Episode 1. Flourishing in the House of the Lord
Church. For many people – just the sound is enough to send a shiver down their spine – and yet, it’s a part of God’s plan. So how do you go about flourishing in the House of the Lord? Join …
Churches can do programs, they can do ministry activities, we can do that until we’re blue in the face and yet not build relationships and not have a sense of community.
Community and Commitment
Have you noticed the more money people earn, the more choices we have- the more choices we have, the busier we are at work and with kids, and we get tired? And so these days, getting a sense of community going is really hard. There are lots of lonely people around the country and around the world and yet God has this plan for His family. God has a plan that His family should get together and be a family and that plan is called ‘church.’ Now, for a lot of people, church is a four letter word. A lot of people are browned off with church. They’ve tried it, they have had enough. People are starting to write text books about this huge number of Bible believing Christians, who have decided they are not doing ‘church’ any more. And for someone who hasn’t come to faith in Jesus Christ yet, the whole notion of church is old fashioned, out of date, and irrelevant. So church gets a lot of bad press. Yet God writes, Himself, in Psalm 68, verse 6, it says that, “God sets the lonely in families.” So God has a plan for His children, for His people to be a part of a family and that family, by and large, is called ‘church.’
Now our society is struggling with having a sense of community. Just out there every day in life, lots of people are struggling to connect with one another and a lot of people never do, a lot of people feel very lonely. And to tell you the truth, in a lot of quarters, the church is struggling as well, to create a sense of community. So often churches come up with programs, you know, they have this program for the youth and they do all these programs. It’s almost like you are going to McChurch, you know, it’s – two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun – approach to Church, where you’re kind of ground through the mill.
Community is about relationships. Community is about, well, it’s organic, isn’t it? It’s naturally people getting on with one another, living with one another as a family, helping one another, compensating for one another. I was reading something that a man by the name of Malcolm Langford wrote. He’s a lawyer and a musician. He wrote this, “I have a dream of a Christian community that when I entered, you were excited to see me. When I revealed my wounds, you held me close. When I lost my job, you paid my rent. When I needed a home, you became my family. When I followed billboards, you led me to the cross. When I ran after mini-loves, you opened my eyes to ‘The’ Lover. When I was self-absorbed, you taught me to love the broken. When I hurt others, you showed me the struggle for justice. When I destroyed everything, you helped me to create beauty. When I let you see my true self, you celebrated my journey and when one day heaven’s glories opened to call me home, I was torn.” That’s a beautiful verse isn’t it? It’s a beautiful picture of what Christian community should look like.
But sadly a lot don’t. Sadly a lot of people who attend churches, with the right intention – the intention of worshipping God, the intention of hearing His Word proclaimed, the intention of being part of a family. Where they love and are loved, where they support and are supported, where they’re cared for and they care. People go to church with that intention, yet so many churches struggle in this area of community. After all, if a church isn’t a family, if a church doesn’t provide community, well, we might as well all just stay home and listen to sermons on the radio or CD. That’s great but it doesn’t help us to be a part of a family. I would strongly encourage you, if you are struggling with church; you hang in with us, this week and the next three weeks, in this four part series that I’ve called, “Flourishing in the House of the Lord.”
Churches can do programs, they can do ministry activities, we can do that till we’re blue in the face and yet not build relationships and not have a sense of community. Community is the Holy Spirit stirring our hearts and moving our hands, you and me. And today in this message that I’ve called, “Flourishing in the House of the Lord,” the first in a four part series, we are going to look at three key impediments to that sense of community. We are going to name them, identify them and I pray, help remove them.
The first of those is the impediment of ‘commitment.’ When you think of a relationship, as a relationship between two people matures, it moves from being casual to ultimately becoming a relationship of commitment. Marriage is like that, boy meets girl, they are attracted to one another, they might date, they might stop dating, they might date again and progressively they go through a process of commitment, of becoming engaged, spending some time in engagement and then becoming married and the whole ‘marriage’ thing is supposed to be a life long commitment to one another. And as that commitment begins with marriage, so the relationship deepens and matures, that’s Gods plan. I know it doesn’t always work out that way. I know half of all marriages, almost, end in divorce, but that’s God’s plan of a mature relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife.
In the New Testament, the word ‘church‘, well, there are two words for it. One is the Greek word “Ecclesia” Now, I don’t normally talk about Greek words, but this is important. One is the Greek word “Ecclesia”. It literally means – an assembly. I guess that’s what we do Sunday mornings or Sunday evenings, when the Church meets together. It’s the word that we get, “Ecclesiastical” from. The other word is “Koinonia”, it means – a fellowship, it comes from a group of words that have a root meaning of – to share something in common. You can do ‘ecclesia‘, you can meet together on Sunday morning as an assembly and have zero commitment, but you can’t do ‘koinonia’ church that is ‘fellowship ’church, without commitment being a foundation of the relationship. You might say, “Well, I’m committed to church, I think.”
Let’s have a read of what God says in Psalm 92, verses 12 to 14. If you’ve got a Bible, grab it and open it up. This is a great passage. He says this, “The righteous flourish like a palm tree and a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the House of the Lord and they flourish in the courts of our God. In old age they still produce fruit, they are always green and full of sap, showing that the Lord is upright, He is my rock and there is no unrighteousness in Him.”
The plan for us is that we should be trees like the cedars of Lebanon and like palm trees, planted in the House of the Lord. The problem is that these days we want to be ‘pot plant’ Christians. We don’t want to put our roots down in the House of the Lord. We don’t want to be part of the fellowship. We want to say, “Well, I’m a Christian and I don’t need those other Christians. They’re a pain in the neck sometimes, so what I’ll be is, I will be a pot plant Christian. In my pot I’ll be protected, I won’t be hurt, I won’t be disillusioned.” Maybe you have been through that, in the past, in a church and you’ve had enough. The hurt has never gone and so you’ve put yourself in a pot instead of a forest. You put yourself in a pot instead of the House of the Lord, where we’re intended to flourish. You put a pot in the wind and it dries out, it blows over. Ultimately you put a pot out there in the weather and the chances are the tree will die. To flourish means to grow well, to thrive, to luxuriate, to be at a time of the highest productivity, and excellence or influence.
And my hunch is it’s not up to us to transplant ourselves from one church to another. You have heard of that term – going church shopping! Isaiah Chapter 61, verse 3, says that “we are trees of righteousness, the plantings of the Lord.” Where we are planted is God’s choice! Am I planted in the right place? Well, there are two answers to that question. What does God want and what do our feelings tell us, and frankly, sometimes they are different. Are we prepared to put the calling of the Holy Spirit above our feelings and say, “Lord, am I planted in the right place, have you got me in the right place?” If the answer is “Yes”, from God, then it’s time to get committed, but if the answer is “No”, we’d better find out where God wants to plant us and go there and be committed.
Pot Bound Christians
We are looking today at flourishing in the House of the Lord and I have made the point that sometimes people who call themselves Christians, well, they have had enough of the “church’ thing. Lots have, lots have left and yet still believe in Jesus Christ. Instead of being planted in the House of the Lord, they become pot plant Christians and when we are pot bound (have you seen a tree or a plant that’s pot bound?) You pull it out of its pot and its roots are all gnarled, sometimes you can’t even get it out of its pot. De-potting can be painful, sometimes you have to break the pot or prune the root-ball, but it’s necessary for the health of the tree.
We were reading before from Psalm 92 and in v 13 it says this, “When they are planted in the House of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God.” Have you ever been in an office building and seen some pot plants, and they are individual pot plants, but they are put in a container and they kind of put bark or stones over the top. And there’s this illusion that they are all in the one pot, but the reality is they’re still, (under the stones or gravel or the bark), they’re still in pots, separated from one another.
Let’s not kid ourselves! Am I pot bound, are you pot bound? Are we attending a church or being a part of a Christian fellowship and yet, still not putting our roots down, still not truly being a part of God’s plan? What’s my pot, what’s your pot? Is it maybe a past hurt, is it maybe a cultural thing, you don’t feel that you fit in with the other people? Have we become cynical, are we afraid of being hurt? I don’t feel like this or that, I feel out of place. There are so many reasons for being pot bound. But an amazing thing happens – when you take a plant out of a pot, maybe the plant is small and stunted, and you put it in the ground and you let its roots go down – deep into the ground, like an attitude of heart that we need to have, a deep attitude of heart – it gets strength, it grows. It does things it could never have done in the pot, it bears fruit. Now you might say to me, “But, Berni, I have been to a church or I go to a church – I just feel dead. In this so called fellowship, I feel like there are no connections, there’s no relationship.”
Have you ever seen a deciduous tree during winter? It looks dead, it just looks like a bunch of sticks that have died and yet in the season of winter, in that time of trial, cold, windy, blowing, that tree is storing up sap and getting ready to blossom in the spring. So often God calls people to a fellowship, calls them to a place and they transplant themselves before they bear fruit. In Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 13 and verse 6, flip there if you have a Bible. This is a parable, a story. Jesus told it. He said, “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard – that was an odd thing to do – and he came looking for fruit on it, and found none, so he said to the gardener, “See here, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree and I still haven’t found any, cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil”, and the gardener replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good but it not, you can cut it down.” What the heck was a fig tree doing in a vineyard? The answer is, the owner planted it there!
Sometimes we feel a bit like a fig tree in a vineyard. Sometimes we look at the vines and they look at us – they’re growing grapes and we are growing figs and we think, “I don’t belong here.” Yet in this parable, it was clearly the owner’s choice where to plant the fig tree. And in God’s family, I believe that it is God’s choice where to plant the fig tree, you and me. “Oh, I feel this, I feel that! It’s hard!” The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord. I don’t believe it is up to us to get up and go. Are we operating in the flesh or in the spirit? Are we following our feelings or following God? If the owner came looking for you where He planted you, would He find you? And would He find you bearing fruit, because a mature tree should be producing fruit.
It’s not a tree inspection. The owner doesn’t come and look at the bark, and the texture and the shape and the colour and the leaves. The owner was looking for fruit. God is the owner. God’s not interested in looks or feelings, God is interested in fruit and in the church, God wants it to be full of established trees, producing fruit. Flourishing in the courts of our God. Flourishing in the House of the Lord. Something is wrong if there’s no fruit. Maybe if you go to God and you pray about it, maybe God will tell you, “I think you are in the wrong Church, I’d like you over here, or over there.” Now, my hunch is that’s in the minority, vastly in the minority, because there is no perfect church. But if you feel that God is saying to you, “I’ve got somewhere else for you to go, there’s a new fellowship, a new thing that I’m doing, get up and go.” But if God comes back to you when you pray about this and says, “No, you’re in the right place!” Well, maybe it’s time to say, ’Well, God, if I’m in the right place, if this is were you want me to be planted, even though I’m a fig tree and they’re all grape vines, I’m going break that pot. I’m going to get committed; I’m going to put my roots down in the House of the Lord. That’s the first major impediment, is a lack of commitment.
The second one is being judgmental. Flip in your Bible again to Matthew, Chapter 7, verses 1 to 5. You may have heard me speak about these verses before in a different context. Here Jesus says, “Do not judge so that you may not be judged, for with the judgment that you make, you will be judged and the measure that you give, you’ll be measured. Why do you see the speck in your neighbours eye, but you don’t notice the log in your own? Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Come here, let me take the speck out of your eye,” while a log is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First, take the log out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye.”
We love to judge other people, especially if we are a fig tree and they are grape vines. We love to condemn, and backstab and gossip – people do. “I can’t believe what Mary did the other day. I don’t mean to gossip, but! I would never have done it that way.” How often do you sit down with people who say, “I am a Christ follower,” and hear them use language like that about other people? That is judgmental. Jesus said, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.”
I used to be in bondage to this. I used to have a saying before I came to Christ. ‘It’s so hard to soar like an eagle, when you are surrounded by turkeys.’ I was critical, I used to get so frustrated and it was ruining my life. I remember my wife, when we were first married, when she washed her hands, she would never wipe the sink down, and it used to drive me nuts, because I grew up in a house where we learned to wipe the sink down. Does that make me better than her? Absolutely not, she just doesn’t wipe the sink down when she has washed her hands, and it was ruining our relationship. It’s the little foxes that spoil the vine, and the same is true inside a church.
Let’s get a revelation here. I have enough of my own sins that God is working through with me, without being in bondage to your sins. Let me tell you, you have enough of your own without being in bondage to my sins or the sins of the people in your church and we get in bondage to other people’s sins when we judge them, because it drives us nuts. Because we focus on the things they are doing wrong, and when we become judgmental, it tears the family apart, just like it does brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. There’s no perfect church. If there was and I went to it, it wouldn’t be perfect any more. There are no perfect people. It is an absolute given, that if we say, “ Hang on a minute, God has called me to this church, He has called me to this place, I’m going to break the pot, I’m going to go….“ If we put our roots down we will experience, first hand, the sins of others. That’s the nature of the beast. We need to stop fighting that – come on! We have strengths and weaknesses, and the next person in the church has strengths and weaknesses, and if I am going to be a godly Christian, Spirit filled, committed brother in the body of Christ, will I accept the responsibility of saying to my brothers and my sisters, “I’ll love you even when you fail me.” How about it, will we?
But How?
Today we are looking at the fact that so often, we come to the church with a lack of commitment. We come to God’s family with a lack of commitment and a sense of judgment and we wonder why this whole ‘church’ thing doesn’t feel like a community. Isn’t it easy to go to a family, to a church and expect to be served rather than to be one of the servants? I’ve heard that term “church shopping’ so many times. It‘s not about being a consumer. It’s not about saying, “What’s the best for me?” For me the only reason that I should be a part of this church, rather than that church, is that God has called me to be in this church. Well it’s all well and good, to talk about trees and roots and pots and figs and grapes, but exactly how do we do this?
Romans Chapter 12, verse 2 says this. “Be not conformed to the ways of this world.” Can I take ’world’ out and stick ’church’ in for a minute? “Be not conformed to the ways of this church.” Sometimes in our churches, sometimes in our families, we’re dysfunctional. The grape vines are screaming at the fig trees, “Be a grape vine!” The fig trees are screaming at the grape vines, “Be a fig tree!” Yet God’s Word teaches us we are all different, and complimentary. Me, I’m not someone for having lots of people around all the time; I prefer to be on my own a little bit more. I’ve had some dysfunction in my family. I’ve been through divorce. I’ve spent some time thinking about that and my motivation is to proclaim God’s Word to you, just as I am right now. So I bring gifts and weaknesses to the table, that you don’t, and you, you bring gifts and weaknesses to the table, that I could never bring. If we can only be who we are and open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, to work out His love in us, what a wonderful place church would be.
Yes, grow, yes, become mature, yes, become holy, but don’t try to bear grapes if you are a fig tree. Be big, sweet, succulent, juicy figs, whatever the grape vines happen to think about you. We can over-spiritualise this stuff sometimes, but there are so many little things that you and I can do to exercise our giftings, in our church. To put our roots down, to share the goodness of God in our lives, with other people. I remember when I first went to church, there was a man called Peter Stringfellow, and he looked like a big sea captain, with a grey beard, you know, just like straight out of central casting, and if Peter hadn’t come and shaken my hand, you know, I was scared going to a church. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. If he hadn’t come and shaken my hand and done that little thing and served me, I don’t know if I would have gone back the next Sunday. I don’t know if I would be here with you now.
Or sometimes we see someone when we go there on Sunday morning, and think, “I don’t know, maybe they just need someone to lean on. Maybe I should invite them out for a cup of coffee during the week.” Maybe during the week you think about someone, maybe you could pick up the phone and call them. Can I suggest that it should be a priority for each one of us, to build at least one or two close friendships in the family of God? It’s the little things, the phone calls, the words of encouragement, the prayers. If you believe that God has planted you in this family, will you also believe that He will lead you to people for whom He has custom made your fruit? People who need to eat figs just like the ones you produce.
We need to be committed in order to flourish. We need to have the courage to stop judging. Set ourselves free from the weaknesses of other people, and we need to have practical acts of love going. It won’t always be convenient. The flesh won’t always like it and probably we’ll get hurt along the way, but will you be a part of this community for Christ’s sake? Will you go to the House of the Lord and flourish where God has planted you? “The righteous flourish like a palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon, they are planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God.”
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