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I want to pick up tonight from when 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 twofold.
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.
So David had to fight them, but he also had to fight the northern 11 tribes who were the followers of King Saul
and who weren't about to yield to his rumor. 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.
To win the loyalty of somebody's heart, they have to willingly submit to your authority.
And 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.
And 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.
That went a long way to show him what his heart was like.
And 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, and David knew what a bad position that put him in.
And he publicly distantiated himself from whatever Joab had done.
And he wanted the northern tribes to know that this was not his doing.
And 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.
And the takeaway there is that whenever God puts you or me in a position of authority,
whether that is parents of children 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's 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 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.
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, having come into his kingdom,
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 in Chronicles 23.2-5.
He also gathered together all the leaders of Israel as well as the priests and 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 temple 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.
If you know those chapters, and again I encourage you when you have a moment or two,
read the Scripture passages from 1 Chronicles 18-27.
They're not a passage that we typically read because 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 belong on them.
And David knew that.
And so when David had come into the kingdom, and we'll talk about that more really 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 it 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, "Praise the Lord with musical instruments I have provided for that purpose."
He must have had a whole factory going out, you know, turning out hearts and wires and whatever,
all they used back in my day because he understood that God and 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 don't really serve as devotional inspiration for us,
but that are part of biblical inspiration and therefore have some profound lessons.
So, take every 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, "Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it."
And in the church, God has appointed first the whole apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles,
also those who have a gift of healing, those able to help others, and then this,
those with gifts of administration and those speaking in different kinds of tongues.
Remember, the Corinthians were enamored with spiritual gifts, particularly they were enamored with the gift of tongues.
Paul was 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 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, the gift of administration.
Now why do I make clear that? I'll tell you why.
There is a certain tendency among certain Christians to be suspicious of structure and organization.
And 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 and 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.
1 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.
Jesus said you need both new wine and new wine skins to contain the grace of God.
And 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 frustrating.
But 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.
A good example, I think, is what we experienced last Sunday morning when Sylvain came marching forward,
for those of you that were there, to suggest that we pray for Valerie after she shared her medical need.
And I've had people ask me, "How do I feel about somebody interrupting on the surface like that?"
Because I'm an orderly person, you might know by now. And 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.
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 to Him, 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, I 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 one Corinthians 13 chapter on love is smack dab in between these chapters and spiritual gifts.
Because the spiritual gifts aren't used to build up the body of Christ, you're missing the mark.
That 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.
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.
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.
We learned that here years ago when under Ben's leadership at the time as Sheriff Council, we made some very significant structural changes
in terms of how this particular congregation was going to go about its business.
Historically, 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,
we had anywhere between 24 and 30 people sitting around the table making decisions, which becomes a significant bottleneck in terms of moving forward.
So one of the changes that we went through quite a number of years ago, and 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,
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.
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 in each of these sections,
and her 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 introduction to it.
The challenge for bigger churches is how do you keep track of everybody,
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 of the lost and the least came and joined him.
And for that select seven or eight years, they were together on the run
and fighting battles 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 talk about a band of brothers.
This was the act.
Now move the clock forward, David becomes king,
and he's got 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 land,
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
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.
But I also knew the kids and I knew the grandkids.
Second congregation, I knew just about everybody, but not to the same degree.
Congregation like this, I know most people,
but there's lots of people in any given semi-morning that I have never seen before
and that you've never seen before that I don't know.
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 Craig 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 were 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.
The self-employed guy says, "Why should my boss be charging 45 bucks a dollar for me,
paying me 15 dollars 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 a job all the time,
but 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 a 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.
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?
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 leading a song
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.
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.
I'll give you an example.
It used to be in this church and lots of churches
that all the worship was led by organists.
When I first came to this congregation,
we had four organists who were marvelous organists
leading the congregation in corporate worship.
But times change.
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
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.
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.
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 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 will gladly take up our cross, follow Jesus,
and say, "Well, whatever it takes,
make us the kind of people, the kind of community
that can fulfill your redemptive purposes in our generation."
Amen?