Don't Get Too Comfortable
08-01-21
St. Peter Lutheran Church, Doss, TX
Eph 4:1-16
Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. 2 Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. 3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. 4 For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all. 7 However, he has given each one of us a special gift through the generosity of Christ. 8 That is why the Scriptures say, “When he ascended to the heights, he led a crowd of captives and gave gifts to his people.” 9 Notice that it says “he ascended.” This clearly means that Christ also descended to our lowly world. 10 And the same one who descended is the one who ascended higher than all the heavens, so that he might fill the entire universe with himself. 11 Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 12 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. 14 Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever, they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. 16 He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.
Tim Keller writes in an online article: We are entering a new era in which there is not only no social benefit to being Christian, but an actual social cost. In many places, culture is becoming increasingly hostile toward faith, and beliefs in God, truth, sin, and the afterlife are disappearing in more and more people. Now, culture is producing people for whom Christianity is not only offensive, but incomprehensible.
Christians must find new ways to reach people who won’t even think about coming to church or believing Christianity’s most basic concepts. And we must find ways of churching and forming people as Christians in the midst of a very different culture. Let’s call this the “Outward Move” and the “Inward Move” of a missionary encounter with Western culture.
To clarify, a missionary encounter is not a withdrawal from culture into communities with little connection to the rest of society. Nor is it an effort to get political power in order to impose Christian standards and beliefs on an unwilling populace. Nor is it such an effort to become relevant that the church becomes completely adapted to and assimilated by the culture.
Instead, a missionary encounter connects (unlike the strategies of withdrawal) yet confronts (unlike the strategies of assimilation) and therefore actually converts people (unlike all the strategies, including that of political takeover). A church having a missionary encounter also maintains its distinctiveness (what the withdrawal approach wants) and it often affirms and always serves neighbors (what the assimilation approach wants) and it calls people to repent and change (what the politically assertive approach wants). And since Western culture is not so much non-Christian as post-Christian, this won’t look exactly like any missionary encounter the church has had in the past.
We live in a culture dominated by non-Christian thought and themes (about reason/science, individualism, relativism, and materialism). This means that the church must train and disciple Christians to integrate their faith with their work in the public sphere. If Christians are equipped to do this, the gospel will become “salt and light” in our culture more naturally than if we take a more political approach in which Christians seek to gain the reins of coercive power, or take a more withdrawn approach in which being a Christian is seen as something you only do in private with no application to every area of life.
We must never lose grasp of the difference between gospel grace and religious moralism. Why does the Protestant church constantly fall into the temptation to self-righteousness, dominance, and exclusion? Why does it fail to understand as the early church did and not lose its grip on the core of its faith?
When we lapse back into thinking that we are saved by our moral efforts, we become enmeshed in both pride and fear. Pride because we may think God and the world owe us acclaim; fear because we can never be sure we’ve lived truly good-enough lives. And so, when we lose the doctrinal grasp on the truth that we are saved by faith alone through grace alone because of Christ alone, we not only lose our joy and fall into fear, but also lose our graciousness and fall into pride. The world, of course, is quick—too quick—to find fault with the church and thus justify its dismissal of the gospel message. And yet it is quite right to do so. If the church continually moves toward dominance and control rather than love and service, it shows that it doesn’t really believe the gospel it preaches. If the church doesn’t believe the gospel, why should the world? The challenges are formidable, but the gospel brings hope. There is no hope without it…. Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). There’s no reason to believe this promise has an expiration date.
Secularism and modern paganism that goes with it are taking its toll. When Americans travel to Great Britain or Europe, they notice beautiful large cathedrals and few if any people going there to worship. That might us think that we’re thankful that we’re not that way, but in fact, we are becoming more and more that way. Secularism pushes back again and again what the Bible teaches about sexual ethics, salvation, education, about the role and reach of the state, and about matters of public welfare. Public opinion has turned against Christians. … Suddenly as a minority group in an increasingly secular nation, we are finding what it means to be outsiders. We don’t like it and we’re not used to it. And it’s easy to find ourselves bewildered, angry, defensive and defeated. This is like Daniel of the Bible, who with his fellow Jews, were captured and taken as slaves into exile. The new Babylonian culture tried to make them over through educating them to their values much like our society has political leaders pushing critical race theory, which is another name for Marxism or Communism. Have you noticed in the news how the Marxist people are supporting the Cuban government against the freedom protesters there and how the Secretary of homeland Security tells the Cuban refugees to stay away from our country and has the US Coast Guard enforcing it. Here we have lots of illegal immigration from Central America with an open border for them and yet other refugees are not welcome. It makes you think.
In the west, we have felt at home with our treasures before us but are not facing the fact that a broken, sinful world in which we live is not our home. Heaven is our home. Peter said this in his first letter: (2:10-12) “Once you had no identity as a people; now you are God’s people. Once you received no mercy; now you have received God’s mercy.” Dear friends, I warn you as “temporary residents and foreigners” to keep away from worldly desires that wage war against your very souls. Be careful to live properly among your unbelieving neighbors. Then even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior, and they will give honor to God when he judges the world.” This world is not our home. We’re not supposed to be settling down here forever. We’re not supposed to treat life as other people who are not believers treat it like the be-all and end-all of everything as if Christians have a nice, comfortable, respectful and prosperous life and look forward to more of those things in heaven. I say this in spite of our being comfortable in our rural setting in a conservative county. The book of Daniel maps out a strategy on how to deal with our new lack of status or to reverse it. Daniel focuses on his relationship with God. In our 2nd lesson, Paul speaks about us being given gifts to build up the body of Christ in order to reach out and help more people come to know, believe and trust in Jesus as Savior.
Paul writes in our text: 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all. 7 However, he has given each one of us a special gift through the generosity of Christ. He says: “Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. 2 Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love.” 11 Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. 12 Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. 13 This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. 14 Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever, they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.” In other words, we could speak of the church of the field and the church of the force. (Love Acceptance and Forgiveness, Jerry Cook) The church of the field does church in its building and its activities are focused about life in the church. The church of the force is equipped as Paul says to go out and make a difference in the world. What you can pray for… is a deeper relationship with Jesus so that knowing Him – not just about Him- you will have more of His heart as His body in the world. (Matthew 9:37) He said to his disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. 38 So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.” In John 4, Jesus said, “I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see how the fields are already white for harvest.” He was not talking about grain … but about people who had not yet come to believe Him, follow Him, and get to know Him. That’s where you and I come in. If you’ve never thought of yourself as a missionary, you are. Jesus said in Matthew 28(19), Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” By your behavior, you are a witness. By your willingness to talk about how God has kept you safe at different points in your life or helped you in times of pain or grief, you will be a more effective sharer of the Good News. The times we are living in are forcing us to be more active and less comfortable, but He promised to be with us and He keeps His promises. We can help each other and encourage each other. Paul says in our text: 3 Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the Spirit, binding yourselves together with peace. A little later in that text, he says: We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever, they sound like the truth. 15 Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. In my e mail this past week, I heard of three ELCA churches in Texas voting by super majority to leave the ELCA and join the NALC. As people take their faith seriously and want to grow, God will help us and has helped us. May we be faithful to His call. Amen
(Some quotes are from Brave by Faith by Alistair Begg)
