"Formed for God's Family"
Sermon Transcript for October 26, 2003By Rev. Mike Beck
Let’s begin with a quick review. In week one of the “40 Day of Purpose”, we began by asking this question: “What on earth am I here for?” And we discovered that the answer to that question is not going to be found in the self-help books or by looking deep within our self, but instead by looking to our Creator, looking to God as revealed in Scripture made known to us most fully in the person of Jesus Christ. And then last week we learned that our first purpose is that “we were planned for God’s pleasure”. There is a word for that, the word “worship”. Worship, in its essence, simply means realizing the love that God has for us--we love God back. And we learned that worship is much more than simply music that we sing or attending a church service. Read with me our Scripture memory verse for last week. Join me, “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind, with all of your strength.” Worship is so much more than just coming to church for an hour on Sunday morning or Saturday night. Worship is taking all that I am and offering it to God.
We distributed 300 of those Purpose Driven Life books and I hope you are being faithful in your daily reading. If you are following the sermons, what you are reading today would be Day 15. If you are looking ahead to next week, the Day is 22. Rick Warren’s insights, which are so practical in nature, let them impact your life as you spend fifteen minutes or so each day reading one of those chapters. In fact, Rev. Dan and I would be blessed if you, if something is speaking to you as you are reading the book, send us an e-mail, let us know that. My heart was blessed this last week. I received an e-mail from a person here in the church that said, “I’ve been reading The Purpose Driven Life.” And she said, “I know work is important to all of us, but I’ve realized in my reading that I have allowed work to occupy much too dominant a position in my life.”
Today we are going to look at the second purpose for our lives, that “we were formed for God’s family”. If you’ve studied Scripture, you will realize that from the book of Genesis all the way to the book of Revelation, that God throughout history is building a family. Hebrews 2:10 tells us, “God is the one who made all things, and all things are for His glory. But then I want you to notice the last line of that verse. He didn’t want to experience that glory simply on the relationship of the Trinity. “He wanted to have many children to share His glory.” Ephesians 1:5 is a great verse. I’m going to invite you to read it with me. “God’s unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into His own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ.” If through faith in Christ you have received God’s gift of salvation, you are not only a part of an earthly family, but you are a part of the family of God. And that family of God has a name. It’s referred to as “the church”, which the New Testament speaks of as the “body of Christ”. It speaks also to us as the “bride of Christ”. But God has laid out some responsibilities that we as members of His family have. They are stated very simply in I Peter 2:17. God’s Word says, “Love your spiritual family”. I John 4:21 put it this way: “The person who loves God” and then it says, “must also love other believers.”
Just as there was a word for our first purpose “worship”, there is a word for the second purpose we want to look at today. That word is the word “fellowship”. But as was true with the word “worship”, the word “fellowship” is a word that we often fail to go often enough in terms of understanding its meaning. Too often in church we’ve reduced this word to fellowship time where you go down to Price Hall and you have coffee and cookies together. Now, having coffee and cookies together is a part of our plan. But we are going to explore this morning the genuine fellowship is much, much deeper than those few minutes that we spend together in Price Hall. In a nutshell, genuine fellowship involves a deep and a genuine love for others in God’s family. In I Timothy 3:14-15, Paul writes to His Son in the faith. He says, “I’m writing to you so that you’ll know how to live in the family of God. That family is the church.” There is a sense in which we speak of a church as a building. There is a sense in which it is an institution. There is a sense in which it has organizational qualities. But the essence of what the church is is not found in a building, or in an institution, or in an organization. The essence of the church is that we are a family. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Just like my family, just like your earthly family, the church of Jesus Christ is made up of very flawed, imperfect people like me, like you.
So I want to look this morning at four aspects of fellowship that God wants us to experience as part of His family. First of all, God wants us to belong. There are times in Scripture where the word “church” is used to refer in a universal sense to all Christians down throughout history. But it is interesting to note that in most places in the New Testament where the word is used, it refers to just who we are here. It refers to a local body of believers. Thus, God expects His children who have come to Him by faith to find a church family and to become connected to it. This is an important sentence this morning. Life in Christ is more than a matter of “believing”. It is also a matter of “belonging”. Romans 12:5 says, “In Christ, we who are many form one Body, and each member belongs to all the others.” Look to the person on your left. You belong to them. Look to the person on the right. You belong to them. Look to the person in front of you. Romans 12:5 says together we make up His body. Every member belongs to all of the others.
In my ministry I have had numerous persons say something like this to me. They’ll say, “Mike, I’m a Christian, but I don’t want to belong to any church.” Friends, that makes no sense. It’s like saying to Jesus, “Lord, I love you, but I can’t stand your body.” Husbands, try saying that to your wife. See how far it gets you. A Christian without a church family is an orphan. And God doesn’t want orphans. God intended for us to be a part of a family. And that family, despite all of its faults and imperfections, is still His church and He wants us to belong.
In that light, I want to extend a challenge and an invitation to some of you hearing my voice. There are some of you to which Grace Church is where you come and worship, but you’ve never taken that covenant step of membership by saying, “My hat is fully in the ring as a part of this family of faith.” If you are sensing God leading you to do that…or it is also possible that there are some believers who have never taken the step of being baptized, which the New Testament refers as a sign that you are a part of God’s family. The “40 Days of Purpose” will conclude on November 22-23 with a celebration Sunday. How wonderful it would be on that Sunday to baptize a number of persons, to receive a large group as members of Grace Church. So if God is speaking to you, you’ve been invited to call the church office, to send Rev. Dan or I an e-mail, to say, “I want to take one of these steps of belonging.”
The second aspect of fellowship involves learning to share with each other. Acts 2:44 in which he’s talking of the early church says, “All the believers met together constantly and they shared everything with each other.” Note two things in that verse. First, if you’re going to develop relationships, you have to spend time together. And, second, for those relationships to grow, we must share with one another. The Bible is full of instructions on things that we ought to share with each other. I want to quickly mention three. First of all God wants us to share our experiences, to share our insights, our understandings. If you are a part of a Sunday School class or a small group, none of us have all of the truth. As you share your perspectives, as you share aspects of your faith journey, all of us grow. So God wants us to share our experiences.
Secondly, God wants us to share our joys. We are so reluctant to do that because we think it sounds like bragging. But my Bible says, “When one person rejoices, we all are to rejoice. When one person weeps, all are to weep together.” Think about your own human family. When you gather together, do you not share with one another the exciting things that have been happening in your life--the accomplishments, the places you have been? And as you share those things, others in the family are able to celebrate with you. God wants the same thing to be true of His church. Last Sunday evening as we had eight of our small groups meeting together in Price Hall, Bob Fortier is one of our small group leaders. Very early in the process his daughter, Melanie, came in. Melanie is a senior in high school. She has been taking flying lessons. She said to her Dad, “I did it. I soloed this afternoon!” Bob immediately turned to everyone that was gathered and said, “Melanie flew that plane all by herself today.” And everybody that was there broke out in applause for Melanie because we are family. We are to share our experiences; we are to share our joys with one another.
And then, thirdly, we are to share our problems and our struggles. We’re family, and we are not intended to face these problems alone. A person once said, “When you share a joy, it is doubled. When you share a problem, it is cut in half.” Now, preachers need to practice what we preach. This morning I got here about an hour before the service began and was preparing the communion elements here in front. Joyce Elliott who is such a perceptive, caring person, she said, “Mike how are you doing?” And I started to respond the way most of us respond in this kind of circumstance. I started to say to Joyce, “I’m fine.” And then I said, “Joyce, I’m about a 4 today. The last month has been hell. There’s been some complications with the treatments that I get for my voice over the past two or three weeks especially. Every word has been a struggle to get out.” You know, it felt good just to say that. You know, you have the tendency to think you are the leader, you are suppose to be the strong one all of the time for everybody else. But I wasn’t feeling strong. Bless her heart, Sarai was standing right here and she said, “Mike, we need to pray for you.” Joyce, your caring; Sarai, your prayer—I can’t tell you how much that meant. Sarai, you prayed for a special anointing and God’s given that. We share our problems. And when you share your problems with others, realize the person hearing the problem is not always going to have an answer. Sometimes we just need somebody to listen, somebody to realize that I’m feeling really down. Just lend a listening ear. And then when you have the opportunity to reach out and provide some help in a practical way, do it as if you were literally doing it to Christ himself.
Friends, I just want to say this in this area. You are not likely to experience that aspect of fellowship unless you are a part of a small group. Worship, which we are doing now, is at the heart of what we are about. But in worship, predominantly you don’t talk to anybody else. You talk to God in prayer, you sing the hymns, you listen to the message, but it is in a small group that we get to relate to one another. It’s in a small group that relationships are built and friends are made and encouragement and care giving takes place. In a large church like Grace, it’s even more important that you be a part of a small group because the small group becomes your small church in the midst of the big church. For you see, at Grace Church we are one body but we are actually 25 or 30 smaller groups all forming the home. We share together.
Thirdly, we are to partner together. This simply means realizing that I have a contribution to make to the family of God. The family of God needs me. Richard, what a wonderful contribution your son, Mason, made this morning. The extended applause said, “My heart has been touched because he gave that contribution.” I Corinthians 3:9 says, “We are partners working together for God.” You know, I like sitting in a spa or in a hot tub. And there is a time and a place for that. Friends, God did not bring you to Grace Church to spend all of your time sitting and soaking in some spiritual hot tub. That’s not why you are here. You are here to serve. God wants to use your unique gifts to touch the lives of others. Remember growing up in your family? Did not every member of the family have their chores to do? They had their responsibilities. That’s how the family functioned. Well, the church is God’s family. Every one of us has a part. Read together what God has to say about this in Ephesians 4:16. Join me. “The whole body is fitted together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole Body is healthy and growing and full of love.” There is a bald headed guy who is pretty special to me that’s sitting back there at the tech booth this morning. He’s using his gifts to make a videotape of this service. Dozens of people here at Grace Church from the Wesley Center at the United Methodist Community are going to share this worship service because Kirk is doing his part. We are going to be talking much more about that in a couple of weeks when we talk about ministry. And I want you to make sure that you attend the Ministry and Mission Fair on November 15 –16 where you will have a chance to discover, if you have not yet done so, what ministry God wants you to have as you partner with God’s family.
And then the fourth and deepest level of fellowship in the family of God is what we might call “kinship”. It’s an old term. It refers to the very closest persons in your family. In many situations you’ve had to take a blank on some form and say give us the name of your “next of kin”. They wanted to know the person that is closest to you. Do you realize that in terms of God’s family we are kin to one another? We may not be blood relatives, but maybe we are something even deeper than that. Acts 2:42 talking about the early church said, “They were like family to each other.” The word for fellowship in the Bible is the Greek work “koinonea”. The basic root of that word means that we are to be as connected to each other as we are to Christ. Most of us know John 3:16, but we also need to give equal attention to I John 3:16. Read it with me. “We know what real love is because Christ gave up His life for us. And we ought to give up our lives for our Christian brothers and sisters.” The deepest level of fellowship because we are kin is when we sacrifice for each other. It’s when we forgive each other. It’s when, because you are family, I give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s being genuinely concerned about the well being of others. That is the kind of love that God has for us and Christ. And God wants us to have that same love for each other.
You were put on this earth to know God and to love Him. That’s your first purpose—worship. And your second purpose is to know and love God’s family. They are all around you this morning—it’s called the church because that’s who you are going to be spending eternity with in heaven! And the word for the second purpose is fellowship. In John 13, Jesus said to His followers: “Your strong love for each other will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” It was only about 20 or 30 years after Jesus said those words that Christians were being burned alive on stakes and thrown to the lions in Roman coliseums. And in that period, one of the most secular, famous historians, who was not a Christian, wrote this about these followers of Jesus. “Behold, how they love each other!” May that same thing be said of us!
Let us pray, “Father, next to salvation the greatest gift You have given us is the opportunity to be a part of Your family. We thank you that we do not have to journey through life disconnected, that we don’t have to live this Christian journey alone. Thank you for creating this family of faith that we call Grace Church. I pray, as one of those entrusted to provide leadership to this family, that through the power of your Holy Spirit we would live out our name. That we would be a people of grace sharing encouragement, partnering, forgiving, sacrificing for one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray these things. Amen”
E-mail Comments to: Reverend Dan Sinkhorn