Sermon for CATM - January 23, 2005 - “The Life of Love”
Genesis 12:1-3; 1 Corinthians 13:11-13; Ephesians 4:32- 5:2
Faith, hope and love. What remains, we are told in Holy Scripture, after all is said and done, is
love. And we are encouraged by scripture to live now as though we are completed in this love.
Eph 5:1-2 Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as
Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Church at the Mission, as many of you know, has a purpose statement. It is a document that was
prayed over and worked over and over in recent years by the church’s leadership team. And part of this statement says that as a church we are called to experience and share the fullness of God’s love in our community by, among other things, developing Christian Maturity.
But what is that? Why do we think that matters? Why do we think that experiencing and sharing God’s love happens through maturity? What can we do to prepare for this reality? How can we live for love? How can we live a life of love? How can we approach our life in a way that we come out mature? My brother says age is a high price to pay for maturity. He’s
funny but right.
So we’re going to look today at the habits we can develop that will lead us to being like Jesus.
Maturity is a growing-up-into what we shall be.
Maturity is the process of developing habits that lead us to a place of being more like Jesus. I want to look at four habits, four ways of looking at our lives as Christians, four things that the Scriptures lead us to develop in our lives in order to become mature.
Habit # 1- Accepting Your Weaknesses
Rom 7:18-19 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing.
There is a big myth commonly believed by non-Christians and sometimes encouraged by Christians. It is that Christians are perfect people, or that they are very good people. Or that we are above temptation, immune to sins. If you are a Christian, you know that this is not true...or you may be living with the feeling that every Christian other than you is very, very good, while you are quite inadequate as a believer.
I’m here to tell you, if you think this way, that a very important thing you need to do is to realize
and accept that you are part of an imperfect spiritual family on a very human journey. We often
think that we are human beings on a spiritual journey. It is more accurate to say that we are
spiritual beings on a human journey. I think Scott Peck said that.
If we try to sustain the myth that Christians are perfect, we will not grow much, because we are
striving for a standard that doesn’t exist in humans. We will feel most often very defeated in our journey - like second-class Christians. And when things go wrong, as they often will in life, we may be left with a shipwreck. Our faith may not be able to survive the crushing blow of pain that will result. So, we best shed the myth of perfection. There is another way, though, that reflects Paul’s discovery in Romans.
Hudson Taylor, was a highly respected fellow who was the founder of the China Inland Mission, a very, very successful missionary movement. Complimented once by a friend on the impact of the mission, Hudson answered, “It seemed to me that God looked over the whole world to find a man who was weak enough to do His work, and when He at last found me, He said, ‘He is weak enough——he’ll do.’
I put this as the first habit because humility is a very, very important quality, and it is an earmark
of maturity. Knowing and accepting your frailties, weaknesses and areas of vulnerability is most
important because by doing this we remain dependant upon God. And we should never lose our need for God. To think that, or to pretend that we need to be perfect, is to waste our energies. The more transparent we are, the more aware we are of our need for God, the more we will grow into what God wants us to be.
Habit # 2 - Accepting Your Blessings
Our Old Testament reading today was of God’s call to Abraham. Abraham was told that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him.
When you read magazines and watch t.v., you get the idea that to have a really good life, you need to get at least one more thing. Advertisers need you to buy their stuff, so they try to influence you to believe that you want or need their product. This is actually huge in the world we live in. What you have is not enough. How you look is not good enough. Your toys are outdated. You spouse may not be enough. Talk about a message from the pit of hell, there’s
actually a Canadian company - I won’t give you their name - that specializes in creating easy
opportunities for married people to get involved in adulterous affairs.
There are many voices around you telling you to focus on what you do not have. That’s because those voices, those interests, those companies can’t profit from what you already have. When we have all this stuff swirling around us, it is very easy to ignore our present blessings. Our current joy. It is very tough to be thankful. So we spend a lot of time complaining, when God tells us that to live well is to be thankful in all things.
Something else we pick up from Abraham is that our blessings are not for our consumption. There’s often a tendency to think that our blessings are signs of God’s favour. So Israel came to believe that what mattered was ‘being’ the chosen people’. Christians sometimes settle in this same rut. “I’m chosen and blessed by God”, that means I’m special. But if we look carefully at Abraham’s encounter with God in Genesis chapter12, it’s not tough to see that there was clearly a reason or a purpose behind God’s choice to bless Abraham.
It wasn’t so that everyone would know Abraham was special. Not by a long shot. It was so that others would be blessed. God promised Abraham that all nations would be blessed through him. Do you have special abilities? They are not yours to keep. They have their meaning in the sharing. Do you have a good education, the result of having enough money or borrowing enough money to go to school?
Your education - the things you have learned, the understanding you have gained has its meaning in the sharing. Same goes with money, artistic ability and personality and even relationships That’s one reason I want to see people share their musical and artistic and other abilities in the church. They mean the most when you give them away for the enjoyment of others. In our worship gathering, your gifts may help another come closer to the living God. What could be
more important than that?
The second habit of maturing Christians is thankfulness and a deep appreciation for the good
things in your life. And a willingness to give what you have meaning by sharing it generously with those you know. There’s a big church in Toronto that has a super-simple purpose statement, but one that I like a lot: “To walk in God’s love and then give it away”. All your blessings are given to you to equip you to be a blessing, not for your own consumption.
Habit #3 - Wrestling with Holiness
I’ve separated holiness from habit #1, knowing your weaknesses, for a reason. Holiness is one of
those million dollar words that religious people use and that other folks find pretty scarey.
One thing holiness is not is a veneer. I said earlier that some people have a wrong idea of what a
Christian is. That wrong idea can elevate Christians and the Christian faith to an unreachable pedestal. Holiness really means set-apart.
It means the conscious, sustained decision to live for God in a way that reflects something of God. But because the standard for holiness is Jesus Christ himself, we need to realize that our holiness is at best a frail holiness.
And the challenge we face is being set-apart from the world while being citizens of the world, being in the world but not of the world. And holiness is not an end in itself. The way some Christians talk you’d think it was an end in itself.
God says, “Be holy as I am holy”. Aside from the sheer magnitude of that thought, we’ve got to
keep in mind that God’s highest purpose for us is communion and relationship. We can, if we want, define holiness as being keeping our noses clean.
We can evaluate our spirituality by how we’re not doing the bad stuff we did before and we are doing the good stuff we used to never do enough of. But I want to suggest another definition. One that comes back to our need for God. Can we define holiness as doing life with God, as being willing accompanists to God’s soaring melody? As developing a quick response to the leading of God’s Spirit and a keeping of short accounts with God? When we sin..and we will all
sin again, can we learn to run quickly back into God’s arms, to not spurn the Father’s love for us.
Can we define holiness as cleaving to God? Clutching to Him with every ounce of strength that we possess? Knowing how big His love is, and knowing just how undeserving we are, and yet not grovelling as if we think we’re nothing? Jesus didn’t suffer and die for nothing. His passion was for the most important thing. You, and me in communion with the living God. If we do this, I suspect, we will grow.
Habit # 4 - Giving God Time
After I had been serving at the mission for about 3 years, Rick Tobias, our executive director, would ask me about every six months: “Do you still know Jesus?” I had varied responses ranging from being offended that he would ask to candid confessions of my neglect of God’s Word and of prayer.
I learned that it’s possible for a Christian to function without much Bible reading, without much
focussed prayer, without a lot of accountability. But I also learned that God graciously carries much of the load and frequently answers even paltry prayers. I learned that God will live with neglect. With the occasional nod or crisis prayer. He doesn’t withdraw His love or His Spirit,ever.
My dad drove his VW van back from Nova Scotia and arrived in Toronto one sunny day in September. He hadn’t bothered with maintenance much while he was out there or on the way back. A few days after he got back I took the van to school. On the Don Valley just south of the Bloor viaduct the van’s crank shaft blew a hole in the engine. My dad hadn’t checked the oil in
the car for a good year.
I coasted to a sputtering, powerless stop. The engine was toast. I was stranded (this was years before cell phones). Not to state the obvious, but this event became a metaphor for me for spiritual neglect. It’s God’s grace that He chooses to keep loving us through mountains of disregard, oversight and inattention.
And its God history with his people that he is ever the faithful father waiting with outstretched arms for his child to return, He is ever the bridegroom giving honour to his bride and waiting for her, longing patiently for her to return.
So, we should decide! Will we neglect the living God, give Him next to none of our personal time, or will we do the hard work of maintaining our spiritual health. Will we read his thoughts and His story with us in his Word. Will we make time to pray. I recently studied with some candidates for the catholic priesthood.
One of the visiting priests told the class that he had been hearing from a lot of people that they
were not morning people, so they couldn’t be expected to get up and give the first fruits of their day to God. His solution was simple. “Become a morning person!” Train yourself to be a morning person so you always place God first in your day. It’s not right to give God the leftovers,ever, he suggested.
God will live with neglect. I’m not sure we can. You see the reason for developing the habit of giving God time is not for God’s well-being. It is for yours. I believe we were made for joy. The picture I see in Scripture of heaven is one of ceaseless joy because of the intimate communion we share together with God. But Jesus said that the Kingdom of heaven is here. It is within you.
God has given us individually and together the capacity to have relationship with Him now, to be in communion with Him...now. So we have all the thing around us that can, if we use them, help us to grow in this communion, this joy. We have the Holy Bible, the Word of God. We have our minds and hearts with which we can talk to God. We have nature around us and we have each other as friends, as people who are in this thing together.
We are called to maturity. We are call to live lives of love. We can make some headway in this by knowing our weaknesses, by accepting our blessings, by wrestling with holiness and by giving God time - the first fruits of our day. Let’s pray.
Gd our Father, thank you for caring that we not remain as infants in the faith, but that we grow
together toward you. You call us to lead lives of love. With your grace we will do this. Help us to
put aside immature habits and practices that don’t lead us forward. Help us to embrace you, the
living God, and to set our eyes on Jesus, who is Himself the autor and finisher of our faith. In His
name we pray. Amen.
