Table Fellowship

Matthew 9:9-13; Luke 10:5-9

Today we continue our series entitled Vaya con Dios. How did your random acts of kindness go last week, I wonder? Did you have opportunities to show the love of Jesus in practical ways the way Rowan challenged us all to do? I hope so. I was privileged to draw out the suggestion of words of encouragement and I had a good time putting that into practice.

 

Today our focus falls on Table Fellowship! “Come to the table” is the invitation. The challenge for this coming week is to invite a stranger to share a meal with you. This might be inviting them into your home … or it might be taking food to them. But the idea is not that we give a handout of food, but rather that we actually share a meal with someone. This is far more difficult and also far more powerful.

 

In the first Scripture today, from Matthew, we observed Jesus applying this practice. For Him it wasn’t a case of inviting someone to His home, because He did not have one. But He shared table fellowship at Matthew’s home … and Matthew invited his friends and colleagues to come and have a meal with Jesus.

Now this was remarkable because the righteous religious people of the day considered all tax collectors to be unclean. Why? Because they were in league with the Roman oppressors and thus spent vast amounts of time in the company of gentiles … who were unclean. Also, they were co-operating with the enemy … and so they were seen as traitors to the Jewish people. These were social outcasts … hated by many … and not to be associated with by anyone who was trying to build a ministry!

Now you would expect that if anyone went to eat with such people, they would hush it up and try not to be found out. But not Jesus!

The scene of the meal was the outer courtyard of a home. This was an open and semi-public area … so the passing Pharisees were able to see the meal going on. And because it was in the courtyard, it was the custom of the day that anyone  could come in off the street. So it was a bit like you and I having a picnic on the front lawn … with an outcast person. Jesus was not ashamed to be having this meal with people who were outcasts in His day. How great it must have been for these “sinners” … for the first time in their careers, a leading religious teacher was associating with them publicly … setting aside the strict Pharisaic laws of not eating with recognised “sinners”, Jesus was openly scandalous.

 

In the second Scripture, Jesus is instructing 72 of His disciples essentially to follow His example. He is sending them out on mission, like we are sending our team out tonight. And He gives them clear instructions that when they are being hosted by someone, they are to extend peace to that person, they are to eat whatever is set before them, and they are to use the opportunity to minister to them. Mealtimes for Jesus were ministry opportunities … they were a form of mission.

So to Jesus, sharing a meal with someone is far more than just eating together. It is an opportunity to minister to that person in a very gentle … very special … very powerful way. So let’s think about this a bit more together and allow the Word to guide us as to how we should go about taking up this challenge!

 

The Attitude

 

The first important thing is to get our attitude right. A good action can be ruined by a bad attitude. There are those who give to the poor, for example, and by their attitude of superiority and almost disgust with the poor … leave the poor person they have just helped feeling far worse than they did before they helped them. This was never Jesus’ way.

 

Jesus went to Matthew’s house … not with the attitude that He was a good person going to be bad people … or that he was somehow doing them a favour.

 

I believe Jesus went there with an attitude of openness to those who were different to Him. He went there with a willingness to engage with these people … to find out more about them and their lives. He went there with a mind open to learn about these people … he went with a heart open to loving these people … he went willing to make the effort to discover who these people truly were.

 

And this is the first key attitude we have to have if we are going to minister through table fellowship. We need to have an attitude of openness.

 

Jesus also had an attitude of mercy rather than judgment. He did not sit with those people thinking of Himself as a morally superior person. The Pharisees came into the courtyard with the attitude of judgment. They challenged the disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus replied, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’”

 

Mercy is when we do not treat people the way they deserve … instead we treat them with love and kindness whether they deserve it or not! This is the attitude we need towards people we are going to be reaching out to with table fellowship. We are not doing this because they are worthy or deserve it … we are doing it because we are called to act in loving and kind ways towards them. We are not to have an attitude of superiority or self-righteousness … but rather of humility and mercy. We are not eating with them to judge them or to treat them with pity. We are doing it to show respect for their humanity.

 

Remember that the start of this series I read from Isaiah 58. And I’d like to quote the relevant part of that challenging Scripture now:

 

What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families.

Isa 58:8  Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The GOD of glory will secure your passage.

Isa 58:9  Then when you pray, GOD will answer. You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’ “If you get rid of unfair practices, quit blaming victims, quit gossiping about other people’s sins,

Isa 58:10  If you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out, Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.

 

Our attitude is to be one of giving ourselves to others in openness, mercy and humility.

 

The Approach

 

How do the spiritually sick become healthy? Through a relationship with Jesus! So if Jesus was there to help the sick become healthy … He was there to build relationships with these people. This was also His approach in the way He sent the disciples out. They were to build relationship. They were to stay in one house, building relationship with the owner. They were not to move around from house to house. They were to extend and receive peace from the owner of the house. This is a picture of building relationships.

 

So when we share table fellowship with strangers … our approach must be one of building relationships. We should be asking questions about them and their families and their lives, out of genuine interest. We should be opening our lives to them and telling them about our families and our lives too. We should be building relationships of true concern with them.

 

In building those relationships they were also to use the opportunity to reveal the Kingdom of God. Jesus was doing this when he ate with the sinners. Through His presence with them … in a public place … and through the things He said to the Pharisees while at the table … He was revealing:

• the generosity of God;
• the openness of God;
• the non-judgmental mercy of God;
• the kindness of God
• in short … the love of God.

 

And when he sent His disciples out He sent them out to tell people, “The Kingdom of God is near you”. They were also to use every opportunity to reveal the Kingdom of God. They were to be the salt and the light of the world. In their conversations around the table they were to be a godly influence.

 

So as we share table fellowship with strangers we must bear this approach in mind. We are to do this in such a way as to build relationships and reveal the love of God … reveal the nature of Jesus to these people. We are not there to let them influence us to become like them … we are there to influence them with the love of God.

 

The Aim

 

Jesus was very clear about what the ultimate aim of His table fellowship was: It was to call sinners. In Luke’s version, Luke remembers that Jesus said, “I have come to call sinners to repentance. Elsewhere he put it this way: “the Son of Man has come to seek and save the lost.”

 

The point is the same no matter how you put it. Jesus was using table fellowship as a means of reaching out to people in order to help them to come home to God.

 

And this was also the point of His disciples’ table fellowship. They were to be observant as they ate with their hosts and take advantage of opportunities to minister.

 

Jesus told them to take the opportunity to pray for people’s healing.

 

He also told them to take the opportunity to share the good news that the Kingdom of God is near.

 

These are both aspects of revealing the love of God of course. If as you are sharing your meal in an attitude of openness and mercy and humility … and as you are using that meal time to build relationship and both talk about and act out the love of God … you should learn that this person has a need for healing either for themselves or in their family … would it not be the loving thing to pray with them. Just do it very simply … “Dear God, I lift up John to you. Please stretch out your hand to heal. In Jesus Name. Amen.” Simple. Let God do the work.

Maybe, as you are sharing that meal in love and humility, you learn that this person is far from God. What a wonderful opportunity to tell them about your own relationship with God and how simple it is … “the Kingdom of God is near” … to tell them that getting into a relationship with God is as simple as making a decision that you want to leave behind you the life in which sin rules your life .. and you want to have God rule your life. It is as simple as making a decision to turn away from sin and to ask Jesus to forgive you and to bring you home to God.

 

We don’t have to complicate things. We have to be straight-forward and simple … as Jesus was.

 

So as you share table fellowship with someone this week, realise that it is going to create opportunities for you to be a blessing to them by praying for them and by sharing the good news of Jesus with them. Maybe neither of those opportunities will seem to arise … but a simple word in your farewell may be enough: “Just remember that Jesus loves you.” That may be all they need. Because that is the good news. But if opportunities arise then pray for them or talk to them about Jesus. He is, after all, the best thing that’s ever happened to you.

 

Vaya con Dios

Matthew 12:5-16; Isaiah 58:6-14

 Our theme for this final term of 2009 is Vaya con Dios. This is a Spanish phrase which means “Go with God”. Throughout the 4^th term of 2009, we as a Church are going to be challenged in many different ways to be getting out of the Church and into the City to make an impact for the Kingdom of Jesus! We are going to be going with God. Vaya con dios!

In May, at our Pentecost Week, one of the clearest images the Lord gave us was the image of a Bride in Combat boots. You’ll see a picture on the screen that depicts this. Throughout this term we will come to understand better what that image is about, but allow me to explain it briefly this morning.

To do that we have to go WAY back! The Bible makes it clear that from the moment that Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden, the world has been under the power of Satan. By his deception, by the use of temptation, by instilling fear and anxiety and mistrust, by condemning people with guilt and shame, he is doing everything in his power to stop people from having a relationship with God. And so we find ourselves in a world where sin has destroyed individual lives … has destroyed families … has destroyed communities. We find ourselves in a world filled with greed – which results in poverty for millions – which results in crime. We find ourselves in a world of hatred – which results in violence and war and bloodshed. We find ourselves in a world of sickness and death – a world where disease ravages lives. We find ourselves in a world where stress and anxiety and despair are destroying the lives of millions.

Into this world a Saviour was born. His name is Jesus – the Son of God. 1 John 4 says: “For this purpose Christ was revealed – to destroy all the works of the evil one!” Jesus came to destroy the devastating works of the devil. John 10:10 tells us that Jesus came to give us back our lives.

When we listen in as Jesus sends His disciples out in Matthew 10, you would not be far wrong if you started to pick up images of warfare against the kingdom of darkness. Jesus gives his troops their marching orders and says: “Preach the message, ‘The Kingdom of God has come’, heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and drive out demons.” He commands them to be single-minded in their pursuit of this agenda … there is no time for luxuries. The disciples were being sent out to rescue prisoners of war … they were being sent out to raid the POW Camps of satan and rescue people by telling them the good news that God’s Kingdom had come and then showing them the signs of that Kingdom in such a way that they would find it easier to believe and to respond. This has always been the mission of the disciple of Jesus and it always will be!

Colossians tells us that at the Cross, as Jesus died, He broke the power of the curse of sin, He took away Satan’s legal right to destroy lives. He made a way for people to come home to God and be in a right relationship with God, and have the Spirit of God living in them, giving them victory over every temptation and every wily scheme of the devil. And many billions of people have accepted that offer and have started to live their lives in a relationship with God. We are some of those people!

Now here is God’s plan for saving the world … all of those who have been saved have become part of the army. Every Christian is a soldier in the army of God. A deception of the devil, by which he has emasculated the church of Jesus, has been to convince Christians the world over … and throughout the ages … that being a Christian is about what I can receive from God. As always, he is deceptive. The Christian life is about receiving from God … but it is also always about giving away what I have received!

Christians have enjoyed the image that we are the bride of Christ. And so we have focussed on making ourselves “beautiful” for the Lord. We have focussed on Christian living … on holiness … on receiving the Holy Spirit and His gifts … on producing the fruit of the Spirit … on fellowship and discipleship … on the promises of prosperity and well-being. Don’t get me wrong … all of these things are important … they are part of the reason we have been saved. But the Lord’s people have been distracted by these things and have conveniently forgotten that while the Church is a bride … it is actually a bride in combat boots.  We have conveniently forgotten that the vast majority of people in the world are still living in the Kingdom of darkness. The vast majority of the world is still voluntarily living under the power of satan … even though they don’t have to. We have conveniently forgotten that once we have been saved and brought in to the Kingdom of God, our primary role in life is to save those who are still satan’s prisoners of war … and to make war against the Kingdom of darkness.

The call which God has placed on the life of St. Luke’s in this 4^th term is to GET OUT into the battlefield and start waging war against the Kingdom of darkness … to start setting free the prisoners of war! And I want to invite you today to recommit yourself to being part of the bride in combat boots.

If you say yes … what will the Lord require of you? What will waging war entail? Well I believe it can be summed up in two key words: Love and Power.

 

1. LOVE

The aspect of waging war against the kingdom of darkness with the power of love is the reason we read Isaiah 58. One of satan’s most powerful weapons is to sow hatred between people. And the only remedy for that is the power of love. If you read Jesus’ teaching in the sermon on the mount, you’ll realise that this is a weapon Jesus spoke about a LOT! He described some very radical “bullets” we can fire when he said things like:

• Love your enemies
• Pray for those who persecute you
• Bless those who curse you
• Lend and don’t expect it back
• Forgive the same sin 7 times in one day

The list goes on and on … because love is a powerful weapon in the war for the souls of people. And love is a major way that we are going to be challenged to be getting out there in this term. Here are some Biblical ways we are commanded to fire the bullets of love into a hate-filled world in Isaiah 58:

• Get rid of exploitation in the workplace
• Free the oppressed
• Cancel debts
• Share your food with the hungry
• Invite the homeless poor into your homes
• Put clothes on the shivering ill-clad
• Be available to your families

Can you see how intensely practical this is?

 

Why is love so important in the battle? Well, because when you raid a prisoner of war camp, it would be vitally important for the prisoners to know who is offering to rescue them! You would need to have some distinguishing mark, like a uniform, to show whose side you’re on. Sadly many Christians come to others speaking about Jesus … but they are not wearing Jesus’ uniform … and so the prisoners say, “No thanks, I don’t think I want what you’ve got.” What is that uniform? The uniform is love! That was certainly Jesus’ own uniform … His life and His message was clothed in love … and it was His disciples uniform too. When we go out and try to win people into the Kingdom … but we do not show them love … they can be forgiven for thinking we might not be the kind of people who ought to be rescuing them.

And so it is that Jesus commands us to love one another and to love those held captive by the enemy. Every single Christian is called to wear the uniform of love and to fire the bullets of love by loving unbelievers in very practical … visible … radical ways. This term we are all going to be challenged in very specific ways to do this … we are also going to be given the opportunity to do so on a weekly basis as a Church. Friends this is going to be a radical term

You are going to be challenged to perform acts of kindness for total strangers. You will be challenged to share a meal with a stranger. You will be challenged to host prayer meetings in your work-places. We are all going to be challenged to wear the uniform of love and fire the bullets of love in this war for the souls of people.

 

2. POWER

In addition to love the next aspect of waging war is the power aspect.

Jesus Christ has not left His church powerless. In fact, quite the contrary. He has delegated His power and authority to us. When he sent out His disciples He sent them out with the command, basically, to show His power to a lost and dying world. Here are some of his power commands:

• Heal the sick
• Raise the dead
• Cleanse the lepers
• Drive out demons

Was this just a case of showing off? Never. It was a matter of demonstrating the truth of the message he gave them: “The Kingdom of heaven is near.” Jesus has called us to set prisoners free … He has called us to invite people to turn away from their broken lifestyles and embrace Jesus as the King of their lives. That is what it means to preach that the Kingdom of God is near. The |kingdom of God is right here for everyone … because at any moment … any  human being is free to exit the Kingdom of satan and enter the kingdom of God by a simple choice … a choice to change direction … to stop pursuing their own selfish agenda for life and to enthrone Jesus Christ as King in their hearts and lives. For us to proclaim that the Kingdom is near is to invite people to make that choice! It is to call people who are trapped as prisoners of war to come with us to freedom!

 

 And then Jesus has also given us the means to help them to break free from the power of their old lives. He has given us a way to help them make that decision and keep that decision by giving us the authority to demonstrate the reality of the Kingdom of God!

Jesus has not only given us a uniform to wear so that people will trust us to help them get free. He has also given us the fire-power to break them out of the POW camp.

He has given us the authority to:

• Pray for the sick
• Raise the dead
• Drive out evil

You know why most of us have never done these things? Because we’ve never tried to do them. And when we have tried, we have often tried without faith. But Jesus said that they will be a natural part of the life of every believer (see Mark 16:16-18). This does not mean that we are able to raise the dead at will … or heal everyone we ever pray for … but it does mean that when a person’s salvation hinges on that being done … the Lord will do it! The Lord will show His power.

So throughout this term you will also be challenged to collect prayer requests from strangers and trust God to show His power in their lives. You will be challenged to pray for the sick and trust God for their healing. You and i will be stretched to REALLY trust God to show His power!

 

CONCLUSION

What am I telling you? I’m telling you Church is not a place where we come to consume spiritual products like prayers, songs and sermons. Church is a place we come to get our ammunition belts filled up for the week’s battles. Church is not a place of comforting, soothing words to calm our souls … it is a place to receive our marching orders. Church is not about me and what I want … it’s about Jesus and what He wants.

Hung by the Tongue

Matthew 12: 33-37; James 3:1-12

Today our message is entitled “Hung by the Tongue”. I have borrowed the title from a book by Francis P. Martin. However the book is not the inspiration for this message. Rather I have been inspired to preach it by the passage from James and also by a person who sat in my office this week and told me that this Church has a reputation for gossip. So I felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to preach the Word of God about the power of the tongue.

 

But as we get going into this Word today, let’s bear in mind the truth of James 3:2. It says: “We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man, able to keep his whole body in check.” Two things need highlighting from this verse. Firstly the easiest sins in the world to commit are sins of speech. If you never sin in your speech then you have probably overcome every other sin as well, James says.

Secondly, James says we all “stumble” in many ways. The word he uses there can also be translated: “to slip up.” We all slip up in the things we say. We don’t intend to … we don’t set out to sin … but before we know what’s happened, we’ve slipped and fallen. We all mess it up horribly from time to time. I am no different. So please … at no point during this message today is anyone (myself included) to think that this message is for the person next to me. It’s not … it’s for me and it’s for you … for all of us.

 

The power of the tongue

 

Why is this such a vitally important issue? It is vital because few sins have more destructive consequences than the sins of speech. In James 3:6 God warns us: “The tongue is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” Those are very strong words.

 

Jesus said in Matthew 12: 36-37, “I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.”

 

But now if you were here last week you’ll be remembering that if you have been saved by Jesus your sins are wiped away. So what is Jesus saying here. I believe he is teaching us that a very good measure of our salvation is our tongue. Have we truly repented of our sin? Have we truly enthroned Jesus as Lord of our lives? We need look no further than our tongues … and if we continue to use our tongues as if Jesus is not Lord of our lives then we should actually be questioning whether He is the Lord of our lives! It was James who said in James 2:18, “Show me your faith by what you do.” Maybe he should have said: “Show me your faith by what you say.” If you truly have faith in Jesus then your use of speech will radically change! If your speech does not radically change you should question your salvation! In Matthew 12 Jesus meant that your words are the evidence of your salvation!

 

And why exactly this is so important to Jesus is because … as Proverbs 18:21 says, “the power of life and death is in the tongue.”

In an ancient Jewish book called Sirach (found in the apocrypha) the wise man says this about the tongue:

“28:13  Curse the whisperer, and double tongued: for such have destroyed many that were at peace.

Sir 28:14  A backbiting tongue hath disquieted many, and driven them from nation to nation, strong cities hath it pulled down, and overthrown the houses of great men.

Sir 28:15  A backbiting tongue hath cast out virtuous women, and deprived them of their labours.

Sir 28:16  Who so hearkeneth vnto it, shall neuer finde rest, and neuer dwel quietly.

Sir 28:17  The stroke of the whip maketh markes in the flesh, but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones.

Sir 28:18  Many haue fallen by the edge of the sword: but not so many as haue fallen by the tongue.

Sir 28:19  Well is he that is defended from it, and hath not passed through the venime thereof: who hath not drawen the yoke thereof, nor hath been bound in her bands.

Sir 28:20  For the yoke thereof is a yoke of yron, and the bands thereof are bandes of brasse.

Sir 28:21  The death therof is an euil death, the graue were better then it.

Sir 28:22  It shall not haue rule ouer them that feare God, neither shall they be burnt with the flame thereof.

Sir 28:23  Such as forsake the Lord shall fall into it, and it shall burne in them, and not be quenched, it shalbe sent vpon them as a Lion, and deuoure them as a Leopard.

Sir 28:24  Looke that thou hedge thy possession about with thornes, and binde vp thy siluer and gold:

Sir 28:25  And weigh thy words in a ballance, and make a doore and barre for thy mouth.

Sir 28:26  Beware thou slide not by it, lest thou fall before him that lieth in wait.”

 

There is tremendous destructive power in the tongue and God hates the sins of the tongue!

 

Now let’s look at this very practically by considering first 3 murderous uses for the tongue and then we’ll end on a positive note by looking at 3 life-giving uses for the tongue. Because you know the same tongue can be used for both. Peter used his tongue to say: “Lord I will even go with you to die”. But he also used it to curse and swear that he never even knew Jesus. John the apostle used his tongue to say “little children love one another for love is of God,” but he had previously wanted to use it to call down fire from heaven on a Samaritan village. No matter who we are we have to be on our guard against this murder weapon in our mouths.

 

A: 3 Murderous uses for the tongue

 

1. Blasphemy and Cursing

 

James tells us that we use our tongue to curse men but I would like to add blasphemy to that. Whenever we use our tongue to either curse or blaspheme we are committing murder with our tongues.

 

When we blaspheme we are breaking the commandment: “You shall not use the name of the Lord your God in vain.” What does that mean? To use something in vain means to use it without a purpose … or with an inappropriate purpose. Blasphemy means to use God’s name for a purpose God has not permitted.

 

Whenever we say the words: “God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Father, Jehovah, etc.” when we are neither speaking about God or to God, we are committing blasphemy. To say “Oh my God”, “Oh Lord”, “Oh Jesus” in common conversation when we are not either praying or testifying, is to commit the sin of blasphemy. And blasphemy is murder … it is murder of the image or the holiness of God. A faithful Jew will not say the word “God” … he won’t even write it down … he’ll rather write “G_d”. This is the reverence with which we are supposed to hold the name of God. And when we use God’s names lightly we are breaking down the holiness of God as if He was just a common person … or worse in some cases… as if He was a source of vileness and filth! Blasphemy is a murderous use for the tongue because it murders the image of God.

 

Cursing is also a murder of the image of God because it is a breaking down of other people … who are created in the image of God. That is because we speak curses against other people: “Damn you … you bastard … you f … this or that!” What are we trying to do? We are tryinging to either murder their self-image … or their image in the eyes of another person.

ALSO it is a murder of our own bearing of the image of God. We are in this world to represent God … to be His image for other people … and do you think that is how God would speak? No way.

 

To quote James: “My brothers, this should not be.”

 

2. Negative speech

Another form of murder by means of the tongue is negative speech. What do we murder by our negative speech? We murder hope. Aren’t you also sick and tired of those who can never see anything good in this world … in Welkom … in South Africa … they can’t see any good in anything? They go around speaking death over everyone and everything. And let me remind you that if you cannot see good in anything it means you also cannot see God in anything … because God is good … all the time. And if you love Him then he is at work in ALL THINGS for your good (Romans 8:28). So a believer MUST be looking for God to be at work in everything that happens in or around their lives.

 

When we face a problem we actually have a choice to approach it either positively or negatively … we have a choice to speak life or to speak death. And all too often Christians forget that they are called to be spreading a Kingdom of light and life and to be speaking life into situations and so they place themselves at the disposal of the Kingdom of darkness and death … and they spout death from their mouths … stealing away the faith and hope that other people have for the future … saying things like:

“This will never work! This town is just going from bad to worse! Nothing will ever come right in this place! South Africa is going to be the next Zimbabwe!”

Well if enough people keep saying that and believing that then that is exactly what will happen. By their words they are murdering our hope and our future!

 

3. Gossip and Slander

Let me give you 2 quick Dave Howard definitions:

Slander is when I say something untrue and negative about someone else!

Gossip is when I say something true and negative about someone else.

 

So it makes no difference if what you’re saying is true. If it is a negative statement about someone else … you are not to say it except to that person directly … and then only if you say it with love.

 

When we gossip or slander about other people, we are murdering their character and their reputation. It is always sin and it is a gross sin … it is murder!

Job said: “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully upon a woman.” (Job 31:1) I want to plead with us as a Church. PLEASE … I beg you … make a covenant with your lips not to speak murderously of anyone else. You are murdering people’s reputations … you are also murdering the image of this Church. There are so many good things that happen here that we ought to have a reputation for … do you really want this church to have the reputation of being a church filled with gossip?

 

THREE LIFE-GIVING USES FOR THE TONGUE

1. Praising God

 As opposed to blasphemy and cursing we have the matter of praising God. When we praise God we honour God instead of using Him for vanity and profanity. When we praise God we are lifting Him up and giving life to His image in the minds of those who hear us. We are exalting God … we are lifting Him high … we are bringing Him to life for those who hear us.

 

Our tongues are designed for praising God … that is their created purpose. That is the reason we were given the gift of speech – to praise God. James talks about “blessing” God with our tongues. As a Jew it was James’ custom that whenever God was mentioned he would respond, “Blessed be He!”

Whata great way to respond whenever someone around us is blaspheming or using God’s name in vain … Can you imagine the impact if, every time you hear someone saying, “Oh my God, or oh my Lord!” you would respond, “Blessed be God!” They will soon get the point!

Also three times a day a faithful Jew had to recite 18 prayers … each of which begin with, “Blessed be Thou o God!” Our tongues are made to bless God.We should be spending our days telling others the praises of God. We should be giving God the glory for all the wonderful things he has done in our lives! And we should be doing so to the point of others getting irritated with us.

 

2. Positive speech

Whereas negative speech kills hope … positive speech gives life to hope. When we are with an optimist it is always easier to be optimistic and we find our hope rising as they speak life into us. This is the kind of person we are called to be as Christians.

 

1 John 5:4 says, “This is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith!” Positive speech is putting faith into words. It is choosing to believe God about our future and not the devil. God has said that he has a hope and a future for us! The devil wants us to believe all is lost. So let us use our mouths to speak God’s will and God’s promise into being instead of speaking the devil’s will for destruction and negativity into being. Let’s look at the situations around us … search for God in them … and speak out the presence of God even in the bad situations. And let us search for the places where God is at work and blessings are flowing and lets advertise those things instead of being part of the devil’s advertising team!

 

Remember it is not only the power of death that is in the tongue but also the power of life. Like God did for the Israelites today he is setting before you life and death and you have to choose which you will take. As for me and my house, we choose life … we choose to use our tongues to speak life and not death!

 

3. Boasting about others 

It is a sin to boast about ourselves … but it is a good thing to boast about others. Whereas death comes when we gossip and slander … life comes when we tell forth the good qualities and deeds of others. Imagine if instead of finding juicy bad things to tell about others, you would rather find juicy good things to tell about them.

 

When we leave the presence of people we have spoken to they should have a higher opinion of those we have spoken about and not a lower opinion. WAY too often the opposite is true.

 

Of course there is also a closely connected truth here and that is that we should (for heaven’s sake) give people the benefit of the doubt. You know the proverb says that the first version of a story sounds like the truth until you hear the next witness!! Then you’re not so sure anymore. And how many times isn’t it so that people have been condemned by the testimony of a single gossip … only for us to find out later that we got the wrong end of the stick! How many times haven’t I heard the most amazing stories told about me which I know are absolutely not true … but someone picked something up and took it as true and spread it around. There is no need for us to be guilty of sinning against yet another command – “You shall not bear false witness” – which is exactly what we do when we spread untested and unfounded stories about others around!

 

But how wonderful is we could rather spread around the true stories of the amazing goodness that is found in so many people. Look for the good in others and boast about that. Don’t flatter them … advertise their goodness. You say, “Ooh that would be a bit awkward!” Well that just shows how we have lost the plot … we don’t find it awkward to gossip or slander about someone … but we find it awkward to advertise the good in others???? How lost we are.

 

 

Conclusion

 

By conclusion, allow me to read a Scripture from Isaiah. Isaiah is in the throne-room of God in a vision. He sees the glory and the holiness of God. And in Isaiah 6:5 he cries out: “Woe to me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty”. Then a seraph flew to him with a live coal in its hand which it had taken from God’s altar and with it he touched Isaiah’s mouth and said, “See this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

 

Today as you kneel to take communion … let us confess that I am a person of unclean lips … let us plead for God’s forgiveness … and let us see the elements as that hot coal that would touch our lips with the cleansing, forgiving, transforming power of God. And as we kneel let us make an individual covenant with God and with our lips … to speak life and not death.

The Way to God

I am going to make a very politically incorrect statement: There is only one way to get to God the Father and that is through faith in Jesus Christ. There are many in the world today who want us to believe that you can get to God through any religion … but this is a deception. The truth is that you cannot get to God through ANY religion … not even Christianity. You can only get to God through one door … and that door is called Jesus! He is a person and not a religion … and we get to God through Jesus. (John 4:6)

What we must remember is that God is the Creator of the Universe and of every human life on this planet. God has created you and me to have a relationship with Him and to enjoy Him forever. Because He loves us, He has created this place called earth and has given us life on this planet in order to give us the freedom to choose to love Him … and also to learn to love Him. God revealed Himself through nature. Romans 1:20 tells us that every one of us on this planet is able to understand God. We can simply look at the world around us and we can see the power and the beauty of God. We can see that there is a God and that he is worthy to be loved, worshipped and served.

God has also put into every human heart something called a conscience. This is an inbuilt knowledge of right and wrong. It is that little voice in your head that talks to you or gives you a feeling when you are about to do something that is wrong. And somehow you just know that what I’m about to do is wrong. Every human being starts off in life with a conscience. (Romans 2:14-15) We have a sense of right and wrong. So every human being can easily know who God is and how to please God … because God has given us the built-in ability to do so.

God is going to allow us to choose

Now here’s the deal … because God loves us He is not going to force us to spend the rest of forever with Him! That’s why he put us on earth with a choice. We can either love Him and obey Him … and then enjoy all the benefits of living with Him … OR we can do whatever we like in this world and live however we feel like living … and then enjoy all the benefits of living without Him. And what is more, God has made it so amazingly … that we will enjoy those benefits forever. So whichever choice we make … the benefits of that choice are going to be enjoyed forever.

In other words if we have chosen in this life to live for God then we will enjoy those benefits of living with God forever. And if we have chosen to live without God then will enjoy the benefits of living without God forever. That’s amazing isn’t it? God loves us so much that he lets us choose for ourselves!

God will be the Judge

So the Bible then goes on to teach that how this works is that at the moment we die and leave our human bodies there is a judgment which God makes. Let’s read about it in Romans 2:6-10.

The benefits of living with God in this world … striving to love Him and to please Him by our actions … is an eternal life filled with glory, honour and peace! In other words … you know that feeling you get when you win … that excitement and happiness and enjoyment … you’ll have THAT feeling forever!

The benefits of living without God in this world … living as if I am the only one that matters and doing everything only for MY pleasure in this world … is trouble and distress. It’s like … if I live this life determined to be my own boss and do what I think is best and forget God (what does He know about life?) … then God will let me be in charge of my own eternity. If I don’t want God then I don’t have to have God! The only thing is that God will respect that choice right into eternity. And believe me there is NO human being who knows how to look after himself after death.

But God loves me and won’t force Himself on me … and so He allows me to make my own choice! You know when that moment comes, God doesn’t even have to keep a written record of our good and bad deeds to know how we’ve lived. He can just take one look at us to know how we’ve been doing. You see, our lives are like a pure white shirt to God. And sin has this natural ability to stain our lives. Sin pollutes us … it makes us unclean. It is like when, as a child, you get all dressed up for church in smart, neat, clean clothes … and then your mom says, now don’t go play outside it’s been raining. But you can’t resist that nice fresh air, so you go outside and play with your puppy a bit. When you come back inside does your mom have to wonder whether you obeyed her or not? Can you possibly hide the fact that you disobeyed her? NO WAY! Because you’re covered in mud … she can see your failure a mile away. God can tell with just one look whether you and I belong to Him. He can tell with one look whether we’ve chosen to love Him in this world or to love ourselves … whether we’ve chosen to live to please Him or to please ourselves. He knows exactly where we belong for eternity.

Hebrews 4:13 makes the chilling statement: “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.” God knows those who belong to Him and those who don’t.

We are all LOST

Now think about your life. Think about whether you have been living a life of loving God or loving yourself. Think about whether you have been living a life to please God or to please yourself. And remember that the way you treat God in this life is going to determine how you spend eternity! Now listen to the truth that the Bible teaches in Romans 3:10, “There is no-one righteous, not even one!”

Okay let me assure you that this is true. It is just as true that if you wear the same white shirt every day for the rest of your life … you WILL eventually … no matter how hard you try to stay clean … you will still eventually be wearing a filthy dirty shirt. That is what the Bible is teaching is also true for us spiritually. No matter how hard you try to stay right with God … you try to love Him and to please Him … eventually you are going to make a wrong choice and you are going to mess up and go against your conscience. IT WILL HAPPEN!

Romans 3:23 puts it slightly differently … “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God!” And because we have sinned and chosen to do things our way … our lives are dirty … and God can clearly see the choices we have made. So God can see that I’ve chosen myself and my own pleasure rather than choosing to serve and love Him with all my heart. He can see the choice I’ve made and He is going to allow me to enjoy the benefits of that choice for eternity … he won’t force me to spend eternity with Him when he can clearly see that I don’t want to … that I’d rather spend it my own way.

He loves us too much

But you see … God loves us even more than we’ve realised.

John 3:16 says, “God so loved the world that he gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

Romans 3:23b-24 says: “All are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Him as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in His blood.”

Romans 6:23 puts it like this: “the wages (in our image, the benefits) of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Now hear the good news as it is declared in 1 John 1:7 – “The blood of Jesus Christ God’s Son purifies us from all sin.”

Jesus Christ came into the world to bring us washing powder for the soul! He came to take our sin away from us. 350 years before Jesus came into the world the prophet Isaiah predicted that this would happen. In Isaiah 53: 6 it says: “We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Jesus the Saviour came into the world and he took willingly took responsibility for everything WE had ever done wrong. He took the punishment that we deserved for every time we chose to love ourselves instead of love God or please ourselves instead of please God. And when he took that punishment … he bled and he died. It was the complete punishment for ALL of our sins!

We can be clean again

Now because Jesus has done that … you and I have a washing powder available to us that can make us pure again. In Hebrews 10:19 it says it this way: “Since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way … let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience, and having our bodies washed with pure water.

Remember God is fair and He is going to let us make our own choice about how we want to spend eternity … whether we want to spend it with Him or without Him. Remember that I said that God can just look at us and see what choice we’ve made because sin makes us dirty in the sight of God. Now what I’m saying is that Jesus has made a way through His death on the cross for us to be cleansed of sin … so that when God looks at us … he no longer sees our sin … he now sees the purity and cleanliness of Jesus.

Jesus obeyed God perfectly and loved God perfectly. And 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that God made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. To use our illustration we can re-phrase that verse like this. “God made Jesus the washing powder and the water … to take the dirt out of us and into Him … so that we may become clean before God again.”

Conclusion

This is the good news of God. God loves us so much that even when we have made the wrong choices in life and have gotten ourselves dirty by loving ourselves more than we love God and behaving in a way that pleases us and doesn’t please God … God makes a way for us to be cleansed again so that when the day of our judgment comes, we will be able to stand before God pure and clean.

This is exactly how it described in the book of Revelation 7:14 when the apostle John has a vision of heaven and he sees people dressed in white robes standing in the presence of God in heaven. He asks, “Who are these people?” And the angel replies to him, “These are they who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! We can be clean before God on the day of our judgment. We can turn back from our mistakes and bad choices and we can choose God again … be cleansed of our sin … and spend eternity with God instead of without God. Jesus has given us an escape route from the road we put ourselves onto by our own choices … the road to an eternity separated from God … an eternity that will be absolute hell because God won’t be there with us.

Receiving Forgiveness

Mark 2:1-12; Romans 3:21-26

Jesus returns to Capernaum from His tour of Galilee. After all the miracles and wonders He has performed, everyone in the town, just about, streams in to hear Him teaching. Can you imagine how amazing it must have been to hear Jesus preach? I wonder what He preached about. I wonder if He was  preaching about love … or maybe about true repentance … or maybe, just maybe, He was preaching about receiving the forgiveness of God.

 

There are probably ten sermons in this one passage. The love of four friends who carried their paralysed companion to Jesus. The determination and desperation of their love as they saw the crowd, climbed the stairway onto the roof and dug through the clay roof to lower the man down to Jesus’ feet. There is certainly a sermon in here about the barriers that keep people away from God: Like the crowd, do we as people sometimes get in the way of others coming to Jesus? Then there is the faith of the friends, who implicitly believed that Jesus held the key to their friend’s healing.

 

But the sermon of today is about forgiveness and its power! Let me make it clear. Sickness and suffering in this world is NOT a punishment from God directed at sinners. It is part of our fallen existence. The man was not paralysed as a punishment for his sins. Jesus made this much very clear in other passages of Scripture where He taught that there is not a necessary connection between someone’s suffering and their own sin. Yet, in this passage Jesus heals a man by forgiving his sins. He actually healed this man through forgiveness. The Jews of Jesus’ day clearly believed that this man was lying here paralysed because of some sin. For when challenged on forgiving the man’s sins, Jesus made the man stand up as proof that he had truly been forgiven.

 

But this is a unique healing in the Bible. It is a healing brought about by forgiveness. It is the only time Jesus did it; and so clearly it is a special case. And it tells us that when sin paralyzes a person, it is only through forgiveness that they can be set free. And now I am no longer talking about physical paralysis only. For sin paralyses us in many different ways. 

 

Sin paralyzes people

 I don’t want to play around with amateur psychology. Psychologists would tell us how feelings of guilt and shame in our emotional life can have disastrous physical consequences on us. It is well within the realm of modern science to believe that this man’s physical paralysis could have been brought about by guilt and shame over some past sin done by him or to him. But that’s him. And he is now healed. But what about us? Sin paralyzes and controls us today too. How?

• Greed can take hold of a person and suddenly their life is no longer their own, they are living in slavery to money. Sin paralyzes people.
• Envy can take hold of us to such an extent that we live to get what others have. Sin paralyzes people.
• Pride can paralyze us. When all that is necessary is a simple, “I’m sorry. I love you,” but pride grips me so fiercely that I cannot do it. I am paralyzed. Sin paralyzes people.
• Self-seeking ambition can grab hold of a person so powerfully that they will do anything to get to the top of their particular pile, and no longer are they governed by any kind of sense of right and wrong. When they know what is wrong, they do it anyway to get to the top. Sin paralyzes people.
• Lust paralyzes people. The great grip of pornography on its victims is testimony to the paralyzing power of lust. The man caught in pornographic lust wants to stop and break free but cannot. The person captured by lust cannot break off the adulterous relationship even when they know they must. Sin paralyzes people.
• Unforgiveness can grab hold of a person’s heart and although we know we must forgive, we are held captive by our own bitterness, anger and hatred … and our whole life slowly becomes consumed with the cancer of unforgiveness. Sin paralyzes people.
• There is no need even to list the sins of alcohol or substance abuse, the scourge of gambling – starting with a lottery ticket, graduating to the slots, the tables, and our whole financial future flushed down the toilet. Sin grabs hold of people, ties them up in bondage and paralyzes them – stealing life away from people. Sin paralyzes people.

 

 

Jesus releases people

 A man is brought to Jesus paralyzed – unable to walk. He leaves on his own two feet, carrying the mat on which he was brought to Jesus. The crowd are amazed. The key to the healing of the paralyzed man – forgiveness!

 

Today Jesus still does exactly the same for people. When the person most caught up in the paralyzing power of sin comes to Jesus in their state of paralysis, Jesus releases them and sets them free. The key to such healing – forgiveness!

 

In this passage Jesus does not set out the prerequisites for a person to be forgiven but in the paralyzed man I see a parable of the prerequisites Scripture as a whole reveals to us:

• Admit your need of forgiveness: Can you imagine the embarrassment the paralyzed man felt. Being carried to the house. Being lowered through a roof. The absolute indignity of it all is striking. But the man did not try to hide his problem. He did not care if the whole world knew and saw his paralysis. He was not trying to fool anyone or hide his problem. If only we would have the same attitude to our sin. As David said in Psalm 51:3, “I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me.” All too often we try to hide our sin, cover it up, pretend its all O.K. HOW FOOLISH THE PARALYZED MAN WOULD HAVE BEEN IF HE TRIED TO CONVINCE HIMSELF HE HAD NO PROBLEM. How foolish we all are whenever we try to convince ourselves we have no sin. We have no problem. People are paralyzed by sin and the first step towards getting un-paralyzed (if there is such a word) is to admit that I have the problem.
• Have faith in Jesus: What faith the man and his friends had. It was not just the friends who had faith. Don’t be fooled. The man was a willing participant in his daring approach to Jesus. He had faith. Why else would he allow them to lower him down like a coffin being lowered into a grave – helpless and dangling there in the air? He had faith. He believed that if he could just get to Jesus it would be O.K. Jesus was the object of his faith. Friends – only Jesus can give us forgiveness. Only Jesus can deliver us from the power and the paralysis of sin. And Jesus CAN SET US FREE. We must believe that with all our hearts.
• Come to Jesus: Like the paralyzed man – all his hope was set on Jesus and he came – we too just need to come to Jesus. He came physically, we come in prayer. Jesus’ power to forgive sins and to set people free from its power is based on people coming to Jesus in faith. When a person bound up in sin and shame and guilt comes to Jesus, falling on their knees before Him and begging for forgiveness in prayer, Jesus forgives. Time and time again Scripture re-assures us that if we confess our sins to Him He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. In the moment we ask, Jesus forgives. Come to Jesus with all your sin and all the paralysis it has caused in your life.
• Get up: Did you notice that Jesus forgave the man and he was healed, but he kept lying there on the mat. Jesus had to tell him to get up! Oh, how often people are forgiven for their sins but they do not get up! The thief is forgiven for stealing, and the power of greed is broken by Jesus, but the thief still sees himself as a thief… and although he has been set free he chooses to stay in bondage. The adulterer comes to Jesus, confesses his sin and is forgiven … but he still does not break off the relationship and stop being an adulterer. He chooses to stay in bondage even when he has been released. The paralyzed man was healed in the instant Jesus pronounced him forgiven but he kept on lying there as if he was not healed. He had to GET UP! When we have been forgiven we have to get up. We have to accept our forgiveness and not let false guilt and shame keep us captive. Sometimes its like we tell Jesus, your forgiveness is not good enough – I need more – I don’t believe you have forgiven me so I am not going to forgive myself and I’m just going to keep lying here wallowing in my guilt and shame and never move on. NO! You are forgiven. Get up. Forget the sin. Forgive yourself. Receive His forgiveness, leave your sin behind you and GET UP!
• Take up your mat: The man had to take responsibility for his past. He could not leave the mat lying there. He had to pick it up and take it with him. Like the alcoholic who dries up but will always be an alcoholic – the man had to take with him the sign of his past paralysis – the mat. He had to carry it with him to remind himself never to get complacent again. He had to remember where he came from so that he could always keep walking in victory. When we have fallen … repented … confessed … come to Jesus … and received our forgiveness … we cannot pretend we never had a problem. We must always remember where we came from so that we will never go there again. Post-apartheid South Africa has to remember what the sin of hatred, pride and racial prejudice did to it … otherwise it will fall right back into it again … and the anger of oppressed black people can easily become the anger of oppressed white people. The person who has been forgiven and set free from gambling must always carry the mat with them – the remembrance that I have been set free and I must never go back there again.
• GO HOME: Jesus tells them man, “Stand up. Pick up your mat. Walk! Walk! Walk! No. He doesn’t. He says, “Pick up your mat and go home.” Four fiends brought the man to Jesus. Four friends would have to help the man live as a normal person. As a paralytic he had no job, he probably had no wife, he probably lived as a beggar and relied on the four friends for shelter. Yet Jesus says, “Go home.” My brother and my sister do not ever think that you can walk in victory over sin by yourself. It is impossible. I live as a pastor with a sense of disappointment and frustration that comes back every now and then – all too often in fact.  For so often I help people to pray and receive the forgiveness of God and as they rejoice in their forgiveness I tell them, “Go Home.” I tell them, “Join a cell group. Get with Christian friends. Don’t go back to the old friends, the old places where you sinned. Stay away from the bar, the casino, the wrong friends.” Go home. Go home to Christian fellowship and friendships with people that will help you to learn how to live a life of freedom. Paralytic man, go home with the friends who can help you get back on your feet again. Go home. If only more of those who received the forgiveness of Jesus would stay in close Christian friendships and fellowship, they would enjoy lasting freedom. But all too many do not go home. Coming to Jesus is not a once off visit. If we are to live in freedom it needs to be a life-long relationship and that relationship will give us life daily … but that relationship needs what I like top call “Jesus with skin”. That’s us – each other – we need each other.

 

Conclusion

A simple parable. Many lessons. Do you want to be free? Admit your need. Have faith in Jesus. Come to Jesus. Receive His forgiveness. Accept His forgivness. Go realistically back into your life being constantly aware of your past, but never bound by it … and stay with those who can help you to stay free. Don’t try to go it alone.

Forgive and Forget

Matthew 6:14-15; Luke 23:32-34

Forgiveness. It’s wonderful to receive it … but it’s really tough to give it!

In the Scripture today, Jesus was up on the mountainside teaching a large group of disciples. What He was really doing was explaining to them just how totally differently they would need to live if they wanted to be His disciples. The instructions given in the Sermon on the Mount are not universal laws for all humanity … they do not aim to describe the kind of behaviour one expects from unsaved people. But rather they are instructions for those who have decided to leave behind a life of sin and follow Jesus Christ into the fullness of abundant life. They are like a manifesto of Christian living!

Now the particular section we are concentrating on today is the section that relates to forgiving others. It is actually part of Jesus’ teaching on prayer. He teaches us that when we pray for God’s forgiveness we should also pray for God to help us to forgive others … because God will apply the same degree of forgiveness to us that we apply to others. And just in case you think that there is some doubt as to what Jesus really meant here, Jesus follows this teaching up with the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18 which culminates in the statement: “This is how my Heavenly Father will treat you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” So the principle is clear: The level of forgiveness you extend to others is the level of forgiveness you should expect to receive from God!

Now another point by way of introduction is that the phrase, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” is a part of the Lord’s Prayer … which is a model for daily prayer. We know this because it teaches us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” That is clearly something we have to pray every day. And just as important, Jesus is saying, is that we ask God to forgive us and to help us to forgive other people daily. He is describing the Christian lifestyle as a lifestyle of forgiveness … a lifestyle where every single day of our lives we both receive forgiveness from God and give forgiveness to other people.

Now before you get unhappy about all of those grudges and offences you’re going to have to let go of, remember that this is Jesus the Lord of Life teaching here; and that Jesus the Lord of Life is busy teaching His disciples how they can best live out the richest, freest, best version of life available to humanity. This is not Jesus trying to spoil life for us … this is Jesus giving us the secrets of true life … the secrets of a life lived in fellowship with Him. So if this is the way Jesus taught us to live, then we can rightly ask the question: “Is this then the way Jesus lived?” And of course the answer is in Luke 23, where Jesus hanging in absolute life-threatening agony on the cross cries out: “Father, forgive them.” Jesus didn’t talk the talk … He walked the walk … with every fibre of His being. Jesus not only spoke about forgiveness being a part of the abundant life … he modelled perfectly how forgiveness is part of the abundant life.

So let’s just for argument’s sake accept that Jesus is right (!!??) and that without forgiving others we’ll never truly be able to enjoy the fullness of the abundant life he died to give us … and let’s try to understand:

1. What forgiveness means ;

2. How we go about forgiving people; and

3. What that forgiveness will do for us in the long run.

Forgiveness is …

The easiest definition of forgiveness is this: “To forgive is to release a person from the wrong they have done to you and decide not to hold that wrong against them anymore.” Please notice I said the definition is easy … not the application! When Thomas Edison was working on his crazy, new-fangled contraption called a “light bulb”, it took a whole team of men 24 straight hours to put just one together. The story goes that when Edison was finished with one light bulb, he gave it to a young boy helper, who nervously carried it up the stairs. Step by step he cautiously watched his hands, obviously frightened of dropping such a priceless piece of work. But when the poor young reached the top stair, he dropped the bulb. It took the entire team of men twenty-four more hours to make another bulb. Finally, tired and ready for a break, Edison was ready to have his bulb carried up the stairs. And who do you think he chose to carry the light bulb? That’s right, he gave it to the same young boy who dropped the first one. That’s the pinnacle of forgiveness – not to count people’s previous failures against them.

Now I don’t think that one is always supposed to immediately trust the person who has harmed us. But forgiveness is when we decide in our own hearts and minds that we are going to release that person from what they did wrong … and that we are no longer going to hold it over their heads … no longer going to use that wrongdoing to fuel our anger against them Lewis Smedes, in an excellent book on forgiveness says, “When you forgive someone, you slice away the wrong from the person who did it. You disengage that person from his sinful act. You recreate him. At one moment you identify him as the person who did you wrong. The next moment you change that identity. He is remade in your memory. You think of him now not as a person who hurt you, but as a person who needs you … Once you branded him as a person powerful in evil, but now you see him as a person weak in his needs. You re-created your past by recreating the person whose wrong made your past painful. So the releasing is a releasing of the person from their connection to the wrong they did. It is the beginning point of seeing them as a person again instead of just as a wrongdoer. It is a conscious choice that we make that we will not bring up their past wrong-doings and hold them against them in future.

Can you see that forgiveness is a manifestation of love? Remember 1 Cor. 13 says that “Love keeps no record of wrongs.”

Lewis Smedes adds something very interesting. He says that forgiveness is not the same as pardon. You may forgive one who has wronged you and still insist that they bear the consequences for their action. Forgiveness simply means that one releases the person … but not necessarily that one is either able to or expected to do away with their consequences. That’s why we can forgive our children when they do wrong … but sometimes in order to teach them we still have to punish them … or allow them to feel the consequences of what they have done. This does not mean that we haven’t forgiven them. It means we love them.

What does forgiveness achieve?

 The beauty of forgiveness, and the reason why it is so vital for abundant life is that when we release the other person, we also automatically release ourselves. I’m sure you noticed that in the parable of the unmerciful servant, it was the person who would not forgive the other’s debt who ended up being tormented. And this is exactly what happens to us when we refuse to forgive. We are tormented by the sin that was committed against us. And forgiveness is the only thing that can ever release us from that torment.

Forgiveness gives release to the sinner and also release to the one sinned against. Holding onto the grudge adds nothing to our lives … it only robs us of our peace, joy and ultimately of our experience of abundant life. Apparently in some parts of Africa people traditionally capture monkeys by setting up cages and placing bait inside. The bait can be anything a monkey would want, such as food or an unusual object. The monkeys are lured to the cages but are too smart to actually go inside. Instead, they reach through the bars, grab the bait, and try to pull it out. Because the object is too large to go through the bars, the only way the monkey can get away is to drop the bait. But monkeys refuse to let go. They kick and squeal but keep holding on. They stay trapped in bondage because they refuse to let go of the bait. So many Christians accept the role of being the devil’s monkey? They grab Satan’s bait, which is called offenses? Satan sets his trap, using offenses as bait. If you grab the offense, you will be his prisoner as long as you hold on. Many people are incarcerated in the devil’s dungeon because they refuse to let go.

You must choose to let go of all past offenses and keep your hands off all future ones.

Unforgiveness means we desire to hurt the people who have wounded us. But ultimately it only serves to hurt us. It’s like the little boy who was sitting on a park bench in obvious agony. A man walking by asked him what was wrong. The boy answered, “I’m sitting on a bumble bee.” “Then why don’t you get up?” the man asked. The boy replied, “Because I figure that I am hurting him more than he is hurting me!” The healing process begins when we get up off the park bench. God will only heal our wounds when we stop inflicting pain on the one who hurt us.

How can we go about forgiving someone?

Even before we take a step towards forgiveness we will already have been praying the Lord’s Prayer … we will have been praying for the Lord to help us to forgive the other person. Once we have asked for this help … we can begin the process of forgiving.

The very first step of forgiveness is to make a conscious decision that we are going to release the person. There will be no immediate change in our feelings … it will simply be a cold, unfeeling decision that we are going to obey Jesus in this matter and release the person and choose no longer to hold their sin against them. That is step #1.

But because we are in a spiritual war and the devil is going to keep on tempting us to live in Unforgiveness … the next part of the Lord’s prayer says … “and deliver us from evil.” If you are trying to forgive someone you can bet that the devil’s going to remind you of the painful event to try and get you back into unforgiveness. So stay faithful in praying that the Lord will give you strength to forgive and to keep forgiving.

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch Christian who was also a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp for almost the duration of World War II. After the war she had a speaking ministry where she particularly taught on the power of forgiveness. Corrie once told of not being able to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had decided to forgive the person, but she kept rehashing the incident and so couldn’t sleep. Finally Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest. She wrote, “God’s help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor, to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.” “Up in the church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down. And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force — which was my willingness in the matter — had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.”

We need to trust God to heal our memories … but while He is busy doing that we need to be willing to recommit ourselves to our decision to forgive … sometimes that will be over and over again.

I am Okay

2 Corinthians 5:17; 6:3-10

I often read the scripture from 2 Cor. 6 with a sense of awe. Let me be honest with you. I have very seldom in my life been in a state of mind I would be able to go through what Paul went through and still stay strong in the Lord. Just think about for a moment. Everything Paul listed there he had to go through BECAUSE he was following Jesus and preaching the gospel to people

 

Because of his obedience to Jesus he was subjected to:

1. Troubles
2. Hardships
3. Distresses
4. Beatings
5. Imprisonment
6. Riots
7. Hard work
8. Sleepless nights
9. Hunger

10. Being dishonoured by people

11. Being treated as an imposter

12. Being denies by those who know me

13. Being beaten

14. Grief

15. Poverty

16. Losing every worldly possession

 

Now if we were obedient to Jesus and as a result of our obedience we experienced those 15 things, what would our immediate reaction be? Let me suggest a few possible reactions:

 

• That’s the last time I obey Jesus?
• What the heck … what did I do wrong that God is punishing me like this?
• If this is what I get for being faithful, then count me out?

 

But Paul’s reaction is completely different. How did he and his companions respond to these things? Listen as he lists their reactions:

1. Purity
2. Understanding
3. Patience
4. Kindness
5. Sincere love
6. Truthful speech
7. Being genuine
8. Always rejoicing
9. Making others rich

 

Their reaction to their hardships and persecutions was absolutely profound! They did not believe for a moment that God had turned away from them just because they were going through hardships. NO. They counted it an honour and a privilege to be allowed to go through this for Jesus. They had the same attitude the apostles had in Acts 5 when, after having been flogged for preaching in Jesus’ Name, verse 41 says: “The apostles left the Sanhedrin rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.”

 

But today there are very few Christians who have that attitude. Most Christians want to know – what’s in it for me? Most Christians want to get something from Jesus … want to receive the blessings of God … want a guarantee of a better life now! We want to know that if danger arises and we pray that God will always deliver us from that danger. We want things always to be for us like they were for Elijah when he defeated the prophets of Baal, or like David when he defeated Goliath, or like Jesus when he walked on water. We don’t want things to be for us like they were for Elijah when he sunk into the depths of depression, or for David when Saul hunted him down for years, or for Jesus when He was betrayed and crucified. We want the good without the bad.

 

But this is not how God works. In that list of 15 bad things … there were 18 good things. And for every Biblical character there were both good times and bad times. Jesus Himself told us that persecution will come. He told us that in this world we will have tribulation.

 

We must expect bad things to happen!

 

But then Jesus also added: “But be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”

 

And here we are coming to the good news. But the good news is not that there is a secret which if you follow it nothing bad will happen to you. Rather the secret is a secret that will enable us to overcome the bad things that happen to us and come out on the other side more than conquerors.

 

The secret starts with making a decision that my life belongs to God!

 

The life of a believer is described in Colossians 3:3 – Your life is hidden now with Christ in God.

 

A Christian … no let me rephrase … a victorious Christian … is one who has made a decision … my life is no longer my own … it belongs to Jesus Christ … it belongs to God.

 

How could Paul overcome so much persecution and still stay faithful to Jesus? Because he had made this decision. He tells us as much in 2 Cor. 5:15 – “He died for all , so that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and was raised again!”

 

If my life’s main aim is pleasure or comfort, I will always be disappointed with Jesus because that is not His main aim. His main aim is to please the Father. But if my life’s main aim is to please Jesus … whose main aim is to please the Father … then if I am obedient to Jesus and that obedience brings persecution … then there is no reason for the persecution to be able to get my life off track … because if Jesus is pleased … that’s all that matters. NO I won’t enjoy being persecuted … but it won’t be able to stop me from living for Jesus … because I value the joy of Jesus higher than I value my own physical comfort.

 

Satan had launched a very clever plan against humanity. He has tempted an tempted and tempted again … and he has successfully moved humanity and our culture to a position where we value our own comfort, pleasure and entertainment far more highly than we value the joy of Jesus.

 

So if I were to tell you that this church is only for those who have “making Jesus joyful” as their top priority … and if I then added that in order to make Jesus joyful we had to sell absolutely everything we owned and give it away to feed the poor … and then start from scratch to look after ourselves again … and if I then added that because that’s what will make Jesus joyful … and because you only be a member of this church if you make Jesus joyful … the new members programme will only be open to those people who sell everything and give it away … there would never be another new member!!!

Why?  Because Jesus is not our top priority … we  are our own top priority.

 

The secret to an overcoming life starts with the decision that Jesus Christ and His pleasure are my absolute top priorities! Only then can we truly say with Paul: I am a new creation … the old has gone the new is come!

 

2. The secret continues with receiving the power of the Holy Spirit

 

You may have noticed that I left out a few gems when I listed the good responses of Paul and his companions. Here they are now:

1. The Holy Spirit
2. The power of God
3. Weapons of righteousness
4. Glory

 

If all there was to the good news was that in order to be saved you have to make Jesus the absolute top priority in your life … then we would be left in a situation of legalistic obedience to Jesus.

 

But that is not the gospel … at least it’s not the full gospel. The full gospel is that when we make the decision to turn away from our selfish lives and make the joy of Jesus our top priority … as Mark said last week to make Jesus our “Boss” … when we do this Jesus Christ Himself fills us with the Holy Spirit of God! We receive Christ in us the hope of glory.

 

Paul and his companions were able to keep making the decision to obey Christ even in the face of persecution because their top priority was Jesus. But the power to follow through on that decision did not come from them .. it came from the Holy Spirit within them. In Colossians 1:29 Paul says: “I labour with all His energy which so powerfully works in me.”

 

The mainline churches have for generations been robbing Christians of the fullness of the Gospel because we have been teaching Jesus without teaching the Holy Spirit! We have been getting people born again … but not giving them the life-blood of the Holy Spirit. We have been keeping Christians in ignorance about the power of the Holy Spirit who lives in them by faith in Jesus!

 

And so from time to time when revival breaks out and people like John Wesley start preaching the fullness of the gospel and weird and wonderful signs begin to happen as the Holy Spirit moves in their midst … they virtually get labelled as heretics. Why? Because the vast majority of mainline Christians think living as a Christian without the power of the Holy Spirit is normal! It’s not. Living in the power of the Holy Spirit is the normal Christian life! When Jason asked us to define revival the other night I heard Mark call out: “It’s when the church is acting normal” Amen to that!

 

When does a body need revival? When it has died … not when it is living normally. Revival returns a body from death to life … where it is meant to be. When a body is alive it does not need revival.

 

If you are a Christian and you have been trying to live the Christian life without the Holy Spirit I have two things to say to you:

1. Now you know why it has always been so HARD!! You’ve been like a human body that’s trying to live without food! That’s not the way it’s meant to be! No wonder you’re finding the Christian life so hard!

 

1. Tonight can be the night that all of that changes. Tonight can be the night when you allow Jesus to fill you with His Spirit and give you the power to live the Christian life with JOY and VICTORY! Don’t go home tonight knowing that I have given my life to Jesus but I have not allowed Him to give me the power to live this new life! Rather go home tonight WITH the power of the Holy Spirit pulsing inside of your life and releasing daily within you the power to be able to stay faithful to Jesus regardless of the consequences of that faithfulness.

Sunday 23 August: Materialism

Breaking free from materialism

Luke 12: 13-31

 Today our theme is “Breaking the chains of materialism”. It is about breaking free from always needing and wanting more and more. This is the need we see in the rich fool in Jesus’ parable. Here was a man who had a lot, but was not satisfied.

He wanted more … bigger barns to store more crops and goods. He wanted to ensure himself of a future where he could eat, drink and be merry.

 There are so many people (both non-Christians and Christians) who live in total bondage to material things. They are living lives of quiet desperation … working harder and harder to gain more and more money and material possessions. Their lives are characterized by worry, anxiety, stress and that haunting sense of unhappiness. For brief moments that unhappiness is driven away when they buy the newest car or big-screen home entertainment centre. But then we all know that the novelty of a new possession soon wears off and we’re back to square one feeling that there is something out there that will satisfy the ache in our souls.

 Maybe you have experienced this emptiness yourself. Then you’ll be able to identify with the Bible’s vivid descriptions of people stuck in this trap. Check out these few examples:

• He who trusts in riches will wither (Prov. 11:28). It is so true that life begis to wither away and become dry and dead when our focus in life is materialistic.
• Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires, that plunge men into ruin and destruction. (1 Tim 6:9). How many have not ended up ruining their lives, their marriages, their families, and their health because life consisted of not much else for them but making more money.

 The bondage of riches is about the fact that riches lure us to find our sense of meaning and purpose in riches … and that will never happen because riches are only a created thing. Riches do not have any power to add anything meaningful to our lives … Money is a dead thing … it is, in itself powerless. But the danger of riches is that we make money an idol … placing our trust in it and our keeping our life’s focus on it. It will then ALWAYS take us down into a trap. Not because there is anything wrong with money in itself but because WE GIVE IT THAT POWER by deciding that it is the top priority in our lives. And when we have done that we end up serving money for the rest of our lives. Did you hear that … we serve money and the material things that it buys. We give our lives to serve a dead thing.

 And not only is it a dead thing … but it is a temporary thing. It is so weak a god that it can be stolen … it can rust … it can break … it can be burnt up by fire … and when we die, it can’t go with us, it has to remain behind. As Jesus said to the rich fool, “You fool! You will die this very night. Then who will get everything you worked for?”  Why on earth would we want to spend our whole lives serving something so temporary and meaningless? It really makes no logical sense at all.

 But the shocking truth is that when we do this we end up being:

• Anxious
• Stressed
• Unhappy
• Unhealthy, and
• Frustrated

 We also end up with a totally warped perspective on life which makes us make terrible, life-destroying decisions. For instance a colleague told me about a couple who came to see him a while back to discuss having an abortion. They already had a number of children, and explained that if they kept the child they would have to sell a farm to cover the expense. Can you see the power of materialism … that a life becomes less important than a farm?

 The good news is that Jesus came to set us free. And so, because money is such a common god in so many people’s lives, it is not surprising that part of Jesus’ offer of salvation was an offer us an alternative lifestyle when it comes to money.

 

The Life of simplicity

 The path to freedom from bondage to materialism lies in the lifestyle of simplicity.

After telling his parable Jesus lays out this lifestyle for us:

 “Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God.” Then, turning to His disciples, Jesus said, “That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food to eat or enough clothes to wear. For life is more than food, and your body more than clothing.

Look at the ravens. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for God feeds them. And you are far more valuable to Him than any birds! Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?

And if worry can’t accomplish a little thing like that, what’s the use of worrying over bigger things? Look at the lilies and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for flowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, He will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith? And don’t be concerned about what to eat and what to drink. Don’t worry about such things.

These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers all over the world, but your Father already knows your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and He will give you everything you need.”

 I want to just point out two key things aspects of this Jesus-lifestyle of simplicity.

 

1. The King dominates our thoughts and desires

“Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God.”

Did you notice the emphasis Jesus puts on God. Whereas the rich fool was totally focussed on his goods and was ignoring God, the disciple of Jesus is called to get their focus off things and onto the God who supplies them for us. They are not ignoring material things or treating them as evil at all. But their primary focus is on God … and when they have material things they view them as gifts from God … and as yet another reason to love God even more.

 When I was preparing this sermon yesterday I asked the Lord what the key message was that He wanted us to hear from Him and almost immediately I felt the answer rising up in my spirit: “Tell my people I want to be their first love!”

 A materialistic lifestyle makes material things and pleasures our first love. While a Jesus-lifestyle makes God our first love. And isn’t it amazing how often in this series on breaking the chains that fact is coming up … that the key to breaking chains is to love God and have Him as first priority in our lives. Whether it is breaking free from addictions … or from our comfort zones … or from our fear … the largest part of the process is loving God more than we love our addiction … more than we love our own comfort … more than we love the opinions of others … and more than we love material things.

 And we must be very careful here because we can easily be Christians who love God because God is the means to acquire blessings. We can end up loving the blessings God gives rather than the God who gives the blessings … and that is really unacceptable. It is God … and not His blessings which we must love above all else.

 And how will we know if this is true in our lives? Well, just let some tragedy or set-back come across our paths. What is our reaction? It is an absolute truth that difficulties in life will always push us closer to God if we allow them to … and so Jesus’ command to rejoice in trials begins to make sense if we love God more than we love His blessings. But if we greet every trial with a sense that God has let us down and with a sense of anger at God because things haven’t worked out our way … then I can guarantee you the root problem is that we love His blessings more than we love Him.

 If we want to live truly free lives then we have got to install the LORD as the number one priority and love in our lives. That is the guaranteed pathway to freedom and abundance of life. That is why the first and greatest commandment is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength.”

 

2.       Let the Kingdom dominate your efforts

 “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and He will give you everything you need.”

 The first principle was a matter of the heart – let the King be your first love.

 The second principle is a matter of behaviour – let the Kingdom dominate your efforts. The rich man was spending all his time and energy getting richer. But Jesus commands us to seek the Kingdom of God first and, while doing so, to trust the King to provide for our needs. Rather than spending all our efforts to get earthly riches … we should be spending our earthly riches in an effort to grow the Kingdom.

 Now that in itself is a principle with many applications. But let’s just try to apply it in the area of material things. How do I seek the Kingdom first in relations to my finances and material property?

 The answer is to let Jesus Christ be the King in every decision I make about my material things. I believe that if we did this we would live radically different and far more effective lives – and I include myself in that statement.

 

1. Money: For the King to be King of my money is not only about letting the King decide how much I give away and how I do that … it is also about letting the King be the King of how I spend my money and how I save my money. You can only do 3 things with money: spend it, save it or give it away. And Jesus must be King of all 3. So we are called to let the King determine our tithe … to let the King determine what we spend our money on … and to let the King determine what we invest our money in. And a simple question will help us to decide what the King wants: “Would Jesus spend His money on this thing?” Would Jesus rent this video with His money? Would Jesus buy this luxury with His money? Let the King be the King. And with our minds on what Jesus said in this passage we should also be asking: “Does this purchase extend the Kingdom of God?” is it going to move me closer to Jesus or further from Jesus? Is it going to move others closer to Jesus or further from Jesus? Jesus is being very radical in this statement when, in the context of money, He says, “Seek first the Kingdom.” Because by saying that He is actually saying that our money should be enslaved to the purpose of growing the Kingdom. As a radical follower of Jesus … living free and abundant life … we are not to serve our money but to serve God … and our money is not to serve us, but to serve God too.
2. Material possessions: We are so often unable to truly justify many of the purchases we make except to say that they are for our own pleasure. Now I’m sure that God wants us to have pleasure … but He also wants us to make sure that our pleasure is not at the expense of the Kingdom of God. And if it is a choice between purchasing something that will give us pleasure and investing in the Kingdom of God, then we must invest in the Kingdom!!  Jesus said: “The purses of heaven never get old or develop holes. Your treasure will be safe; no thief can steal it and no moth can destroy it.” To invest in the Kingdom is an eternal investment. That new TV will break … but the soul saved by the missionary in India will live forever. The car will rust and grow old and useless … but the person you feed and give a gospel tract to may just get saved and live forever. Our material possessions are to be investments in the Kingdom.

 

So the call is to use our earthly wealth and possessions in such a way as to grow the Kingdom of God. We are to invest energy, time and effort in the Kingdom of God … but also money and possessions … because the Kingdom of God is worth more than all the riches of this world.

 

Freedom from materialism comes from a change of first love and a change of priority. God, not riches are to be our first love … and the Kingdom of heaven … not the Kingdom of our own comfort is to be our first priority.