Calling People Forth

SERMON: 2015-11-15--s1115--calling-people-forth-part-1 SOURCE DURATION: 00:35:45.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The entire provided segment range constitutes continuous sermon material, starting with an introduction and concluding with pastoral application/exposition. 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 --- Well, two weeks ago yesterday we held an in-house staff council retreat with a view of looking at leadership issues and one of the presentations that we listened to was a presentation by Craig Hill who is the founder and president of Family Foundations International. It's an organization that seeks to help people to identify underlying issues in their lives that are harmful to marriages and to relationships. And Craig Hill introduced us by way of video to a leadership model taken from the business world that really helped us to understand what it takes to expand and multiply our influence as leaders. Don't have time obviously this morning to walk you through his whole presentation, but allow me to take a moment or two to summarize it this way because I think you'll find it interesting as we did. Key to his presentation is a chart that looks like this. The letters there E, S, B, and I represent four different ways in which most people make their living because this is a model that comes out of the business world and can also be transported into the world of ministry. E stands for employee and an employee is a person who exchanges time and work for money. The primary value of an employee is the security that comes with the job. S stands for self-employed. Self-employed person is the kind of person who says, "Why should I be working for $15 an hour when my boss charges $45 an hour for the work that I do and he pockets the difference? Why not pocket that difference myself?" And so he or she goes out on his own and starts his or her own business. The primary value of a self-employed person is to exercise a sense of control over the work environment and the business world. The B stands for business and this is the guy who looks at the employee and at the self-employed person and he says, "I only get paid if I work and the harder I work maybe the more I get paid, why not let other people do the work for me?" And so the B person is the kind of person who finds other people, hires them, gives them a mandate and empowers them to do business on his behalf and so now he can afford to step back, he can take time off, the work goes on. And so his primary value is one of having free time and watching the work multiply without his constant handholding. And then the I person is an extreme example of the B person. The B person, the I person is a B person who says, "Okay, I've got this business going. I've hired all these many people. This thing is pretty much running on its own, I've got time, effort and energy and resources left. Let me invest in multiple businesses." And so he now invests in multiple businesses and they're all being resourced and they're all managing to run on their own. That's how business multiplies. Now what was really interesting for us as we listened to his presentation was the fact, if we can put that chart back up, that according to Craig Hill, and I think he's right about that, he says it's not that difficult to move vertically down these two columns. In other words, it's not that difficult for an employee to become a self-employed person. Think of all the construction guys that used to work for somebody else, came to the conclusion that they could do better on their own, loaded their tools in the back of a truck and now they are self-employed business people. Neither is it that difficult to move from a business model the way that I just described it to an investment model, depending of course on your resources and your capability. But he says what is very difficult is to move horizontally across from one to the other. And the reason he says is because it involves an entirely different set of skills and an entirely different way of thinking. Over here, you have to have a skill and you have to know how to do the business, but it's all under your control. To grow from being self-employed to running a business with many employees requires an entirely different set of skills because now you have to be able to identify giftedness in other people, you have to be able to hire them, you have to be able to motivate them, you have to be able to set them free, and you have to live with the reality that it probably takes two of them to do half the work that you used to be able to do yourself. And so it's a place where a lot of people get stuck. So how do you move from the one to the other? How do you cross laterally from an E and an S to a B and an I? And the key he says, apart from having some of the skills that are needed to do that obviously, the key is mentoring. You need somebody who comes alongside you, who's been there, who can identify your gifting, who can call your gifting forth and who can empower you and encourage you on the journey until you have learned to do what needs to be done and able to multiply and to develop your ministry or your business. So I got to thinking about that after those presentations two weeks ago, and it occurred to me that this applies really not only to people who are in business, applies not only to people who have a ministry and who need to multiply the effectiveness of their ministry, but really it applies to all of us at one level or another. Because as we've been saying, the Lord wants each of us to grow up in Christ in both the fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit. In the fruit of the Spirit, God wants us to excel in love. He wants us to be like Jesus. And in the gifts of the Spirit, He wants us to excel in exercising the greatest and the best of gifts so that we can be most effective for Him in His kingdom. So how do we get there? We get there by having somebody in our lives who can call us forth and empower us on our journey. And that's what Paul talks about, interestingly enough, here in these verses that we have read from 1 Thessalonians chapter 2, and as we look at the verses that we have read together in some detail, there are three things I want us to know. Three very important things that I believe we need to lay to heart if this process is going to work for you and for me, regardless of our age and regardless of where we find ourselves in life. Number one, Paul says in this particular passage that in order to come to full maturity in both the natural and the spiritual, we need both a father and a mother. We need a father and a mother to grow up in Christ. Listen again to how he puts it. Verse 6 and 7, "As apostles of Christ," he says, "we could have been a burden to you, but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children." Like a mother caring for her little children. Then later on in the passage, "For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting, and urging you to live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and glory." You've got the logo blocking my thing here upstairs. If you can fix that, please. We dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children. Now, as you well know, we live in a world where there is a tremendous confusion about issues of gender. We're confused about fathers and mothers. We're confused about male and female. And we're confused about boys and girls. Story out of Texas this past week that just utterly shocked me, two Christian daycare workers were fired. Why were they fired? Because they refused to go along with the instruction from on high, and not from the Lord on high, maybe should say from below. There was a little girl in that school with two male parents who decided that she was really a boy. And so these teachers had been instructed to not only address her as a boy, but to instruct all the other children in the class to consider her as a boy. And the teachers refused to do that. And for that, they lost their jobs. Now, this little girl herself is clearly ambivalent. Sometimes she thinks she's a boy. Sometimes she thinks she's a girl. But the politically correct gender issue is you go along with whatever. Imagine how messed up that kid's going to be as life goes on. And that's not the only story. There's another similar story in the news just this past week taking a bit of a different tack. To their credit, a district school board in the Chicago area refused to submit to an order that came down from up in the government somewhere that they had to allow a transgendered boy to have full access to the girls' shower and locker facilities. Now, they tried everything to accommodate this young lad, but nothing was good enough except full ability to use the girls' lockers. How would you like your 13-year-old daughter having to share a shower facility with a transgendered boy? To their credit, they're holding firm, but they stand to lose $7 million in federal funding if they don't bow to this dictate. The world's gone crazy. Honestly, gone crazy. But that's where we find ourselves, and the reason for that is because there is such a great confusion about what it is to be male and female, what is masculinity and femininity. We've talked about this before. I'll be very brief on it, but as you know, Leon Pottles in his book, The Church Impotent, The Feminization of Christianity, traces the history of this whole movement, and he has done some very extensive research in cultures around the world as to what identifies masculinity and what identifies femininity, because there's a lot of wrong notions that people are, of course, reacting against. And as he has studied different cultures from all over the world, he has reduced femininity and masculinity to just two terms each. Here's what he says about femininity. He says, "Femininity is communion and integration." Communion and integration means you remove the obstacles, you bring people together. You can see that among girls, for example, when in the world of girls, a girl who stands out from the crowd is rejected and gets treated meanly because it's all about belonging to the group. In opposition to that is masculinity, which he says is separation and differentiation. That is to say, men and boys draw a line in the sand, they emphasize the differences, and they determine what their adopted position is. You can see that among boys, for example, where the hero in the group is the one who stands out from the group that everybody wants to emulate. So there is a principle of femininity which is nurturing, which is loving, which is I'll make you safe. And there is a principle of masculinity that says, "All right, you've been safe enough. Let's leave that cuddly place behind and step out into the world and face the world." Do you see the difference? Did I hear a yes? Thank you. Femininity, the principle of femininity, typically exemplified in women and mothers, but not always, is a principle that says, "Let me be gentle among you like a mother. I'll nurture you. I'll make it safe for you. I'll kiss you always better." The principle of masculinity says, "Don't be such a baby. Time to grow up. Step out into the world." Right? You see it in, and I've said this before, kid leaves home, last words of moms, "Be careful." Last words of dads, "Go get 'em, Rover." Right? It's a different world altogether. Those are inherent in the structure of creation. Now we've talked about this before. The proportions of it vary from an individual to an individual. That's why we have all these gender discussions in today's society, but we need to understand what the issues are or we'll be bowled over by the emotion of the push that lies behind it. What Paul is saying here in this particular passage is that in order for us to grow up in Christ, we need both a mother and a father. We need to be nurtured so that we can be secure and we can be safe, and we can have a father who says, "You've been safe long enough. There's a world out there for you to step into and to conquer, and I'm going to call you forth." That's why in this passage he says, "We were gentle among you like a mother, caring for her little children." He says, "We dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children." If in the natural family this responsibility lies with the father and the mother, in this spiritual family of God, this responsibility rests on spiritual moms and spiritual dads who can, on the one hand, keep us safe and secure and know that we're loved and know that we're looked after and, on the other hand, challenged so that we step into the hard and the difficult places of life that God is calling us into as his children. You with me? We need the male and the female. We need the masculine and the feminine to develop a well-balanced, healthy spirituality in every area of life. Second thing I want us to notice in this particular passage, then, that the masculine role is defined in this passage by three words. What are the three words? Well, here they are, encouraging, comforting, and urging. For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting, and urging you to live lives worthy of God who calls you into his own kingdom and glory. Let me begin with the end product here, to live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and glory. Think this through with me. What is our destiny in Christ? Do you ever think about that? Why did God create us? Why did God redeem us? Well, he created us and he's redeemed us so that we could share the glory of the Lord Jesus at the right hand of God the Father. If you are in Christ this morning, then you are an heir of God and a co-heir with Christ. What that means is that God's destiny for you and me is we're going to sit on, and it's hard to even begin to picture this, but we're going to sit on thrones ruling God's eternal kingdom on his behalf. In order for us to qualify for that, we have to be like Jesus, fully obedient to the Father, filled with compassion so that we don't ruin the new creation like Adam and Eve ruined the old creation. The only way that we can even begin to get at what this looks like is to put it in human terms. Think of all the things in life that you strive for or that you dream for or that you celebrate the promotion, the possessions, the house, the car, the good repute, all of the things that are part and parcel of life that the nations strive for. God wants to give to you in Christ, not for three, four, five, or six decades or whatever, but for all eternity and so God brings us to faith in Christ so that we can learn to live lives worthily of the calling that he has upon us. He wants us to be worthy of receiving what God has for us so that we can be conformed to the image of Christ and we can be entrusted with God's authority over the new creation, whatever that is going to look like. So how do we get there? Well, we have to learn to grow up into Christ. We have to learn to live out what in Christ we already are. So how do we do that? We need somebody to call us forth. We need somebody, first of all, to encourage us. We need to be encouraged in the life we live before the face of God. Now the Greek word to be encouraged here is the same root word that Jesus uses in John's gospel to say that the comforter or the counselor is going to come when he goes to heaven. The word is parakaleo. It literally means called alongside. And the picture here, the way that I always picture it is, is you've got a runner that is running the race and he's getting mighty tired and weary and he says, "I don't know that I can finish this race. Somebody please help." And so somebody from the sidelines comes alongside, as you sometimes see happening in marathons, for example, and I'm going to walk this out with you knowing that you can get to the end. That's what an encourager is. An encourager is one who has a realistic view of your ability, one who knows what your potential is, who knows what your weaknesses are, who will come alongside you when you're tired and weary and want to throw in the towel and who says, "Listen, I believe in you. You can in Christ do this. You may not think you can do this. You may not feel like you can do this. Nobody else may have told you, you can never do this. I believe that in Christ you can do this, so let's get up and at it. I will resource you if I need to. I will do whatever it takes to help you run the race." How many people have you known in your life who played that kind of role? People who loved you, who saw you, who cared for you? And I said, "Listen, I'll help you do this because I believe in you. It's one of the greatest gifts that any of us can give to anybody else." So we need encouragement not only, but we also need comfort. We need to be comforted, and the word here literally means cheering someone up with soothing words and personal touch, something we often associate with the feminine. But Paul here associates it also with the masculine. Because I'll tell you something, I don't care how gifted you are, and I don't care how wonderful a person you are, if you're serious about following Jesus, being like him and stepping out into the areas of gifting that he has called you to in your life, I will guarantee you there will be times in your life when you fall flat on your fanny and you want to throw in the towel. Anybody here honest enough to say that's been the story of your life? Why? Because the devil, the world, and the flesh do not want you to become like Jesus and do not want you to be a threat to the kingdom of darkness. And if he and the world see where you're going, they will do whatever they can to pull the rug out from underneath you and make you fall flat on your face, and if it isn't the devil in the world that's on your case, it's your own flesh that says this is too hard, I don't want to do this, God, you know, here I am, but take somebody else. That's human nature. And we've all been there, if we have tried to overcome sin or if we have tried to step out into places where we haven't been before, we just get to a point where we say, well, this is just who I am and don't ever dare ask me to be something else. So how do we get beyond that? Well, we need somebody to kiss us better. We need somebody to provide comfort, somebody who can say you can do this if only you will try. Interesting story in the newspaper this past week that really threw me off at first, Catholic School Board in Toronto has gone on record as saying that the lowest grade a teacher is allowed to give to a student in midterms is 35%. And the teachers are all up in arms about that because, you know, there are kids who deserve a flat zero because they never turn in an assignment and they never show up in class. And when I first saw that headline in the paper, I said to myself, boy, what another example of political correct catering to the lowest common denominator, until I read the article and understood the reasoning, and the reasoning was this, if you give a kid a zero in midterm, you are demotivating him powerfully to even begin to bother. And so the idea behind the 35% was, well, let's at least give them something so that they have some sense of being able to climb out of the hole in which they find themselves. And I said, you know, there's wisdom. That's a very different mindset from when I first perceived that headline. Comfort is a person who can come to us after we have fallen flat on our face. And when we are demoralized and we think we're beyond redemption and we have just really, really messed up, a person who comforts is one who can come along and minister the grace and the love of the Lord Jesus and to inspire and encourage us that we can really get back up. We need to be encouraged. We need to be comforted in the places where we have failed. And then, frankly, we need to be challenged. And the word literally means solemnly charged. It's translated here in the text as urged. I urge you to live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and glory. We need exhortation and challenge beyond the comfort. Why should I get back up when I have fallen flat on my face? Why should I try again when every time I try it just reinforces the fact that I'm a loser and I really can't do it? Why bother to roll out of bed on a Sunday morning to get to church when I could easily be sleeping in? Why discipline my child who is out of control when all it does is cause me more hassle? Why engage my wife in these emotionally waters of turmoil when all it does is produce more conflict? Why stand up for what is right in a world that doesn't honor people for standing up and who would just as soon see me fail? Why bother? That's where a lot of society ends up. That's where a lot of the church ends up. Because it's just too hard and the devil and the world and the flesh are all working together to keep us passive, to keep us disengaged, and to be so filled with self-love that we don't care about the bigger issues of life. Well, I'll give you two reasons why it matters. It matters because God says so and it matters because other people need you. God is looking for you and me to be participants in His kingdom. He is building a kingdom of power and glory. He is building a people who will move through this land by His power to manifest His name. Ultimately, that's what's going to defeat evil, you know. Evil isn't going to be defeated simply by war, don't you ever believe it? Because the more we fight evil with evil, the worse it gets. You know how evil is going to be overcome? It's going to be overcome by good. When there is a significant percentage of God's people who would rather die than compromise their walk and their relationship with Him. And when God sees that happening and the devil sees that happening, the scales turn, Jesus returns and the kingdom gets established. God wants you and me to grow up in Christ because that is His agenda for the world. Not only does God have His reputation at stake, other people around me need me. Why engage my child? Because my child needs me to engage him. Why engage my spouse in the areas where it leads to nothing but conflict and confusion because if we don't work through these issues, the relationship is useless and we're not getting where we need to be. And the biblical reality, the biblical reality is that people need us to be what God is calling us to be. And as I've often said, if you don't want to deal with your stuff for your own sake, and if you don't want to grow up in Christ for God's sake, and if you don't want to discover your spiritual gifts and operate in your spiritual gifts for the greater good, then do it for your children and do it for the people around you because they're the ones who are paying for what you are in want. And so we need somebody to come alongside and urge us, kick our behinds, if you will, to get us moving in the paths of righteousness for the glory of God. And in our natural families, that's the job of fathers and mothers, and in the church, it's the job of those of us who are in community together so that we can help each other to grow up. On the one hand, the church has to be this place where we feel safe, where we feel unconditional love, where we feel accepted for who we are, and on the other hand, it has to be a place where we're loved too much to remain where we are so that we can call each other out and forward to become everything that God wants us to be. I think that's where we'll stop. There's a third point I had wanted to make, perhaps we'll come back to it next week. Let me introduce it briefly, and that is this. We need the key to this whole process is a thing called unconditional love, and here's your homework assignment for this week. Look through this passage that we have read in between those two verses that we have booked ended and have been looking at, and look at how Paul describes his relationship with the Thessalonian church. See if you can find in that passage five characteristics, five action verbs that he uses to describe his relationship with the Thessalonian church, and then ask yourself, "In my dealings with my kids, in my dealings with my employees, in my dealings with my friend, in my mentoring relationships, if you will, how many of these characteristics are part of my life?" As we come back and look at that, we'll get some very practical tools to make this process work, because when we grow up in Christ and when we function better in our spiritual gifts, everybody benefits. If I'm a better father, if I'm a better mother, if I'm a better pastor, if I'm a better leader, if I'm whatever better at it, it benefits everybody, and the life level in the community [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:35:38.580; remove through 00:35:45.000] rises because Christ is being made manifest in the hearts and in the lives of God's people. [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:35:45.000; resume after this marked segment]