Sermon Notes on 1 Corinthians 5: Drive Out the Unrepentant Christian

To frame this sermon… Let me tell you a story from the beginning of the book of Joshua in the Old Testament. Are you sitting comfortably….? Then I’ll begin.

Israel after 40 years of wandering is on the edge of the “Promised Land”

Jericho is the first city they are to take and it is to be given to the Lord – everyone killed, all the buildings razed to the ground and all the plunder brought into the Lord’s treasury.

After the battle everyone is bringing the Jericho booty to tabernacle – the place where the God of Israel was worshiped.

But a man called Achan holds some or all of it back for himself – a ceremonial robe, 200 silver coins and a bar of gold.

His family is (forced to be?) complicit with him this – they should dob him in, but they don’t. They honour their family and friendship ties above obedience to God’s command.

As a result of this disobedience, God refuses to go with Israel into the next battle and they become sitting ducks for the surrounding nations to come in and annihilate them, 36 men die, men who are sons, brothers, husbands and fathers to many. 36 men who had been obedient in the battle of Jericho, fell to their deaths in the battle of Ai because of Achan and his family’s disobedience.

Achan’s sin weakened the whole nation of Israel so that together they could not stand against or push back the enemy.

Achan and his family are found out, and stoned to death for in their selfish disregard for others, they had put their personal family enrichment and pleasure before the safety and prosperity of the wider community of the nation and before obedience and love to God.

You might choose your actions, but you can never choose the consequences for those actions.

Had he known what the outcome would be, would Achan have done that? Probably not, but by then it was too late.

We find stories like this hard to stomach in 21st Century Britain because:

1. There is a lot of seemingly gratuitous death,
2. We more often think of God being like an indulgent parent than we do a righteous king and
3. We are so individualist in our outlook, we just don’t see how our personal choices could ever be anyone else’s business and we often have a very poor appreciation of how our personal choices affect our lives as well as wider community life together.

But this story from Joshua is so important and helpful in shedding light on our text for today and helps us to understand why Paul gets so exercised about the situation in view because:

1. Joshua under God, was leading Israel in conquering the promised land, Paul under God was leading the church in the new phase of Jesus command to conquer the world by making disciples.
2. Israel’s battle was physical with swords and fighting. The church’s battle is spiritual with the words of God and prayer.

But the secret to success in Jericho, in Corinth and now is the same – active, obedient faith and trust in all that God has spoken. And the consequences of ignoring that are the same – divisiveness, disarray, disappointment and if left unchecked, destruction.

Without obedience, our mission statement of bringing the kingdom of God to Reading and beyond will remain a statement and never become a reality. And the devil loves mission statements, what he hates is when those statements become reality in real people’s lives so he will do everything he can to fool you into thinking that that obedience is either unnecessary or impossible.

Verses 1-5: It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father's wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgement on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.

Back in Ch.1:11 we read that Chloe’s household has brought a report to Paul about the church in Corinth, and that report is the provocation for him writing this letter.

Having talked about how the old so-called wisdom of the world rooted in disobedience to God has made its way back into the church and caused divisions in it, now we see how that same so-called wisdom is causing trouble in other areas too. Namely, in the moral backbone and public integrity of the whole church.

A man in the church has entered into sexual relationship with his stepmother. We aren’t given any more details than that, we don’t know if the woman is divorced or widowed or how long this relationship has been going on for.

The Bible forbade this kind of behaviour – both Genesis 2:24 and Jesus in Matthew 19:5 said that a man should LEAVE his father’s house and be united to his wife and the two should become one flesh. No ifs, no buts, this man has done an outrageous thing.

That should have been enough, but then Paul reminds them that even the laws of Corinth, sexually liberal Corinth, where all kinds of perversions are not just tolerated but openly encouraged and glorified, also still ruled this to be an unlawful thing.

Now, no doubt there are a good number in the church that think he should have been reprimanded for this action, but somehow, so far, nothing has been done. The church as a whole has been at the very least tolerating this, if not actively shielding him from any consequences of it. Why?

• Is he a big financial backer of the church who no one wants to upset?
• Is he part of a family which had a big influence in the church and had started to throw its weight around expecting special treatment and intimidating those who disagreed?
• Are they, as a church, so soaked in a particular misunderstanding of grace that they think the normal everyday rules of the bible and of life don’t apply to them anymore?
• Or do they know they’re in the wrong, but are furiously trying to save face and pretend that they are a church which has everything sorted because publically admitting this man’s lifestyle choice would bring them more shame and cries of hypocrisy than they could handle?

We don’t know, but my guess is that, like the slide behind me, that their priorities when it came to how to live the Christian life had gotten totally back to front. And they had become so arrogant in it that they hadn’t noticed just how corrupted they had become. This counterfeit wisdom that had infected the church had gotten all their priorities the wrong way round. They were fussing about small things and ignoring the big things. Trying to remove the specks from each other’s eyes rather than removing the great big trees.

You see chapter 7 of this letter begins with the phrase “now for the matters you wrote about…” they are clearly very interested in knowing Paul’s opinion on certain moral issues like:

• Whether they should eat meat offered to idols
• Whether they should get married or stay single for the Gospel
• Whether a Christian, once converted should remain married to an unbeliever
• Whether slaves should seek their freedom
• How to handle spiritual gifts in meetings and which gifts should be given more prominence.
• And on it goes

But they don’t seem to care one bit about issues of integrity that God seems to think are of great importance, they never thought to ask him about this guy who is sleeping with his step mum. They were so ok with it, it never crossed their minds to ask him.

Those other moral and theological questions, which they do want ask have their place. But they are nothing compared to the big black and white teachings about sexual conduct and the reason Paul gets so exercised here is that when we sin sexually, we tell lies to ourselves and to the world with our whole being – body, mind and soul about the God in whose likeness we were all made.  God created sex and marriage to be a beautiful parable to the world of what God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are like and what the mission of the church is. When we sin sexually we deny the nature of God and God's mission in the world.

Paul will say in chapter 11 that their communion meals do more harm than good, and one of the reasons for that is that some are grossly sinning against God and then walking into church and taking communion as if nothing has happened and nothing is wrong, he says: Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine themselves, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself [and on the rest of the body for we are all connected inseparably together]. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, [if our priorities were right] we would not be judged.

Just as Achan’s disobedience brought disaster on the nation of Israel, the willful disobedience of this man in sleeping with his stepmother is one of the factors contributing to the disarray and impotence and potential destruction of this church.

Paul pulls no punches as a spiritual father to the church – he tells them that they must eject the man from the family of the church. The reason is simple, this man is claiming to be a Christian, but is living like the devil, and so to bring him to his senses, Paul tells the church to hand this man over the one who appears to be his heart’s desire - to the devil.

This is a restorative action not a vindictive one. The aim is to restore the man, it is a gift of grace to him. The hope is that this man will come to his senses, repent and then be welcomed back into the church family. Paul is echoing Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18. If the man doesn’t repent, he proves that his profession of faith in Christ, however impressive or seemingly heartfelt, is meaningless and he should therefore be treated like an unbeliever - that is with great love and compassion, but not as a brother or sister in the faith and he must be denied access to the communion meal.

Paul isn’t advocating this practice for all sins and all unrepentance. If I squash a fly because I get impatient with it buzzing around the room, I may well have anger management issues and you may well want to challenge me on it, we may end up agreeing to disagree, about whether I was in the wrong, but no one would think we would need to go to the elders about it and kick me out of the church. So what is the rule of thumb here?

It would seem that what gets a person excommunicated from the church, that is kicked out of the church family, is the same kind of thing that would have received the death penalty in Old Testament Israel. Hence we have the list later on in the chapter, if you were convicted in the Old Testament of idolatry, sexual immorality, greed, drunkenness, lying and cheating – in some or all of those cases, you would be handed the ultimate sentence. You would lose your life.

The good news here is that the death penalty is no longer in view, that is for the state authorities to decide and in this country, at least, that is no longer in play, but spiritually speaking this is no less serious, to be put out of the church is to be put out of Christ. In Matthew 16 Jesus said, whatever you (the church) bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven, that simply means that Jesus will back up his church when his church is obedient to what he has told her to do, so if, in obedience to God’s word, the church has to kick someone out of the family for gross disobedience and unrepentence, then Jesus will give it his AMEN to them and back them up.

Of course there have been abuses of that authority all down church history, and Jesus will judge those who have misused his authority for their own ends, but the principle still stands and we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If, in obedience to God’s word, the church has to kick someone out of the family for gross disobedience and unrepentence, then Jesus has said he will back them up.

The difference between the Old Testament and the New is that in the Old Testament, there was no way back. Once you were dead, you were dead. But here, in the new life of the church, there is every possibility that a person who has had to be put out can come back in and be restored.

And indeed that is exactly what we see in a later letter Paul wrote cleverly titled 2 Corinthians. This man has finally been disciplined by the church, has repented and is being restored. Paul writes in chapter 2 of 2 Corinthians: Now if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure—not to put it too severely—to all of you. For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. 8 So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything.

The good news is that whilst this man may have had to endure consequences to his actions in the everyday of life, he was nevertheless restored to full participation in the family of the church and welcomed back to the communion table.

Verses 6-8: Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Paul draws in these middle few verses on an analogy from the Old Testament festival of Passover.

In cultures where everyone made bread at home, the practice was that you would make the bread rise by creating what was known as a sourdough starter, but that took time and effort and wasn’t something that could be done every day, so they did something ingenious; once their bread had risen and before they put it in the oven, they would remove a piece of the dough, put it in a jar and keep it for the next day. The next day, when it came to making bread again, they wouldn’t need to ferment another starter, they would just make their dough and then add the lump from yesterday’s mixture into the new batch and the unseen yeast already present in that little lump inside that lump would multiply through the whole new batch. Once that batch had risen again they would take out another lump and put it aside for the next day and so on and so on.

A brief look on the internet told me yesterday that the oldest leaven lump known to be in existence is to be found in Newcastle, Wyoming in the USA and it was first created in 1889 – the same year the construction of the Eiffel Tower was completed. It is a lump that has been passed down the generations and continues to rise the family breads and pancakes to this day.

At Passover, the nation of Israel was supposed to get rid of all the leaven lumps in their houses and only eat unleavened bread. It was symbolic of a new beginning, a new start, a new creation.

Christ our Passover Lamb was sacrificed, not so that we could carry on the old destructive ways of life, but that so we could enter into a new kind of life – not ruled by the hidden desires of sin and the flesh, but ruled by the hidden eternal, holy Spirit of God.

Verses 9-13: I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people - not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”

A couple of practical pointers then from these verses as we come to a close.

To reiterate from earlier, Paul is not at all advocating that the church cuts itself off from sinners or unbelievers, for those are exactly the kinds of people Jesus came to save and be amongst – the kinds of people you and I were, at least in our hearts, before we received the truth about Christ. In chapter 14, Paul seems to take it as given that there can be unbelievers in church meetings. If the church cuts itself off from the world, it will end up having no mission purpose in the world and therefore self-destruct.

The issue is that we should not call someone a brother or sister in the faith or be treating them like one if there is a gross unrepentant disobedience going on in their life. You can associate with them in all manner of other ways, indeed you have to if they are a member of your family, or a work colleague or someone with whom you do a hobby. The point isn’t that you shun them completely, that would be totally unworkable in some cases. You can love them in a thousand different and creative ways, just not as a brother or sister in Christ – until they repent. And until that time, you will have to live with some degree of awkwardness, sadness and tension.

Finally, when Paul says that he has nothing to do with judging those outside the church, he is not saying that the church should not be interested or involved with wider social or national issues, he is saying two things:

• Firstly, that the church must get its own house in order before it starts getting involved in anything else. In a letter to Timothy, Paul tells Timothy that he should not appoint any man as an elder of a church if he cannot keep his own household in good order. For if he cannot manage his own household, how can he oversee the church family with any credibility. Similarly, if the church with all the power of God at its disposal cannot govern its own family life with any integrity or diligence, she will not in any way be God’s means of saving the world, but rather she will become a total laughing stock.
• Secondly, that the church’s mission in the world is not to get people to behave like Christians, without receiving Christ. The church’s mission is to introduce people to Jesus and all that he is and says – once a person has received him into their life, then we can have the conversation about what it means to live like God requires, but if you just try and get people to behave Christianly without receiving Christ, all you do is turn them into hypocrites. And the church has enough of them already without making any more.

Purge the evil doer from among you. Drive out the unrepentant Christian, so that they may come to their senses and be restored and the church strengthened for her mission to the world.

The Bible says that God’s love is to lead us to repentance not complacency and pride. Sin has consequences that go beyond you and me into the body of the church. I don’t say that so that anyone can start a witch hunt on others, I say it so that we can all come before God in humility and ask him if there is any offensive way in us that he might lead us in the path that leads not just us to life but others too. Where sin has abounded, grace abounds all the more. In Christ, we are all connected together in deep and eternal ways, many of which we don’t understand, but we can trust God that as we walk in obedience to him, quickly repenting when we fall short to him and others, he will ensure that we have everything we need and will be successful in the calling he has made upon our lives.

Notes on Death and Judgment

To complement Sean's sermon, (which will go up on Tuesday afternoon) here are the notes I wrote, for our elders' meeting, that represent the historic Reformed Protestant Christian confession, on the weighty subject of death and judgment.  All of this turns on the assumption that through Jesus, God offers us not just a cleaned up heart, but a new one; not just a cleaned up life, but a new one.

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Death is the defining chrysalis moment where our true spiritual identity as belonging to Jesus or belonging to the Devil is finally revealed.

The fact that physical death has not been removed by the Cross, should spur a Christian on to honest reflection, maturity and holiness not denial, dissipation and depravity.

Christians follow Christ through death to resurrection life and the new World. If the Master underwent it, so must we, for we are no greater than he.

Our attitude to death reveals to our hearts - where we really think our source of life is located. If we think it is in ourselves, our love and obedience to God will stall, if we know it is from God we will freely give ourselves up to him in love, even to death as he has already done for us in his Son at the Cross.

Below is the handout we distributed: (click on it to enlarge)

The apostle Paul in Acts seemed happy declaring the “brute fact” of Final Judgment to all people, believers and unbelievers alike, whether they were familiar with the Bible or not. What imperative does that press on us for our preaching, our personal lifestyle and our church culture?

The Final Judgement is the great unveiling. Things that were hidden from view will finally be fully understood. This judgment is not our opportunity to plead our case with God – that outcome is already known by whether we received Christ or not – the point of the Final judgement is the public vindication of God’s reputation in condemning sin (rebellion against him) forever in individuals who refused his offer or in Christ at the cross for those who have received him.

Thus, final judgment is for declaring the severity of the sentence for the unbeliever and the greatness of the reward for the believer.

If God does reveal the sins of believers at the Judgment (and it would appear that he does) it will only be in the context of vindicating his grace, and showing that no one receives eternal life on the basis of their own efforts, but only as a gift of Christ’s righteousness. It is therefore not a reason to fear, but it
should provoke a Christian to godliness and to the renunciation of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is probably the biggest sin in the church, causing the enemies of God to mock him – 2 Sam 12:14 (See NASB translation)

The Nature of Judgment

Christ will be the judge – unbelievers will never see the Father only the righteous will see him. (Matt 5:8)

Unbelievers will be judged and the judgement will be brutally holistic and nothing will be left in the dark, no questions left unanswered, no loose ends left unravelled – and there will be degrees of punishment. The punishments will be greatest for those heretics of the faith who whilst claiming to bring people to God led them instead to greater destruction by their false teaching - using Christianity as a means of getting riches and glory in this life only.

We assume that Hell is a place where people will lament and wish they had repented, but it is not. Only those who hate God are sent to Hell. The torments of fire and worm come as each time those who hate God declare how much they loathe him. Were it true that people were crying out to God from Hell to be saved, God would immediately save them, his compassion is so great. But the chilling truth is that like a madman floating on driftwood at sea, refusing to get in the lifeboat when it arrives, so too, gripped by the madness of sin, the wicked would rather be the kings and queens on the throne of their own sinful hearts and go to Hell, arrogant and defiant before God, than humbly bow the knee and lovingly submit to him. However moral and good they may have looked in this life, at the judgment, their nature as children of their “father” the devil - John 8:44 is fully revealed.

Believers will be judged equally holistically and rewards given, (remember their rebellion against God has been paid for by Christ) based on how they have lived. Whilst not everyone’s reward will be the same, for not all have worked equally hard and God is not a communist state, nevertheless everyone’s joy will be complete for God has no favourite children and Christians will have no favourites amongst their brothers and sisters.  There will be no pride in those who have received more, only humble loving service to those under them in the New World.  Equally, there will be no envy in those who have received less, but loving, humble submission to those over them in the New World. Love will perfect all things. Rewards will be greatest not for those who converted the most souls (that is often the immediate conclusion after looking at a subject like this), but for those who have loved God and then their neighbour most wholeheartedly, laying down their lives for both to the uttermost.

The Moral Application of Final Judgment

On a personal level, the final judgment satisfies our need for justice and lets us freely forgive, confident that God will repay rightly. (But remember, its God's standard of justice, not our flawed ones.) It also admonishes us to live righteously now in the present moment. and spurs us to compassion and evangelism.

On one level, this can all seem rather cold and clinical, but the Apostle Paul writes of the joy and sorrow he feels here, almost all at the same time.  It is a tension to be held, in trust of God, not a problem to be solved. The joy:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?  He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And in the very next verse, the sorrow...

I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.

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At this point, one might legitimately ask:

• What about those in unreached parts of the world who have never heard the Gospel?
• What about those who never really heard the gospel clearly because all the Christians in their lives were too flaky to say anything? 
• What about all those tiny aborted lives or the lives those who died so young?
• What about the mentally disabled / enfeebled?
• What about those who have turned away from God because of a dreadful hypocritical witness from those who claimed to be Christians acting in the name of God?
• Will God really condemn these people?

These are good questions. And along with the Why does God allow suffering? question, they are probably the biggest arguments that lead many to reject the Faith or give it up if they began in it. They cannot reconcile a loving God with these kinds of black and white, in or out pronouncements on eternal destiny.

Many have given defences of God by coming up with reasons why God would grant all of those people eternal life. Others have come down the other way and said, there is no salvation without an explicit profession of faith. And there is every shade in between too.

Personally I would not want to declare either way. I know you think that is a cop out, but on balance, this is a tension to hold, not a problem to solve. There are some things that are for God alone to know. On the one hand, our confidence is that God is loving and merciful, gracious and compassionate, but on the other, he has not given us any confidence in the Bible that there is any way to be saved other than through faith in Jesus Christ, so neither should we.

We might in our arrogance demand, or in our grief plead, that God give an account of his actions, but the truth is that if we as a race had never rebelled against God in the first place, we wouldn't be in this predicament, so the blame is finally with us, not God. God has offered in his love and mercy a way out through his Son, but instead of taking it we try and frame God as the criminal in this, to get ourselves off the hook and vindicate ourselves.

Moreover, in our Western cultural narrative of "rights and equality," we tend to assume that we are entitled to God's kindness, that it's God's job to save us because that's what a loving God should do give us everything we want - like some kind of overindulging parent. Interestingly, in other cultures the question is framed differently, namely, how can God allow himself to draw near to such dark and lowly creatures as we are and still remain pure and just?  If we have an entitlement to anything, it is justice, not generosity, wrath not grace.

So when it comes up in conversation, I would be inclined to say: “Don’t worry about other people, God will take care of them rightly, the question is what are you going to do with Jesus’ offer of life to you today? Or if they are Christian – What does this knowledge of Judgment mean for you? What has God asked of you when it comes to being his witness to the world around you?

One interesting example of this is how the Mouk people received the Gospel. (See from 27:23, but the whole video is worth a watch. It's the second of a two part film series.  Chapter 1 is here.)  The Mouk people could have gotten really angry with God that their relatives and ancestors had entered a Christless eternity, and they do mourn for them, but they don’t allow that sorrow to overshadow the great joy they have at receiving Christ as their Lord and Saviour, or stop it from sharing what they have received with others.

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For more on what we believe at RFC, click here.

Sermon Notes: 1 Corinthians 3:16-23

Paul continues in this first section of his letter addressing the issue of true wisdom and how it leads to true unity and false wisdom and how it leads to division.

Vv16-17
Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy and you are that temple.

Each individual Christian has the fullness of the Holy Spirit living in them (Paul: 1 Cor 6:19 and Jesus: John 14:23), but the “you” of this passage is plural. Don’t you know that you all – the gathered church is also the expression of the fullness of God’s Spirit. Each individual Christian has the fullness of the Holy Spirit dwelling in them, yet when 200 Christians gather together to worship God, there aren’t 200 Holy Spirits in the room, there is one Holy Spirit. The same Spirit who lives in you is the Spirit who lives in the gathered Church.

But in Corinth, factionalism was destroying unity and therefore destroying the church. In this case, it wasn’t the fault of leaders, it was the fault of the led. That’s why he is addressing the church with this letter rather than just the elders in private. Paul, Peter and Apollos hadn’t set themselves up as superstars, the people were dividing themselves over them and maybe some others who aren’t mentioned. And the bad news was that it wouldn’t get any better. If you fast forward to the end of 2 Corinthians, it got worse. So called “super-apostles” are seeking to gain an (financial?) advantage for themselves by driving even deeper wedges of division into the church.

Before I continue, let me reiterate that there is nothing wrong with having great love for leaders in the church. In chapter four Paul talks of himself as a father to the Corinthian church, meaning that like any good father, he has loved her, watched over her and nourished her with the word of truth, but it also means that as a good father according to that culture, he is preparing her for the day when he will give her away to another. She is not his property and never has been, he is preparing her to be fully united to Christ her Saviour and Lord on the day of Judgment as a pure and spotless bride.

The problem comes when we make the idolatrous switch, when instead of thanking God for the service of leaders in the church, we come to view them as mini-messiahs, which is what the Corinthians had done. They had somehow come to believe that they would be more blessed, more victorious, more favoured by God, more favoured by society, look more cool in front of their non-Christian friends, be more proficient in spiritual gifts, see more supernatural activity or have a greater understanding of scripture if they aligned themselves with a particular person and they therefore put that person, or that ministry up on a pedestal and made them something of an idol in their hearts.

When we pursue personalities, we are pursuing idolatry for we are more interested in hearing what a particular personality has to say than we are in what the Holy Spirit has to say. And when we start pursuing personalities, or church brands or online ministries, more than Christ himself, we start to tear down God’s house, the church, which means we destroy God’s testimony in the world and ourselves in the process. It is spiritual suicide and madness. Like the man ripping his head open in the picture.

Why is this utter folly and foolishness? Because God has already given us everything we need. Everything! EVERYTHING! At the Cross, he has given us himself at Pentecost, he poured out his Spirit upon us. What more do we need? Why do so often sit in the dumps thinking we can never be a great Christian because we don’t have access to this or that person, this or that ministry? We have everything we need for life and godliness, we are told that in 2 Peter 1, we just need to believe God and activate it. Fan it into flame. The Bible says that if anyone lacks wisdom, they should ask God who richly provides it. Paul told the Corinthians back in chapter one that they have already been enriched in EVERY WAY, so there was no need to align themselves with someone who they think would get them so to speak a “better deal.” Money pile analogy.

Now that already have everything doesn’t mean we become individual lone ranger Christians, for God has called us to be a people together – the church. For what we can achieve together in God is greater than the sum of our individual parts. It’s not because we lack anything.

God’s temple, the church is holy – set apart for him – it’s not ours to do with as we please – it’s not a place to experiment with our cool ideas. The Church is Christ’s property – when people messed with him (crucifixion) he turned the other cheek, but if we mess with and divide his church with our factions and divisions and do not repent, this text says he will destroy us.  Let the weight of that sit not because we want to engender fear, but rather spur us on to godliness.

Now indulge me a moment. The honest truth is that we don’t see any factionalism in RFC – I can see preferences, which are understandable and human, we all have those, and as long as those preferences are kept in their place, and we are 80% happy with what goes on then that is ok, but think for a moment –the fact that you are here is testimony to the fact that you like church to be a certain way. We already agree on so much here, otherwise we would never have walked through the door.

But imagine there is only one church in Reading, like there was in Corinth. Imagine all the Catholics, Baptists, Charismatics, Anglicans, Orthodox, Brethren etc all had to meet together in one building and in one meeting what would that look like, because that is probably closer to seed of disunity we have here in Corinth? These days, in the consumer atmosphere of the UK when we become a member of any church we are automatically making a whole host of value assumptions choosing one church over another. Are you at RFC because you think God will give you more by being here as opposed to another church? Maybe not, but be wary of that kind of thinking and that you don’t unconsciously make the idolatrous switch because we already have everything we need in God in Christ.

Having said that, I realise the issues around churches and denominations are complex and I don’t have the catch all solution to church unity, but Jesus prayed for the unity of his church in John 17 that we would be one across all boundaries, so therefore should we, not just guarding the unity we have here at RFC, but praying for the unity of the whole church. For Christ does not have many churches, but one church, he does not have many bodies, but one body, he does not have many brides, he as one bride and he is returning to take that one body, one church, one bride to be with him forever.

Vv18-20

Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”

The Corinthians were not the first bunch of people to pursue this kind of idolatry and personality cult believing that they needed more than they already had.  Where is the first personality cult in the Bible? Put another way, which is the first creature in the Bible to be called crafty? It’s the serpent in the garden of Eden and for me the most helpful way of understanding this middle section v18-20 and the human wisdom vs. God’s wisdom argument more generally is through the lens of Genesis 3:1-6.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

Adam and Eve were the babies of the human race to whom God had given everything – everything they could possibly want. And through childlike love and obedience to the God who loved them they would learn to rule the world in righteousness through a right knowledge of good and evil, but that meant being patient and humble, it meant maturing and growing up in God and so when the serpent entered the garden and told them that God didn’t really want them to get wise, that God didn’t really love them and wanted to keep them as servile creatures, he tempted them to get wise and rule the world through disobedience to God’s command, seizing the fruit of the tree and defining good and evil for themselves. And as they bit into the fruit, they spurned God’s love, and were deceived into following the serpent’s lead.

And so much of human history has flowed from that simple moment of mistrust and disobedience. Whatever we say about the great civilisations of history, the great religions of history, that on the surface have had many things in common – similar moral codes when it comes to how to treat your neighbour etc. The fundamental truth underneath the surface is that the history of fallen humanity has been hallmarked but by disobedience to the word of Christ and a desire to gain the blessings of God (life, wisdom, health, wealth and prosperity) without any loving relationship to God or obedience of him. We want God’s blessings, but we don’t want him.

Interestingly, Sisyphus, the king who founded Corinth was the embodiment of this ungodly craftiness and cunning (so called wisdom) and the myths surrounding his escapades with the gods no doubt permeated the culture and the “spirit” of the city as a whole. I won’t say any more on that, but he is worth a glance on Wikipedia, if you get a moment.

But that so called wisdom, the “wisdom of this age” is passing away. God has given his eternal NO! to that counterfeit wisdom, birthed in disobedience. For the only kingdom or civilisation that can stand forever is one that is founded on love and obedience to God’s command – love and obedience to Christ. That is the Kingdom of God and when we talk in our vision statement about bringing the kingdom of God to Reading and beyond, the foundation of that Kingdom is Christ and obedience to Christ. God the Father has given the reign of all things over to his Son Jesus Christ because Jesus was obedient – he was truly wise and he gained authority over everything not by trickery, impatience, violence or mistrust, but through obedience, love and sacrifice even to death.

Whatever the cool influencers Corinth were saying, chapter 4 suggests it was probably a variation on this theme of Adam and Eve – “Have it NOW don’t wait”. Have great bible knowledge, have a supernatural ministry, have amazing worship bands, have all kinds of social action projects, have a vision fund for a new building, or when it comes to general life - get a spouse, get a pay rise, get babies, get your health, get a good qualification, get good friends, get in shape, but obedience? Nah, don’t sweat about that. Who needs the long plod of obedience when there are miracles to be had worship songs to sung and great teaching to be listened to, loving partners to be found, bills to pay etc, etc etc?

Don’t be deceived like Adam and Eve who fell for the serpent’s craftiness, don’t think that you can gain fullness of life or eternal life by craftiness, or disobedience, rather receive the love of God and become foolish in the eyes of a watching world by learning the long plod of obedience that comes by faith in Christ who loves you and called you to be his own. Synchronise you heart with the deep truth that true reigning in life comes through obedience to Christ. God’s people are those who by patience and faith in Christ inherit promises.

One of the big things I have experienced becoming a parent is that you are forced to change your rhythm of life. There are some things we can’t do anymore. There are no shortcuts, nappy change by nappy change, cry by cry, gurgle by gurgle, feed by feed we are preparing her for life in the world. There are no shortcuts to that process. I remember feeling deeply frustrated at the age of 12 that I had to wait 5 years before I could get behind the wheel of a car, but there was no way of legitimately shortcutting that process. I just had to wait. And it did me no harm whatsoever. And there are no shortcuts to our spiritual growth either. Jesus said, whoever wants to enter the kingdom must become like a little child, trusting and obeying the Heavenly Father.

Don’t despise the change in rhythm that comes with learning or relearning the basics of obedient faith for they are life to you and they will make you truly wise.

Paul’s quotes, from Job 5:13 and Psalm 94:11 respectively ram home the point that this issue of whether we receive God’s wisdom or the world’s is not a morally neutral one. It is the difference between life and death, blessing and curse, salvation and judgment. Pride and arrogance before Christ are the hallmarks of this wicked wisdom and humble obedience to Christ is the hallmark of the righteous. Adam, Eve and the Serpent, came under God’s judgment pretty swiftly, but judgment may not always be instantaneous, in every case, but it will finally come on all those who refuse to hear God’s call and turn aside to pursue the vanity of their own imagination. – Wanting the blessings of God’s world without God himself.

Christ was the obedient one and he gives us the gift of his righteousness, not so that you and I can continue in disobedience but now that by the Spirit we have been given the kind of heart he has we can follow him in the same kind of obedience he had.

Vv21-23

So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.

What can help us to stop grabbing? What can help us to stop boasting in our worldly connections?

Who owns everything? You do, Jesus said that the meek shall inherit the earth, not by earning it but by receiving it as a gift. What Adam sought to take by force - God has given to us as a gift in Christ. All things are yours, you have all authority just as Christ had for the old world is passing away and the new world is dawning – a new world, in which, thanks to great kindness and love of God, you have a place. Paul reels off a short list of what it means that God has given everything to the church.

• Church leaders yours, they are God’s servants whom God has given to you not for you to bully into your way of thinking, but for your joy, maturity and service.
• The world is yours – every square metre of it belongs to you for God has given it to you as an inheritance for you to reign over not by violence and warfare, but by prayer – waging spiritual warfare and better still you will reign over it in peace when it is renewed at the end of the age after the judgment of all the living and the dead.
• Life and death are yours for death is no longer source of fear, but a motivator for life, spurring you to greater godliness, preparing for the day when you will be rewarded by Jesus Christ for your faithful service to him. Life is to be lived in daily talking to the Lord –for this is the privilege of the children of God, we can talk to him at any time – asking him for help in the circumstances we find ourselves in and asking him what he would have us do for him as obedient sons and daughters.
• The present and the future are all yours for God is right now, in the present, working all things, ALL THINGS for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Even horrible circumstances can be redeemed for whilst God is not the author of evil, as we look to him and stand on his word, trusting him, God can make all things, not just the good things work for our good in the end.

It would be easy to get proud and passive here and think that we are amazing because God has lavished so much upon us, but Paul then reminds us, in view of all that God has lavished upon us, not to forget that we are not independent actors, but that we belong to Christ and our first allegiance and obedience is to him and we only inherit everything if we remain in him. And Christ, though in every way equal with the God, belongs to the Father.

In summary:

• Are you putting certain personalities or people in your life in a place where they are more important to you than Jesus? If yes, repent of your idolatry and return these people to their proper place in your thinking. Christ is all you need, stop hamstringing the church by an over-allegiance / reliance on human teachers.
• Are you seeking the good things of life through impatient shortcuts and disobedience or patient trust and obedience?
• If Heaven was a place where you could have all the health, friends, food, gadgets and entertainments you could wish for, but Christ was not there, would you be happy with that? Would that be enough for you? Because that isn’t true Heaven.
• You stand to inherit the whole world, in good time. How should that affect the way you live now, how you share that life with others and God’s creation?
• If you are not a Christian, God calls you in love to the obedience of faith that means trusting in all that Jesus is and all that he has done. It will cost you everything you have, but you will truly gain everything that is valuable in the exchange.

Jesus is our Past our Present and our Future - A Communion Meditation

The Bridegroom is here. Jesus is here and we are going to share a family meal with him – that family meal is communion. I don’t know what your experience of family meals is or has been, but our Heavenly Father intends for this to be a joyful time, where Christ is present by his Spirit to love on and strengthen his people – the church.

And in this meal, the Bread and the Wine tell the story of the God’s people. That’s us and our brothers and sisters all over the world.

The bread and wine speak of our past, of the crucifixion of our precious Lord Jesus; the bread speaks of his body offered up in obedience to death and the wine speaks of his blood poured out in death that we might be washed and cleansed of all our darkness and that we might stand before God, now and forever, in all purity.

But the bread and wine speak also of Christ’s presence here and now for Christ did not stay dead, but was resurrected and now he intercedes for us before the Father in the power of an indestructible life, and by his Spirit, he pours out that eternal life upon us his people. And so the bread speaks of Jesus and his words being our sustenance, that he is our daily bread, and the wine of him being our victory and our joy so that we need not walk in fear, but in fullness of life.

And yet, whilst Christ is truly present now by his Spirit, he is also truly absent. For today, we eat and drink by faith, but one day, we will finally see God face to face and so the bread and wine remind us of the great wedding feast, when all darkness is finally swallowed up by light, when all tears are finally swallowed up by all joy, when our weak, temporary bodies are replaced with eternal, spiritual ones and when all death is finally swallowed up by life.

As you go up to collect the bread and wine, talk to the Lord, ask him to search your heart and to lead you in the everlasting way, then thank him that he has made all provision for you:

• To stand pure before God,
• To walk daily in his strength, victory and joy
• And to sit down with him at the feast in the great climax of history.

The DNA of Church Life: Sermon Text

If you’re like me then, this morning, you’ll be feeling a bit weird. The Christmas and New Year Holidays suspend the normal rhythms of life. Our bodies have not been through the usual Monday to Saturday routines that we do week in week out and so, we can find ourselves a bit detached and disorientated when arriving here on this first Sunday of the year.

However, whatever we feel this morning, we stand, as individuals, as families, as a church family, as a town and as a nation at the beginning of another year. Whether we want it to or not, the great big wheel of life is about to make another turn as it travels down the road of history. In the coming year, we will do many of the same things again that we did last year, and that’s good. The routines and rhythms of our lives give us a great sense of identity, direction, passion and conviction. They reveal what we truly believe to be important. But there will also be new things in 2016; some we will have planned for, others we won’t have. Some will be in our control, others will be beyond our control. And no matter how cynical you may have become about New Year’s resolutions, it is always important to reflect on where you’ve been and where you’re going.

Take a look at the photo behind me. I’m not sure how easy it is for those at the back to pick out individual faces, but this is a photo of an RFC morning meeting from about 7-8 years ago.

There are many people in this photo who have relocated to new places and new stages of life e.g. Sitho and Miranda being the most obvious here. Those of us who are still around have also change stages of life, James Del Rio has shorter hair and has become a dad, whilst I have more hair, at least on my face and I’m married with a kid arriving imminently . Scott and Bea have children, and Zoe Green, a mere tot in this picture, started secondary school this year.

If you think back to ten years ago, you could cite many things that have changed since that time, but there are no doubt many things that are still the same too. At a very basic level, you’re still eating three meals a day, still sleeping for roughly 8hrs over a 24hr period, maybe still watching Eastenders, or tuning in to the football results, still seeing many of the people you know from back then, a good number of them you saw just this last week.

Healthy human life on every level personal and communal is always a mixture of things that remain constant and repeated and things that are changing.

As a church there are many things that have remained the same, we still meet on Sundays to worship Jesus, teach the Bible, take up an offering, take communion and encourage one another to live faithfully for Jesus in the nitty-gritty of the day to day. Many of us still meet mid-week in small groups of various kinds to encourage one another because once every seven days is not often enough. However, things are also different now, we are gathering a greater diversity of people than ever before at more times and locations than ever before.

And so this morning, at the turn of another year, I want to shine a spotlight on those constant routines, which have be growing and advancing the kingdom of God ever since the church was birthed about 2000 years ago and after me, Ian Anderson will get up and tell us how we are looking to work some of that out in our refreshed small group system and how you can get involved.

Following that, over the next two Sundays, Scott and Andy will further flesh out some of those refreshments to our small groups system by talking about two new kinds of groups that we want to dovetail into the our current way of doing things. The reason we are making those additions is because we live in 21st century Reading, not first century Judea and we want to best serve all of you who come through our doors at each of our three Sunday meetings.
Our hope is that if you are:

1. Currently happy in a lifegroup, little will change,
2. If you are new, you will find it easier to get knitted into our small group community life, and
3. If you are a long term RFC member, there will be something new and invigorating for you to get involved in so that you don’t feel like small group life is more of a treadmill than a joy.

So if you have a Bible, please turn with me to one of the most well-known passages in the New Testament: Acts 2:42-47 and let’s take our noses off the grindstone of the present moment and see what the Spirit of God stirs in us afresh as we read and meditate on it together.

And they [that’s the new believers – the early church] devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Acts 2:42-47

Acts 2:42-47 shows us the “DNA” of the routines in the early church. (If you can make it out, it’s DNA in the image behind the text on this slide). Every human being has the same essential DNA, it’s what makes us human as opposed to ants or pigs, or tulips, but every human being’s DNA is slightly different. Some people have blue eyes, others brown, some people have black hair, others blond etc etc. So whilst we aim to have the same “DNA” as the early church, because we live in 21st century Reading, it will look different on the surface.

So what was the DNA of those first Christians?

The passage opens with the phrase they devoted themselves in other words, they made a conscious effort to make the things we’re about to look at a priority. There’s no sense of accident, no sense of “can I be bothered today? No sense of “well if it happens, it happens.” No doubt this devoting meant persevering for the long haul – a kind of “for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health” style devotion, the kind of devotions where they had to give up other things, things that they used to do, because no matter how rich or poor you are, in the wisdom of God we all have only 24hrs in a day.

Now Baby Walker is on the way, Elli and I will have to rethink how this devotion will look for us. Elli has given up paid employment and I have given up extra management responsibility at work so that we can together devote ourselves to the Lord in this new season. Our seasons of life change and with each change, we need to reassess, and devote ourselves again to the important things.

If you are honest with yourself, as 2016 stretches out in front of you, what do you need to give up / or just do less, so that you can devote yourself to the most important things?

To frame that question more positively, what do you need to pick up in 2016? For some of us, there are some things in the list behind me that we’ve never really thought about doing, for others of us, we have done them in fits and starts, in a hit and miss kind of way, for others, we are flying on some of these. But I would be willing to guess that none of us are sitting there thinking that we have all six totally nailed.

My aim, as we walk through this list is not to burden us with huge expectations, and fill up our diaries with more meetings, it is to show you how God wants to share his heart with us and wants you to share your heart with him. He loves you unbelievably – more than you could ask or think and in inviting us into these six things, he is inviting us into his heart.

So, firstly, v46 they regularly met together, both in large gatherings at the Temple and house to house across the city of Jerusalem. There isn’t any detail about how the system worked, only that they wanted to be in each other’s lives a lot. They were a new family, and healthy family life means they made it a priority to be regularly physically in each other’s presence, social media was not enough, and they only used Skype when for a time, they were forced apart by circumstance.
It’s these regular meetings together of various kinds that make the rest of the passage we looked at possible. They didn’t have the internet or books or TV to get what they needed, or electronic giving as a way of helping the needy from the comfort of the sofa. If they wanted to grow in understanding, or meet the needs of others they had to get of the sofa and go and find a real person to do it. And they knew that if they didn’t do it, their hearts would grow cold. (Heb.10:25)

And what did they do when they met together?

Well, second on the list. verse 42 says, they devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching. What was the Apostles’ teaching? I hear you say. It’s everything that Jesus’ disciples (now apostles)

1. Learned from him as they lived with him during his life on earth (1 John 1:1-2),
2. It was learning how Jesus is the fulfilment of all the Old Testament hope (Lk.24:27) and
3. It was learning how Jesus’ life and work transform everything for the world, now and forever. (Rev. 21:5)

In short, they devoted themselves to understanding what we would now call the whole Bible and what it meant for their lives and they devoted themselves to those who helped them to understand it, because in doing so they got to know God’s heart. Like I said a second ago, the only way they got the vast majority of that teaching was to be in the physical presence of those who were delivering it. They didn’t have the Internet.

Now in our day, assuming we have appetite to know what the Bible says, then beyond the 30min Sunday sermon, we are drowning in all kinds of clever ways and means to get the Bible and its message into our hearts whether through reading, hearing or watching, whether free online or through the purchase of study materials. For us, as we seek to get the solid gold teaching of the Bible into our hearts, we need to ensure:

1. That we are listening to people who teach what the Bible actually says and not to those who are twisting its message - that means using the Bible to make you a follower of them rather than a follower of God.
2. That what we are listening to isn’t making us proud and drawing us away from the local church.
3. That we are around people who help us not only understand it, but put it into practice so we don’t become hypocrites.

How are you doing with getting the words of the Bible into your heart? If you only ate meals, as often as you read the Bible what would your body look like? If the answer is not good or dead, what needs to change so that you can feed and thrive your soul? (If you can’t find anything, let me know, I will do all I can to help point you in the right direction.)

Thirdly, they devoted themselves to fellowship. Fellowship is being united together around a great cause. It’s more than friendship and definitely more than just acquaintance. Friendship is what we do when we need to relax, Fellowship is what we do when we want to work together to make a difference. Chatting about football over coffee after this meeting is nice, but in the strictest term, it is not fellowship. Both friendship and fellowship are needed, because life is a rhythm of work and rest, and we should do our best to embrace both, whilst not confusing or pushing too far one way or the other. The early believers no doubt enjoyed each other’s company, and relaxed with each other, but they also devoted themselves to the fellowship task of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. I consider Sean and Scott both as my brothers in the fellowship of the gospel, but also as friends because I enjoy relaxing with them on the rare occasions we get opportunity for that, like the meal we had together before Christmas.

Jesus reigns and calls us into the mission of carrying his presence to every nook and cranny of the world. Like the Fellowship of the Ring in Tolkien’s books, the fellowship of the church calls us all to unite in and work for a greater cause than our own lives would naturally give to us.
Based on these definitions of friendship and fellowship. How much of your interaction with other Christians needs to shift in focus. I guess some of us need to chill out a bit and take ourselves less seriously – It’s Jesus who is God’s gift to the world, not you or me, but others of us need to step up and take ourselves more seriously – again, Jesus is God’s gift to the world, but the God of Heaven calls all of us to stop lingering in the shadows and get into the task of bringing the Kindgom of God to the whole of creation whether on our doorstep or around the world.

Fourthly, they devoted themselves to the “breaking of bread.” That means, they ate meals together. They ate meals together in each other’s homes and they ate meals together as a church. Moreover, they took communion together – that is bread and wine.
Now this sharing of food together was more than a mere refuelling session – topping up on much needed calories and nutrients, it was a sharing of lives. So long as you’re not all hypnotised together in front of a TV screen, then when you share food together, you share hearts together. When we take communion together, we are sharing a meal with God, and sharing our hearts with him. Whether that is in your home or out and about in Starbucks because living in a shared house setting means you can’t always spontaneously invite people back to your place.

Two quick things about this sharing food is sharing life thing.

1. If you are inviting people to share food with you, remember that these are family meals, not Great British Bake Off auditions. When you invite Christians to your house, just put in front of them what you would normally eat yourself, whether that is a ready meal, beans on toast, pizza and chips or something else. Don’t get caught in that toxic mentality that says you have to cook something, better, impressive or different. Don’t put the cart before the horse, sharing food creates an opportunity to share hearts together. It’s not about you and your clever cookery, so don’t close your heart to offering someone a meal because you can’t so something that in your head looks “good enough.” More than that, if you’re too busy feeling annoyed about the consistency of your chocolate pudding, you’ll become annoying because you won’t be really listening to or engaging in the conversation with the people around you.
2. If you are invited to eat together with someone, say yes (assuming the diary allows of course) and thank them. If you have any dietary requirements, or food you really can’t stand then say so because they won’t want to torture your taste buds or make you ill. When you arrive enjoy what they put in front of you even if it is not what you would make for yourself and thank them for what they have taken time to prepare and thank God that you have a meal to eat. Then share your lives together.

Last year we had the month of meals, where we were all encouraged to get together over food, why not, in the spirit of that, think of someone now that you could invite round for a bite or take them out for a drink or a meal before the month of January is over. And if you do invite them round, remember, it’s ok to give them turkey left overs. ☺

Fifthly, they devoted themselves to prayer. Now when I read the word prayer in that text, I think all of the following happened:

1. Singing songs (Col.3:16)
2. Singing or saying the psalms of the Old Testament together – a practice that the more modern churches have lost in recent decades (Eph. 5:19)
3. Practising the gifts of the Holy Spirit like prophecy, words of knowledge etc
4. Praying for the successful advance of the Gospel (2 Cor. 1:11, Phil. 1:19)
5. Times of fasting (Acts 13:2)
6. People praying on their own
7. People praying informally together
8. Organised prayer meetings

A healthy prayer life, will have all of these elements in it.

Prayer does a number of things:

1. It draws us closer to God and brings the Kingdom of God to earth – on earth as it is in Heaven. (Matt.6:10)
2. It reminds us that it is God’s power that changes the world, not our clever words or organisation (although those are part of it too.)
3. It builds trust. Hearing a person pray helps forge trust between you. (John 15:7)
4. It births in us a generosity of heart to others –It’s hard to hold a grudge against someone you are praying for God to bless. God softens your heart in the praying. (2 Tim 2:8)
5. It reveals to us what our priorities in life really are. You and I will spend our time praying about the things that are most important to you (1 Peter 5:7).

What do your prayer routines say about you? What do they reveal about your priorities? What adjustments do you need to make?

Mention Prayermate App if time.

And finally, they devoted themselves to meeting each other’s needs. You see, when you are family, you cease to draw strong lines about what belongs to whom. This is a hard idea to grasp in our culture, because, even in our sense of family, we are so rabidly individualistic. From their very first steps, our children grow up in an environment, which is always drawing lines about what belong to whom. Many children have their own room where they can cultivate the life long capitalist routine of amassing a stash of stuff they can call “MINE” and mine means “NOT YOURS”

But if like me, you have had the privilege of travelling to far flung places that aren’t so chronically individualistic, you find that families and communities don’t talk in such strong terms of “MINE, NOT YOURS,” but rather they share everything together according to need. They aren’t communist, it’s just that when you are poor and all your family lives in one or two rooms, it’s very hard to develop a sense of entitlement to your own things, like we do in the prosperous West, because poverty and necessity give rise to a common dependency which means people share.

Consider your own biological family. If relations are good between you, then when one of your family member hits hard times, then the other family members do all they can to help them out, even going without in their own lives to ensure the others who have fallen on hard times, for whatever reason, have what they need. And they do it not because they have too, but because they are family and that is what healthy family does. It sticks together supporting one another.

The early church was God’s family, and so when one person got into difficulty, then others helped them out, not because they were forced to, of felt they had to, but because they considered them to be family, like their very own flesh and blood.

Now that happens here in RFC – both formally and informally. Formally, before Christmas, the elders gather info from the church family about who is in need and as a church family we distributed food vouchers various people.

But it also goes on more informally in the day to day, ranging from people helping others out who are in desperate times to people helping others out who just need a hand.

Now, what does the passage say happened when the believers devoted themselves to these things? Well six things happened:

1. v43 they revered God – They began to see God’s words as more important than their own opinions – they put their own self-centred assumptions to one side, chose to do what God said and saw that he was able to do super abundantly more than they could ever ask or think.
2. v46 they had joy – They managed to break free from the lie that we are most happy when we focus on ourselves and came to understand the truth that obedience, far from being the road to slavery and misery, was the road to true liberation and joy.
3. v43 the apostles did miracles - This is a truth that our individualistic culture finds hard to swallow and I am not entirely sure how it works, but due to the obedience and devotion of the whole church - together, certain individuals, namely the apostles were performing signs and wonders. Our obedience, or lack of it, to God, doesn’t just affect the fruitfulness of our own lives, it affects the fruitfulness of the wider church family. Imagine what God would do if we all devoted ourselves wholeheartedly to all these things above.
4. v47 they praised God They saw all that God hand done and all that he was doing and they couldn’t help but burst forth in praise to God. And as per Psalm 67 when the praises and obediences went up, the blessings came down and at this point in the story they came down in two ways:
5. v47 they had the favour of the wider community People were saying – wow – God is really among you! Now whilst the respect would remain, the favour wouldn’t last for long, after the stoning of Stephen at the end of Acts 7 the wider community and especially the authorities, became hostile to the early church favour turned to fear and suspicion, but even they would have still revered them and what is most important in all this is not wider society’s opinion on the church for that changes with the fads and fashions of the times; what matters is that God’s people are faithful to all that he asks of them.
6. v47 People were converted and added into the church God blessed their endeavours, spoke life into dead souls. Whilst we can never turn the word of God into a robotic formula, nevertheless, as they gave themselves to God, God blessed their endeavours with life – new spiritual life.

2016 stretches out in front of us, and God has given us everything we need for life and godliness though his Son and the presence of his Spirit with us, so that we can with confidence devote ourselves the things we have highlighted this morning. Now, Ian is going to come and tell us about how we can work some of this out by getting involved in small groups, as they give us a great opportunity to grow in the likeness of God.

Overtaken by Greater Joy: A Christmas Meditation

Zach and Liz (Zechariah and Elisabeth) were a godly couple who had never been able to conceive a family naturally. No doubt this caused them much frustration down the years. By the time we meet them in Luke 1 they are old and "passed it" and had likely given up all hope of being parents.

So when an angel appears to Zach as he offers incense at the altar and tells him he is going to be a dad, he is no doubt stunned, but there's a question worth pondering. Read the extract below and ask yourself, what was the "prayer that had been heard?"

Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense. And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.”

As painful as the childlessness must have been and no doubt prayers had gone up for that, that wasn't the primary prayer of Zach that the angel had come to announce the answer for. It was that God was finally fulfilling his promise to the world after thousands of years to come to us as one of us.

And yet, in that answer to the prayer of the righteous, the prayer of the ages, the prayer of prayers, God also, in this case, fulfills the very natural desire of a heart for children. Zach and Liz's joy at becoming parents is overtaken by the greater joy that God is faithful to his ancient promise and will fulfill it in their lifetime. This is clear by what Zach says after John is born:

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us; to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham, to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Zach doesn't burst into song about the handsomeness of his son like many parents would, but about the grace of God coming. Putting it bluntly, Zach waxes much more lyrically about "Mary's son" than he does his own. Little John only gets a look in at the last bit, and he is only the warm up act!!

Whilst their personal, temporal joy is no doubt very great, it is caught up in an eternal, universal joy of what God is doing by uniting himself to us for ever.

So whatever joy (or indeed sadness) you have this Christmas, and I hope you have much deep and profound joy in being with those you love and sharing precious moments with them, there is a greater joy to be swept up into, one that goes deeper, wider, higher and longer than the deep pleasures and sorrows of this life can ever know.

The Incarnation - God becoming like us, is an invitation, for us to become like God for ever.

Merry Christmas.

A is for Acceptance: GRACE Sermon Series Notes

Twelve years ago, I went to Weightwatchers. It was the first time, as a twenty-something man, I had walked into a room where I felt like a total outsider. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to be there and get my bodyweight under control and everyone was very friendly, but all the leaflets I got, all the advice I received and all the motivational hooks, were set up for the majority woman audience. There were even a couple of awkward laughs when the meeting facilitator gave one of those "top tips" and then realized, it wouldn't work for me. I wanted what the company was offering, but the community it fostered, left me cold and awkward. If it wasn't for the fact that I was paying to get weighed and so wanted to drop the weight as fast as I could, I probably would never have gone back. It all seemed nice, but irrelevant, and I was out of place.

I'm sure Weightwatchers meetings have come a long way since the day I stepped across the threshold of that primary school hall 12 years ago. These days every trendy business or charitable cause is seeking to build an accepting and diverse community base; bending over backwards to flaunt and affirm their "accepting credentials" so that no one can accuse them of being bigoted. The church is no different and rightly so.

But whilst we can all talk in wishy-washy, inoffensive ways about acceptance, we also have to recognise that EVERY community has to have a unifying principle that puts people on the inside or outside of that community. If I turn up to Weightwatchers and want to be “in” their community, I have to at the very least pay my fee and agree with their mission that loosing excess weight and maintaining a healthy body weight is a good idea. Otherwise, why am I there? No one would think that Weightwatchers was an intolerant organisation if it kicked me out after turned up to their meeting and started slagging it off for not welcoming people who aren’t interested in living healthily or telling everyone they’re all hypocrites because they haven’t lost any weight that week.

The church is called to demonstrate the love and acceptance of Jesus, but in a cliché-driven and image-saturated culture, what does it really mean to be accepting or loving? What is the unifying principle in the church?

What binds us together is the love of God. But that love has a definition and that definition isn’t my feelings. It is the person, words and actions of Jesus Christ – the Son of God. Just as our words and actions are the evidence of the kind of love that is in our hearts, so Jesus' words and actions are the evidence of the kind of love that is in God's heart (Luke 6:45) because Jesus was and is God.

Receiving the love of God and receiving the words of God is one and the same thing. You cannot receive the love of God, separate from the words and actions of God. (John 1:17)

Jesus effortlessly moved amongst all ranks of society, meeting with the ruling elite, the common folk as well as the excluded outsiders - the lepers and the tax collectors. No one was left out in the cold. He loved them all, without distinction with his words and actions. He loved everybody and he challenged everybody both those who looked good on the outside as well as those who looked chaotic and messed up.

This love of Jesus brings hope to the down cast, but it also calls us up and out of ourselves and calls us into a much bigger reality than we ever realised was possible.

The reason he did that was because on little cross on a hillside outside Jerusalem 2000 years ago God removed EVERY barrier between us and him. EVERY BARRIER.

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. 1 Peter 3:18

He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world. 1 John 2:2

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39

God has said that there is no barrier left. At the cross, God removed ALL the barriers that stopped God from uniting himself to the human race. Nothing that can separate us from the love of God, not our sin against him or against others nor other people's sin against us, not our shame, nor our self-loathing, not any demonic power nor our any human government, not our ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or nationality, not our weakness nor our illness, not our lifestyle choice nor the place that we live, not our education nor lack of education, not our political preferences nor our lack of it, not our body shape, not our past, our present or our future, not our ignorance nor our hypocrisy... NOT EVEN being polite, successful and middle-class.

God in Christ, throws his arms out wide to you, without qualification, he has accepted you and me with all our foibles and inconsistencies and hopes and fears. Nothing can stop him from doing good to you and for you. Will you now receive him, receive his words into your heart? The only reason anyone might possibly be rejected by God is because they continually refuse to receive him and put themselves beyond his welcome.

The problem is that even after we have been welcomed by Jesus and welcome him into our lives, are filled with his Spirit and desire to be like him, sharing what we have received from him with others, we still make a hash of it in all kinds of ways. There are many accusers both in and outside the church who are quick to remind us when we mess up.

The good news is that Jesus is not surprised or fazed by the laziness, fecklessness or even the plain nastiness of his people. If you have a bible, turn to Luke 18:35-43

Jesus has for a while now, been going around announcing the arrival of the Kingdom of God, teaching people, healing people, casting out demons etc. Things like that don’t happen every day and his reputation precedes him. So when a blind beggar, sitting at the side of the road going into Jericho city, hears that the man who is the long awaited Messiah of the human race is passing through, he is not going to be passive about the possibility of receiving his sight.

But an incredible thing happens. Even though everyone knows that Jesus is a healer, something in the hearts of the crowd closes up and instead of saying… “Friend, what a great day this is, let us lead you to Messiah that you might receive your sight,” they tell him to shut up! What kind of heart does that?

• Did they have a misplaced sense of purity that let them to think that – unlike them – the blind man was unclean and unworthy to come to Jesus? (Lev. 21:16-24)
• Did they have a misplaced sense of order – that Jesus wouldn’t like it or would be thrown by it?
• Did they not really understand the blessing of sight? – “Sight is overrated?”
• Were they hypnotised by the fear of missing out? A noble desire to receive from Jesus becomes a dark and twisted thing as they pushed the weak and needy out the way just in case Jesus only had a limited amount of “power” to bless them with.

Do we have the same attitude as that crowd at times?

• Do we due to some misplaced sense of purity in our hearts, think there are people who are too unclean and unworthy to come to Jesus?
• Do we have a misplaced sense of order – that Jesus or church life would somehow be thrown off course by welcoming others?
• Do we misunderstand the goodness of the gospel? – “Jesus is overrated?”
• Are we so fearful of missing out, or just so plain selfish at times that a noble desire to receive from Jesus becomes a dark and twisted thing as we push others out of the way so that we can get a blessing.

But the guy is not silenced. Peer pressure will NOT stop him from getting a blessing from the Lord of the Universe.

On the surface, it probably looked like any ordinary crowd, but Jesus, fully aware of the dark dynamic going on, intervenes because he orders to the crowd to bring the man to him.

Jesus asks him what he would like, not because he doesn’t know, but because he wants him to confess faith. The blind man addresses Jesus as LORD –he knows who he is talking to, and the LORD of all creation gladly grants him his request.
The crowd go wild with joy at this miracle.

Notice that Jesus doesn’t rip into the crowd for trying to keep the blind man away from him. He doesn’t say “You stupid, wicked, sinful, heartless people, why did you try and stop him from coming to me?” Jesus would have been within his rights to do so. But grace rarely speaks of rights, it speaks of kindness and generosity to the undeserving. He knows that we are all weak, stupid, dark and fallen creatures who need his love and his help whether we look like it on the outside or not. We need to stop pretending that we have it all sorted and receive his words, and receive his love. The only perfect person around when any group of people gather, is Jesus.

Over a thousand years previously, after the Israelites had annihilated this Jericho, Joshua pronounced a curse over it (Josh. 6:26). Hiel of Bethel did rebuild it, and suffered as a result, (1 Kings 16:24) but in the miracle of that day, Jesus announced that he was reversing the curse on the city. No wonder it was a day of celebration.

A love that is overdue and overwhelming breaths through our town. The curse is done away with at the cross, the way to God is open, and life and blessing flow to all who will receive the words of Jesus.

Jesus has done what we could never do and brought the love and acceptance of God to us. He has filled us with his Spirit so that we might be transformed and come to a place where we can share what we have received from him with everyone.

Jesus-shaped acceptance can often look like the kinds of acceptance we see in the wider culture, but it is not the same. This is how he welcomes us and this is how with his help, we can learn to accept others.

1. Jesus is not non-judgmental, he accepts us on the basis of truth (reality) and he full of wise judgement. He knows how bad we really are, but he knows also that he has the power to make us fit for his presence. (John 8:11)
2. Jesus isn’t bothered about superficial behaviours or micro managing people’s lifestyle choices (Luke 15:2). He is most interested in our hearts and its allegiances and so his acceptance of us goes to the very deepest level and he has no problem sitting with people in seemingly “impure” settings.
3. Life poured out of Jesus, (John 7:37-39) so he didn’t fear pollution by association with the non-Christians of the day and he wasn’t up tight around them. Neither is he fearful that moving towards us in love will somehow taint him. When he comes into contact with us, he joyfully transformed them, not the other way round.
4. Jesus went looking for opportunities to bless people because his acceptance was not about maintaining a status quo but about looking to see what the love of God can do in the hearts of people. (John 10:16) He sent someone to speak the love of God into our hearts, and we can have the privilege of doing the same.
5. We are not entitled to anything from God and Jesus doesn’t just tolerate those he accepts, he welcomes them as his very own family – he can’t wait to get to know them. (John 15:15)
6. Jesus would be justified, as God, in feeling a sense of superiority about his acceptance of others, but he doesn’t – he is naturally humble (Matt. 11:29) and happily serves and sacrifices himself for the sake of others.
7. Jesus is patient and enduring (Mark 9:19, Hebrews 12:2) – he accepts us with all our mess because he knows the future, the glorious new world that is coming, and the power of God that will be demonstrated in that time that will translate our weak, and floored bodies into glorious eternal ones.

Some of the Deacons put Jesus shaped acceptance this way:

“Having open arms to all, just as Christ has opened his arms to us.”

“Accepting others as we have been accepted ourselves by God.”

“Awareness of times when we focus our time and energy on those ‘like us’ – proactively step out of cliques to engage with those unlike us.

I can think of no better way of ending a message like this than with communion.

God the Father welcomes as his very own Family, all those who have welcomed Jesus into their hearts as Lord. Communion is not a funeral, it’s a family meal and just like any family meal, the dynamics can be messy, some members of the family can be happy, others sad, some family members can be grumpy and nasty to each other. But each has a place at the table and just as the Father welcomes us to his table, so we come to join him, not because we have earned our place, but because by God’s incredible kindness we have been given the right to come as his children.

So come, eat, drink and celebrate God’s love and welcome and accept one another as God has welcomed and accepted us.

Questions for Reflection:

1. When have you ever felt out of place? Why?
2. What do you think about the statement that the love of God/Jesus and the words of God/Jesus are the same thing? How does it change your view of God's love?
3. Do you agree with the statement that receiving all the words of Jesus is the only qualification for coming into the presence of God. How does that change your view of the Christian life?
4. What do you think of the crowd in Luke 18? Do you ever exhibit the same tendencies?
5. What do you think of Jesus' (non) reaction to the nastiness of the crowd? What does that tell you about him, and about us?
6. Jesus publically (by his actions) reverses the curse laid on Jericho over a thousand years earlier, what do you think that means for the place where you live?
7. Communion is a family meal time. How does this statement help us to understand how we should interact with each other and our Heavenly Father as we take bread and wine together.