Life’s Too Short To. . .Go It Alone
Life’s Too Short To…10 of 10
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
June 5, 2005
Last week I talked to you about how life is too short to follow the crowd. Today I’m going to preach a message that could almost seem like the exact opposite – Life’s Too Short to Go It Alone. Last week I told you not to follow the crowd who is on what Jesus called “the broad road” (in other words the “wide” road) because according to Jesus the way to life with God is found on the narrow road – the one Jesus said only a few will find.
So this morning I want to confront what I believe is the most insidious sin going on in the American church today. Remember last week we talked about how we have to draw careful lines between American values and Christian values because they often are not the same? This morning I want to talk to you about what I believe is probably America’s #1 value, and I believe this American value has been taken into the church and is rotting the church from the inside out and I don’t use that language to sound alarmist, I use it because by most statistical measures, the American church IS rotting, it IS falling apart, it IS breaking down, it IS losing a grip on its ability to meaningfully guide and direct people.
What is this insidious sin I’m talking about? It’s not adultery, or greed, or lust, or lying, or envy, or gluttony. It’s actually much worse than those things, because this is a sin that has crept in under the radar screen of many churches, and many Christians in America. The things I just mentioned – well most people KNOW those things are sins. But this one has taken us kind of by surprise, disguised itself as a value that patriotic and God-fearing Americans ought to adopt for themselves, and thus has gained legitimacy in many of our churches and in the lives of many who call themselves Christian. My friends, it is a sin that some of you have embraced – probably not because you are bad people, but because you have never realized before that it is sin, that it should be avoided as steadily as you may avoid the obvious sins I mentioned earlier. Probably more so.
This sin is worse than all of those sins because, when we have taken this sin into our lives and our minds and our hearts, it makes it gradually more and more difficult for us to see any of the more obvious sins in our lives – it dims our perception of sin, keeps us from discerning the things that drive a wedge between us and God, and ultimately fools us into actually serving another god while we don’t even realize it.
This morning I want to talk to you about the sin (or the much exalted American virtue, depending on how you choose to think about it) of individualism. Individualism.
Are you surprised that it’s something that seems so mundane? Are you bummed out that it’s not more salacious or scandalous? Are you confused, wondering how on earth this word that doesn’t even appear in the Bible gets ranked by me today as one of the worst sins in the church? Let me tell you something. I can stand up and say these words because this is a church and I am the pastor and America grants me the freedom to preach whatever I want to whoever will freely listen. But do you realize that what I have just said – if it showed up tomorrow night on the evening news – would be very frightening to many Americans? The pastor of Wildwind Church is speaking out against individual freedoms, against an individual’s right to determine his own life, make her own decisions – the pastor of that church doesn’t believe in freedom – the pastor of Wildwind Church wants to tell all the rest of us how we are supposed to live. I can imagine Larry King just nearly having a meltdown at my calling individualism a sin. It’s downright un-American.
My friends let me make one thing very clear this morning. I’m thankful to live in a country where every person gets to determine how he is going to live. No one respects that right more than me. My aim this morning isn’t about telling Americans how they ought to live. My aim this morning is to make sure that those who have made the free choice to live as Christians understand that specifically because of that choice there are now areas of your life where how you live is no longer up to you. Fundamentally, to be a Christian is to align yourself with Christ, to be willing to adopt Christ’s values and priorities as your own. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to live this way. You have the freedom to live however you choose – God bless America and every person who died, who suffered, who served – to give us that freedom.
Individualism says it’s all about me. What’s right and wrong, the way to live and not live, what to accept and what to avoid, all of those things are my decisions as a free moral agent and a consenting adult. Individualism claims that what you do with your money, your time, your body, your possessions, your passions and interests, and your occupation, are completely up to you. Individualism says that who you date, whether and if you marry, whether and if you live with someone before marriage, the gender of your partner, and practically every other decision about your life is about you and affects no one else but you and whoever consents to be involved with you.
Now remember, here we are in America, where people have died to give us exactly the rights I just talked about. And this is where things get confusing for Christians and those exploring Christianity. As an American, you DO have those rights. Our founding fathers even acknowledged that we were created BY GOD with these rights. But a Christian lays those rights back down again at the feet of Jesus.
What’s the first line of the song we sing?
"We fall down, we lay our crowns at the feet of Jesus." Our crowns, folks, that means our kingship and queenship over our own lives – our God-given right to determine our own lives, to steer our own ships. We lay them at the feet of Jesus. God gives us the right to make the choice about who we will serve (which America is correct to acknowledge through the granting of religious freedom), but to serve God, to be a Christian, to follow Christ with our lives, is to turn right back around and say, “God, I choose YOU. I want what YOU have for me – I lay down my crown at your feet, I place it on your head – YOU call the shots in my life. YOU be the leader.”
Now the question is can we legislate these things? Should we? The answer to both, in my opinion, is no. We should not try to force non-believers to live lives that would please God. But my whole point this morning is that I would at least like it to be such that Christian pastors in Christian churches all over our country stand up and ask those who call themselves Christians to actually live that way. That’s another freedom we have in America – the right for Christian ministers to teach their congregations how to live Christian lives – the right for Christian ministers to call some things a sin and pronounce other things blessed by God – for pastors and teachers in the church to draw clear moral lines and boundaries and warn people about the physical and spiritual dangers in crossing those lines. To take sin and hell – and redemption and heaven – seriously.
Yet all over America the church is losing its grip on what makes it unique. Many of our churches are so busy blessing every possible way of life, every behavior, that comes along they have completely lost their distinctiveness. Jesus spoke of this:
Matthew 5:13 (NIV)
13 "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.
The church, believers around the world, are what Jesus called the salt of the earth – salt at that time was a preservative. Because there was no refrigeration, salt was what kept foods from going bad and becoming poisonous. Jesus here says to his followers, “You are in this world to keep it from completely rotting – you are here to preserve it, to bring out all that is good in it – if you become the same as the world around you, you lose your ability to do that, you no longer serve any purpose and I’ll get rid of you.”
Last week we talked about what happens when the church appropriates the values of the culture around it. That is no more easily seen than in the way the church has absorbed the value of individualism. Let me tell you how that value manifests itself in the lives of church people or those seeking to attend a church. I have written out an extensive list of these comparisons for you, which you’ll receive on your way out today, but for now let me just hit a few of these.
1. In the life of an individualist, the question is not, “Did the pastor say something true,” the question is, “Do I like what the pastor said.”
2. In the life of an individualist, the question is not, “How can I really enter into this community,” the question is “What can this church do for me.”
3. In the life of an individualist, the question is not “Is this the right church for me” but “Why should I belong to any church at all – I can do my own thing.”
4. In the life of an individualist, the question is not, “How can God’s Word – the Bible – mold and shape my life, my attitudes, beliefs, and actions,” the question is, “How do I want to live and what will I choose to accept and reject in the Bible to support whatever it is that I want”
5. In the life of an individualist, the question is not, “What is the role of money in my life as I move toward God” the question is “What right does the church or anyone else have to talk to me about money – that’s my business.”
6. In the life of an individualist, the question is not, “How can I be guided and shaped to follow God by the church,” the question is “Who gave the church the right to tell me how to live – I’ll figure out for myself what I’m supposed to do.”
7. In the life of an individualist, the question is not “How can I serve God,” the question is “How can God make my life more comfortable”
8. In the life of an individualist, the question is not “Is this right or wrong,” the question is “Will this make me happy?” Individualists ultimately believe wrong is whatever makes them unhappy, and right is whatever makes them happy.
Getting the point? Need I go on? Do you see what’s wrong with individualism yet? Churches all over America, right at this instant, are giving their blessing to millions of people who are less interested in walking the narrow path that leads to God than they are in just using God to make them feel good and inspire them to do whatever it is they already want to do.
As a Christian, I read this in the Bible and I deeply believe it:
Proverbs 14:11-13 (MSG)
11 Lives of careless wrongdoing are tumbledown shacks; holy living builds soaring cathedrals.
12 There’s a way of life that looks harmless enough; look again—it leads straight to hell.
13 Sure, those people appear to be having a good time, but all that laughter will end in heartbreak.
That way of life that seems harmless enough – “I’m not hurting anybody with this decision, this doesn’t affect anybody but me” – that’s what Jesus referred to in our text last week as the broad path – the obvious road that most people are walking on.
Now in the last section of this message I want to give you the alternative to the broad path – to completely individualism. The alternative, my friends, is found in true Christian commitment. I said earlier that to truly follow Christ is to seek God’s will above our own, to live out God’s priorities in our lives, to seek to bring all our attitudes and actions and beliefs into alignment with God so that the whole flow of our lives are a flow God-ward.
Individualism is going it alone. Life’s too short to go it alone. Individualism believes that your choices don’t have any impact on anyone but you. It also believes that you get to be the only one to decide what harms you and what doesn’t. Why is it a worse sin than all the others? Because it is self-worship, and leads to all the other sins. It exalts the individual above God, claiming that the self, and only the self, gets to decide what’s good for the self. Self-worship IS the ultimate sin.
By way of contrast, if you’ve been through Discovery class you’ve heard this before, but Christianity is a communal faith. Always has been. It assumes that this is a lifestyle we pursue together, with other believers, and that we cast our lot with them and commit our lives to them as we have committed our lives to Christ. Life’s too short to go it alone, which ironically is what all those millions of individualists are doing. They’re all clustered there together on the same path, but it’s a path of individualism – leaving every individual ultimately on their own.
If you read the Bible (which if you haven’t I would encourage you to try sometime – seriously) you will see that the New Testament never once tells new believers to join a church or commit their lives to others. You may think this is because it really wasn’t necessary, but actually the reason is just the opposite. It was simply assumed that to follow Christ was to follow Christ in the context of committed relationships with other followers. How did Jesus teach this way of life? In community with 12 disciples to whom he was deeply committed. Where was Jesus often found as a little boy? In the temple with other believers. He apparently believed it was important to be in church and if anyone ever lived who maybe could have said he didn’t need the church, it was Jesus.
Where did we get 2/3 of the New Testament in our Bible today? From the writings of the Apostle Paul, most of which were letters addressed to local churches. Churches were not buildings then, they were simply households where believers met together. In fact the word in the New Testament for “church” is the Greek word ekklesia, which is never once used to refer to a building, but always to a group of believers! Where did these little clusters of believers come from that Paul was writing to? They sprung up as a result of Paul going into a town and preaching and people coming to Christ and then just banding together and forming an Ekklesia. That is what Christians naturally did – they formed churches – living bodies of Christ right in their own neighborhoods. And how did they live?
Acts 2:38-47 (NIV)
38 Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off--for all whom the Lord our God will call."
40 With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, "Save yourselves from this corrupt generation."
41 Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
43 Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.
44 All the believers were together and had everything in common.
45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.
46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,
47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
See what happened? Peter preached and three-thousand people became believers. Notice it doesn’t say, “then each one returned to his own home and felt really good about having just prayed the sinners prayer, and wiped his brow because he was so relieved to know he wasn’t going to hell.” It says they devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles, to fellowship with each other, to sharing meals together and praying together, to taking care of each other, to ongoing meetings with each other, and God blessed what was happening and more and more people continued to come to faith.
Do we think that was then and this is now – that we shouldn’t have to live that way now because this is America? Remember a few weeks ago I mentioned to you about the churches around the world that AREN’T decaying from the inside out, the ones that are actually thriving, where the conditions of oppression and persecution are horrific, but they are growing like crazy anyway? You know what they’re doing? They are living life together – committed to one another – supporting each other – serving each other and their communities – eating together – and suffering persecution together.
All our comfort, all our independence, all our individualism, isn’t producing a vibrant church is it? Just the opposite. It’s producing a bunch of fat-cats that are losing their ability to be the salt of the earth – losing their saltiness. The church is still vibrant today in those externally awful parts of the world that have not exalted self above God and embraced individualism, where people are living in the way we just read about in Acts – the way Jesus lived, the way all the early believers lived. That’s the way Christianity works – and it barely works at all any other way. That’s how it was made to be.
That is the ekklesia. Not a building, but a collection of people, living together with God in their midst. People who have stopped insisting on their rights as individuals and committed their lives to God and one another.
People always ask me, “Dave, can a person be a Christian and not go to church?” I don’t know. It’s hard to say because the Bible doesn’t really address questions like that. It just assumes that once we commit our lives to Christ as the forgiver of our sins, we immediately attach to the ekklesia. It never really addresses what happens if we ask him to forgive our sins and then refuse to attach to his body, the church.
Romans 12:4-8 (NLT)
4 Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function,
5 so it is with Christ’s body. We are all parts of his one body, and each of us has different work to do. And since we are all one body in Christ, we belong to each other, and each of us needs all the others.
6 God has given each of us the ability to do certain things well. So if God has given you the ability to prophesy, speak out when you have faith that God is speaking through you.
7 If your gift is that of serving others, serve them well. If you are a teacher, do a good job of teaching.
8 If your gift is to encourage others, do it! If you have money, share it generously. If God has given you leadership ability, take the responsibility seriously. And if you have a gift for showing kindness to others, do it gladly.
Every Christian is part of Christ’s body, which this passage says means that we belong to each other. What I say affects you, and what you say affects me. I can no longer selfishly say that my life, my decisions, my actions, are all about me and have no impact on you. I cannot hold you at arms length and tell you just to cop a smile and be happy for me no matter what I might do or how I might choose to live. In the ekklesia I have cast my lot with you and am committed to you and accountable to you, and ask the same from you in return. Every Christian has a part to play in the ekklesia – the church – the body of Christ. The local church – the ekklesia – the local gathering of believers – is where that work gets done. Certainly it gets done also in other places, but Eph. 4 tells us that pastors are appointed in churches to help people find their gifts in order to build up the church – the body of Christ – which will lead us to spiritual maturity. At the very least that tells us that those not attached to an ekklesia – to a gathering of other believers they are sharing life closely with – will not grow, will not mature according to God’s plan for them.
We have little clusters in our church that are living as close to that New Testament model as we know how to get at this time. Groups of people who love each other, pray for each other, encourage each other, and give one another access to their lives – people who belong to each other.
If you’re not in a small group, I want to tell you that I’m glad you’re at least sitting here in church this morning. But remember that church is not a building, nor is it even really just a meeting where people come and listen to sermons, but church – the ekklesia we read about constantly in the Bible – is the living, breathing, functional people of God, living their lives together and allowing God to sharpen them, teach them, correct them, and strengthen them as they support and encourage each other. In a few weeks we’ll spend a whole service discussing small groups, but let this stuff simmer for a while. Consider whether you are a church-attender – someone who comes into a building and listens to sermons – or part of the ekklesia. I invite you, encourage you, and challenge you this morning to take your place in the ekklesia – to let down your guard, join a group, and live your life in close relationship to other believers.
If you are not a Christian this morning, there’s nothing in the world like the ekklesia. I don’t care about church buildings, I’m not called to build an institution, I’m called to equip and encourage one small portion of the worldwide, living, eternal ekklesia, of which Christ-followers at Wildwind are just one small part. I invite you to commit your life to Jesus Christ – to ask him to forgive your sins and be the leader of your life so that you can be part of the ekklesia – the only God-created institution on earth and the one that, despite our flaws and serious shortcomings, God will ultimately use to bring peace and healing to this world one heart at a time. Will you let that begin your heart this morning?
