“HDTV Out-Putting”
Scripture Reading:1 Corinthians 12:4-6
Sermon Transcript for February 4, 2007
By Pastor Bob Coleman
(Knock, Knock, Knock) No, that’s not from Edgar Allen Poe’s “Who’s that rap, rap, rapping, tap, tap, tapping on my door?” quote the raven nevermore. Jesus doesn’t quit; Jesus knocks upon the doors of our hearts and minds. Today we look at the knocking that brings us to the focus of service. Service is a tool of discipleship. A disciple is one who follows Jesus Christ; and this service helps to increase the output of our inner signal. As we understand it today, we remember that we are not just a technical piece of machinery like High Definition TV. We are something that God molds and shapes and continues to work with us.
I want us to reflect a little bit upon what service means. I’m going to do it from a personal perspective. This being Scout Sunday, I was a boy scout and I became an Eagle. And I’m sure that there was a moment in time when we did service for others. That’s a part of who we were and still are. But I spent most of my time in late elementary, middle school, and high school doing what most youth of that age do—seeking some money. I did yard work, mowing grass and those kinds of things for several summers. I delivered newspapers, again for money. And the 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning edition was the most difficult particularly on a morning like this. I don’t see very many people delivering paper on mornings like this on bicycles like I did. Now, I’m not asking for a sympathy vote okay. I would have driven a car if I had of been old enough to do it too. But it also meant that I had a good excuse for falling asleep in church that morning.
Well, that was one of the kinds of work; then there is what we called a “carpenter’s assistant”. And I did the work that he told me to do. Sometimes, it meant cleaning up the mess; sometimes I actually helped build something. That was a learning experience. I, in college, worked in a biscuit factory of all things. It sounds like a fun thing to do, but I wasn’t in where they were making biscuits and it was air conditioned. I was out in the warehouse where it was hot, grimy, and not much fun at all. But the job that I hated most was selling waterless cookware. Yes, I went door to door knocking on those doors dreading the opportunity that someone would answer because I had to mark it down that if they answered the door it was an official sales call. And answering the door is only a very miniscule beginning of making a sale. I think I lasted four weeks. I learned that it takes great persistence, but it also means that I was not one who was willing to go around door to door knocking for someone to slam it in my face. They were resistant; and, actually, I was resistant. It was an emotional and mental challenge.
So all that work was to “earn” money--some fun and some not so fun. It wasn’t until the years between my junior and senior year at Indiana Central College then, now University of Indianapolis, that I saw a little notice on a bulletin board. “Volunteer work at Redbird Mission.” I looked closer. They said, “We’ll pay your way down and back. We’ll provide you food and a place to sleep if you’ll come and volunteer for us.” Well, financially I could do it for that summer. It really meant I borrowed more, is all it meant. But I went down and for two and a half months I learned what it meant to be a true volunteer. Oh, I was fed and I was provided a place to sleep and that was good. But the Redbird experience marked for me the first moment when I really lived out the role of being a servant not for personal gain--to do it because the work needed to be done. And I truly was at their beck and call. I preached some Sundays. One at Bowlings Creek United Methodist Church up in the hills and hollers where there were 14 kids, 2 dogs, and a cat attending service that morning. True—no adults whatsoever! We had a fun Sunday school.
It was a mountaintop experience and that way it was also teaching Vacation Bible School. I oversaw five high school students and we went around as a work team cutting grass with an old hand scythe type of thing on the hillsides. We also dug ditches. We did whatever they asked us to do. Poured and laid cement for a sidewalk. And the one that was the most notorious of all, when they said, “Here are the hatch, here are the shovels with the long handles, and here are the gloves, this septic tank needs to be emptied.” Don’t ever respond…well, yeah, you should do it at least one time, yes! It’s a remembrance only to clean out a septic tank. But in a sense, that’s really what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ to be in service. Does it mean you are going to clean out septic tanks? Not likely. But it means being open and receptive to do the Lord’s bidding whatever that might be.
Let’s look at the word “service” and you see the synonyms for it—help, assistance, to be of use, benefit, advantage, do a good turn. And the antonym or the opposite is disservice. When you do a disservice to the Lord, it’s meaning that you don’t serve. It’s simply that. A parallel word or supportive word, I should say, is submission. Service and submission go together because submission is defined as obedience, compliance, surrender. And the antonym, by the way, is resistance. You have to be submissive to be a servant. You can’t be on top of it and choose for yourself what you want to do in the way God calls you to do and reshaping everything the Lord says because God asks for you to do something and you say, “But that’s not really my strength.”
Max Lucado in his writings, “Cure for the Common Life”, quotes Mark 10, Verse 45 when he says, “The son of man has not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” To be served, not to serve—which one, to be served or to serve? The world needs servants just as much now as it did when Jesus walked upon the earth. People like Jesus who “have not come to be served, but to serve”. He chose the out-of-the-way place to go, the little town of Nazareth in Bethlehem. His dad’s carpentry shop, a simple backwoods, back country type of work. When it came to needing sleep, He chose prayer—the wilderness over the resorts of the Jordon. Instead of choosing obedient angels, like Gabriel or Michael, He had to choose Peter, and James, and John and they weren’t exactly the top selection. They were common, average people. If we were in that situation and we had that kind of work to do, we probably would have chosen, I know I would have, angels. But not Jesus, he chose people like you and me, the average run-in-the-mill, the one’s who least expected called forth. But not to leave them do their work alone because if they need to pay taxes, he’d have to provide the coin for it; if they needed wine for a wedding, he would change water to wine. And when they ran out of food and faith, he provided food for the 5,000. It’s fascinating what the partnership with Jesus means when we serve.
Jesus offers the invitation for us to serve. But many of us can come up with all kinds of excuses. We’ve done so in the past and will continue to do so--to stay away from, to turn Him down, to ignore that persistent knock, knock, knocking in our minds and in our heart. Jesus even gave a response for that in Luke 9:61. Just a simple request, when Jesus called someone to follow Him, he said, “I will follow you Lord; but first let me go back and say good bye to my family.” But Jesus’ response to that, “No one who puts his hand to the plow… (meaning to pick up the reins of service) ...and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” Does that mean you can’t say and love people and say goodbye to them? That wasn’t the point; the point was this man was really putting up an excuse. “I’ll go back and say goodbye and well, maybe, I’ll become busy and maybe I’m not really the one that He wanted in the first place.”
We so often define sin as doing something terrible. But sin is also anything that we do that takes us away from the direction that God wants us to go. That is really the sin of the disciple who turns down the leading, the call of the Lord. To not answer the call to serve is a sin.
I want to share with you some Scripture now, though, that shows you that you do not respond only on your own strength. But if God calls you to serve, as He does for all disciples in whatever way and form, God helps to provide what you need. In 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 there are three different ways that Paul interprets this for us. “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit.” You have a gift; I have a gift. All of God’s children have a gift. All who follow Jesus Christ and respond and disciples of Christ have at least one gift. Different from others—all kinds of gifts—different from the person next to you, but God gives those gifts. And it is that spirit that helps us to understand what they are.
In the next verse Paul says, “There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.” We are all disciples of the same Lord, Jesus Christ. Interestingly enough, we don’t sign up for the same type of service. It can be varied. It can be very mundane; it could be exciting; it could be dull. It could be foreign; it could be local. It could be well-known; it could be behind the scenes. All kinds of service, but it’s all for the same Lord.
And in verse 6, “There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.” Different kinds of working—there’s a service even within a variety of those people doing the same kind of service in how they approach it and will accomplish it—styles of work. But God gives us that way and what a joy it is. You see, you don’t enter in to the line of service as a disciple of Jesus Christ on your own with your own ideas and your own strength. But God gives you what you need if you’ll step forward.
Watchman Nee in his book, The Normal Christian Life, states “Partnership! I can’t do what God does. And God will not do what I need to do.” Hear the difference? God will not do what I need to do—not just what I want to do. I did not want to dig out that septic tank. I did not want to do some of those other jobs that they asked me to do. But I learned from it. I needed it to understand what service meant because later, as our girls came …By the way, another special side blessing, I met Joyce at Redbird. She was not on my work team; she was teaching Headstart. We met there, I fell in love and finally convinced her of that about four months later. We were married in a year. So you see, service can provide other blessings. But no guarantees, okay?
So we learn from that as we came into our family life. And when the opportunity happened at Hagerstown, we took our girls on a work camp to New Mexico. It was one of several. We enjoyed it as a family. We enjoyed it because of the hard work; we enjoyed it because the girls learned to be servants in their way of thinking. They are now both servants in my definition—Speech Pathology in Hearing and Therapy and a Social Worker with those who have special mental and emotional needs in Indianapolis. It takes a certain heart to do that kind of work. We helped them to be exposed and Jesus guided them along the way.
The Spirit is there if we will but open our hearts to it when we hear the knock. For it says in Luke 12, Jesus says “For where the treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And Jesus gives the instructions to us to “Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like men waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him.” We need to be ready for service—a ready heart, a ready mind is more responsive when Jesus knocks at the door of your heart first to dwell. You have to receive Christ into your heart. Christ has to be a part of who you are. And many people are struggling to fight against that alone. But the knocking continues in our heads, in our hearts, and we are to respond and let Christ in. And then we, as we said last week, let Christ in so that we can sit down and converse with, learn from God, let God teach us and mold us and shape us in the Spirit. And then God, through Jesus Christ, continues knocking on our hearts and our minds to say, “Come on out into this world for you need to be their in my name. There are things you need to do that I will not do. It’s for you to accomplish in my name, to be my people in that place.” And Paul says the reason for doing all of this isn’t to amass people around us to make us look good, it’s that we might glory in Christ Jesus and that our service is dedicated to Him.
From the book, The Angels Were Silent, it says “What are the signs of those who are saved? Definitely, those who are disciples! Is it because of your great mind and sharp wit or your willingness to travel to far off lands? Is this a sign of being a disciple? Is it because you are a great preacher and people just think you are wonderful or your skillful pen will write lines that many people will read or your hands are able to perform miracles? Is that the outward sign of a disciple of Jesus Christ? No, the outward sign of a disciple is to love the least, not for your own gain but for the glory of Christ. Those who put on the right hand of God in service will be those who truly do give food to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, warmth to the lonely and clothing to the naked, comfort to the sick and friendship to the imprisoned. Just being good people doing good things in the name of Christ, being Christ for others.”
It’s about Jesus getting into a boat to speak to the crowds. We must get in to the boat of service. We can not stand on the shore and dream about it. We cannot think it will be a nice thing if the right service comes along. When the Lord calls, when the Lord knocks upon your mind and your heart, please respond. Get into the boat and sail where the captain of the ship sails. But remember, once you are in that boat, all boats belong to Christ. It is the service of Christ that is at the top of our list.
So if you want to design your view of the world, design it through service. This church is following it in action with their youth program. Not only do they raise large sums of money, yes, to go to a distant place which is a life-changing experience in the summer, but each month they are going out to do some service, some mission work in the name of Jesus Christ. We are teaching our youth but are we doing it ourselves as adults? I want you to take a moment, as we did last week, in silence to be in prayer, but to be in prayer to listen for the knocking on the door of your heart and your mind. The secret to loving is to be loved and the secret to service is to serve. So let us hear, in a moment of silence. And don’t be afraid to respond for God provides the gifts and Spirit, He provides the service and the strength and the work to accomplish it whether it is in scouting, school or far-out mission or right here in our back yard or to make a call to someone who is hurting and needs encouragement. Listen, this very (knock, knock, knock) on your heart this morning.
Let us bow our heads this morning for a moment of silence. “Maybe our hearts have been closed to you for fear of letting you in. May we let you in this morning to dwell in us, to accept you as Lord and Savior, to start the life of being a disciple. Let us continue to open our hearts and minds to the conversation of your Word in us helping us to see in the concerns around us what we are to say and do. And let us hear the knock on the door of our hearts and minds that invites us into the world to increase the signal of our service, not for our sake, nor for our glory, not for the certificates on the wall, but for your doing and to minister to the least, the last, the lost, to the neighbor sitting beside us. Amen.”
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