Intro: You ever have one of those moments when everything just seems to come together and you step back from your life and everything makes sense? We call those light bulb or ah ha moments. It’s like when I get something that says “some assembly required”. When it comes to putting things together my perspective is to get the job done as fast as possible. So reading the instructions seems to only slow me down – I just want a picture of the finished product. But after about my second attempt I’ll usually get out the instructions and have one of those “ah ha” moments.
I’ve had many of those moments when studying my Bible or talking with someone about spiritual things. When I’ve realized that there is something more I never knew about or never utilized my spiritual life in such a capacity. So let’s go to God’s instructional manual the Word of God and see what God says about going to church. Here are God’s instructions for churchgoers. This is the classic Scriptures on church attendance found in Hebrews chapter 10 beginning in verse twenty-four.
Notice that these verses are not directed to the preacher or the pastor or the person on stage but look at the pronouns – us and we; this is directed to everyone in attendance. We have taken on this whole mentality of this Christianity being between God and me and it doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else. We reefer to our Christianity as a personal relationship and rightly so but we must be careful not to exclude the importance of the church. To fulfill God’s purpose for your life you must understand the value of your church relationship. This is not about one guy (the pastor) who stands in front of you and feeds you and runs the show. It’s an entire team or family of people (the church) that gets involved in your life.
Illustration: Picture for instance the Indy 500 when those cars pull into the pit. And out comes this uniform wearing color coordinated pit crew and they surround this car and all start working on it. Now picture a car that pulls into the pit and doesn’t have a pit crew, kind of a self service pit, he has to get out of the car and washes the window, fuels it up himself and changes the tires all alone. He’s not going to be efficient or win a race that way. Or lets say that the guy who owns the racecar employs only one guy to be his pit crew. And this guy knows all there is to know about formula one race cars. None of that makes sense! Or worse yet picture the owner of the race team looking down from the sky box and seeing a pit full of people he is paying and only half the crew came out and worked on the car and the other half stayed in the pit and examined their figure nails? What do you think that owner would do, he would fire them because he wants his car and his driver to pull into a pit were everyone is going to get involved.
I wonder how comfortable our owner is with pulling lives into our church? Does He see it as a one man pit stop were one man does all the work to equip and encourage someone? Or does he see an entire team of Christians surrounding a person saying; “how can we help you, how can we encourage you, how can we get you moving forward in the Christian life? How can we spur you on to love and to good deeds in your life?
It amazes me that if the church is like a team and we’re all team members for the Lord that so many church members are satisfied to just sit and do nothing. People join a team to get in the game and play to get involved to participate. I have seen people who have joined their kids in pewee baseball and say; “well, he’s not very athletic or he isn’t very coordinated so I’m hoping this will bring it out of him”. You know as a coach in trouble then. But all in all most people join athletic teams to participate. I’ve never known of a high school athlete going to his coach and saying, “Coach, I’ve been starting all year and getting to play just a little too much, let someone else play and I’ll watch”.
It’s a team effort but the problem today is that so many Christians are going to church without even a thought as to what they can do to help other people in their walk with Christ. Sometimes we think of it as all one sided and one directional and totally forget about our responsibility to spur one another along. Spurring one another on is what we are supposed to be doing. To spur is a negative action with a positive result occurring in the one being spurred. Spur might be a positive action if you’re the cowboy but not if you’re the horse. You don’t want to be spurred today; no one wants a set of spurs digging into their rib cage.
You go to church to provoke people to good works. What am I doing to help people follow Christ, to love God more and to love other people to a greater extent?
WE ARE CALLED TO CREATVILY HELP SOMEONE GROW
“Let us consider” means we are to ponder or study on how we can creatively help someone grow in their faith. If I said you’re called to come to church and help someone grow. Well, the easy thing would be just to show up and tell some, “Hey, you need to grow”. But it’s not quite that simple.
Some ways that people have helped me to grow:
Bought me study materials (books and so on). Influence of other Christian friends and how they have lived their lives (John Barnes; Bro. Bob; Jim Parr).
What can you say, what can you do that can help someone at Sand Flat Baptist church to grow in their faith? I’m called to do the same thing every week, to take the Scriptures study them try and make some sense of them and give them to you. But your not bound to one thing if you’re an attender here you can creatively provoke someone to good works. You can sit down with someone and pray for them, bring your victory and share it with the rest of the church, share a certain verse that means something special to you in S.S. Do you come to church that way, do you think about that before you come?
Many people in our culture have come to think about church as a one way street it’s all about feeding me. And that’s a part of it, I’m not trying to slight my responsibility. But don’t fall into that rut, because if you do something might happen to your church attendance. If you think it’s all about you – you might wake up on a Sunday morning and think…I don’t really need that today. If you don’t see yourself as a part of the pit crew you might stop coming. That’s were the next phrase comes into being “let us not give up on meeting together”.
If you think about it you can’t do a lot of spurring on if you’re not present. That’s why a good Christian tape, or TV program will never quite have as powerful of an effect on you as it would if you where present. If you’re physically able to attend church Christian television just isn’t going to do it for you because teaching and worship or only two components and the broader picture is that real life people get together fellowship together in real life situations and experience real growth. As iron sharpens iron so does one man sharpen another. This occurs in real life situations. But this only happens when you’re in the physical presence of God’s people.
We’ve got such a consumer perspective of church that ruins our whole church experience. I don’t go into Don PePe’s with a servants attitude and look for some way to help people eat their food, or try to wait tables. I go pay my money to have someone else cook food I can’t cook and also have someone wait on me and have someone clean up after me. It’s great – all I do is pay my money and enjoy my meal with not responsibility to cook or clean up. And that’s the same mentality that’s settled on the church today.
In Romans 1:11 Paul gives us his perspective of attending church. “I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong”. Paul is saying that he wanted to offer them something for the purpose of making them strong. This isn’t just the preacher coming to preach to the people – look at the next verse. “That is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.” You see? We must come to church with the mentality of loading the kids in the car, bringing my Bible and my spiritual gifts and seeing what I can do to impart some strength to someone.
In 1Thesselonians 3:6-10 Paul can’t go so he sends Timothy and his heart is breaking because he wants to be with the church so bad. “But Timothy has just now come to us from you and has brought good news about your faith and love. He has told us that you always have pleasant memories of us and that you long to see us, just as we also long to se you.” Spiritual people long to be in church, it’s not that they are so spiritual that they don’t need church, they not only need it they long for it.
When you see church as just optional then you don’t see yourself as a part of the pit crew in place to help people. When you come to church you have one of two choices servant hood or consumerism. Can I help someone today, have I creatively thought through how I might help someone to grow in his or her faith? When you come to serve and to help someone else to grow that’s when you will really begin to grow yourself. When you start serving people that’s when God will pour out on you like you never experienced.
I heard of an old billboard out in Alabama that has a picture of the devil on it – red suit horns, pitchfork, pointed tail. And the sign says, “Go to church or the devils gona getch ya”.
How often should we go, how frequent should it be?
v.25 …as you see the Day approaching.
Are we closer to the day now than they were then? Do you think that we need to meet together more now? Or do you think they needed to meet more then? Well I think we need to, not that it was unimportant then, but things are going from bad to worse in our world today. Why is that? Well 2 Timothy 3 tells us that things are going to be getting worse as the Day approaches. 2 Timothy 3:2-4 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.
As things go from bad to worse we as a church are going to need to meet even more, we are going to need to encourage each other even more. You know often in our day we are under the false assumption that things are getting better with the advancements in technology and what have you. Is that true? Have our advancements really made us better? Did you know that 266 new pornographic sits are added to the Internet everyday? Then there is television, we have this box that is our window to the world. Our kids view over 100,000 episodes of violence before they’re out of elementary school. Then we have all the fun recreation in our country, did you know that there is one alcohol related accident every minute in our country? Our world is doing nothing but getting worse and the Bible tells us it will continue to get worse. And as things get darker and darker in our world what do we need? We need more time together.
GET TOGETHER MORE OFTEN
Today it’s more critical that we get together than it was 10 years ago. Because this is the place where we will get the right kind of influences the right kind of friends and the right kind of pier pressure. Is it always easy, is it always comfortable, is it always convenient the answer of course is no. Sometimes it will cost you but it’s well worth the price. And if you think this is all about checking into services once a week and getting 6 songs and a twenty minute sermon then you’re missing the point. You won’t make it you’ll give up and quite.
Hebrews 3:13 tells us how often we need to be getting together.
Think about how people come back from retreats or camps. Is it that the teaching is really all that much better? Is the music that much better? Or is that people come back on spiritual highs because they have spent 2 or 3 days surrounded by Christians and their continual influence. You see if church is something you only do one hour a week then your not going to get out of it what you need, nor can you give what you need to give. We should be doing church every day, now I’m not saying that you should be here at this location everyday, but I am saying you need to be building Christian relationships and spurring one another on everyday.
When we put out clip boards for people to volunteer should it really take weeks to get enough people to help out? Clip boards in youth room the drama loaded with names but the Bible study only two.
Conclusion: Baking soda and vinegar certain elements are not mixed together because they’re too volatile. Some things are catalyst when mixed together and they blow everything up. Some things you just can’t mix together. Now if someone has a group of stamp collectors together and they do their thing and they share their passion for stamps. It’s not a big deal, no ones hurt by that. When people who love dogs have their dog grooming shows, no big deal. But when the body of Christ gets together and shares their passion for Christ it should stir things up, one should serve as a catalyst to others. But when we’re alone it’s not bit deal.
