Community Unity
Notes
Transcript
Community-Wide Thanksgiving Service
Community Unity
Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to this community-wide service as we prepare our hearts for the celebration of gratitude later this week. I love the quote I heard recently by Terry Jacobson…. While you are carving the turkey, don’t forget about the Lamb. That is why we are here today. We do not want to forget about the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!
One of the joys of being the new guy in town, even if it’s because I just moved back after a decade of being gone, is that you get tapped for all those things in the community… like preaching the Community Thanksgiving service… Thanks for the nomination Charky! I mean, I shook his hand for the first time and 10 minutes later he’s throwing me under the bus so he wouldn’t have to preach… I mean, Danny didn’t even do that!
All kidding aside, it is an honor to stand before this community, in this great church of the Community, and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I know, I’m supposed to talk about Thanksgiving and I’m probably supposed to read one of the 85 “Give Thanks to the Lord” passages from the Psalms… but, that’s not where God led me. In fact, you may never want me to preach in front of you again when we get to the end, because God has laid something different on my heart that I am to share with this community.
So, buckle in and turn in your Bibles to Romans 11:33-12:2(NIV)
<Prayer>
Sermon Slide
Unity. That is our goal… That’s why we gather in a community service like this. We are one body of Christ. Maybe the Catholic Church is the Arm, the Methodist the leg… Grace, you might be the other leg. Presbyterians… maybe you are the head – You know they are smart and all… Baptists you are another arm… Pentecostals – you guys are the heart… We are all different parts of the same body. We each have a combination of gifts in our congregation that yields a different outcome. But here is the challenge, in our local church, in our community, and in our nation…
There is a concerted effort to divide us. Oh, I don’t think the intent is division… I think the intent is profit, but the unintended consequence is division. How many of you frequent a social media site? Facebook, X, Instagram, Snap Chat, TikTok, Linkedin… or anything like that? The algorithms of these sites are designed to feed you more of what you look at. If you look at sports results for the Dallas Cowboys… you will get things in your feed about the Dallas Cowboys.
If you look at political posts about conservative issues, you will see more posts about conservative issues… Same thing with liberal issues, republican and democrat posts. They feed you more of what you have looked at in the past.
How about your choice in news?
If you watch Fox News or CNN exclusively, you are getting information slanted to one side or the other… Marketing tells them that a Democrat watching CNN wants these kinds of stories so that’s what they do.
Same thing with Fox News, CNBC, OANN, and the list goes on.
Their goal isn’t to divide the nation, their goal is to make money off of you.
It has and continues to create situations where we are siloed in our thinking and a narrative in which people of different backgrounds cannot converse with each other without getting angry. We are divided and the divide is becoming more and more vitriolic.
On November 5th, I prayed that we could move past the day and reunite. What I found on Wednesday, November 6 was a news feed split with ½ friends who thought the Anti-Christ had been elected and the other half who you would have thought Jesus had returned. And Donald Trump is neither.
We aren’t the first to deal with something like this. We know from the Book of Acts that in the early church, they were a ragtag group. You had Paul, the scholar and you had Andrew the Fisherman. You had women in leadership, unheard of in the normal society of the day… you had poor laborers and wealthy patrons. You had slave and free, you had Jew and Roman and Greek. And yet, they were together… they had EVERYTHING in common.
They shared together the needs of one another. They didn’t need the government for welfare, they cared for one another. Those who were doing well helped those in need with the understanding that if the tables turned, the others would care for them. They set up ways to take care of the widows and orphans. They regularly brought abandoned children into the church to care for them and raise them in the church.
Not only that… they worshiped together, they shared Communion, the Eucharist, together… they fellowshipped together in each other’s homes with glad and sincere hearts. They were grateful for one another and for their Lord!
Acts 2 tells us that they gave Thanks and Praise! And you know the outcome? The Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Friends, we have got to get out of the cultural wars and political backbiting… we’ve got to get out of our ideological and theological silos and link arms with those of us who have the most important thing in common… Jesus Christ! You and I are not Democrats or Republicans… you and I are Christians… We are followers of Jesus Christ first, before anything else. Yes, I’m proud to be an American, but what is more important is the fact that I am a child of the one true king!
The early church understood that the remedy for keeping out the spirit of division was to embrace a spirit of grace and gratitude. Paul and the early Church Fathers preached a gospel of grace. In the New Testament, the word Grace, Charis,and its derivatives are mentioned more than 170 times! We already used it once in the word Eucharist.
These early church leaders knew, that if the people would simply slow down and give thanks for one another and thanks for who God is, then we would live like Jesus.
And that moves us into my next point. We have a need for Holiness. We are called to be holy.
Need for Holiness
The first line of Dr John Oswalt’s book, Called to be Holy, says it plainly, “The fate of the Christian Church around the world depends upon what the church does with the idea of holiness.”. He goes on to say, “Unless Christians are truly transformed into the character of God, the whole purpose of the Church’s existence becomes blurred and confused. The world looks upon (the unconverted) who nevertheless claim to be the people of God and they say “You lie!” But beyond that, a Church without the character of God lacks the power of God and we find ourselves right back in the situation that Israel was in when Isaiah told her “you were with child and you writhed in pain, but you gave birth to wind; you did not bring salvation to the earth; you have not given birth to the people of God.”
I don’t have to give the ever-changing statistics to this group, we are living in the reality of the fact that fewer and fewer are in church. More and more are leaving the faith or never claiming faith in Jesus. In an April 2009 Newsweek article, the author said “The Christian God isn’t dead, but he’s less of a force… than at any other time in recent memory.”
Rather than living a life transformed into the image of God, so many of us live a superficial life attempting behavior modification to combat sin. You know what I mean… It’s like the little blue book I was given in 1984. In it, I had instructions for daily devotionals, little checkmarks on daily activities to perform, and notes for me to journal. If I did those things then I was a good Christian and I got a gold star by my name in the youth room.
Sounds a little old school, I know… I am old… but here’s the problem with that method of “Discipleship.” It was about what I was doing more than it was about the one working in me. I would have seasons of success with my little blue book where I felt good about my faith, then I would slip away from my habits and I would be racked with guilt. As author Hannah Moore wrote in Religion of the Heart, many of us live a Christianity “that is too sincere to be hypocrisy and yet too sporadic to be profitable.”
The Romans passage we just read talks about being a Living Sacrifice. What is a sacrifice? It is something that dies. The problem is we are too focused on the living part and we don’t live through the dying part. We aren’t willing to die to ourselves, instead we try to modify our behavior so we look good. Yet, the reality is that we don’t truly live until we die… as Paul told us, to live is Christ, but to die is gain! Or better, as Jesus said, we don’t understand the abundant life until we take up our cross and follow Him.
If I were to go around this room, I would bet that many of you have similar stories.
We see our children walking away from the church. We see families more focused on what activities they can have their kids in for the best scholarships rather than having them in church to grow in faith.
We don’t disciple our children as parents and,
as pastors and leaders, we don’t disciple those in our pews
because we haven’t been discipled.
And, the irony of this is that all this has happened in a season when we have more discipleship materials available than at any other time in history. I wanted a copy of Dr. Oswalt’s book on Monday so I ordered it and Amazon delivered it on Tuesday. Between Amazon and the WWW – we have the world at our fingertips within 24 hours…
Yet people are not being discipled in the faith. We are not reaching the lost, and we ourselves are not being transformed into the image of Christ.
Paul told us in Romans 12:2 that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. What is that? Well, Paul tells us in Philippians 2:5 that we are to have the same mind as Christ Jesus.
Unfortunately, the focus of the church has too often been on sin and what method to prevent sin than it has been the renewal of our minds in Jesus Christ. We don’t disciple, we don’t talk about holiness, we don’t talk about transformation… instead, our Christian life has morphed into some kind of humanistic moralistic therapeutic deism where we try to do good and be good, rather that abide in the one that is good.
The unintended consequence of our lack of discipleship has been a lack of evangelism within our own homes and faith communities.
Need for Evangelism
Every Sunday you, I, we drive to our churches across the community… from all over Navarro County we travel to our churches oblivious to what and who we are passing… unknowingly or simply not caring, we drive past 22,000 people who do not have a church home. Men and women, boys and girls. Elderly and young… red and yellow, black and white… we pass by 22,000 people living through hell on earth as they head toward an eternity apart from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Rather than think of those 22,000, we worry about sharing sheep between the flocks… You know what Sheep Sharing is, right? Amy and John want a better children’s program than they have at ABC Church so they move over to Main Street church, but Bill and Sue got mad at the pastor preaching politics at Main Street Church and run across town to ABC Church where the pastor is more in line with their political preferences. Both churches celebrate, calling it church growth but the Kingdom of God only shrinks as another young person sees through the façade and walks away from the church.
Friends, we have to stop sharing sheep and start looking for the lost sheep and offering them a savior.
You wait for your pastor to evangelize but there’s something you need to understand. Your pastor spent all that money at seminary and he or she learned how to read Tillich and Bart, they learned who Origin and Augustine of Hippo were, and they studied the arguments of Calvin and Arminius, but they didn’t learn how to evangelize. Instead they took courses on evangelism that taught them the theory of evangelism, the history of evangelistic movements, the negatives of Bible thumping theology, and the harm caused by such questions as “if you were to die tonight where would you spend eternity.” But, they likely did not learn how to share the gospel with another individual.
Here's how simple evangelism is. When you find a new restaurant that you love, how easy is it to tell others about it?
Well, if you are being transformed… if you are a living sacrifice, being transformed by the renewing of your mind, then to tell others about Jesus should be second nature, as easy as telling someone how great the new Academy is.
OK, we’ve talked about Unity, Discipleship as a need for Holiness, and Evangelism… and I’ve stomped all over my toes in the process, and I hope that God has convicted you through these words that God has laid on my heart.
So, don’t worry… I’m wrapping this up with the final point. A point of unity for us all during this Thanksgiving season. That is the word, Thanksgiving. We are called to be holy, we are called to share the gospel with others, and we are called to be thankful.
Brothers and sisters in Christ. I am thankful for you. I am so glad that we serve our Lord together, here in this great community. I am thankful for the camaraderie among the pastors as we gather monthly. I am thankful for the interdenominational agencies that help those in need. But, do you know what I am most thankful for? My savior and Lord, Jesus Christ…
You know, even when I am on social media commenting on things I should ignore… getting pulled into my ideological silo…
Even when I have forgotten the need to be holy…
Even when I fail to share the joy of my salvation with others…
Even when I sin… when I mess up… when I fail to be obedient to Christ…
He loves me anyway. Truly, it was while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us.
And, as we wrap this up today, I want to leave you with the rest of Paul’s words from Romans 12, beginning in verse 9. They won’t be on the screen, but I want you to simply receive them, let them wash over you
Romans 12:9-21
If we, as the followers of Jesus Christ here in Navarro County can live that out… then God will change the world through us!
Friends, Happy Thanksgiving… and don’t forget… when you are carving the turkey, don’t forget about the Lamb.
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