This is not a competition!

 

Read 2 Corinthians 10

 We are not going too far in our boasting, as would be the case if we had not come to you, for we did get as far as you with the gospel of Christ. Neither do we go beyond our limits by boasting of work done by others. Our hope is that, as your faith continues to grow, our sphere of activity among you will greatly expand, so that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you. For we do not want to boast about work already done in someone else’s territory. But, “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”

Some of Paul’s battles are fought because of jealousy and contempt. Others don’t like what he has accomplished. He was not one of the disciples who followed Jesus for three years. He was the oddball. He couldn’t be as good as the regular apostles, who might be dubbed super apostles.

That was part of the challenge before Paul. Division was a real thing in Corinth, and it does its best to invade every church body it finds.  It’s as if Paul gets to the point where he says, “Enough!”

This is not a competition.

We are not enemies with you or the other apostles who are legitimately doing the work of the Lord.

We are coworkers in Christ. Yes, I am different from the dozen who followed Jesus in the flesh. Here’s the kicker: You will be, too!

This is not an election. There is no campaign. We are not comparing resumes. There will not be a series of three debates.

The goal here in what we are doing in your area is to make you a light unto the world. We want you to be the salt of the earth. We want you to be known as followers of Jesus by your love.

And…

Here’s the kicker: We want you to clone what we have done and become missionaries to this lost world.

You are not going out to make followers of Peter, Paul, Apollos, or any other servant of the Lord. Your objective is to take the good news that we have in the Lord, not in any other human.

Your goal is to do what we did with you and do it with others. Go into the world with good news. Unless God tells you to go to Spain or Egypt, then go across the street or to the next village over and share the good news of life in Jesus Christ.

You will be sharing with some who may know your pagan ways. You will have to explain the old self and new self to them, using the term "new creation" or "new creature."

You need to be learning, studying, and praying because you will soon be the vessels that carry the good news to your neighbors and future generations.

You are not just working on yourselves—and we all need a lot of work—we are reaching out with this gospel of salvation and peace. You must become teachers and evangelists.

The Spirit that lives within you must be—to use Paul’s words to Timothy—fanned into the flames of action.

It’s the same as it was with Abram. You are blessed to be a blessing. The blessing that you are to carry to others is the gospel of truth.

You are to take the truth to the world, at least those within your purview.

By the way, this applies to us in this place and this age as well. It’s grist for the mill business once again. Everything we go through, every sermon you hear, every scripture you read, is grist for the mill as we fulfill our commissions.

Yes, we want to grow in God’s grace and become better people. That’s a noble goal, but as we advance towards that goal, we are gathering others to go with us.

We seek others to replace us, for this gospel must continue to be shared with all generations.

Paul will discuss metacognition, and we will discuss that in the next service. In the chapter ahead, he will warn us about others distorting the gospel.

For now, know that we are being prepared to be evangelists, among other things. We must not only receive God’s grace but also share it.

Amen.

Take Every Thought Captive

 

Read 2 Corinthians 10

Paul gets a little personal here. He has heard the gossip that Paul is bold in his letters but timid in person. He talks big when he is somewhere else, but not when he is with us.

Paul mentioned before that when he comes to visit, he hoped for a time of fellowship, not discipline. He wanted hugs and friendly meals with friends, not people to chastise.

What is Paul saying?

We are all on the same team. We are not competitors. We are surely not enemies. We should be friends and coworkers in the gospel.

The battles we face are mostly in our minds. We do not look at scorecards of accomplishments, but Paul could play that game if required. To use the leadership metaphor, we all need to get our eyes off the scoreboard and on the ball.

This morning, we get to talk a little about one of my favorite subjects—metacognition. We will examine thinking about thinking and consider Paul’s words to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ.

Is that an analogy, a metaphor, or some other figurative tool? What if it is as literal as it gets?

Remember, the battle is in our minds. We don’t just kick bad thoughts to the curb; we make them obedient to the will of our Master. 

Any thought that somehow enters our mind is challenged. Halt! Who goes there!

Halt! Who goes there!

To challenge every thought, we must have a perimeter. Any thought that enters that perimeter is challenged, and if it stands in accordance with our Master’s instructions, it can stay.

And every other thought is not just dismissed, it is made to be obedient to the will of Christ. If the thought enters our minds, there is a battle—a battle of wills if you will—and only the will of our Master is acceptable.

Last Sunday, I mentioned that you can’t go through life with the paradigm that life is a minefield. Yes, there is God’s way and there is everything else, but we can’t let fear govern and just creep along through life. We keep our eyes fixed on Jesus and run our race of faith. We don’t sweat the troubles of this world.

But we can’t be passive either. It’s not Que Sera, Sera. It’s not whatever will be, will be. It’s not whatever. That mindset is called cheerful fatalism. If you are a cartoonist like Gary Larsen, then you might use this cheerful fatalism for a little gallows humor.

The rest of us need to avoid it at all costs.

We don’t worry, we are not anxious, we don’t sweat the circumstances of the world, but we are not passive. Our minds are always engaged, and we are always on the lookout for those things that don’t get to live within our security perimeter.

The passive mind is like a sponge that does not discriminate. It will absorb whatever comes its way, be it good, bad, or ugly. The passive mind is indifferent to God’s way and everything else.

The passive mind grants equal access to the thoughts of Satan and the thoughts of God. That dog don’t hunt! We justify the passive mind, thinking that God will use it all for good.

Yes, God will use everything for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, but that’s no excuse for us to tune out this thinking business.

You might think Tom loves this metacognition business, but is it biblical? Really, does the Bible even talk about thinking?

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

Before we fight the stray thoughts that enter our minds, we fight the battle outside the lines. We are proactive in thinking about specific things. We don’t have to fight thoughts in our minds if our minds are already engaged in thinking on good things.

We are not passive.

We are proactive in our thinking.

In Paul’s earlier letter to this congregation, he said:

For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful. So what shall I do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my understanding; I will sing with my spirit, but I will also sing with my understanding.

Our thinking and the Spirit's leading inside us need to be in sync. We want our thinking to be in accord with God’s directions.

Too often, we ask him to align with our plans. Our own understanding has confounded our thinking. We want God to bless our plans, and he does when we align them with his plans.

In Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, we get these words.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

You might be thinking that this thinking stuff is just Paul, so let’s consider Isaiah’s words.

You will keep in perfect peace

    those whose minds are steadfast,

    because they trust in you.

The prophet noted that peace comes with a steadfast mind—a mind that trusts in the Lord.

Most of our battles are in our minds. Our battlefields are not places like Thermopylae, Waterloo, or Iwo Jima. I’m sure we could relate to some intensive mental combat in our minds even though the battles may or may not have names.

We do not fight most of our battles in the physical world. The strongholds that we demolish are falsehoods, lies, and deception. Our primary weapon is the truth, and we are not passive.

Peace is not passive.

And now I get to do another favorite thing. I get to cover some grammar and syntax in the sermon. It’s Christmas come early for me.

How should most professional writing be designed these days?  Correspondence is usually present tense. The target audience for most professional writing is at an eighth-grade level. That one still seems odd.  Here’s the heart of professional writing:

Active voice, indicative mood.

What?  We should use the active voice and the indicative mood. That’s how we communicate real things.

As opposed to?

Passive voice, subjunctive mood.

It’s the difference between “I’m doing this” and “Whatever will be will be.”

It’s the difference between being proactive with God’s directions and what-ifing something until you are overcome by events.

It’s the difference between putting your Master’s talents to work at once and burying them in the ground.

It’s the difference between doing something and explaining why it can’t be done.

And it’s all happening in our minds. Our minds prompt us to action, and our minds convince us to do nothing. The battle and the battlefield are in our minds.

Paul says that we have to be proactive. We take this cognitive fight to the enemy. We think on good things. We renew our minds in the word of God. Our hearts and our minds trust the Lord.

Our thinking is proactive, not passive.

We are a sponge for God’s directions and repel all that runs counter.

Any thought that enters our minds without proper authority will be captured, then indoctrinated, or destroyed. There is no catch-and-release.

No worldly thoughts live rent-free in our minds. If they show up, they are in for a fight.

One of Paul’s secular contemporaries was Plutarch. He said: The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.  We are to fan the flames of our God-driven minds.

When the world thinks it has us beat, remember, we have the mind of Christ.

God’s ways and thoughts are not ours. They are so much higher than ours, but we have the mind of Christ. We have the mind of God that lived the human life.

We have the best counsel ever.

It’s still God’s way and everything else, but we have the mind of the only One who has ever lived God’s way in a human body. So, here are your thoughts for Sunday lunch.

Our thinking is proactive, not passive.

We are a sponge for God’s directions and repel all that runs counter.

Any thought that enters our minds without proper authority will be captured, then indoctrinated, or destroyed. There is no catch-and-release.

No worldly thoughts live rent-free in our minds. They are in for the fight of their lives.

One last analogy, for now. Do we take the gifts of our minds and God’s directions on how to use them and put them to work at once and produce a return for our Master, or do we bury them in the ground?

That’s the big picture. For now, work on taking every thought captive and making it obedient to Christ.

Amen.

 

 

Will we do the will of the One who redeemed us?

 

Read 2 Corinthians 9

We should.

We ought to.

It’s the right thing to do.

We’re supposed to.

That’s what the rules say, right?

Don’t want to get out of line, do you?

There’s a whole bunch of people who want to just stay within the lines and follow the rules and never even wonder why we have the rules, the directives, the commandments of God.

Just put your head down and grind it out.

There are times for just that: Head down and grind it out. Lean into it. You are not sure of the whole journey but know for the moment you need to just keep pushing forward.

Do you remember Jesus telling his disciples that he no longer regarded them as servants but as friends? He chose us to bear fruit. We are more than servants.

Yes, we still serve, but we know there is more than just following the rules. God has revealed himself to us in Christ Jesus. These are no longer arbitrary rules that seem to put us through a maze.

These are directions, guidelines, counsel, and commands rooted in love. Our love must be first for God then for others. When we grasp love, we grasp the intent of the Commander—what God wants from us.

We no longer consider the law a minefield of places where we must or must not step. Both are important if you find yourself in one. I never thought that I would ever find myself in a minefield, but then one day, there you are. I was blessed that nobody was shooting at me at the time.

Where you step or don’t step is important, but you can’t go through life with the paradigm that it’s a minefield. You would be a basket case. You can’t do every day negotiating a minefield. We need something positive to steer by. We need a target on which to focus.

We need to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.

How do we do this? Let’s get to the core of our incentives and motivations. Is it not to go to hell? Your profession of faith received the gift of life from God.

Is it to live a flawless life? You are probably not going to make it through the rest of the day, perhaps the rest of the hour.

Or, and this is a big or, is our driving desire to please God and to put a smile on his face? That’s a motivation with some latitude. That’s what you give your senior commanders, not the buck private who just goes where you send him.

We are treated as friends, as family. We are trusted with our mission and commission, and our hearts desire to please God and fulfill the assignments he gave us.

Now to this morning’s chapter.

This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, others will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

When you—when we—do the things that God commands and we do them out of love for God and for our neighbor, people see that we obey our God and they will give thanks to him.

Our actions can be the catalyst that brings people to thank God. If they thank God, they may seek God. If they seek God, they will find him.

People are searching to fill a void in their lives. Fear gets in the way, and people resist and refuse to accept that God is real, he is good, and he loves them. It’s easier to live a meaningless life, or so that’s what many think.

The truth is that once you profess your belief in God and receive Jesus as Lord, your life choices become easier. You will know the right thing to do. You will know.

Whether you do the godly thing or not can be another story. It can be a big challenge on occasion.

That doesn’t mean that your circumstances are easy, but your choices are.

Will my decision bring people closer to God?

Will my choice cause people to give thanks to God?

Will what I do lead people to profess Jesus is Lord?

Will this course of action put a smile on God’s face?

It’s the whole God’s Way and Everything Else mantra that I gave you for most of a year.

Paul told the believers in Corinth that this offering that they were making would cause people to give thanks to God. That’s something to get behind or to use last week’s term, jump on the bandwagon

If what we do prompts people to give thanks to God, then we have hit the target. We are putting a smile on God’s face.

I think that we did that last Sunday afternoon. We pray that many people who thanked us also thank God and come to know him as Lord.

What’s next? It doesn’t have to be a scheduled event. It just needs to be a purposeful decision in the course of your day. What sort of decision?

To give.

To forgive.

To serve.

To pray, especially with and for someone.

To acknowledge someone, just so they know that you know they are there.

To love one another. Every time we decide to do this, we make a way for people to give thanks, not so much to us, but to God. People see who we belong to.

Our choices can bring people closer to God, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Imagine being the one who first brings the good news to someone.

Now imagine bringing the good news to someone who has heard it a thousand times but this time, it registers.

Sometimes our acts of giving and kindness can prompt someone to give thanks to God, and to thank God means you believe in God. That gets us one step closer to helping people profess Jesus is Lord!

Amen.

Giving is part of Living: Why not enjoy it!

 

Read 2 Corinthians 9

Paul is still discussing the offering for the believers in Jerusalem. He is prompting the believers in Corinth to have their offering ready when he arrives.

As an added incentive, Paul noted that it would be embarrassing if he came with a few Macedonians—who had so little and gave so much—only to find that you didn’t have your offering together yet. It’s Paul saying, “Don’t make me look bad, guys. I’ve been bragging about you, a bunch.”

Those instructions were somewhat transient, but what endures is much of what follows.

Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work

It's this whole, you reap what you sow business. The statement applies generally to our lives and specifically to our offerings.

This reaping—this harvesting business—is more than just a good investment of our money and resources. It is a reflection of the condition of our hearts.

We are to decide—that’s the verb at work here—to give in accordance with our hearts. We decide. Listen to God as he speaks to you inside, perhaps in that still, small voice, and then decide what to give.

God decided to rescue us from sin and death and he did it with the blood of his Son. We get to decide how to respond. One way we respond is by giving.

We don’t give because we are required to by God or by the laws of man.

We are not reluctant to give. We actually should look forward to it!

God loves a cheerful giver.

 Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

We should give in response to God’s love. That should be enough, but we are promised more.

God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work

You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

The giver is blessed and God is glorified! That sounds like a win-win to me.

Paul is spending a little time on this offering business. He is partially motivated by the fact that the time to collect the last of the offering has come, but much of his counsel applies to us in these modern times.

I’ll use a modern medium, the FAQ. You see these things on every online page. Have you ever wondered how companies come up with frequently asked questions when they just lauched the product and website?

Sure, there are focus groups who guess what people might ask, but mostly it’s the marketing manager who didn’t want to make his or her spiel too long but wanted to work more stuff into the presentation, at least for those who would read more.

FAQs are a marketing strategy. They want to sell you something or keep from hiring people to answer the phones. But you know the presentation, so I will do a little antiphonal presentation for you in the context of the full biblical witness. Lets go!

What should our offering not be?

A source of anxiousness.

A source of worry.

A burden of any sort. God takes our burdens

Our motivation is to receive something more. We will receive blessings, but our hearts give out of love, not greed.

Our vehicle to salvation. Jesus paid it all.

What does our offering say about us?

He doesn’t have much, does he?

She’s writing some big checks.

If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Or not!

Our offering says a lot about whether we believe in a God of abundance or one of scarcity.  Did everything really come from God, and does he still have something left for our age, or does he operate on a shoestring budget?

I hope you enjoy the paradigm of abundance. God has more than enough to meet your needs, and he looks out for you in this modern age.

Does the confluence of outside pressures cause us to cough up the offering money, or are we compelled by the Spirit that lives within us to give cheerfully?

In this age, the outside pressure to give is gone. Society doesn’t expect to see you in worship, giving from what you could spend on yourself, or loving each other. Those pressures were from a time that most here never knew.

There was a time in this country when the church and our society's morals were more closely aligned. The fact that society is moving farther from God does not discourage me.

Everyone I see on Sunday mornings, at a ministry event, or helping others during the week is doing it because God has called them to. It’s not just what everyone expects anymore.

I don’t become disheartened because those who used to come because their neighbors expected them to are not here anymore. I am encouraged that there is no outside pressure from the world for you to be here, and yet, here you are.

We get this giving is part of living mindset.

We get this cheerful giver business.

We know that God will take care of us.

We know that we are blessed—not to pad our comfort zones—but to be a blessing to others, or to abound in every good work if we want Paul’s words.

Let’s consider all these thoughts in Paul’s words once again.

God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work

You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

We are and will continue to be blessed to be a blessing to others.

Our giving and our receiving are linked.

Our blessings and those blessings we bestowed upon each other are linked.

Giving and living—to the full—are linked.

Here’s a quick tie-in with our first service. When we help, give, love, and show mercy and compassion for others, those others may be prompted to give thanks to God.

Is that not a big step in the right direction for a world that seems dead-set on operating without God or in opposition to him? It is, and for some, it may lead to salvation. Our giving may be the thing that gives that last little nudge before someone quits resisting God and receives him as Lord of their lives.

When other believers receive our mercy, compassion, and giving and give thanks to God, we have prompted their discipleship.

As believers, we know:

The Lord loves a cheerful giver. I hope you go into the world knowing this is more than a mantra—it’s real living.

·       Giving is an essential part of living.

·       Giving may even be the sine qua non of abundant life. It’s something to think on.

·        Giving is a part of living.

Why not enjoy it?

Amen.

 

Jump on the Bandwagon!

 

Read 2 Corinthians 8

Oh great! It’s more offering scriptures. Here comes the money talk again.

So, the tithe is ten percent. Tithe means tenth. I have heard or read The Money Message a few times.

Paul tells us that we should each give as we have decided in our hearts, not out of fear or compulsion or any other "have to do" reason. The Lord loves a cheerful giver.

We are to be the master of our money. We tell it what to do. The amount is much less important than the relationship. We are master of our money.

Some of that money is meant for giving. We are to be generous. We are givers.

In fact, we should embrace the paradigm that giving is part of living. You might say that there are plenty of people around who are not givers. They are living entirely for themselves.

They are not fully living. You cannot fully live until you give. Giving is important. Giving reveals our true intentions.

You can listen to the best sermon ever. You can listen to a dozen podcasts every week or every day. You can watch videos on YouTube and Reels on Facebook that talk about God, love, giving, hope, despair, joy, peace, and so much more.

But nothing expresses our true theology like giving. Will we give of what we have? That’s what Paul asks of us, and that’s what God asks of us.

We are not all required to tithe $15,000 or $20,000 per year. We should tithe ten percent of what we have, even if that works out to $100 a year.  We should tithe joyfully.  We should give beyond the tithe joyfully as well.

Paul is talking about this offering that is beyond the tithe. This was a special offering for the Hebrew believers in Jerusalem. Many had been ostracized for their professions that Jesus is Lord. Many had suffered loss. Many were just poor. All were believers and now brothers and sisters in Christ with every believer of every age and geography, including the Jewish believers of that First Century who lived in Jerusalem.

The churches in Europe were putting together a special offering. Titus had been a big part of this. The Macedonian churches were on board and excited about making this offering for God’s people.

All believers were God’s people, but this was a chance for those who had been regarded as Gentiles, pagans, and aliens but were now brothers and sisters with believers among God’s Chosen People to really connect and really show their love.

Paul noted that the believers in Northern Greece didn’t have much, but they gave from what they had and were excited to do so. This offering generated excitement.

Paul wanted all the churches in Greece to have the same excitement, especially in Corinth. This could connect believers not only in Greece and Jerusalem, but also among the churches in Greece. They could be a connectional community.

Paul talked a lot about being a new creature and saying goodbye to who we were. He told us to keep our eyes set on what is unseen, that is of God. He affirmed that we are to walk by faith not by sight.

The old is gone is new is come. That’s good counsel and we should strive for be holy as God is holy, but it’s not tactile. It’s not kinesthetic.

It’s purposeful but hard to get our heads around sometimes.

Hey! We are helping some believers who need help. That’s hands-on stuff right there. It comes with a rallying cry, and we can get behind it.

That’s a bandwagon to jump on.

When we say jump on the bandwagon today, we are usually talking about endorsing someone’s diatribe that degrades someone else. We see a lot of that these days.  We are beating up people who believe this today. Jump on my bandwagon and help me.

But we can jump on a bandwagon for good reasons. Helping the poor and afflicted is always a good reason, and we need a few causes like this to be vital in our discipleship.

Do you remember going to Moore, Oklahoma with supplies and helpers a few years ago. People were excited to help. But we don’t have to look back to find something to be excited about.

As it turns out we have a really big one happening today. It’s our backpack ministry. We are helping those who need help and live right here. The supplies help but they will be gone in a few weeks or months.

It’s the connections we make that should excite us. We should jump on the gospel bandwagon. People are coming to us. We need to share our faith with them. We need to be excited about it.

This next piece of counsel comes from Mr. Rogers. He said that when bad things happened, he would look for the helpers. Who is helping?

Instead of rubbernecking to see the gore of the accident or the demolished structures, look for who is helping. Who is helping?

Paul told the church in Corinth, "You started something good. Now, finish it. Let’s do this right, and let’s get excited about doing it right."

We should trust God.

We should profess that Jesus is Lord.

We should love one another.

We should desire to be the servants of all.

We should take the gospel to the world.

We should do all of those things, but sometimes, something just takes hold as an act of mercy, compassion, giving, or extreme kindness, and we want to jump on the bandwagon.

That’s fanning the flames of the Spirit that lives within us. That’s passion. That’s living life to the full.

Be a passionate part of what we have this afternoon or passionately part of something else that brings glory to God, but find something to be excited about in your discipleship.

We are not just waiting this thing out until Jesus returns. We are passionately putting his words into practice, and sometimes, we find something to be very excited about.

Amen.

 

Pick Your Pronouns

 

Do you remember all the hubbub surrounding picking your pronouns? I think those days are gone for a while, but who knows? What is it to picking a pronoun?

He

She

It

We

They – I am they. I remember long ago, Louis Wilson, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, once said, “I am they.” It was in response to Marines saying, “They say do this. They say do that.”  Wilson said, “I am they.”

Why stop at pronouns? There’s more action in verbs. I think the Christian might be more interested in verbs.

Go

Make

Baptize

Teach

Pray

Study

Believe

Trust

Obey

Give

Live

Love

If we have eyes to see, we will have a verb or two for every situation we encounter. We will put his words into practice.

But I can’t leave out the nouns.

Faith, hope, and love are good ones, though they have some verb blood in them as well.

Peace

Joy

Patience—though the adjective form—patient—let’s us combined it with some of our nouns. Let’s try hope. We have patient hope.

Suffering. That’s never a favorite, though after last week’s message, maybe it should be if it brings us to godly repentance.

And then there are those words that seem to cover more than one category. They are qualities. Let’s start with trust.  It’s noun and verb but it is essential to our growth. Trust!

When coupled with obey, it’s a great hymn and a powerful combination. What other qualities?

Kindness.

Gentleness.

Compassion.

Teachable. It’s an adjective, but it is also a quality we must have to continue our growth in grace. We must be teachable.

Worthy. There’s a good one. Only Jesus was and is worthy. He is worthy, but we are to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received.

Holy. We are to be holy as God is holy. It is our target. Be holy as God is holy.

I’m going to put two regular words together and make them extraordinary.

I am.

I am. Take that simple pronoun and add a very short verb, and you get a powerful sentence.  How did God tell Moses to identify who sent him?

With the words, “I am sent me.” I am. Remember, Jesus rebuking the self-righteous religious leaders.  Before anyone that you hold in high esteem in your history, “I am.”

Who sent you? “I am sent me.” Two powerful words.

Did you know that when you introduce yourself to someone, God’s name precedes yours?

I am Joe. I am Sue. I am Billy Bob. I am woman hear me roar. Sorry, Hellen Ready kept coming on the radio this week.

This was a fun little rabbit trail but I hope you take this away. We don’t spend a lot of time picking our pronouns. We choose all of our words wisely—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and more.

No, we will not diagram sentences this morning, but don’t give up hope. That might come before the end of the year.

Choose your words. God chose you to be his own. Now we choose our response to that love. Part of that response includes the words that we choose and the words that we use.

We are closing in on the part of Paul’s letter where he tells us to take every thought captive. For now, be deliberate in choosing your vocabulary, especially that which you share with others.

Amen.

Aim for Holiness

 

Read 2 Corinthians 7

If P, then Q.  Who remembers conditional statements from algebra or geometry? You can make truth tables and all sorts of cool stuff.

Back in the 90s, I took my first computer class. I was self-taught up to then, and there wasn’t a whole bunch to learn back then. Then I took a computer class at Drake University.

It taught me a lot. I loved the Word program. I graduated OSU in a degree with a lot of papers to write, and I wrote them on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

When I got to try a word processor a few years after I graduated, I thought I was in heaven. The thing was bigger than a refrigerator and all it did was word processing, but my language improved immensely as I didn’t have to start over after three mistakes. I just backspaced and retyped it.

Some years later, in this class at Drake, I was introduced to a relatively new software called Excel. It’s commonplace now, but it was cutting-edge back in the day. Nevertheless, I was underwhelmed. I wasn’t a numbers guy.

Then I discovered that Excel did conditional statements. If condition one is true or meets a specified criterion, you get condition two. Formulas use alpha designators instead of conditions one and two, but you get the idea.

You could imbed conditional statements inside of each other. That’s some fun stuff there. Or, it might just be me, but don’t we all like to get through the week and instead of going out on the town like we once did, we settle into our homes on Friday evenings and do conditional statements.

That’s how Paul started this part of this letter. Condition one is that we have these promises and that should produce condition two in us.  What?

We are promised life, abundant life, and eternal life in Christ Jesus. We are promised more, but these are three big ones.

Therefore, we should live holy lives. Holy means set apart for God. Our lives should be given entirely to God.

Our lives going forward from our professions of faith should not be tainted or tarnished by the ways of the world. It should be a no-brainer.

God gave you life—a full life—and the promise of eternal life—a promise we know to be true because it’s from God. Paul notes that alone should be enough for us to sing: Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe every day of our lives.

You shouldn’t need a moving sermon.

You don’t need a sign from God. We have all we need in this gift of life and the faith that God gave to each of us. We have what we need.

We don’t need a Blood Moon, a Hunter’s Moon, or a Moonpie to get us in the right frame of mind.

We love God because he first loved us. His love manifests to us in the life, death, blood, and resurrection of Christ Jesus. That should be enough for us to live fully for God.

And yet, it is a challenge for us. It should be a conditional statement without variation. God loves us. We love him back by being holy and untainted by the world.

We are his. That should be an unqualified statement—no conditions and no exceptions; yet, we continue to miss the mark. We still fall short.

What is it with you people! Other pastors don’t have to contend with this. Their congregations are set apart entirely for God. They don’t give in to their own understandings.

Well, maybe some do. OK, they all do as do their pastors and your pastor. We all fall short. We all miss the mark. We all transgress.

I bet that God wished he had known this about us before creation. I am quite certain that he did, and he made us anyway. He loved us anyway. He still loves us and keeps on loving us.

He knew that we would struggle. We wouldn’t always hit the target dead center. Sometimes, we miss it altogether. We struggle.

Struggle is part of life.

Look at the calf or the deer when it’s first born. It struggles to stand.

Look at the vegetation in nature. Everything struggles to get water and nutrients out of the ground and sunlight from above, except what grows in the parking lot cracks. That stuff doesn’t struggle. It thrives and would keep growing through a nuclear winter.

Look at the human child transitioning from crawling to walking. Learning to crawl was challenging, but the struggle in learning to walk is more pronounced. We all struggle.

Struggle is a part of life, but for Christians, we have a target to aim for—a target that we want to hit. We want to be holy as God is holy. That’s a holy target.

We can’t hit it every time, yet. I am confident that in the life to come, we will all be wearing those expert badges. But for now, it is a struggle.

You might be thinking. Like I needed a sermon to tell me that I fall short of God’s glory. I know the verse.

The first time that I qualified with a service rifle and pistol, I didn’t shoot expert. That was disappointing, so I threw in the towel.

No, I didn’t. I kept working on hitting the target every time until what I wore on my chest read double expert. That’s the only standard that was acceptable.

Condition one was that I was a Marine officer. Therefore, condition two must be that I could hit what I aimed at. It didn’t happen right away, but it happened.

The message isn’t that we fall short. It is that we have a target. That target is holiness. We can only hit it through life in Christ and even then, it is a struggle.

But it is still our target.  Holiness is still our target.

Holiness is our target!

Will we throw in the towel or keep aiming for the target?

Jesus made us right with God. Will we continue to aim for the holiness that we have been given without struggle?

The gift is salvation. The struggle is our discipleship. Condition one is that we are saved by the grace of God and have life, life abundant, and life eternal.

Condition two is our target, which is holiness. Can you keep your sights fixed on the target? Can you keep your eyes fixed on Jesus?

It’s a simple dichotomy. Throw in the towel on this discipleship business or keep aiming for the target of holiness?

Paul gives us a bunch of dichotomies.

·       Away from the body, with the Lord.

·       We are a new creation. The old is gone. The new has come.

·       Focus on what is unseen, not the things of the world that are seen.

·       Seeing is believing or believing is seeing?

·       By faith, not sight.

Now we get one for our modern age. Throw in the towel or pursue holiness?

You know the choice we are called to make so that we may grow in God’s grace. Just in case you don’t, it’s to pursue holiness.

Amen.

Sorrowful Repentance for the Believer

 

Read 2 Corinthians 7

Why do bad things happen to good people?

That’s the question that people have struggled with since the time of Job, likely earlier than that.

And we answer, “It’s a broken world.” We retort, “Sin is still at work in the world.”

We postulate our godly theorems to address the why of everything, and come up short every time.

We have dissonance when we think of a perfect God and a broken world and wonder why he doesn’t fix it. I want to be with God and like God in so many ways, but we live in this world and much of it does not live God’s way.

God says that I am his, but I feel like I belong to this world. It’s got its hooks in me, for sure. Why can’t the Christian be free of the world?

Why are we not set free?

But we are. And this is where the preacher steps on toes. We like the bondage of the world. Just as the Hebrew people complained to Moses that life was better back in Egypt, we hold on to and long for our old ways.

We are made new. The old has gone. The new has come. You know these words, but it seems so hard to live them.

We still hold on to the old self—the person that we were. We won’t let go. We try to make the old me fit into the godly new me and it doesn’t work, but we keep trying.

You know what’s easy to let go of? An electric fence. We have all touched an electric fence, got the little shock, and pulled our finger back. But have you ever grabbed the fence wire while it’s hot?

That takes a little more effort but you sure let go and don’t want to grab it again. It’s the same voltage either way but you feel the sting when you are holding on and there is no doubt that you want to let go.

Paul said that he wrote the church body in Corinth and chastised them in many ways. He didn’t want to, but it was necessary.

Paul didn’t want to lose the sense of fellowship that he had with this body of believers, but he couldn’t short change them either.  He had to do what he coined as speaking the truth in love when he wrote to the Ephesians.

Paul had to speak the truth in love, and it hurt him a little to have to say what he said, but Paul didn’t opt out of difficult tasks. He now told the Corinthians that he had to bring them to this sadness, this sorrow, this state of being that was ready to repent.

These were believers who had repented. They were saved, but their discipleship was lacking, and Paul could not ignore it. Love demanded that he address many issues.

This hurt the Corinthians. They knew Paul. They enjoyed Paul. They loved Paul, but now they had come to a point where truth was essential, and the truth might hurt a little. It did and it did its work.

Paul noted that Titus validated all of this. The Corinthian believers were wonderful people who sought God. They messed up a bunch, but they never gave up. Paul’s words were hard to receive, but they were received.

Paul’s words were hard to send, but he sent them, and the godly sorrow of the Corinthian believers brought about repentance. This is not the repentance that precedes salvation. This is a daily repentance where we measure ourselves against what God expects of us now that we have been saved from sin and death.

Perhaps Paul should write a few letters to the churches in America. We could use some stern counsel, but Paul finished his race and has his crown. I keep checking the mail and email, but no letter.

What do we do? Let’s try God’s word.

·       God’s words seem to be alive.

·       His word is more powerful than the best sword.

·       It can divide that which is spiritual and that which is physical.

·       It will cause us to examine ourselves as nobody else can.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, capable of dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

The word of God can bring us to sorrowful repentance. Sometimes, that is what we need because our comfort zones are so comfortable that we don’t even recognize they are present.

We are not getting a letter from Paul. We have more than just Paul’s letters. Everyone here has access to the word of God. It is available to you 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

Here’s the question. Will we let it do its work?

Will we let it do its work?

God has completed us. We are whole, complete, and reconciled to God. He did all of this.

Don’t you think we could look in that spiritual mirror which is the word of God and receive its counsel, even if it chastises us much of the time.

We celebrate because God has rescued us, but from time to time, we need to revisit repentance, not to be saved but to fully live and to bring glory to God.

We are more than conquerors, but we still need humility for none of us truly have attained a life lived completely in love.

Sometimes there must be something introduced into our comfort zones to bring us to our knees so that only God can pick us up again.

Sometimes, the blessing of life is forgotten until we lose someone or someone is seriously hurt. Sometimes there must be trouble and hurt to get us out of our comfort zones.

James tells us to celebrate our trials.

Jesus told us that if we go through trials because we follow him, we are in league with the prophets.

Why do bad things happen to good people? I don’t have an all-encompassing answer, but add this one to your list.

Sometimes, it takes sorrowful repentance to wake us up and refocus us on Jesus.

So what do I take home from this?

·       Don’t get too comfortable in your discipleship.

·       Don’t check the mailbox for a letter from Paul. Read the text from God.

·       Quit fighting the new creature that you are now. Be transformed. That begins in the mind and manifests itself in action.

What do I do?

·       Let the word of God examine you.

·       Embrace sorrowful repentance.

·       Celebrate that the truth will set you free so don’t be afraid. Don’t be anxious.

What do I get?

·       Grow in grace.

·       Look more like our Master.

·       A preview of standing before the Judgment Seat of Christ.

But what will I do? And I return to a familiar thought.

The curse of modern Christianity is to acknowledge God, acknowledge Jesus died for our sins, and acknowledge that the Spirit lives within us, and then live unchanged lives because we hold our own understanding in such high esteem.

Will we remain unchanged even in the light of the blessings and promises we know in Christ Jesus?

Will we quit fitting Jesus into our comfort zones and let sorrowful repentance do its work?

Let the word of God do its work. It is better to do that now than wait until we stand before Jesus.

Amen.