Finding One's Place

SERMON: 2015-10-25--s0815--finding-one-s-place-part-3 SOURCE DURATION: 00:37:43.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 2 CONFIDENCE: 0.98 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 15 explicitly labels the material as '(soft music)', marking a clear transition away from the sermon content. Candidate 14 is the last segment of theological exposition/pastoral application before this musical interlude. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:00:00.000; remove through 00:00:03.300] [CUT] (dramatic music) [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:00:03.300; resume after this marked segment] Quick review again this morning for those of you that may have missed services the last couple of weeks. We've been looking together that for the church to function properly as the body of Christ, there are in fact four things that need to happen. Number one, we need to draw our life from Christ. Scripture says, Colossians 2, nine and 10, for in him, that is in Christ, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily and you have come to fullness of life in him who is the head of all rule and authority. Peter echoes that same thought in second Peter one, verse three, where he says concerning the Lord, his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence. The only one who can break all the natural obstacles to unity among God's people is the Lord Jesus by the power of his spirit and all the things that we're talking about in this series of messages then are focused on the reality of being in Christ and joined to his body. Secondly, we have seen that we need to find and embrace the place that Christ has for us in the local body. 1 Corinthians 7, 17, each one of you should retain the place in life that the Lord has assigned to him and to which God has called him. This says Paul is the rule, I lay down in all the churches. The context there is different. The context is married versus unmarried, slave versus free, but the same principle applies. The Lord has a place in life that he has assigned to us, his people, when we are part of his body. Number three, we need to trust God to establish our position. Psalm 75, six and seven are verses that I have much reflected on in the course of my own life. It is not from east nor from the west and not from the wilderness comes lifting up, but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another. God is sovereign over the rise and the fall of nations as well as individuals. And then number four, and we talked about this last week especially, we need to expect diversity. 1 Corinthians 12, four, five and six, there are different kinds of gifts, but the same spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men. We could add, of course, all women. And there lies the rub because it is the tendency of human nature to judge other people based on my own life and my own experience of God. I experience God a certain way. He gifts me in a certain way. He calls me to a certain task. And that for me very quickly becomes the standard by which I judge other people. And as soon as that happens, there's one or two things that happen. Number one, we question, criticize, and sometimes ultimately reject the other person or we question, criticize, and reject our own spirituality. I cannot tell you how many times over the years in ministry I have heard folks say as the Holy Spirit moves in the life of the church and people's lives are being transformed, people sometimes become very self-reflective and they say, well, what was wrong with the way that we have always done it? And the answer is, of course, maybe nothing. Maybe, just maybe, the Holy Spirit is pouring out diverse gifts, diverse experiences, diverse services on the body of Christ. And unless we can grab hold of that and embrace it, what happens, of course, is that the church continues to be fragmented as it is all over the world. And so I don't believe that I've ever been part of a church where on the one hand there isn't a court of people who are sort of at the center of church life, who own the vision and who throw themselves, their time talent and their treasure, wholeheartedly into building what God is building. But surrounding that core, there are often folks who are distanciated to varying degrees because they feel less than or they feel like they don't really belong and so they hold back their hearts. Their attendance is sporadic, their giving is erratic, their love is cold, their criticism often high. And what Paul does now, and this is really interesting, in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, he begins to discuss God's solution for people who find themselves in this situation. Now remember, we're talking about people who profess Christ. We're not talking about people who are not Christians. If you're not a Christian and the Holy Spirit isn't working in your heart and you're not moving towards the Lord, you will never find your place on the body of Christ because you don't belong. And the only way that you can belong is to come to faith in Jesus. But there are lots of people who profess faith in Jesus but who nevertheless still do not really feel they matter and they don't really feel they belong. And the challenge is how can we move them forward to owning community and throwing themselves wholeheartedly into what God is building. You get where I'm going with this? Well, that's what Paul now begins to talk about in the verses 21 to 24 of this chapter. Let's read them together and then we'll talk about that a little bit. 1 Corinthians 12, beginning at verse 21, he says, "The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you, "and the head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you." Let me pause there for a moment because here you have, again a parallel to the human body, God underscoring the importance of every part and the head cannot say to the hand, or the eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you, the head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you. Every part of the body is needed for it to function properly. So now he goes on, "On the contrary, those parts of the body "that seem to be weaker are indispensable, "and the parts that we think are less honorable, "we treat with greater honor, and the parts that are "unpresentable are treated with special modesty, "while our presentable parts need no special treatment." Notice what he's doing, he is comparing how we treat the parts of our bodies to how the Lord God treats the parts of the body of Christ. And Paul in this passage uses three phrases that define parts of the body. Let me run them by you because it's really quite interesting. First of all, he talks about the body having parts that are weaker, we'll talk about that in a moment. Then he talks about parts that are less honorable, and then he talks about parts that are unpresentable. So what is a weaker body part? Well, it's a part that is not as strong as other parts are. Maybe it is a flaw, a defect, or there's something broken. A zit on your face may be a weakness. A ankle that is twisted is a weakness. Lungs that can't breathe properly, they are a weakness. They are parts of the body that are weak. Then he says there are parts of the body that are less honorable. Well, those will be parts of the body that maybe you don't like very much, maybe you're even ashamed of. You know, a midriff that looks like a Michelin tire man. A behind that is bigger than it ought to be. Knees that are more knobby than they want to be. Ears that are too big, Lord knows why. And then we have unpresentable parts. And those are clearly private parts that in most cultures people hide and treat with a greater degree of respect. So you have parts that are weak, you have parts that are less honorable, and you have parts that are unpresentable. What do we do? Get rid of them? Sometimes we might wish that we can, but they're part of who you all are. And good luck trying to get rid of that. No, we treat them with greater honor. We lavish more time on them. If you have a face that breaks out a lot, you spend more time putting on makeup, particularly talking to women here, you spend more time putting makeup on than somebody whose skin is flawless. And if your ankle is twisted, you're gonna be very careful in how you move it unless you twist it even more. And if you have trouble breathing, you're not gonna put yourself in situations where you're gasping for air and can no longer keep on going. And if you have parts of your body that you're not proud of or that you're ashamed of, what do you do? Will you take extra care selecting clothing that flatters you as opposed to accentuate the part that you're not trying to accentuate? And the same thing is true for unpresentable parts. You cover up. You get rid of extra body hair that you don't want showing to the rest of the world. You fall in line with what the culture expects. And so Paul says, look at how you treat your body. There are these weaker parts, there are these less honorable parts, there are these unpresentable parts. How do you treat your body? He says with greater honor and greater care because you want the whole body to be as balanced as you can. You don't want some extreme to carry the day unless of course you're a teenager who doesn't have an identity and you wanna prove to the rest of the world that you are who you are. And then you are totally cross-cultural and you flaunt your differences. But eventually even they grow out of that. Well, Paul says this is what the Lord does with his people. Listen again to how he goes on here. Verse 24, God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it. He has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it. In other words, God lavishes special attention on those parts of the body of Christ who feel less than, who feel they don't belong, who feel weak, who feel less honorable, who feel less presentable. And as we'll see in a few moments, he does that so there will be no imbalance in the body of Christ. So practically speaking, what does that mean? Well, let's examine for starters what that looks like in terms of the body. What does it look like to be weak? What does it look like to feel less honorable? What does it feel like to feel un-presentable? And then let's see what God does about it. So I've thought of five elements that I think underscores why some people feel, now they're in Christ, but they still feel like they don't really belong. Reason number one is because they are people from a lower socioeconomic class. They are lower class than the bulk of the people in the community. If you've ever walked into some highfalutin event underdressed, then you will know what that feels like. When our second son Michael first went to Toronto to go to the Radio College of Canada, he decided to attend a local neighborhood church and when he did, he discovered it was literally an all-black church. He was the only white face in that whole congregation and he felt, as you might imagine, a little odd. I remember a time, Michelle and I, and I don't know how this came to be, but we stopped in at a shopping mall around the Finch-Jane area of Toronto. I was astonished. I do not believe there was one single Caucasian in that shopping mall. Everybody was Asiatic or black and I remember thinking, this is how minorities feel all the time. And those of you that are part of this community that are of lower socioeconomic status or those of you that are of a different skin color than some of the majority, you know what it feels like to feel less than because that's how the distinctions in the world work. Second, close to it, is people who lack social graces. I still remember back in 1958 when our family emigrated from the Netherlands to Canada, when we got ready to go on the boat, our parents took the time to teach us how to eat properly with knife and fork. Why? Because the dining room on the boat was a high class affair and they didn't want us to stand out for our boorish manners. I don't know how successful they were because I still don't know how to eat properly with a knife and a fork and I keep switching hands back and forth unlike some of you who are just so skilled at proper table manners. One of the reasons it's so important to grow up in fairly functional and stable families is because that's where we learn, generally speaking, the skills to do life and to do relationships. And if you've ever seen people or if you are one of the persons who grows up in a family and there wasn't proper parenting, then there are so many things that you have never learned. And now you're an adult, you're living in an adult world and you don't know how to do relationships, you don't know how to fit in, you don't know what is expected of you and you're always trying to learn from other people what you should have learned when you were little. I read a very interesting story some time ago about how the gang movement in America's big cities has changed over the years as families have declined and the brokenness takes hold. It used to be that if a young man or a young woman became part of a gang, this gang began to serve as their family and they would be committed to that gang for a lifetime. But you see, that requires certain skills of being able to get along with each other. That involves knowing how to do conflict resolution and how to fit in and the more broken people are coming into these relationships, they can't even stick it out with their own gangs and so the modern phenomenon is what they call serial gangs. I'll join your gang until our relationships fall apart and having fallen apart, I'm gonna join the next gang and the next gang and the next gang. That's how a lot of people live these days. They can't hold their friends and so they're always moving from one social circle to another. If that's your story, then it's very hard to fit into community because it just doesn't click and you feel less than. Usually you'll blame everybody else around you, mind you, but the reality is that's a major problem. Third reason is people who are spiritually immature, that is to say they're babes in Christ. To be a babe in Christ is to have come to faith in Jesus but to not yet have had Jesus change your heart to become more and more fully like him. And so babes in Christ tend to be characterized by jealousy and strife and Paul talks about that earlier on in the book of Corinthians in chapter three when he says, "But I, brethren, "could not address you as spiritual men "but as men of the flesh as babes in Christ. "I fed you with milk, not solid food, "for you were not ready for it "and even yet you are not ready." And then he goes on to say, and that won't be on the screen, "While there is jealousy and strife among you, "are you not of the flesh and behaving like ordinary men?" So let's suppose that you're a babe in Christ. Your temper gets away with you, you don't know your Bible and you don't know, you know, your life bears more of the works of the flesh than it does the fruit of the Spirit. You struggle with these deep-seated places of anger and confusion and you're surrounded by people who seem like they have their life together but you cannot keep your life together and it doesn't take much to feel less than, doesn't it? You look at other people and you say, "I'll never be like that." And then you drop out or you wander away because shame kicks in and you are one of the weaker members of the body. You feel less honorable and you certainly feel less presentable. Number four, people who are broken. To be broken means that some part of you isn't functioning the way God designed for it to function. It can be physical, that's the most obvious. It can be mental, that is often obvious. But it can be emotional, it can be spiritual, those are often less obvious. The reality is because we live in a world of sin and fallenness, we're all broken one way or the other, that having been said, some people are much more broken than others. And the more broken you are, the harder a time you have doing life. I've often said and you've heard me say this many times, a broken person, a person who's broken emotionally or physically or mentally often has to work twice as hard to be half as good as a regular person. It just doesn't come naturally to you. You get triggered in places that you don't know what to do with. And so you feel like you're not pulling your weight. These are people who feel that they can't sustain relationships, these are people who feel they can't sustain community, these are people who feel weak, they feel less honorable, and they feel un-presentable. And so again, they see everybody else living in a certain way, and they say to themselves, that's not me. And so they gravitate towards other people who feel the same way that they do, and they normalize their relationship rather than recognizing that the Lord wants to work in their lives to heal these broken places. One more area then that we can talk about just quickly, and that is people who have experienced a major moral failure. Got an email a week or two ago from a colleague of mine asking for advice. He was confronted by a situation where a registered sex offender had begun attending his church. And as you can imagine, that produces a bit of a dilemma, because on the one hand, you want to extend grace to the last and the lost and the least, because that's what the gospel is about. On the other hand, you have to protect the community, you have to protect the families, and you for sure have to protect the children, so what to do? So he contacted some experts in this field, and this particular lady instructed him, among many other things, to let the whole congregation know this man's past. And that seemed a little over the top to him, and so he asked me, what do I do? And I haven't yet answered his question, because our staff were still discussing it. How do you make sure the community is safe for all the people in the community? Without shaming this person to such a degree that it makes it impossible for him to be part of the church community. You know, in this day and age, there are certain sins that people flaunt, but there are other sins that mark you with the proverbial A of adultery, so to speak, and you can never ever find your place back into the body of Christ. That's a huge issue, because Jesus did come for the last and the lost and the least, and as we'll see later on, when David is being chased around the wilderness by King Saul, who are the people who become the basis of his ministry? 1 Samuel 22, interesting verse. All those who were in distress, or in debt, or discontented, gathered around him, and he became their leader. About 400 men were with him. How would you like to build your kingdom on that? It's a little bit like Jesus choosing the 12 disciples, isn't it? And Paul, earlier on in Corinthians, of course, says not many of you were rich and wise and all of the things that the world is looking for, but you were the last and the lost and the least, and I'm paraphrasing here, because God delights to show his glory in those who can only boast in the Lord. So I'm sure you can think of other things that make people feel like they don't belong, and perhaps one or more of these speaks to you. And yes, you're part of this community, and you're here periodically or even regularly, and but in your heart, there's a distance. In your heart, there is something that says, this is, these are my limits. This is where I draw the line, because this is simply too painful. So what does God do with the parts that are weak, the parts that are less honorable, the parts that are unpresentable? Ignore us, throw us away, chastise us for not doing better, none of those things. He does what you and I do with the parts that are weak, less honorable, and unpresentable. He lavishes special attention on those parts. Listen again, God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it. Greater honor to the parts that lacked it. What does that mean? It means two things. Number one, God has a special love for the last, the lost, and the least, or in Paul's language, the weak, the less honorable, the unpresentable. Scripture puts it this way, and this is a theme that runs throughout the Bible, the Lord is close to the what? To the brokenhearted, and he saves those who are what? Crushed in spirit. Never, ever think that it's your weakness, or your brokenness, or your sin that keeps God away, or that makes you less usable in the body of Christ. The opposite is true. There's only one kind of person that God can't do anything with, and those are the proud and the arrogant who think they don't need God. The reason God loves the brokenhearted is because they know they don't have anywhere to go. They have to throw themselves on the mercies of God, and if you fall into that category in some area of your life today, then regardless of what you feel, or how you feel, or what other people think, or what you think about yourself, you need to know God loves you with an incredible love. His eye is on the sparrow, his eye's on you. More than that, what God does is he will give you, listen to this, he will give you an extra measure of grace. James, James 4:6, he gives us more grace. That is why scripture says God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. God's grace is in proportion to your need. And so practically speaking, what that means is if you are socially or economically disadvantaged, God says the Bible will compensate you for that by giving you an extra measure of what? Faith, listen to James again. Listen, my dear brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith, and to inherit the kingdom he promised for those who love him? And if you're socially awkward, and you don't know how to do life, and you don't know how to do relationships, what does God do? He puts you with people who will walk this out with you so that you can grow up in the Lord. Psalm 68, the verses five and six, he is a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows. Remember, those are the helpless categories in scripture. Is God in his holy dwelling? God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing. And if you're spiritually immature, what do you think he does? Well, he shows his face to you to show that he's real, and to show how much he loves you. If you've ever hung around with new believers, you will discover that new believers get answers to prayer that you, if you are an older believer, have a hard time laying hold of. I mean, you're trying to walk by faith, right? And you're trying to keep on believing, even though the sky sometimes seems like brass, and God's answers are nowhere to be found. And along come these new Christians who, you know, have half a foot in the world, maybe, and half a foot in the kingdom, and they, as much as pray for this, that, or the other thing, and God is right there. That's what he does. Because, you see, he likes to balance things out. And what if you're broken? Well, God comes to you in your brokenness, and he gives you the grace of the Holy Spirit to identify the roots and the causes of that brokenness, and he gives you the strength and the power to stand against those forces, and he starts lifting you up and he starts exalting you, because he is near to the brokenhearted and he loves their cries, and he gives extra grace. And you can go on in that way. So why does the Lord do that? Because he doesn't want there to be inequality in the body of Christ. Listen to how Paul goes on. 1 Corinthians 12, 24 and 25. God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it. That's what we've read earlier. And then he gives the reason, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. God knows how to balance out the body. And what that means is that old believers who are steady in their faith need new believers over here, because new believers bring an energy and an immediacy of life in the kingdom that has become stale and blase maybe to an older believer. And the new believer who is filled with that kind of new wine and vitality needs the older believer because the older believer is more steady, has endured drought and rain and different seasons, and can help the new believer to stabilize instead of being up and down one moment and abandoning the Lord the other. And if you're poor, you need the rich, but the rich need you, because you see, your gift of faith contributes to the body in ways that somebody else may not be able to understand. And in turn, you need the rich because maybe there are ways of managing resources that you can learn from them that will also help you economically move forward. You see where this is going? And if you come out of a steady family and you take all of these things for granted, you need people whose families were, do you know what families some people in this congregation come? It would put your hair on end if you hear the stories of people who have come through hell and back and God has claimed them and has put them here. And you, who are steady and solid as a rock, you need to hear their stories and you need to embrace them because you will never understand how much of the world operates unless you understand the tragedy of the brokenness of sin. And they in turn need you for your steadiness and for your encouragement and your support. You see how God does this? Now for this to be reality, there are two things every last one of us needs to embrace. Let me see if I can get to it here. Number one, I need to be secure about my own place in the Lord. And what I mean by that is, I need to know that God loves me unconditionally in Christ. I need to know that he secures my place for me and I need to know that I am doing what I'm being called to do in the body of Christ. In other words, I need to be solid in my relationship with the Lord so that out of the solidity of that relationship, I can secondly then extend grace to the people around me. It's our insecurity that makes us intolerant. It's our insecurity that makes us critical. It's our insecurity that makes us judgmental. If I know that I'm solidly rooted and grounded in God and I know that God creates diversity in the body of Christ, then I can bless other people. Then I can rejoice with those who rejoice. I can weep with those who weep because I know that each one of us, in his or her inevitable way, we bring a certain strength to the body that God uses to accomplish his purposes in the world. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 START at 00:37:36.960; remove through 00:37:43.000] (soft music) [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 END at 00:37:43.000; resume after this marked segment]