Consolidating the Kingdom

SERMON: 2016-03-13--s1816--consolidating-the-kingdom-part-2 SOURCE DURATION: 00:42:26.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 38 is the final prayer/benediction (pastoral application). Candidate 39 ('Amen?') is the immediate conversational closing tag that completes the sermon's delivery before any potential music or silence begins. 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 --- I want to pick up tonight where we left off three weeks ago. We've been looking together, you may remember, at David's journey from a man on the run for his life to the day when he occupied the throne of Israel according to the promises of God. And we've been looking specifically at the things David had to do in order to see the promises of God come to fulfillment. You may recall that I pointed out that the Christian life is a curious balance between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. On the one hand, it is God who says to David, "I will bring it about. All you have to do is trust me." And on the other hand, David had to do what he needed to do in order to accomplish the purposes of God. So, so far we've looked at two of three things that David had to do as his part in bringing about the promises of God for the nation of Israel. Let me just quickly review those first two, and then we'll get on to the third one tonight. The first thing that David had to do was overcome his enemies. His enemies were two-fold. They were the surrounding nations, the Philistines particularly, the Amorites, the Moabites, the Edomites, and all the other rights that were constantly trying to take away Israel's freedom and bring them into captivity. He had to fight them, but he also had to fight the northern eleven tribes who were the followers of King Saul and who weren't about to yield to his kingdom or to his rule. And the takeaway that we looked at three weeks ago is that whenever you and I in Christ begin to perceive what is our inheritance and what it is that God wants us to trust him for and we start stepping out into that, you can expect significant opposition. The devil, the world, and the flesh all team together to try to keep us from being and becoming what God has for us. And it takes a combination of the grace of God working in us to equip us to step out in faith, to believe him, and to lay hold for what it is that God has for his people. And the difference between the Christians who make a difference and who accomplish the purposes of God in their generation and those who don't is caught up in that ability to lay hold by faith of God's promises and then to do what they need to do in obedience to the will of God. Does that make sense? So on the one hand it's you trust God for everything and on the other hand you have to obey what God calls you to do. God will not do for you what you are supposed to do. He will help you do it, but he wants you and me to obey. That's one area that we looked at together. The second area that we looked at together is that David had to win over the people. It wasn't so hard to win over the people of Judah because they were his tribe, but the northern tribes, they were loyal to the house of Saul. We've talked about a seven-year war that he had to wage to bring them into submission, but you and I both know that force alone cannot win the loyalty of somebody's heart. They have to willingly submit to your authority. David really shone at that. We looked at the two examples three weeks ago of David's grief when Saul and Jonathan were killed in battle with the Philistines. He demonstrated that he wasn't an interloper. He wasn't a person who was trying to take over his master's position. He wasn't trying to be a king. No, he was trusting God and he loved Saul and he truly loved Jonathan. It went a long way to show him what his heart was like. Then, of course, he showed his heart after Joab, his commander-in-chief, brutally and wrongly murdered Abner, who was the leading general of the northern tribes who had come for a peace initiative and Joab tricked him and killed him. David knew what a bad position that put him in and he publicly distanciated himself from whatever it was that they had done, whatever Joab had done, and he wanted the northern tribes to know that this was not his doing. Both of those elements really helped him ultimately to win over the people of Israel. So the Bible summarizes his reign, 2 Samuel 8.15, David reigned over all Israel, doing what was just and right for all his people. The takeaway there is that whenever God puts you or me in a position of authority, whether that is parents with children or grandparents with grandchildren or teachers in school or employers in the workplace, authority alone will not win people's hearts. If we want people's loyalty, they have to see our hearts, they have to know that we love them, that we have their best interests at heart, and that we can be trusted with their loyalty because we are men and women of integrity. That is a huge issue, particularly in this day and age. That brings us then to the third point that I briefly introduced last time, but I want to expand on a little bit more. The third thing David had to do in his quest to fulfill God's purposes as king over Israel and to establish the kingdom of God is he had to organize the nation. He had to organize the nation. He had to do that on two levels. First of all, he had to do it on a civil level. That is to say, in terms of the governmental structures of the nation. If we can put that slide up, Andrew. 1 Chronicles 27.1 puts it this way. This is the list of the Israelites, heads of families, commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds, and their officers who served the king in all that concerned the army divisions that were on duty month by month throughout the year. Each division consisted of 24,000 men. Now that may not mean much if you read that verse, but if you read the succeeding verses in scripture, then you will notice that what David is doing is having come into his kingdom, he is organizing the governance of the whole nation. And that involves appointing people with places of responsibility. It means putting the right people in the right position and creating a structure of governance that could sustain the growing population. David was not only an incredible poet, he was not only an incredible warrior, he was an extremely capable administrator. Now the second area where he organized Israel, and for us that's of more significance, is that he organized the religious life of Israel. Again here is a slide with the scripture, 1 Chronicles 23.2-5. He also gathered together all the leaders of Israel, as well as the priests of Levites. The Levites 30 years old or more were counted, and the total number of men was 38,000. David said of these 24,000 are to supervise the work of the gentleman of the Lord, and 6,000 are to be officials and judges. 4,000 are to be gatekeepers, and 4,000 are to praise the Lord with musical instruments. I have provided for that purpose. And if you know those chapters, and again I encourage you when you have a moment or two, read the scripture passages from 1 Chronicles chapter 18 to chapter 27. They're not a passage that we typically read because you know it's got a lot of names in it and a lot of administrative issues, but there's a point there. And the point is that David knew that Israel's well-being depended on her covenant relationship with God. Remember he had the vision of what God was after, and that was creating a people who would love God and honor God and who would walk in his ways and who could be a light to the nations from whom eventually the Messiah would come, and through whom ultimately all the nations of the world would be restored to loyalty to God, living a life that was pleasing to God so that God could well run them, and David knew that. And so when David had come into the kingdom, and we'll talk about that Lord willing probably some Sunday mornings after Easter, David's passion was to build the house of God. But remember he was a man of war, his hands were covered with blood, that honor would ultimately be given to his son Solomon, but David used the opportunity to get the nation of Israel ready. And he not only prepared by gathering a lot of building materials and making the plans for the temple and all the things that were involved in that, but he also structured Israel's religious life. And here you have in this passage that we just looked at in subsequent verses, he gathers the priests and the Levites, and he begins to structure Israel's life. The priests were the sons of Aaron, they were charged with duty in the temple, they stood between God and the nation, the Levites were their assistants. And because there were so many of them, he organized their routines so that they all took turns. I love this passage where he says, "Four thousand, or praise the Lord, little musical instruments I have provided for that purpose." He must have had a whole factory going out, you know, turning out harps and wires and whatever, all they used back in my day because he understood, he understood that God in God alone was worthy of the praise of his people. So he organized the nation, he did it on a civil and a military level, but he also did it on a religious level in the worship of God. So the question then is, what's our takeaway? What do we learn from David's steps towards consolidating the nation of Israel? And in the time that remains I want to give you three very practical lessons that I think flows out of this story. Chapters that we don't typically read and pages that, you know, don't really serve as devotional inspiration for us, but that are part of biblical inspiration and therefore have some profound lessons. So take away number one, administration, that is the gift of organization, is, believe it or not, a spiritual gift. Listen to how Paul puts it when Corinthians 12, if we can put that up in here, "Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it." And in the church God is appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, and then this, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues. I think that slide up for just a little bit. Remember the Corinthians were enamored with spiritual gifts, particularly they were enamored with the gift of tongues. Paul is trying to bring things into balance. You'll notice he puts the gift of tongues last in the list, but he also talks about the gift of administration. And the gift of administration, he says, is a spiritual gift. The Greek word is koubernisis, and it literally means, and a, let me put it this way, a steerman ship, it refers to the helmsman of a boat. And so the picture here is that God's people are like a boat going down on the journey towards the kingdom of God, and the helmsman is the guy who guides the boat past all the shoals and into the right direction so that it arrives safely at last. So the gift of administration is the ability to plan, it's the ability to organize, it's the ability to pull the people of God together and to create the structures that are necessary for God's people to live in unity and in harmony. That's what David did when he organized the military, he organized the temple worship, he didn't just throw it all together and hope that something good came out of it, no, he created very specific structures. That's the gift of administration. Now why do I make point of that? I'll tell you why. There is a certain tendency among certain Christians to be suspicious of structure and organization. One of the reasons for that is that sometimes people have been burned by structure and organization, and they have placed it in a position that is opposite to the leading of the Holy Spirit. And they have found it so bottlenecked that they have rejected structure and organization. And it's true, one of the dangers of life in the church is that people are so busy structuring and organizing that the Holy Spirit can't get in there even if he tried. I've known many, many churches that are so certain about who they are and what they're doing that if the Holy Spirit came knocking on their door, they wouldn't recognize him for who he is. So that's always a danger. That's not to say organization or structure is automatically at odds with being led by the Spirit. What was the first creative act of God on the book of Genesis? It was to create order out of chaos. On Corinthians chapter 12, 13, and 14, when Paul talks about the spiritual gifts, what is the point of his teaching? It's let all things be done peaceably and in order. That is to say, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and spontaneity in the Holy Spirit is not at odds with structure. God can create and use structure just as readily as he can bypass structure in order to accomplish his purposes. I always say God can be in the organizing of something ahead of time just as readily as he can be in the middle of it. He can be both wineskin, new wine, and new wineskins to contain the grace of God. I've said this before, if you've ever been part of a meeting or ever been part of a church group that wasn't organized or that wasn't structured, you know that you want to pull out your hair because nothing gets done and everything gets frustrated. The key is that structure has to yield to the Holy Spirit and cannot be used as the Pharisees did to keep God away because we think we happen to know better. Does that make sense? A good example, I think, is what we experienced last Sunday morning when Sylvain came marching forward, those of you that were there, to suggest that we pray for Valerie after she shared her medical need. I've had people ask me, "How do I feel about somebody interrupting the service like that?" Because I'm an ordinary person you might know by now. Generally speaking, interruptions, of course, are not necessarily welcome or helpful. But in this particular situation, my judgment is that it was right on the mark in terms of what the Lord was doing. There are reasons for that that I can't go into tonight, but it provided an opportunity for us as a congregation to step into a situation that was hugely important, not only for us as a church, but also for Valerie to see how you were there to love her, to support her, and to encourage her. And that story is her story to tell, but that profoundly impacted something very deep in her heart. Administration is a spiritual gift. Never apologize for planning. Never apologize for structure. Never apologize for thinking ahead, but hold it loosely. Do it prayerfully, knowing that God might well want to change the plan. He might well want to step into a situation. But He is not anti-structure. He's not anti-organization. You know, don't want to belabor that ability, but my experience is that sometimes the people who are most anti-structure are simply people who have places of brokenness they cannot submit to authority and they don't know how to work with other people. And rather than owning that for what it is, they spiritualize it and they say, "Well, I just want to obey the Holy Spirit." Well, the Holy Spirit is going to put you in community, and if He's going to put you in community, you're going to rub shoulders. And the 13th chapter on love is smack dab in between these chapters and spiritual gifts, because if spiritual gifts aren't used to build up the body of Christ, you're missing the mark. I said, number one, administration is a gift given by the Holy Spirit. Number two, second takeaway is the larger an organization grows, the more the structure needs to change. The more an organization grows, the more its governance or administrative structure changes. As most of you know, I've been privileged to pastor three churches in the course of my lifetime, three very different churches of very different sizes. The first church had maybe about 35 families. The next church was maybe twice that size. And this congregation probably two or three times the size of that. And I can tell you from experience that while in our denomination, technically the organizational structure of each congregation is similar, in actual practice there's no comparison. Small churches tend to be run by two or three powerful individuals who control the whole organization by virtue of their personality and who impose their values on the community. Some of you have heard me tell the story. The first church that I pastor took me close to six years to discover this. The whole church was run by two women, two elderly women, two women who were sisters who couldn't stand each other and nobody else liked them, but they ran the show. They pulled all the strings behind the scenes, and when push came to shove, they were the ones who decided who got nominated or elected in council. They had relationships with such people, and they just knew how to keep that whole business afloat. It took me five years to figure that one out. And a few conflicts as maybe you might imagine. But that's what happens in a smaller church. In a larger church, the dynamics repeat themselves, but now you tend to deal with extended families. Most Christian Reformed congregations, if you go back to their history, will have congregations that are founded by a number of dominant families. Those families are all interconnected, and because they're all interconnected, they are the ones who determine the values and what is allowed and what is not allowed in that community. As long as you dance to those tunes, you're doing perfectly fine. Challenge them, and you might run into a little bit of a problem. Bigger churches operate on a different level, because there tend to be so many people that no given individual tends to have the kind of power that they have in smaller congregations. And so they become a different organization altogether. But as churches move or grow from one level to another level to another level, the organizational nature of that group has to change if it wants to keep on growing. And we learned that here years ago when under Ben's leadership at the time as chair of council, we made some very significant structural changes in terms of how this particular congregation was going to go about its business. Historically in Christian Reformed Churches, of course, when a church grows, you would just add elders and deacons to council, because each elder typically had, and a lot of you will recall this, they would have a section that they were responsible for pastorally. And the result of that was that as churches grew, councils got bigger and bigger until in our situation, anywhere between 24 and 30 people sitting around the table making decisions, which becomes a significant bottleneck in terms of how we move forward. So one of the changes that we went through quite a number of years ago, and just to set your heart at ease, I had nothing to do with that, even though I supported it, Ben introduced the model that you see in Christian schools where you have a smaller body that serves as a board in our situation. Now we have, as you know, six elders and three deacons who serve as our board of governance to whom staff reports. And this group sets the policy and does all the other kind of things that we've talked about, but then the work of ministry gets delegated to people who are in staff positions who are responsible for volunteers and for the other kinds of things. And what that does is it creates a model of ministry that changes how governance happens, and there are pluses to that and there are minuses to that that I will explain in just a moment or two. But what happens is that for churches to grow, the internal structure has to change so that it can continue to expand and not get bottlenecked by one or two individuals. In a smaller church, you know everybody. In a smaller church, you're involved in all the details of everybody's lives, but that quickly becomes a bottleneck because no matter how gifted or called or qualified you are as a leader, you can only do so much. And so the multiplication of leaders becomes really important, and that's why in a congregation like this we have a lot of large group meetings and we have smaller group meetings so that you try to combine the best of both worlds. You try to combine the large group structure that can look after the large groups of people, but you also want to maintain the kind of intimacy that you can have in smaller groups. Now one of the things that Valerie and her pastoral care team have just introduced to the congregation, and we haven't talked about this publicly yet, is a thing that we call section pastors. You know how in the auditorium, the auditorium is divided into multiple sections and most of you, once you've been here for a while, you have found your place and will be tied if somebody else sits in your seat. And you really mess with me just for the record if you move elsewhere because then I can't find you. But it's easy to get lost in a larger crowd. And so one of the things that we have begun to do, or that Valerie has begun to do, is she has appointed people who are in charge of each of these sections. And their responsibility is to identify who's there, who's not there, with a view to encouraging growth and maturity in the body of Christ. There's a lot more detail to it than that, but that's just a very brief and quick introduction to it. The challenge for bigger churches is how do you keep track of everybody and how do you meet everybody's needs when in smaller churches that's automatically taken for granted because you have those kind of connections. And that brings me to a third takeaway, and that's a really important one, and that's this. Structural change or organizational growth almost always causes relational pain. Think back to David. Remember, he was on the run from Saul, he was hiding in the cave of Adon, and 400 of the last and the last and the least came and joined him. And for that, what, seven or eight years, they were together on the run and fighting battles and running for their lives and trying to stay alive. Can you imagine the kind of intensity of relationships that developed among these people? The way they had each other's backs, and the way they knew each other through and through, and could count on each other, and the kind of intimate, talk about a band of brothers, this was the act. Now move the clock forward, David becomes king, and he's got, you know, the three outstanding colleagues that he has, but he has the 30, and we've talked about these before, and then he's organizing his kingdom. And now some of these people are being relocated into the distant lands, and he's become king, he lives in a palace, and can you imagine how intimacy changed? Because they no longer had that ease of access to him, and life was very, very different. And one of the reasons a lot of people don't want to see churches grow, and have idealized notions of small churches, is because they don't want to lose that sense of immediacy relationally. And so when people lose that, there is a great deal of grieving that takes place, and you have to make allowances for that. First church that I pastored, I knew everybody. I not only knew everybody, I knew everything about everybody. People didn't know I was like that. But I also knew their kids, and I knew their grandkids. Second congregation, I knew just about everybody, but not to the same degree. A congregation like this, I know most people, but there's lots of people in a given Sunday morning that I have never seen before, and that you've never seen before, and that I hope not. So relationships change, and that can be a sense of loss, and a sense of grief. There's a second reason, though, why organizational change causes pain, and that's a much tougher one to put your finger on, and that is this. Leadership requirements change when an organization grows and comes to maturity. Let me say that again. Leadership qualifications change when an organization grows and comes to maturity. Let's take a look for a moment at the next slide. I've shown you this before. It comes from Crate Hill, from Family Foundations International. We've talked about this before. As he was developing his ministry to try to help individuals and churches grow, he discovered very quickly that there are four kinds of people that he was working with, and if he didn't know how to make that distinction in terms of multiplying the ministry, he ran stuck very, very quickly. The E stands for employee. He's the kind of guy who works from eight to five, and is used to being told what to do, and is happy to do it, and is a very important part of keeping the machinery going. The S stands for the self-employed. We've talked about this before. The self-employed guy says, "Why should my boss be charging $45 a dollar for me, paying me $15 when I can be doing this myself?" And so he starts his own business. The B stands for the business person who recognizes that if he's self-employed or working for somebody else, he's got to be on the job all the time. When he stops working, he stops getting paid. So he says, "Why don't I just hire people to do the work for me? I will train them. I will put them to work in the system. They can carry on the work, and then I have time to do other things." And the I person then is the person who does this on a much larger scale. But remember, the point that we've made before, as we've talked about this before, is that it's relatively easy to go from an employee to being self-employed. It's very difficult to go from self-employed to being businessman or one of these people down here. Why? Because it requires an entirely different skill set. Let me apply that to church situation. Why do most people in church get involved in ministry? Because they have a certain level of gifting and a certain level of interest, and so they volunteer. And in small churches, you're happy with anybody that will volunteer, and you're happy to let them do what they can and what they must do because the work needs to be done. And it's a wonderful thing. But remember that as organizations grow, it isn't good enough just to be able to do the ministry. It's not good enough to be an E or an S. You've got to be a B. That is a person who can lead others to do the ministry. Are you with me on this? That is an other whole skill set. There are tons of people who are very good at what they do who cannot lead other people to reproduce the same kind of thing. That's a leadership skill. So what happens is churches grow. You have people who are very happy, you know, leading us along or they're very happy to step into a place of ministry. But then pretty soon they become responsible for other people to do that ministry under their leadership. But that is a whole other skill. It's like an entrepreneur who knows how to start a business. But then when the business grows, he becomes the bottleneck in the business because he doesn't have what it takes to run an organization. I'm making sense here? That's really important to understand because now what happens is that you begin to reach your ceiling and you either step aside for the sake of the organization or you have to be put aside for the sake of the organization and in either case that involves a lot of pain. Give you an example. It used to be in this church and in lots of churches that all the worship was led by who? Organists, right? And when I first came to this congregation we had four organists who were marvelous organists and leading the congregation in corporate worship. But times change. The only place you hear organ music these days is on a television show when somebody's having a funeral. That's really true. And then they sing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." And so as things began to change, praise teams began to be raised up and then the challenge was how do we incorporate organists with praise teams? And we tried all kinds of things. We had an organist and a pianist playing together in the early days and that worked really well. But then you start adding other instrumentation or other singers and you begin to get a clash of cultures because an organist is used to leading, is not used to working with praise teams. So what happened? One after the other organists stepped down, mostly voluntarily, because they recognized that times were changing. Now that's painful. That was painful for them. It's also painful for those of us who like organ music. It's an interesting fact that Roberta is one of the few extremely accomplished organists who can do both. Which is one of the reasons that she's in the position that she's in today because she knows both how to lead people and how to be actively engaged in the ministry of music. Am I making sense here in terms of what I'm saying? Those are changes that are painful. But they are an inevitable part of God's people moving forward to engage new people and a new generation. So what's our takeaway? Administration is a spiritual gift. Some people are just really good at organizing and hearing the Holy Spirit in the process of that. But organizations grow. There's change on a structural level. Big churches are not little churches grown big. I love the way Tim Keller puts it in an article that I had a chance to download this past week. He says this, and it's very important to understand, "A large church is not simply a bigger version of a small church. The difference in communication, community formation, decision-making processes are so great that the leadership skills required in each are almost of completely different orders." And thirdly, organizational change always produces relational pain. And the temptation and the tendency is always to say, "Let's just be a holy little huddle." And that's okay to a point, but God wants to grow His Kingdom. God wants to reach the last and the lost and the least. And the more mature you and I are in the Lord, and the more we share our heart and share His passion, the more we have to be the ones that are willing to make the adjustment to see His Kingdom to come. And my hope and prayer is that as God continues to build His Church, not only here but elsewhere, that we will be so passionately in tune with what God wants to do that we would gladly take up our cross, follow Jesus, and say, "Lord, whatever it takes, make us the kind of people, the kind of community that can fulfill Your redemptive purposes in our generation." Amen? [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:42:19.000; remove through 00:42:26.000] [end of transcript] [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:42:26.000; resume after this marked segment]