In 1725 a young man named John reached a turning point in his career. Recently graduated from college, John was entering the ministry as a preacher in the Church of England, but John was ironically at one of the low points in his life.
He has participated in the fun-loving college life as a student and so it was he found himself at one such gathering one evening. That fateful night, John struck up a conversation with the doorman. It was cold that night and the doorman wasn’t dressed for the weather. He was urged to go home and get his coat, which the doorman proceeded to do. His coat wasn’t much of a coat - the doorman was poor, but he thanked God for the one poor coat he had, such as it was, and while he was at it, he thanked God that he had good, clear, water to drink that day. Apparently, daily clean water to drink was a luxury for this man.
John wanted to know what else he thanked God for.
“I thank Him that I have the dry stones to lie upon,” he said.
Yes, yes, and what else, John wanted to know. John wanted to know what other basic necessities of life this poor, poor fellow was so thankful for and how there could be such depth to his relationship with God, given his condition.
“I thank Him that He has given me my life and being,” the doorman continued, “I thank him for a heart to love Him, and desire to serve Him.”
John went home that evening sure of what he suspected. There was something missing from his faith. He didn’t possess what the doorman had and he desperately wanted it.
John’s life began to change. In many ways, John began to cultivate in his life the holy habits we have been exploring here at Grace church.
As John continued his search, this is what he found:
“I began to see that true religion was seated in the heart, and that God’s law extended to all our thoughts as well as words and actions...I set apart two hours a day for Bible study. I prayed. I watched against all sin, whether in word or deed. I began to aim at pray for inward holiness...”
John began attending worship weekly - something he hadn’t done in college - and began to ask his friends to join him, to cultivate holy habits in their lives, as well. And so it was the group came together with a regimen of weekly Bible study, prayer, service and worship attendance came to be known as the Holy Club. Later, this group, on their way to church, would earn the nickname Methodists.
So methodical were they in their habits, so devoted to cultivating holy lives, they earned the name Methodists. It wasn’t meant to be a compliment. Most people John associated with were not “religious” people.
John began living a very different life than most of those in his community.
His devotion and constant search for what was missing in his relationship with God showed in the great man he became, though I dare say he would never consider himself great. Great people often don’t. John became the leader of this group and later, John Wesley would become the founder of the Methodist Church in the new United States of America.
In our Bible lesson, we have before us a sermon written and shared with Hebrew Christians to encourage them. The Hebrew Christians were people in a crisis. Much like John Wesley, much like ourselves, they needed holy habits cultivated in their own lives.
Because of the work and life of Jesus Christ, those early Christians are encouraged to embrace a life of faith - to accept Christ and their Savior, to believe it with all of their heart.
They are encouraged to hold fast to the hope of our promise in Christ for our salvation, and to do so by encouraging one another in ministry to one another and to the world by continuing to gather together.
Don’t we need to hear that too? Don’t we need to be encouraged to believe in Christ, to hang on to hope when difficult days come, and to remember to gather together to encourage one another?
These Hebrew Christians were becoming discouraged and complacent.
Some of them who had been faithful in their attendance at first had stopped gathering together. Why did they do that?
Well, some were fearful of being persecuted for their faith. We don’t really face that today in our country. The closest we come is that its not cool to take our faith too seriously. I actually heard someone refer to himself as a Jesus Freak the other day with a smile on his face.
We don’t like that.
When anything else in our society has a pull on our time and attention away from worship, whatever it is often get first priority and our attendance at church goes by the wayside.
Some had some real interesting ideas about what it meant to be a Christian. Most of what we have as the second half of the Bible - what we call the New Testament - is writings of first centuries Christians trying to work out all the really interesting ideas about being Christians.
I bet they had some who said they didn’t have to go to church to be a Christian, suggesting, perhaps, that God could be found on a mountain top type of thing. What do you think? I bet they did. And of course they would be right.
It is not a requirement to go to church to believe. Some people believe who can’t physically come to church.
It is written in the letter of James that even demons and evil spirits believe and I assure you they don’t come to church.
You can be a believer in Christ and not go to church just as assuredly as you can be married and never go home.
But that would make for a very strained and strange relationship.
Yes there were some Hebrew Christians who weren’t gathering together to worship together, but is it any wonder that they were struggling and in crisis with their faith?
There were other reasons they Hebrew Christians weren’t gathering together. Some of them had leadership issues in the church. Maybe some of them were discouraged because they wanted to have leadership positions and didn’t receive one, but it is more likely they were afraid if they showed up they would be given positions of leadership in the church.
When you said you were a Christian back then, you meant it, because when you did it could mean your very life for what you believe in. And it was the leadership that were in gravest danger - to remove the leadership was to remove the power of the group.
Still others quit gathering together because they had expected Christ’s eminent return, and for life to get better, and it didn’t immediately happen.
“Don’t give up,” the writer of Hebrews tells us.
Don’t neglect to gather together and encourage one another all the more, as the Day of our Lord approaches.”
Why? Why did they call themselves Christians? Why did they claim the Christian faith? Why does our writer insist on gathering together? Why should we faithfully come to worship? Why should we go to church? Why?
On December 11, 1934, a man by the name of Bill Wilson found himself on the steps of Charles B. Townes Hospital in New York City. He went there to dry out - he was drunk.
And he’d been there before. He met there his old friend, Dr. Silkworth. Dr. Silkworth had an interesting idea. He believed that Alcoholics had an obsession to drink and an allergy to it at the same time. The inevitable result of continual exposure to the allergen is death. That’s where he saw Bill Wilson going. He was killing himself by his drinking.
It just so happened that at this same point in his life, Bill came in contact with a school friend of his who was also an alcoholic named Ebby who had become active in a Christian spiritual group called Oxford Groups.
These Oxford Groups believed in absolute honesty, absolute purity, and absolute love. In other words, they cultivated holy habits in their lives.
Both Ebby and Bill saw the attractiveness of these groups. They wanted to have different lives. They wanted to be different people. With the principals of the Oxford Groups they brought together one more element both of these men shared that eventually empowered these men to turn their lives around.
Two individuals with the same disease were able to come together and receive from one another the inoculation they needed to combat their allergen through spiritual time together. The principals from the Oxford Groups they incorporated and expounded on became the 12 step program and the new group that would eventually form would come to be known as Alcoholics Anonymous.
It was two sick people coming together regularly to hold one another up and to hold one another accountable. It is the injection they needed to combat the allergy they live with. AA has changed the lives of millions of people all over the world.
Now let me ask you something. Don’t we all suffer from the communal disease of sin? Isn’t it an allergen that’s killing us? Isn’t the result of sin death? Don’t we, who all share commonly in the same disease, need regular injections against this allergen in the form of communal worship and prayer, in encouragement and exhortation of one another, in song and in Scripture?
Just like the individual who marries but never goes home, can we have a true relationship with God without frequently and regularly visiting God’s house?
Can we be a family without gathering together with our brothers and sisters?
In a few days we will all be celebrating Thanksgiving. There’s a song we sing that talks about traveling over the river and through the woods where families gather together at grandma’s house.
Here at Grace Church we are traveling on a spiritual journey. We are focusing on five different aspects of what it means to call ourselves Christians, to be faithful followers of Christ.
As we turn to the stair steps for this holy habit, we are shaping our attendance, making commitments to be faithful attenders,
gradually growing to where we want to be,
growing to what we are created to be, growing to be the healthy and whole family of God.
I can’t tell you what your faithful attendance should look like. I can’t tell you what your commitment should be.
I can only share with you MY story and what faithful attendance has meant to me.
Growing up, my family was not a family that was in church every week. We would go for two or three months and then we wouldn’t go for two or three months. Growing up, attending church was just something some people did, some of the time. The only ones I knew going all the time were old people or stick-in-the-muds who I thought didn’t have anything better to do. If they did, they wouldn’t be in church, because that’s what I perceived my family as doing.
Now don’t get me wrong... it wasn’t that I was clambering to go every week and my parents weren’t. In fact is was probably an uphill battle to get us all to go to church for my mother and so she gave in rather than deal with the hassle and that’s why we didn’t go so often.
I was uncomfortable going to church, because through my sporadic attendance I always felt like the new kid on the block, always awkward, like the first day of school, always like I was starting over.
It wasn’t until I was grown up and had a family of my own that I discovered what I was missing.
At church I found a family. I found friends and warm and loving people who cared about me. I found a place where I was welcome as I was. I found a place I felt secure to grow as Christian, and thereby to grow as a person.
I found a place where I felt loved and supported. I had found a family, and the reason and purpose for who I am and why I am alive.
I can’t tell you how much that has come to mean to me.
I have found a family.
As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope we all have happy and whole families to celebrate with but I KNOW I have a happy and whole family to celebrate with here. And those this family can’t save me, can’t be my salvation, my salvation takes place among this family.
The seventeenth century theologian Martin Luther puts its this way. “The church does not provide salvation; God does. But the “saved” one can’t fulfill what it means to be a Christian apart from the church.”
I extend and invitation to all us of this evening: Will you grow one step in your faithful worship attendance this year?
I invite you to be prayerfully considering your answer in the week ahead.
