In case you haven’t heard we’re building a church. Actually we’ve been building a church for 10 years and now we are constructing a Church facility. And I really need to thank those who are working with me on that, Mike Kneebone, John Greenough, Heather Stubbert, Bruce Barteaux, Louise Caza and from a distance Don Grant. Without them none of this would be happening, they really are the brains behind the operation.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been in this type of project, we built in Truro and in Brisbane. And, Angela if you want to cover your ears for a second, I hope this isn’t the last time I’m in this type of project. Just the other day I was thinking, I wonder how we will expand when we fill this building?
And it’s really coming together well, and I truly believe that we are going to have a first class facility to worship God in, and I think that’s important, I do not believe that we serve a God of mediocrity, I believe that he deserves the best that we can offer.
Almost thirty years ago my home church in Saint John, New Brunswick dedicated their new facilities and one of their laymen a very gracious gentleman by the name of Irvine bruhier said “We’ve built a church, now we need to build the church.” Well folks I am here to say that “we are building a church but let’s not forget to build the church.”
Europe is full of cathedrals which make what we are planning look pretty pathetic, but they are spiritually dead. Why? Because they have churches but they don’t have churches.
You see the church is the body of Jesus Christ, it is not brick or mortar or wood or glass it is a living breathing conglomeration of god’s people. This building that will be constructed on Hammonds Plains Road is not Cornerstone Wesleyan Church, but you people you are Cornerstone Wesleyan Church. But I want to let you in on a little secret, it’s a whole lot easier to put up a church building then it is to maintain a healthy church body. Because some day we will be through building our new church building, but the church body is never completed, it is never finished and the work goes on forever.
The scripture that Ruth read this morning is my favourite portion of the holy writ.
It is found in the book of 1 Corinthians which is the seventh book of the New Testament. It is a letter written by Paul to Christians in the Church in Corinth. If we pull up a map we discover that Corinth is in what we now refer to as Greece. Paul himself had planted this church two or three years prior to this letter being written in AD 55. The reason that Paul wrote the letter, well the church was having some major problems and Paul was seeking to restore balance to the church. Which brings us to the verse I want to look at this morning.
1 Corinthians 13:13 There are three things that will endure—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
Out of the sixty six books of the bible Paul says that these three concepts are by far the most important. Of all the dissertations, theological debates, studies, theories, theorems and personal opinion, Paul tells us that these three remain faith, hope and love. The Old Testament, the New Testament, everything in between and everything written since about Christianity is summed up in these three attributes, faith, hope and love.
Now if this is the sum total of Paul’s teaching then that should be indicative of how important they need to be in our lives. I have seen churches that stress their doctrine, our doctrine and everybody else’s doctrine. But as important as doctrine is and needs to be it cannot replace these three concepts. I have seen churches that concentrate on liturgy and ritual but without faith hope and love they are simply formal club meetings and you might as well become a Mason.
I have seen churches that talk about fellowship and accountability but without faith, hope and love they are just glorified and spiritualised social clubs. The only way that we can build the church that god wants us to build is with faith, and with hope and with love.
1. Faith We have preached about faith so much since we started talking about building that it ought to be like the old fellow said, “you throw enough mud at a wall some of it’s bound to stick.” What is faith? Well first of all it’s a New Testament concept or at least a New Testament word. In the New Living Translation of the bible the word faith is used eleven times in the Old Testament and over two hundred times in the New Testament.
And while this word faith wasn’t a common expression in the Old Testament that doesn’t mean that the expression of faith was missing. Hebrews chapter eleven gives us a faith hall of fame and it starts in Genesis chapter four with Abel and then is seen in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers , Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. The Old Testament is alive with examples of faith from beginning to end. It may not be called faith but what is it when a couple in their nineties believe that they are to become parents? What do you call it when a little shepherd boy takes on a giant warrior with a slingshot, or when somebody builds a boat in the middle of the desert in preparation for a flood?
The bible defines faith in Hebrews 11:1 What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see.
That means that faith is being positive of those things that you can’t hold in you hands, see with your eyes, feel with your fingers or weigh with a scale. It means being sure of our dreams. I have heard good, Godly Christian men and women say, “Well I guess I just don’t have very much faith.” Don’t have much faith? Your very salvation is one of the greatest statements of faith in the world. It’s not a tangible good. You can’t hold it, can’t squeeze it, can’t smell it, can’t say “Here’s my salvation isn’t it cute?” But you know by faith that if you ask forgiveness, repent of your sins and ask Jesus into your heart that you will be saved.
“Well” you say “What I mean is that I can’t have faith in things I don’t understand.” No problem. I don’t really understand how the blood of Jesus can wipe away my sin but then again those chairs that you are sitting on are nothing more then electrons, neutrons and protons revolving at approximately 186,000 miles per second. Arranged in exact mathematical proportion to simulate the structure that you think is there but is actually nothing but pure energy. I don’t understand it, but hey I have no problem sitting in one of those chairs, and having faith that it will hold me.
If we are to build a strong, dynamic church then we will need to stretch our faith to the very limit. And one of the most effective ways of exercising our faith is by acting on it, either in action or in word. Noah built the ark, Abraham left the land of his father, Moses stretched his rod over the red sea, Joshua marched around Jericho and rahab the harlot told the spies of Israel “I know that the Lord has given you this land.”
First there is faith, but faith alone is not enough. There is faith and then Paul says there is 2. Hope.
One of my favourite scriptures is Proverbs 29:18 where the KJV says Without a vision the people perish. Hope is nothing more then a vision, an expectancy of the future. Aristotle said “Hope is a waking dream.” Hope is your dreams. We all have dreams or if we are to live we must have a dream. Because nothing kills quicker then a dreamless spirit. When you’ve lost your hope then you have lost what it takes to cling to this slender strand of life. You have to see it, if you can’t see it then you can’t have it. We’ve said it a dozens of times before if you don’t build castle in the air you’ll never build anything on the ground.
Everything that you have every received was the result of a dream. Your job, house, car, spouse, family. Man was born to dream. You want to see a practical demonstration of dreaming? Ask a child what they want for Christmas. When you lose hope you lose life itself.
When the allies liberated the death camps of Nazi Germany the survivors had lost their pride, their dignity, all of their earthly possessions, but the ones who survived held to that one thing which the victims had lost and that was hope.
You say “Pastor we know what your dream is. It’s our new church building.” No that is a start but my dream for Cornerstone Wesleyan church is a whole lot bigger then a mere building. My dream for Cornerstone is that the we will have such a powerful impact in the community that the most disinterested person will not be able to ignore the testimony of the church” my dream is to see Hammonds Plains, Bedford, the HRM become a better place to live, to see people come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, to see people in Cornerstone mobilised to love and care for one another, to see righteousness returned to our nation . You say “Those are big dreams Denn.” They sure are but they start right here with you. My dream is to motivate you to change the world for Jesus Christ. To see you reach out and touch your communities for Jesus Christ.
How high we can go is totally dependent on how high we can dream. In flying one important thing to remember is that your attitude affects your altitude. In other words the direction your nose is pointing in determines whether you are going to go up or whether you are going to go down. Not your speed, not your power but your attitude. And that applies double in our Christian life; your attitude determines your altitude.
And so we have faith, and we have hope but that isn’t the end, Paul writes, 1 Corinthians 13:13 There are three things that will endure—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
You can have your dreams, you can have faith to implement your dreams but if you are not guided by 3) Love then God isn’t in it, and he won’t be in it either. In listing these three attributes he finds it necessary to add to it “but the greatest of these is love. It is unfortunate that too often churches focus on doctrinally and theological purity while neglecting love. But the scriptures are very clear on the importance of love. When Jesus told the disciples that there would be one overriding characteristic by which they would be judged, it would be whether or not they crossed all of their doctrinal t’s and dotted all of their theological i’s instead he told them in John 13:35 Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.”
Now we know that scripture we probably sang about it as kids “They’ll know we are Christians by our love by our love” but we really believe that they will know that we are Christians by our doctrine because we don’t believe what they believe or don’t practice what somebody else might practice.
But if Cornerstone is going to be everything that God wants it to be it will be because we love one another. Friends of ours left the Wesleyan church that they had attended for years to attend a charismatic church. The reason they left had nothing to do with doctrine or theology, Patti had been a Wesleyan pastor for a number of years before she got married. The reason they left was that they didn’t feel loved at First Wesleyan but the people of Abundant Life Fellowship offered them that love and acceptance that they felt they were missing. There are literally thousands of people in this city who feel betrayed by the church. They were expecting to find the love and acceptance modeled by the New Testament church instead they were greeted with legalism and criticism. Now that doesn’t mean that we soft pedal sin. We don’t compromise the message of the scripture or stop preaching a holy life style but it does mean that we take the time needed to lift one another up, to care for one another and to love one another.
Jesus felt that love was so important to his followers that he didn’t suggest that they love one another he commanded it, in John 13:34 So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. . .
Love one another, that’s tough sometimes and to make it tougher he says; Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. That’s not a mamby pamby, whishy washy type love that is a serious commitment. And he says you must love one another this way, not you should or it would be nice if, but you must.
We need to be a church that loves, that doesn’t mean that we ditch good theology and sound doctrine but it does mean that we practice 1 Corinthians 16:14 where it says And everything you do must be done with love.
So what is love? Ruth read it earlier but let’s pull it up again and read it together. I will read the parts marked Pastor and you read the sections indicated by People.
PowerPoint is available for this message, contact me at denn@powerpoint4preaching.com or visit www.powerpoint4preaching.com
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 NLT
Pastor
If I could speak in any language in heaven or on earth but didn’t love others, I would only be making meaningless noise like a loud gong or a clanging cymbal.
People
If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I knew all the mysteries of the future and knew everything about everything, but didn’t love others, what good would I be?
Pastor
And if I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make it move, without love I would be no good to anybody.
People
If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would be of no value whatsoever.
Pastor
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way.
People
Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.
Pastor
Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever, but prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will all disappear.
People
Now we know only a little, and even the gift of prophecy reveals little! But when the end comes, these special gifts will all disappear.
Pastor
It’s like this: When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child does. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.
People
Now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God knows me now.
Together
There are three things that will endure—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
