayer, the prayer that we want to look at today, is the prayer that he had for all believers or people that would believe based on the message of the disciples, which includes really everyone in this room today. And so that is what we are going to do. I am going to read through the third part of the prayer, which again is John 17:20 and then read on down through that section at the end of the chapter. Once again, John 17:20. “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the Glory that you have gave me that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” That is a lot of deep theology in there, but hopefully, you pick up on the central theme of that last prayer. It is a theme of oneness. It is a theme of unity. Of unity between the Father and the Son and the Son and the Father and all believers with them. That is really what Jesus’ last prayer request is. It is that we would be one. That we would be a unified church, a unified body. But as we know, really Jesus’ prayer request didn’t get answered in many ways because we know that the church, as I already mentioned, is pretty much a church divided. It is a church that has been split pretty much ever since the dawn of Christianity. We know, if we had time to look at the Book of Acts, we would see the church kickoff on the day of Pentecost. We see the Holy Spirit came and 3,000 people were converted on that day and that it kick started the church. Then we would see, in fact what I wanted to do was have a timeline up here of church history that would show the various splits in the church. It would show the church coming together first as what we would refer to nowadays as the Roman Catholic Church and then we would see about the year 1000 or so, we would see a split between the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church. Then if we look farther down the line about another 500 years, we would see what is called the Protestant Reformation where Martin Luther but the 95 theses on the wall or whatever and split the church and started what we know as the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant Church. If we look a little farther, we would also see the Episcopalians, or the Church of England, splitting off from the Catholic church. I could go through the church history and some of you might find that interesting, some of you or most of you would probably be bored to tears, but you would see that there have been a lot of splits. Down the road, that since the dawn of Christianity, it started off with such a noble ambition, with 120 people gathered up in the room as one and over 2,000 years splits actually into 7 billion today Christians with over 41,000 different denominations.
What I wanted to do, again, if we had the technology, I made this nice little square with four quadrants in it just so you can see how the churches are generally classified within Christianity. On the upper left hand part of the grid you would see what I would call the formal churches or the liturgical churches. Probably where you would put the Catholic church or the Episcopalian churches, the high churches. On the upper right would have been a grid that contained what I would call the mainline churches, which would be like the Protestants, and the Methodists, and maybe the Lutherans. The lower left you would have what I would call the Pentecostal or the charismatic churches or what some call the renewal churches. In there, you would have the Assemblies of God, Christian Assemblies, you would have the Vineyard Churches, and maybe Church of God, and also Four Square Church. On the lower right, you would have what they call the conservative churches, the Evangelical churches, the Baptist churches, and maybe the Brethren churches and that sort of stuff. So that is what the grid would look like. Although the individual churches would occasionally break outside of their individual boxes and do something together maybe once a year like a community service centered on a holiday, generally speaking, they would stay all in their respective boxes. That is just the way it was.
That is up until the last 20 or maybe actually 30-50 years because what happened was things started shaking up a bit. People began to leave the denominational boxes of their youth and began to go to other churches and try out other different forms of worship. That was quite an upset because people didn’t know how to deal with it. There were kids that were raised in a particular denomination as Catholic or Lutheran or whatever and now they are getting up and they are actually going to a different church even though their family had been there for possibly 100 years or so. So that was going on and there are a lot of questions or speculation as far as what caused this sudden movement about 50 years ago. Some would say that it had to do with the increased availability of transportation. That following World War II, all of a sudden they had everybody spending money and enjoying life and purchasing automobiles. So if somebody grew up in a rural community and went to a rural church, now suddenly they could get in a car and go someplace else. You had this transportation available. Not only could they go to another church, they could not go to church at all because they might want to take a ride out to the country or something like that. Some speculate maybe it had to do with the rise of the Baby Boomers. Because the Baby Boomers, which many of us, including myself, are part of that generation, we were the generation that kind of rebelled against our parents. You went to this church, so we are going to go to this church or we’re not going to go to church at all. And so some would speculate that is what caused, all of a sudden, this shake up in churches. Some would even suggest, well it really has to do most recently to the rise of the internet, the awful thing called the internet. Because we know, for all the things the internet is, basically it facilitates the free flow of information about anything, including religion. So you may have had these certain ideas in your head about religion and all of a sudden you’re online and you’re talking about all sorts of different religions and you’re meeting people from different religious backgrounds. All these things contribute to all of a sudden the more recent shake up of the Christian church. In the middle of this, you have a lot of people that are responding to this, especially church leaders from some of the more traditional churches. You see, they are getting a little nervous because what is happening, they are losing some of the congregates and so they are sitting there thinking, they are evaluating what is going on here. What do we need to do? Do we need to dig out heels in deeper and say this is just the way it is going to be? Or possibly change our practices or even some of their beliefs and possibly even toss out some of the excess baggage that they have been carrying for years because that could be some of the reason why they are losing some congregates. So you’ve got this shake up going on, you’ve got the church leaders beginning to evaluate, and in the midst of all this, you got this new church that is rising up. A new church that is not defined by denominations. It is not defined by walls. In fact, if anything is clear, anything you can say about it, is it is not definitive. There is no definition to it. So when you see one of these new churches pop up, you may go to a church that would be in this area of new church, and you would see, depending on where you go, they could morph into a variety of different worship experiences. You could go to one of these new churches and it could be kind of more of a high church feel with a focus on maybe some of the spiritual disciplines and sacraments, candles, possibly even icons. On the other extreme, you can go to a church that is a contemporary loud band worship and instead of communion, they serve pizza or something like that. It doesn’t define anything other than it looks like a rock concert or something. So you have the other extreme there. And then you have these churches that are not defined by where their focus is. Some of these new churches are actually focused on community. Their core church community. It is all about coming together. Getting a small group of people doing life together, living together, living out life together. But then you have other emerging churches that would come and begin to focus on social justice and all sorts of causes out there, be really outward focused. This new church is rising that lacks definition. It can’t even be defined by the structure that it meets in. Some would meet in a traditional church, a building. Some meet in coffee houses. Some meet in schools now. Some meet in restaurants. Some meet in theaters. Some even meet in bars. They meet in a backroom of a bar. That becomes a church. Some meet down at a park. So you’ve got this thing happening that lacks definition and it doesn’t even have a clear name to it. You know, some people like trendy names, so they talk about, well this is a missional church, this is a gospel community, or this is an emergent church. They try to attach names to it, but it kinds of refuses to give itself a definite name because it doesn’t have a denomination attached to it. This is really not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing because it creates all these new avenues for getting the gospel of Jesus Christ out into the world in places that it couldn’t go before. And so it’s not a bad thing. Except for some people, they kind of react to it and especially the people that don’t like change. The people that are used to maybe keeping churches in these boxes that are clearly defined by high church, charismatic church, mainline church, or evangelical church because when you keep them in a box that means it is easier to shoot at them. It is easier to find out their faults, their strengths and their weaknesses. But this new church that doesn’t have any definition, you can’t take pot shots at it, because again, it is not defined by anything. It is like a moving target. It kind of reminds me of remember the game at the carnival, the whack-a-mole or whatever. You’ve got this rubber mallet and this mole is coming up and you try to whack and he comes down there and he comes up over here. It’s like that is what is happening with the church. Just when you try to point your finger and say I don’t like you because of this, well the church is changing. It is over here and it’s sprouting up in a new way.
And so I say all this stuff to kind of give you a history of what is happening on the global scale of the church. And you say, well, okay Chuck, what has that got to do with today? What has that got to do with Bellevue Christian Church? What does it have to do with each one of you in the pew? And I say, well you know, maybe nothing. Maybe very little unless you are someone who really maybe has an interest in what is going on in the global church especially if God is in it. If God is doing a great thing, if God is doing a new thing in the church, I think it is to our benefit to be aware of what is going on, what God is doing, what is going on in the larger church world. And really it explains a lot of things. I think it explains why we at Bellevue Christian Church, seem to be in a pretty rapid growth mode. In the last eight years or so, we have been growing about 15-20% a year. And I don’t say that to brag, I just say that is a reality. And that we can’t pinpoint exactly why we are growing, but I think a lot has to do with this larger movement that is happening in the church. As many of you know, we don’t call ourselves a denomination and that drives some people crazy. We just choose to be like the first century Church of Antioch, they were called Christians. And people say, well you can’t be called Christians, you got to be called Presbyterians or you got to be Lutherans or you got to be Baptists or you got to be Pentecostals. No, we just want to be called Christians and that drives some people crazy. But other people love it because really they get it. They get it because the minute you put a denomination, a label, on a church, you are creating division. You really are. You are creating a separation. Even though we don’t find ourselves tied to a particular denomination, we have people from all denominations represented here. If I would have had time, we would have done a survey to find out how many different denominations are represented. But I really don’t have to. All I have to do is point to our own staff. Ramsey, our youth minister, he’s an Episcopalian. Sandy, our children’s director, she’s a Methodist. Debbie is one of those crazy Pentecostals and I come from a Catholic background. That is kind of an interesting thing. Again, if I took a survey, I would find all sorts of other background here. So I think it is a good thing with a lot of benefits, and it shows why we are growing, but it also shows why sometimes we have some friction in the church. Why people sometimes kind of rub against each other because they don’t always agree on anything. Take, for instance, worship. It gives us reason why you have some people from the mainline churches, you know Methodists or Lutherans or Presbyterians, had a hard time in worship doing anything besides standing up. I mean they don’t want to shake their booty, they don’t want to do anything, they don’t want to raise their hand, but you get the Pentecostals, and they would run up and down the aisles, if the ushers would let them, waving flags. That is why we are different in that area and that is why you have people that come from a Catholic background that enjoy the fact that we have weekly communion because they had weekly communion. But the other ones say, no you can’t have weekly communion because that just dilutes the value of communion. We should do it monthly or quarterly or maybe once a year. Or you have people that say we have to have certain prayers done every week because that is what I grew up with. I grew up with saying The Lord’s Prayer every week and you need to say it every week. Other people say, no, just wing it. Just pray. You don’t need structured prayer because if you do structured prayer, what happens, those prayers become very rote. It is even a reason why people refer to me by different titles and different names. Why some people refer to me as Father Chuck and some people refer to me as Reverend Chuck Gohn. Those are the high church people. And then you got kind of the lower church people, you know, that refer to me as Pastor Chuck or somebody would refer to me as The Chuckster or something like that, you know. You get that. I get that on a Sunday that whole thing there. I say all that and I think about it. I think, gosh I envy to a certain degree the churches out there that fit within those boxes because they have everything down. I know you guys think I’m wild and crazy by the way I dress, but I like structure. I like to know things. I like to have things kind of wired down and some of the other churches out there, the mainline churches, the Catholics especially, you know Father Dennis, he knows every week what he is going to do. He knows exactly the order, the prayer he is going to say, when he is going to say it, he probably even knows the homily he is supposed to say. The same with Cathy down at the Bellevue United Presbyterian. They have it all wired in. They pull the manual out that says do this, this, this. They do it, what prayer to say, when to say it, what season, what they should be preaching on each Sunday. What passage in the bible. I am a little bit jealous of that because after 117 years of being here as the same church, we wing it every week. We do to a certain degree, don’t we wing it. I winged it this morning. Poor Debbie. I come up on Sunday morning and said oh I think you need to sing this song and everybody has to change. Now I couldn’t get away with that over at Assumption, I don’t think. Could I? I don’t know, but I’m married to the music minister, so I can. Anyway, as much as I say there are benefits of being part of that structure, I really like what we have going here. I really like it because what we have the ability to do here is to adapt to the cultural without compromising the gospel. You get that? We can adapt and that is what this church has been doing for 117 years. It adapts to the culture without changing the core truths of the gospel. And not only that, what it does, I really believe that we are on track for becoming the kind of church that Jesus prayed about in that high priestly prayer. That we would be one. That we, in some way, we reflect the kind of church that Jesus was thinking about when he prayed that prayer the night before his crucifixion. But again, as we think about the history, the history of the church has been filled with nothing but division. Christ, through the cross, brought the Jews and the Gentiles together, created one church and what happened, the church began to split it and created all these new branches. But I believe that something that is happening right now is that because of all the stuff we are seeing in a larger church that God is moving to bring the church back to one. And He has to bring the church back to one because of what we are facing in the world. You know, I said this a few weeks ago, I said I am not an end times type of guy, but you look around you and you say, man, this world is getting a little crazy. Not just violence but the weather and the economy and everything. You know, I would like to be an optimistic person and say, you know, everything is going to work out fine, everything is going to get better. You know, the 16 trillion dollar debt that we have is suddenly just going to go away. I was looking on line and figuring out how much debt the economy has. America 16 trillion. It is adding like 3 billion a day. If we were to split it amongst every citizen in the United States our share would each be $52,000. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have an extra $52,000 laying around to pay off the national debt.
You know, think about this gun control issue. We’d like to think that the people who like guns and the people who don’t like guns would get together and the criminals too, they’d all kind of get together and say, we’re just going to put down our guns. Just sell them and get rid of them and live like we are living in Mayberry where the sheriff doesn’t have a gun and the worst thing you have to deal with is the town drunk, like Otis. It’s not going happen. It’s not going to happen whatsoever. That’s not going to happen. We think about healthcare. We think about, okay someday maybe there will be universal healthcare. What is that going to look like. Are we all going to get as much free healthcare as we want. Are we all going to get paid prescriptions. Are we going to get the best doctors in the world, everybody. I don’t think so. I’d like to think so, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. What about schools. You think schools are suddenly going to become drug free and the kids are going to be well behaved and the worst thing you have to worry about is a kid who gets caught smoking in a boys room or something like that or chewing gum. You know, that there is going to be suddenly a very nice teacher-to-student ratio going on. It’s just not going to happen. Even when you think about the weather and how crazy it’s been. With the storms, the hurricanes, the tsunamis, and even most recently the meteor that almost hit Russia. You know, you like to think that someday the weatherman is going to be right. For the rest of eternity, it is going to be partly sunny and 75 degrees for the rest of life here. I don’t think it’s going happen.
In conclusion, what I believe God is doing, he is calling the church back to one in order that we can be united as we face the trials and the tribulation that is coming down the road. Because people eventually are going to be turning back to the church. They are going to be looking for help. They are going to be looking for physical help. They are going to be looking for emotional help. Most importantly, they are going to be looking for spiritual help. We have to be at a place where we are ready to give them that. That they might be able to truly, and most importantly, get a picture of what we were designed to be. That we were designed to be a people in submission to God while worshipping God. I was trying to think of a closing illustration, and I was a little frustrated. I got to Saturday afternoon, and as usual, I didn’t have my sermon done, and I was really stuck because this was such a heavy passage. I’m thinking, okay, somehow I’ve got to give some really theological deep meaning and draw back to this and everything else and really had nothing. I was getting frustrated. We had tickets last night to the Chris Tomlin concert, which is a Christian Musician, a very popular one. Some of you were at that concert, and I really didn’t want to go, but Debbie suggested I go. It started at 7 and I knew it wouldn’t get done until 10 o’clock and I don’t even have my sermon done, but I decided to go. And sure enough, I was really uplifted by it. It was more like a church service than a concert. It was phenomenal. As I thought about that, as I reflected on that, I thought about the song that we did, one of the last songs they did last night, it’s called Revelation Song. If you’ve heard that song, actually we are going to play it here in a few minutes, it is just a phenomenal song about what worship is going to be like not today, not tomorrow, but for all eternity. That it is going to be a place where everybody is united. As we were singing that song, and I was looking around Consol Energy Center, I was blown away. I think it was almost full. There were probably between 10 and 15,000 people there. I looked around and I purposely just looked around and I saw so many people. All the people there. Some people were raising their hands. Some people were just standing. Some people were sitting. Some people were crying. Some people were laughing. Some people were shouting. It was just an awesome experience. But you know what, not one of them really gave a hoot who they were standing next to. They didn’t know who they were standing next to. They could have been standing next to a Catholic, God forbid. They could have been standing next to a Pentecostal, a Methodist, or a Presbyterian. They could have been standing next to anybody, and they didn’t know it. They didn’t care what church they went to. They didn’t care what type of communion they did, whether they did it weekly, monthly, yearly, or never. They didn’t care what kind of baptism they did, whether they did infant baptism, baptized emersion, baptism by sprinkling it. They didn’t care. They didn’t care because all they cared about was worship. All they cared about was worship. Now hear me out, I am not saying that when I talk about unity that we are talking about uniformity. That everybody does everything exactly the same. No, God honors the distinctives. But there is something about it when you are standing in the worship of just 10,000 people, imagine when there are about 10 billion people standing in worship. At that point, all those things that you worried about, all those things we fought about in church, just kind of melt away, and they’re gone. They are lost in the worship of the Triune God. The Father who created us, the Son who redeemed us, and the Spirit who sustains our life. As we close here, as we go into our time of prayer, I asked Debbie to do the song ‘Revelation Song’. I would say that, today, no matter what your religious background, your flavor, whatever your likes or dislikes, just worship in whatever way that you’re accustomed to. Not be worried about what the person next to you is doing or not doing, what you should be doing. You know, if you feel like sitting, sit. If you feel like standing, stand. If you feel like raising your hands, raise your hands. But just worship because that is what you are going to be doing for all eternity. Revelations 17, it says, “Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels numbering thousands upon thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne of the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise. Then I heard every creature in heaven and earth and under the earth and on the sea and all that is in them singing to Him who sits on the throne and to the lamb be praise and honor and glory and power forever and ever.”
