Breaking Up with Ourselves

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Don Filcek; Romans 12:3-8 Breaking Up with Ourselves

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsack preaches from his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Good morning and welcome to Recast Church.
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As Dave said, I'm Don Filsack, I'm the lead pastor here, and it is a privilege for us to gather together in the name of our
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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. One note about our church, we are a church that values simplicity, and I think those of you that have been around here have probably noticed some things that are a little bit different in that regard.
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We don't have a lot of flashy programs. We're seeking, three primary things, we're seeking to connect to the truth of God's word so that we can grow in our faith.
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We do that on Sunday mornings, that's one of the reasons we gather together and kind of center our time on the word of God. Second of all, we're seeking to connect to one another so that we can grow in community.
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It's our conviction that God has created us for community, that we need relationships with one another in order to practice the very things that God wants to sharpen in us and to get rid of the things that he wants to get rid of in us.
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And so that happens best in community. And then lastly, we are seeking to connect to our gifts and talents so that we can grow in our service.
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That's the conviction that God has given each and every one of you, something that can benefit the others around you here in the church and out in the community.
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And so using those gifts and providing opportunities to serve one another is vital.
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And our text this morning is gonna touch on all three of those, faith, community, and service. In the passage, we're gonna be looking at, as I'm introducing that, and then we're gonna come to a time of singing and stuff, this passage that we're looking at, we are told that we are brought into community like members of a body, like parts of the human body, like arms and eyes and ears and hands and that kind of stuff.
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And as members together of one body, we are to serve one another using our
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God -given abilities, the gifts that he's given to us, the talents that he's given to us in the service of one another.
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And this is the whole picture of why Recash Church exists. This is why we started a church 10 years ago here in Matawan, was to exhibit this faith, community, and service.
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And we wanna be a place where those three things intersect in people's lives and here in this community. And so I also find it interesting that the idea of community and service that's gonna be mentioned in our text this morning comes in the context of thinking correctly about ourselves.
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How we think about ourselves matters. Paul has communicated the gospel in very detailed terms for the first 11 chapters of the book of Romans.
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And he is now giving instructions for our lives as followers of Christ. Now that we are followers of Christ, now that we've come in the door through the grace that is given to us, through the righteousness given to us by Jesus Christ, now that we've come in that way, we are being called to a different kind of life.
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He's giving us instructions for how to live. And one of the major sinful patterns of this world, you see, last week he called us to not be conformed to the sinful patterns of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.
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And so there's something that needs to be renewed in here. There's a wrong way of thinking, a wrong way of living, a wrong way of being conformed.
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And so one of the patterns of the sinful world around us that we're being called out from is thinking too highly of ourselves than we ought.
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How many of you would ever just identify that maybe occasionally in your life you've had a problem with thinking too highly of yourself? Maybe a couple people?
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Some of you don't wanna raise your hand because that might look like you're thinking too highly of yourselves? I don't know. Really raise your hand if you've had that problem, if you've had that struggle.
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I think that accounts for many of us. And I think those of you that aren't raising your hand, maybe by the end you would. Maybe by the end you would identify that, yeah,
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I have been guilty of that. That's one of the major sinful patterns among humanity.
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And I think it's something that actually sticks to every single one of us, even the most humble in this room. Still at the end of the day deeply is impacted by thinking too highly of ourselves than we ought.
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So Paul wants us to make sure that we don't think of this living sacrifice business as a solo gig.
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We need community. We need the opportunities to serve one another that will help us to overcome this tendency in ourselves to think more highly of ourselves than we ought.
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And we are called in this text to think right thoughts about ourselves.
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And we do so by faith in the gospel. We do so by understanding what it means to be brought into community.
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And we do so by engaging in service within that community. And so let's open our Bibles, if you're not already there, to Romans chapter 12, verses three through eight.
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Again, Romans 12, three through eight. You can navigate in your device over to that or grab the
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Bible that's under the seat in front of you or the Bible that you brought with you. I'm gonna be reading out of the English standard version, not because it's the best, it's just the one that I prefer for my personal study and then also for public reading, it seems to work well.
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But again, recast, this is God's precious and holy word to us. We have the opportunity to hear from God in the pages of scripture as we read
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Romans 12, three through eight. For by the grace given to me,
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I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
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For as in one body we have many members and the members do not all have the same function, so we though many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.
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Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them. If prophecy in proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the calling that you've placed on our lives to not be conformed to this world but to be renewed in our minds and the way that we think.
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Father, I pray that you would convict each and every one of us of those areas where we need to change our thinking, particularly in regard to ourselves.
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We are so easily deceived into thinking that we've got things in hand, that we've got things under control, and even in that there is an arrogance, even in that there is pride.
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And Father, we're a culture, a self -esteem culture, a self -improvement culture, a self -love culture, a self -care culture.
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Father, I just don't see that here. And so, Father, I pray that even if that's a radical statement to anybody in this room,
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Father, that you would let your word deal with us because I wanna care for myself too. I wanna take care of number one.
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But Father, you are calling us to serve one another. You've called us into community. You've called us to think gospel thoughts about our own lives.
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And so, Father, I pray that that would be a reality among us this morning. That even as we might, in our mopiness, think poor thoughts about ourselves, we still center it on us.
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And so, Father, I pray that you would correct us all this morning by your grace and by your mercy. Let this not be a heavy text, but let it be a text that encourages us forward.
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And then, Father, I thank you most importantly that we have the first 11 chapters of the Book of Romans by which we can launch out into worship and praise.
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Even now, we can sing songs of delight. Even as people who don't have it all right in our lives now, but you have made it right by a righteousness given to us.
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And so, Father, I pray that even as we wrestle and struggle with our flesh, we wrestle and struggle with this world system and with all of these thoughts that rage in our minds, you've done it for us and that our hope is firmly placed in Jesus Christ and his sacrifice for us.
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And so, let our hearts explode with praise and gladness and joy even as we have a chance to sing these songs to you in Jesus' name.
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Yeah, you can go ahead and be seated. But if you could do me a favor and reopen your Bibles if you lost your place there, your device, over to Romans 12, three through eight, so that you can have that open in front of you.
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And then, remember at any time if you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, you're not gonna distract me if that's what you need to kind of keep your focus on God's word.
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If you need to use the restrooms, go out the double doors down the hallway on the left -hand side. But again, our goal is that the remainder of our time together is spent focusing our attention on God's word, the very powerful word of God that has the power to change us.
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And I think that we run the risk when we enter into any portion later in the book of Romans after chapter 12 or 12 or later, where we need to,
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I'm gonna constantly, probably at the start of every message moving forward for the remainder of the time in Romans, remind us of the gospel.
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Because it's very important as we enter into these what are called imperatives. Imperative, how many of you know what an imperative is just when
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I say that? A few of you, and a few of you like me didn't necessarily appreciate English class.
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An imperative is a command, it's a command. And so everything prior to this, almost all of the verbs were indicative.
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They were saying something that's true of us or true about things before. They weren't command -oriented verbs up until chapter 12.
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And then everything turns towards now do this, do this, do this. Well, if you jump into the Christian life in chapter 12, you miss the gospel, you miss the things that God says is true of you and what you need to believe in order to be considered a child of God and given the righteousness that we need.
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And so don't forget where we've been, that's my point. The gospel has been well established by the apostle
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Paul. You cannot be saved by keeping any of the rules that you find from chapter 12 on.
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You can't be saved by keeping those rules and those commands. Instead, what we all need is a
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God -given righteousness, a new heart that is only available through faith in Jesus Christ and his substitutionary sacrifice for us on the cross.
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That's where the hope is found. And now he's talking about now if your life is established on that foundation, on that bedrock of forgiveness of Jesus Christ and a new heart given to you, now go out and live in this way.
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And so the life of living for God by grace starts with us presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice like we saw last week.
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And as a starting point in seeking that which is good and acceptable and the perfect will of God, moment by moment, day by day, and rendering those decisions as worship to God.
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And this comes through a renewed mind that seeks God and his will through the pages of scripture, knowing what he desires of us, digging in and seeing the very things that he says here and like these examples of Romans 12 on.
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How does he want us to live? What does he want our lives to look like now that we have been bought by Jesus Christ?
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And Paul begins a new paragraph in verse three by defending his right to give us instruction. That's where he starts.
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He says, why should you trust me? Why should you listen to me is what Paul is saying at the very start of verse three.
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He is writing to the church in Rome and he says I'm writing to you by the grace that was given to him.
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Paul was given a measure of grace and he says that's the very nature of why you ought to listen to me. This is a gift from God given to me to speak the words and commands of God.
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In other words, God's inspired and holy word brought to us today, recast through the apostle
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Paul, is an undeserved gift. It is a grace to us that God would show us how to live a good life, how we are meant to be together in community, how we are to think of ourselves.
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This is a grace to us. Often, how many of you have ever been guilty of thinking of the rules and the laws and the commandments of God as a big killjoy, like a wet blanket on a fun night?
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Do you know what I'm talking about? And it's like that's not the point. It is about his grace given to us to lead us into that which is for our flourishing, that which is for our benefit, church.
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He loves us enough that he doesn't just leave us to ourselves. How many of you have ever gone a season living for yourself?
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Did it go well? Do you endorse that? Is that what you want for your children? Is that what, no, of course not.
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And that's not what God wants for his children. And so he is gracious to give us commands and rules and things for us as a church to live by and to walk in.
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And the main problem that this text exists to defeat, hear this short text, Romans 12, three through eight, it exists to defeat the human tendency to esteem ourselves too highly.
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Now I would suggest to you, and I know that I'm out on a limb on this, but I would suggest to you that every single one of us has this problem.
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Every single one of you is guilty of thinking of yourself too highly.
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From the most arrogant among us, I don't know who that is, but from the most arrogant to the most guilt -wracked individual, we all think too highly of ourselves.
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So really at the end of the day, I don't know, this is kind of a weird thought, but we all could line ourselves up by some kind of standard to determine who on the, you know, we could line up on this side.
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Most arrogant over here, most humble over here. Now if we, I mean, God knows that, by the way.
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God has some kind of identification for that. He could do it. He could line us all up that way right now. But the fact of the matter is, the whole spectrum thinks too well of themselves.
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The one that's clear over here, the most humble among us, would still be guilty of thinking wrongly about themselves, putting themselves too much at the center, thinking too well of themselves, and thinking higher thoughts than they deserve to think about themselves.
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I would suggest to you that the person that would be over there still doesn't deep down believe that they deserve hell.
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Deep down thinks, I'm really not that bad, though. Do you get what
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I'm saying in this? All of us struggle with this. It's a reality for all of us. I'm convinced in my own life, by the way, that I often am most depressed and down when
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I pay the greatest attention to myself. Can anybody testify to that? Is that true of you?
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When I'm thinking and focusing and trying to pay all of my attention on myself, when I'm serving myself, when
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I'm striving after my own self -esteem, and when I cease to serve others, when
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I cease to see myself as God sees me, that is the pathway, a sure pathway, to a downcast soul.
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Put yourself at the center and think a lot of thoughts about yourself. It is not just when
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I'm patting myself on the back for a job well done, but it's equally when I'm wallowing in self -deprecating defeat that I find that I'm thinking thoughts too much about myself.
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And in any and all circumstances, there is always the temptation for way too much me in the picture. There's a lot of me in there.
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So in our text, Paul gives us three remedies to correct our love affair with ourselves. You can take that picture down if you'd like.
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A little awkward. Three remedies, because I think that all of us could testify to having some degree of a love affair with ourselves.
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All of us are guilty of that. And so, our outline this morning is pretty straightforward, and each point is a remedy to thinking too highly of ourselves.
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These are the remedies. These are the things that God is gonna give us, and he's gonna give us some ideas and some thoughts about how we can defeat this in our lives.
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And the first is a gospel honesty in verse three. The second thing is church unity in verses four and five.
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The third is an intentional service, verses six through eight.
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So three remedies in this text given to us by the Apostle Paul through the grace of God that will help remedy thinking too highly of ourselves.
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Gospel honesty, church unity, and intentional service. You see, by grace,
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God is seeking to limit how high we think of ourselves. That's the limiting factor in this.
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That's the problem that he's identifying. That's what he chooses. And I suggest to you, this is already a corrective to our culture, the notion that we might not think that that's the real problem.
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But this is where Paul draws up, and this is where God draws up the battle lines in our lives, first, when he begins to give us the imperatives.
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Do not think more highly of yourself than you ought.
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This is ground zero of the battle. This is where he starts the attack against the sinful world system that we live in and breathe in and move in and the sinful world system that first and foremost is gonna say, you gotta take care of number one.
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You gotta care for self. You gotta make sure you're okay. You gotta fix yourself. You gotta think about yourself.
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You gotta meditate on yourself. You gotta fix yourself, right? How many of you hear that in the world? And he says, he says, don't think more highly of yourself than you ought.
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Because we often think our problem is thinking too lowly of ourselves. We think if we just stood up for ourselves, if we were more assertive, if I had more love for myself, then
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I'd arrive at joy, then I'd arrive at happiness. But this shows up in the modern therapeutic mindset that I've been hearing so much lately.
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I just need to take care of myself. I understand the sentiment, but it wasn't the sentiment of Jesus or Paul or any other of the biblical writers when
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Jesus says, love your neighbor as yourself. He doesn't say love yourself.
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He says love your neighbor as yourself. What does he presuppose in that instruction? What's the presupposition?
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You love yourself. I think Jesus took that for granted because he knew it was true. He knew it was already true.
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You already love yourself enough. You really do. Now, some of you are going, wait a second.
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Let's pull back on this a little bit, Don. Is there some kind of a caveat to this or whatever? Well, I'm just trying to deal with the text.
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I'm trying to deal with, not just this text, but the entirety of what I read in the pages of scripture here.
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I'm here suddenly out of nowhere. Out of nowhere in the giving of first instructions.
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Paul assumes that the church thinks more highly of themselves than they should.
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So he's addressing it to us. He puts a finger on a consistent human problem.
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He is not misdiagnosing our problem here. He gets it right, and the fundamental problem is that you and I all think too highly of ourselves.
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You see, fundamental to a renewal of your mind is to think correctly, and to think correctly about yourself.
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So the problem is set up in verse three, and the pattern of this world in general is that humans think too highly of themselves, but don't get hung up on looking for exceptions, because some of you, your mind is churning and you're thinking about exceptions right now.
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This is indeed a general truism that we all know works if we really seek it out in our hearts, but our tendency to look for loopholes often comes from a desire to squirm out from underneath conviction.
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This is one of those texts that we would like not to convict us, and so we could find exceptions to the rule or anything like that, but let this text,
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Recast, talking to all of you, this has impacted me this week, let this text speak to you rather than trying to figure out who it does and doesn't apply to.
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Let it speak to your heart. Matter of fact, maybe even just for a second here, you can listen faster than I can talk, and so maybe right now in the quiet of your heart, you would just say,
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God, show me, correct me, fix me, help me to think rightly about myself this morning through the pages of this text.
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The remainder of this text this morning is taken up with what is expressed in verse three as sober judgment.
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We should have sober judgment, that's how we should think about ourselves. We are called to lower our thoughts, to lower our thoughts, not to think more highly of yourself, to lower your thoughts about yourself.
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We must think of ourselves with sober judgment, and it's a pretty cool phrase in Greek, it means an unfoggy and clear view.
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An unfoggy, all kinds of things could come in and cloud your view of yourself, the words of others, the praise of others, the praise of self, the accomplishments, the whatever it might be, the gifts and talents that you have and that you've honed and that you've worked hard for, the wealth that you've accumulated, the status that you've accumulated, all kinds of things cloud your vision.
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Maybe it's even just ignorance of God's word that could cloud your vision to thinking right thoughts about yourself, but we're being called to have an unfoggy, clear, like any of you ever on a foggy day, we're about to get a couple of those, any of you ever just scrape just a little hole, you don't have much time, and so you're driving down the road with just this thing, and then what happens?
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That little patch fogs up, and then you're really in trouble, and then you're driving into the glare of the sun, and it's like,
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I'm in trouble, pull over please, before you get in a wreck, right? I think all of us have had that experience where you don't have a cloud, you have a clouded, unclear view of what's really going on out there.
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It's a recipe for disaster, right? So we need a sober judgment, a clear, honest, accurate assessment of who we really are.
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That's what we're being called to. Now I wanna point out just kind of an illustration of how this works in the negative, how you can actually come across as being humble, come across as being contrite, and sometimes in the lowest points of life, really, you're still thinking too much of yourself, you're still thinking too highly.
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When I was in high school, my soccer team made it to the district finals my senior year. I love soccer, soccer was the only sport that I seemed to really excel at,
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I didn't really excel at basketball until later, and some might question whether that's true or not, but soccer was my sport.
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We played against Lowell, does anybody even know where Lowell is? That was our district final. We won the game, three to one, district champions.
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That year, I was co -captain of the soccer team, I actually was later nominated as the most valuable player, and I don't say any of this to boost myself because of the way that this story goes.
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At that district final game, everybody lined up to receive their medals, and I was not present there.
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I actually had wandered off the field at the final whistle and was off moping in a playground, okay, sitting on a swing, totally beside myself.
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I was angry, I wasn't present, they were literally, my team is lined up receiving district champion medals around their neck, and I'm over moping in the playground.
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I'm the co -captain, I'm gonna be nominated later, I didn't know this at the time, I'm gonna be nominated as the MVP for the year.
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I'd wandered off upset with my performance in that game. I was sulking and cursing myself in my mind while the team enjoyed the victory, and the reason, the reason was that I thought so highly of myself that I was beating myself up, why?
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Because the score would have been three to nothing if it wasn't for me, I scored a goal in that game, I scored an own goal in that game.
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The other team makes a cross, I misplayed it, perfect shot into the back of the net.
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I mean, the goalie, I could still see it in my mind, the goalie arching for the corner, it went right into the cross, right there.
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There's no way, I mean, the best keeper in the world was not gonna field that ball, shank in. I was beside myself.
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I'm the most valuable player, I'm the co -captain, and even at this low point of self -loathing in my life,
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I was betraying my own self -centeredness and my own pride. I don't make mistakes.
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Mistakes are for lesser people, and I was angry. Can you see it?
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Can you see thinking too highly of myself in that context? The game was fine, we won.
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The keeper was totally forgiving about it, and was like, hey, we're district champions, awesome, I would've loved to shut out, but hey, whatever.
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You see, I'm convinced that even in moments where we think we are thinking low thoughts about ourselves, we are still way too full of ourselves.
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This is what it means to be a fallen human. And so how do we combat this pervasive human problem that stalks us in the low points as well as in the high points?
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It'll never work for us to run around in our day saying, don't think too highly of yourself, don't think too highly of yourself, don't think too highly of yourself, that's not gonna cut it.
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At the end of verse three, we get the first movement towards a sober and unclouded correct judgment of ourselves, and it's found in, the end of verse three, it's a gospel honesty.
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We are called to have a gospel honesty about ourselves. You see, the phrase at the end of verse three is a bit hard to discern in English, it says this in the
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ESV, it says it, there's a bunch of different translations, but this is the English Standard Version that I read earlier, that we are to think about ourselves with sober judgment according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
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So something to do with our faith is supposed to inform the way we view ourselves, something to the effect of the amount of faith that we've received is to inform the way that we think of ourselves.
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Well, how much faith have we received? Well, it's not again, it's not the, I'm convinced that because Paul is encouraging us to not think too highly of ourselves, not at all, it's not possible that what he's saying is line yourself up according to the most faith and the least faith, figure out where you're at in the pecking order.
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God has given to each one a different measure of faith, and so you need to figure out where you fit in that and just roll with that, that's not at all, because how many of you know that that's a breeding ground for us to think more highly of ourselves than we ought or to feel too lowly about ourselves, and that would have its way with us, but I don't believe that that's what he's getting at.
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I don't believe that he's suggesting that we line ourselves up in that way and look around the room and go, well, who's got the most faith?
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I guess I'm probably one of the highest. That wouldn't be what he's getting at. Instead, I believe that he's calling us to consider the way we came into salvation.
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How was it measured out to us? Evenly. Saving faith, that is a faith that trusts in Jesus and his work on the cross is what brought you in, every one of you.
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That's it. That's the measure. Look around you right now,
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Recast. Go ahead and take a second to look at other people. Really.
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Please, humor me. Everyone in this room who professes faith in Jesus Christ came through the same door as you.
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We are united and we are together in Christ because of the faith that was measured out to us.
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You see, the standard of value in the church, a gospel honesty is recognizing that we all came the same way.
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We all were brought into the faith in the same way. The standard of value in the church is a saving faith measured out evenly to each of us.
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Kings stand no taller than peasants at the foot of the cross. Everyone who has ever been saved and brought into the church of Christ has come on their knees.
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So the first remedy for thinking too highly of ourselves is a gospel honesty.
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We are all needy beggars, pleading for crumbs of righteousness from the bountiful table of the
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Almighty. Let that be sober judgment indeed. And one more word on gospel honesty before we move on, stop believing your own hype.
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Stop believing your own hype. We get into these ruts of self -righteousness, of self -justification. We cut ourselves all the slack and that's why we can get so angry at a person who drives just like us when we're in a hurry.
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We're allowed to be in a hurry, aren't we? But God forbid that somebody else is in a hurry and cuts us off.
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What about when somebody criticizes you? I mean, think about a sober judgment about that.
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I've heard it said, and I don't even know who I'm quoting here, but someone said, you know, when somebody criticizes me, the right answer ought to be, you just don't know the half of it.
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You're thinking too low about your criticism because if you knew all of it, you would bring that too.
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I mean, certainly we're at times falsely criticized, but that's because they didn't know the right category to criticize us in.
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Am I right? But our tendency, what is your first response when somebody criticizes you?
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To put up a defense. To lean into the cloudiness.
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To cloudy and muddy the thing instead of with laser -like focus and with clarity from God. And with clarity from scripture, identify, yes.
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Yes, I'm broken, I'm fallen, I sinned. I shouldn't have responded in that way. And apologize and said it right.
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But what if people around you, what if people around you truly knew what you know about yourself?
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What if that was just the standard alone? What if they knew every deep and secret and dark thought you've ever had?
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Every deep and secret thing you've ever done? Do you think you'd be vindicated?
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Or do you think you'd be ashamed? Do you think you would disgust people or impress them?
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It's a rough question, isn't it? Because I think I can hear in the room a sense of, yeah, we know what it means to have an unclouded view because at the end of the day, we really do know ourselves, don't we?
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We really do know the deep and secret things, the darkness within us.
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So I guess what Paul's saying here when he says, think soberly about yourself, is the gospel and his grace that defines us.
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Have a gospel honesty. What is the best thing about you? The best thing about you is faith in Jesus.
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The faith measured out and given to you as a gift, that is the greatest thing about everyone.
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And you know what's beautiful about that? Look around. We have that in common. Everybody here on the same par of value because we've been brought in by the great and awesome grace of God that has given us faith in his son.
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So stop pretending and grow a bit of honesty. Grow a bit of sober judgment. The more we contemplate and consider the glorious gospel that saved a wretch like me, the more we will naturally be moved away from thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought.
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We will let God's thoughts define us. And we most importantly, we'll let God's great mercy reign in the church because all of us, as I said, came through that same door of faith.
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And that faith was measured out and ladled into our mouths in the same portions. No one here, hear me carefully church, no one here is super saved.
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No one here is super saved. You're either saved or you're not. That's the measure.
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You're not super saved. God assigned your faith and measured it out to you like a mother feeding her slobbering infant.
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Oh, here you go. Here's a little faith for you. Each of us received Christ that way.
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So commit to living in a gospel honesty. Recast. The second thing, the second remedy to thinking too highly of ourselves is church unity.
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God is doing something in our midst by bringing us in a humility of recognizing that we're not the only one that God is working on.
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He's working on a community, bringing together a group of people who are dependent on one another.
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We have a dependency on one another in order to walk in this
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Christian life. You see, the first remedy is somewhat isolated. We can work on the way we think about ourselves and we can think about things with a gospel honesty and leave it there, right?
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Like that might be all that we're tempted to do is just, I can deal with this on my own. I got this in my own heart. I'll just contemplate and consider the gospel and I'll change my thinking by doing that on my own, but that's not enough according to this text.
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According to verses four and five, God has made us to be sharpened in relationship with one another. He has saved us in the community and for so many reasons we can recoil at community, right?
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There's a lot of reasons to recoil at community. It might be that you've had some experiences in the past.
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It might be that you're an introvert and you just don't like connecting with other people and that's not your natural bent.
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You already have enough friendships as it is or whatever it might be, but one of the prominent reasons for Christians to recoil at the idea of risking relationship is that you've been hurt in the past and some of you
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I know in this room have not just merely been hurt in relationship in the past, but you've been hurt in the church in the past.
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And let me say to you first, I'm sorry. I mean that sincerely. I'm sorry that that has been your experience.
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But just like anything that God commands, we need to trust that he knows what he's doing. He's commanding us to enter into community with one another and anything worth doing,
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I think you know this by now, those of you that are adults in the room, you know anything worth doing always involves risk.
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It always involves risk. And so in verses four and five, Paul uses the human body as an illustration for the church.
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Interestingly, these verses presuppose a local gathering. There's a connectedness in relationship with one another that's found in these verses.
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And by the way, the human body illustration was one that was really common in the Roman world. It was used for republics.
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It was used for governments. It was used for other gatherings. It was used in Judaism. It was a really common metaphor of the time.
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But you see, the way that he uses this metaphor of the human body presupposes an actual relational linking of Christians together in a physical place.
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The arms, the hands, the feet, the nose, the eyes, the ears all have benefit to the body only if they're connected together.
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Our hands benefit from our eyes that are attached and work in sync and we call it hand -eye coordination.
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How many of you are glad that your hands work in sync with your eyes? Some in various degrees. Some are better than others.
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Paul states the obvious in verse four. Our human bodies are a collection of many parts, unity, but they do not all have the same function, diversity within that unity.
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So in this analogy, we see that tackling our high thinking about ourselves is not merely for the benefit of ourselves because thinking too highly of ourselves is a community problem.
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It's a community problem. If you were alone on a desert island, thinking too highly of yourselves would still be a sin as pride in relationship to God, but it would be limited in its damage without other people to experience you as a complete tool who is too full of yourself.
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But in the church, thinking too highly of ourselves is a toxic poison that will destroy local churches.
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So Paul uses this second point of church unity to remind us that we are, hear me carefully recast, we are obligated to one another.
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The way we think of ourselves is not a private matter. It bleeds out into our relationships with others.
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It impacts the church. Having a sober assessment of ourselves should be motivated in part by the fact that we are saved into a diverse but united church.
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And we are individually members of one another, as he stated at the end of verse five. And this requires us to think of church as so much more.
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I'll recast, I hope you see it more than that, more than what I'm about to say. We are more than a collection of people who show up at 10 .30
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at the same building. Do you see yourself as that? Do you recognize that you need more than that?
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I hope you're more than a collection of people who don't mind listening to the same preacher, enjoy the same music, kind of convenient place.
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You like the donuts, maybe the coffee. Maybe you got one friend here or something like that.
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The church is more than that, isn't it? We're an interdependent organism of sorts, like a body that works and functions together, that needs each other, that helps out and offers help.
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And that receives help. What united us into one body, recast? What has made us into a local church here in Matawan?
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In verse five it says, it is the unity in Christ as expressed in this text. It is unity in Christ.
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He has brought us together into one body. So let's commit to consider the church unity that God is working out in our midst.
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The New Testament leaves no room for Lone Ranger Christians. And amputation is never God's plan.
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And yet any Christian who refuses to enter into a relationship with the local church is likened by this illustration of the body as a severed arm or a severed leg.
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Now I don't want to be heavy handed, but I want to be more direct than I've been in the past. You see, when we started recast,
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I was a little bit down on church membership. I thought it sounded a lot like an in group and an out group.
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I thought it sounded like we're all gonna be showing up with our members only jackets and then everybody else feels left out and all of that kind of stuff.
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So I kind of had a little bit of a worldly view of membership when it first started. Show me in the Bible, I would have said.
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Show me in the Bible where it says that we have to have church membership. We're just gonna have church membership because the state requires it.
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That was my mindset. And so it was kind of dumbed down and I think there was a point where we were about 150 people with about 25 members.
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People weren't taking that step and we weren't talking about it, we weren't promoting it or anything. But then I came across some things that I was just like, duh,
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Don, where's your head at? You do a search for the word member in the New Testament, did you know what shows up?
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It shows up in this text. Members of the body together.
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Membership like that. Membership like my body is glad my hand is here. Membership like I'm glad I have eyes that work.
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Are you getting what I'm saying? That kind of membership and I'm excited about that. I'm excited about that kind of needing each other.
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That kind of giving to one another and receiving from one another and interacting with one another and living together and doing life together and being responsible to one another and accountable to one another.
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Do you see what I'm saying? And so again, I don't wanna be heavy handed but why not pick up a membership application?
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If you've been here for a while, why not take that step? I like the way that Michael Whitmer said it a few weeks ago.
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If you call this your church home, you love it, why not put a ring on it, right? I mean, that's really what membership is.
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It's an official stating I'm here and I love you and I wanna be a part of your life and I want you to be a part of mine.
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We're not a perfect church but we sure do love God and we sure do love each other and I'm convinced that you need the accountability of a local body just like I do.
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How many of you would say you need accountability? You recognize your need for that. I think we all do. Lastly, but powerfully, so let me recap where we've been.
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We need gospel honesty, we need church unity and then lastly, we need intentional service.
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Powerfully, Paul concludes with verses six through eight and the content of these verses could throw us off the trail of the main point because Paul gets carried away down a rabbit trail of illustrations of this intentional service but that really is the third remedy to thinking too highly of ourselves, an intentional service to one another.
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In verse six, Paul expands in what he said in verse four, we do not all have the same functions. Again, you can look around the room and say we all came in through the same door, we all have this gospel honesty about us that we all came in through faith but we have different things to offer.
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That's a great thing. We all came through the same faith but after we're saved and that gives us equal value but our roles, we're given different roles in the body.
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As different as the role of the eye and the foot. How many of you think that your eye and your foot have different roles and functions?
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A pretty big deal, right? You gotta get those right but how many of you would be willing to sacrifice one or the other? How many of you just kind of, if you're given the option, you'd like to keep both?
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Right? I'd like to have both of those functioning correctly in our bodies. So by turning our attention to service,
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God is giving us the most powerful, I believe the most powerful remedy to thinking too highly of ourselves. You see, here's the crux of it.
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The things we've been given by God that make us think that we're better than others are actually gifts given to us by God for the service of others.
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Often the very things that promote arrogance and pride in our heart are the very gifts that we've only received from God in order to bless others.
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Well, I can sing really good, I can play really good, I'm a really good baller, I'm really good at this, I'm really good at that,
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I'm really good at soccer, I'm really, all the things that you could say you're good at are a gift that God has given to you.
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Do you see what I'm saying? And instead what we often do is we let those things puff us up when instead what they're meant to be is an opportunity to serve others.
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See, all of us have various gifts. And Paul's command in verse six is this.
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Here's the command. Let us use them. You have a gift, you have talents, you have abilities.
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Let us use them. That applies to any and all talents and abilities that God gives.
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He goes on to list some. This is where we could get hung up, especially on this first one. If it is prophecy, then the prophet is to apply that gift that says in the text, in accordance or in proportion to our faith.
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The word our faith there needs to be understood, I believe it's used in the same way as it would be used later in scripture, our faith handed down to us by our forefathers, that kind of faith, like the body of belief, like the religion that we practice, the faith.
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And so it's our set of beliefs and what Paul is instructing here is the use of the gift of prophecy in a way that comes under the authority of the faith as handed down to us by the apostles, the authority of revelation of God's word.
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I know that the word prophecy makes some of you very curious, but it holds such a side note part of this text that this is not the time to launch out into and spend 15 to 20 minutes discussing the nature of New Testament prophecy.
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But if you have a question, you can email me or text me or we can talk about it, especially if you're curious about what our stance is as a church on prophecy.
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I know, I just heard recently that other churches in the area have had a prophet come in for an evening service or for a morning service and literally walk up and down the aisles and prophesy over people and predict what your future is and stuff.
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And that's a little bit like fortune teller type stuff. So that kind of stuff happens, that's a real thing and we could talk about that and I'm already talking about it more than I was going to in my notes here.
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But it's something, how many of you would just admit that it produces some curiosity in you? Just a little bit like, I wonder what that's about.
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We could talk about that later. There are passages, by the way, that are more central to this, that that's where I would address it.
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I'm not saying I'm not afraid to talk about it up here, it just comes down to an issue of time and what really
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I think the main point of this text is not to divert us into a discussion of prophecy because there's all of these other things as well.
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But it serves here in this text as the first of multiple illustrations where Paul's main point is this.
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Serving others with our various gifts is a remedy to thinking too highly of ourselves.
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So if your gift is serving, then get serving. If it's teaching, then let's get you teaching.
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If it's encouraging and exhortation, a word that's hard to figure whether he means encouraging or exhortation but kind of an interrelated word, then get busy encouraging.
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Write letters of encouragement to others and bring the truth to bear in their lives in a positive way.
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If you have the gift of giving, that is contribution, then he kind of goes a little bit on a side note on this. He doesn't say if you have the gift of giving, then just give, but he says if you have the gift of giving, then do so with generosity, a word that can equally be translated sincerity.
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The word that is translated in there implies an internal consistency within your giving.
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So any and all of us who have the ability and the means to give, if God has given you a gift of blessing the church and others financially, then make sure you're doing that from your heart and not from the desire to look really good.
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Make sure there's an internal cheerfulness and gladness in your giving is what he's getting at here. That's where the generous heart comes in to the act of giving.
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And that's what he's calling us to in that. If that's your gift, then do that.
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If your gift is leadership, then lead with zeal and passion, with enthusiasm and with a drive.
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If your gift is to do service for the down and out, that is acts of mercy, then do so with cheerfulness, cheerfulness.
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Nothing would be worse than serving those who are down and out with a dour spirit. Sadness and yep, boy,
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I'm sad too. The main point, by the way, to every gift mentioned here is the understood, if this is your gift, do it.
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That's the main point. With whatever gift you're given, do it. It's a call to action here in the text.
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To defeat high thoughts of ourselves, get out and serve others. Get out and help. Get out and use what you have been given in the benefit of others.
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Despite the fact that our attention is drawn to this inexhaustible, by the way, I believe it's a very inexhaustible list of spiritual gifts.
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I believe that God gives all kinds of gifts. Everything that I have, every talent, every ability, every resource is a gift from God.
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He doesn't list them exhaustively, but the fact is we want to take those spiritual gifts and we want to define each one, and the focus of the text should be on the call that God is giving to each one of us to use whatever gifts we have.
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Don't get hung up on this list and go, mine's not there, I guess I'm off the hook. Whatever your gift is, go out and do that.
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Serve one another with your talents and your abilities and your resources. Yesterday was a beautiful picture of that.
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There were about a dozen guys and ladies who showed up here and served in the morning.
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They built a retaining wall out there. They put in a new culvert for a ditch out on the other side of the, and did all kinds of stuff, moved brush, and just using their resources.
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And the coolest thing is there were some tractors that showed up here, and people using their resources and giving of,
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I mean, I've got a tractor. Let me bring it to help the church. It's a cool and beautiful thing when that happens, right? How many of you love that, when people come together and unite under a common purpose and serve one another?
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That's a beautiful thing. So let's summarize the text, then, and allow the applications to flow directly from the text.
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Let's let the text dictate what we're gonna do different. And really, my prayer is not just the text, but the
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Spirit speaking into your heart individually. Because I can draw application out of this, but I want you to hear what the
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Spirit is saying to you to do with this text. It might be,
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I'd encourage you to have at least one, at least one, and if you don't walk out of here with one application from this text, then that's just a sign that you need to wrestle this afternoon.
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That's a sign that you need to go back through the text and read it, because I'm confident that the Spirit has something for each and every one of us here in this text, and I just might not hit yours.
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But here's kind of what the text is saying to us. Go back a little bit. God is graciously seeking to renew our minds this morning.
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This flows right after verse two. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind like this.
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Rethink things, think in a different way. So God is trying to renew your mind this morning to help you to think correctly, by correcting our latent tendency to think too highly of ourselves.
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Instead, what he wants us to do is he wants us to think about ourselves with a sober judgment, with clarity, he wants to clear the windshield and show us who we really are.
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And so we are to think about ourselves with a gospel honesty. If this is your need that God is pointing out to you this morning, to actually recognize that we're all on the level playing field, we've all been given grace, we've all been brought in by the same grace, then let me encourage you to rehearse the gospel regularly.
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See me about grabbing a copy of the Gospel Primer. I've got a copy of it up here. Linda, were there a couple of copies out there?
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There's two copies out. We'll get you a copy if you would read it, but what it is is it's a really small book, but there's readings in there for one reading every day.
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You could read it through in a month, one, like two pages a day, and it's almost kind of devotional, but what it does is it just reminds us and rehearses for us our desperate need and all the needs that we have that are met in the gospel.
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It's focused on that, and it's a really powerful tool that we've used as a staff together. I've used it in my own life.
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I've bought copies for family members who have gone through it. It's a powerful book, and it's not magic.
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It's not magic. It just, at the end of the day, is a tool. It's a resource to help us to remember the need that we all come to the gospel with.
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Secondly, we're to engage in church unity according to this text, and maybe it's the formal step of defining the relationship through grabbing a membership application.
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Maybe that's where you're at, and that's where you need to be today, and God is putting a finger on you saying, you know what, you have been here for years.
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You've been here for months. You've been here for a long time, and you've called this your church home. Why not take the plunge? We printed extras of those because we anticipate a run on those, so maybe we need to get another person out there at the welcome table so that we've got a couple of people, but just pass on these things.
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I don't know, but again, I'm enthusiastic about this, not because I wanna grow the membership of this church, because I wanna see people vitally, intentionally connected in relationship with one another for accountability and for saying, yes,
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I'm here, and I want to serve. Yes, I'm here, and in my down times, I want to be served.
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I want to have a community that surrounds me, and I want also leadership to know that I'm in.
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I want leadership to know that I'm committed to this body and that I want to be a vital, connected part of it.
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Does that all make sense? Perfect. So maybe that's your step is to grab that application.
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Lastly, well, let me back up and say one other thing about that, because it's not just membership is the only potential application to that.
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Some of you are here, and I recognize, I've actually interacted with some of you for the first time this morning. Some of you are new here.
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You've only been coming for a few weeks. You're still at that stage where you're just literally checking it out, and you don't really know if this is the place for you or not.
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Let me just encourage you in this direction. Let your time away from a vital connection to a local body be short.
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Now, find a place and then dig in and serve and be a part of it. Now, I'm not saying, that's not heavy -handed to say this has to be it.
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This church is not for everybody, but let me encourage you to make that time of wandering away from whatever you've known as church to be short, get connected, get back into the body and be a part of a local place.
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And I say this with sincerity. I say this at every lunch with a pastor. I recognize that Recast might not be the place for everybody, but I'm connected with a lot of churches in this area.
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And if this isn't the place for you, then take me up on this offer. I've had a handful of people take me up on this offer, and I mean it sincerely.
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I might be able to guide you and direct you to a church that is a better fit for you, because I know other churches in the area.
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I know other pastors, and I know the way that they roll and the things that they do and what makes them distinct. And so, if you're saying, this isn't the place for me, but I'm still wandering and I'm out there,
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I just wanna see people vitally connected to churches. I would love it if this was the place for you, but recognize that it's not for everybody.
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The last thing is, let us use our gifts here to serve one another. A healthy church is a serving church.
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We are united, but we are diverse, and there's a rich depth in that, Recast. If Recast is your church home, then there is without question a need for you and your abilities here.
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If you're interested in music, contact Dave Bunt. If you'd like to help out with middle school and high school, there's some needs in those areas right now, contact
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David Schrock. If you have a heart for children, contact Ginger Rixey. If you can see yourself helping out in hospitality, making coffee or greeting at the door or working at the welcome table, or you wanna help out in maintaining and caring for the facility, maybe you've got some specific skills or trades or abilities, helping out with ground maintenance outside, blowing leaves and getting things ready for the fall, ready in the spring and that kind of stuff, then
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I just encourage you to please contact the church office, and we would love to explore places where you could get connected, and I'm confident that everybody can.
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The body needs you, and you also need the body. And so let's come to communion this morning to remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that has provided these remedies to our wrong thinking.
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The gospel is all about him. In his sacrifice, our sin is exposed, and the masks are peeled away to reveal just how utterly sinful we really are.
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When we line up to go to those tables, everybody who is lined up to go to those tables, go ahead and in a minute,
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Dave's gonna get up, play a song, I can predict it, there's gonna be lines. And if you're here and you are not yet in relationship with Jesus Christ, you haven't asked him to save you and to be your king, then just skip that, stay in your seat, take in the song, think and contemplate about the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for you on the cross, and maybe even ask him to be your lord and king today.
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But when we stand in those lines to go to those tables, we are exposing ourself to the community with gospel honesty.
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Look around the room with sober judgment. We are a room full of needy sinners saved by the
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God -man who took on himself our sin. Remember his body broken for us as you take the cracker.
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Remember his blood shed for us as you take that juice. He has saved us even while we were rebels and enemies against him.
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And he has brought us into a unified local gathering. And he has called us to serve one another with sincerity, with zeal, and with cheerfulness.
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So my prayer this morning is that we leave here with some specific steps to more sober and clear judgment about ourselves this week.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the grace that has been given to us, the grace that is even found in the fact that you would reveal this text to the apostle
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Paul on behalf of the church. Father, I pray that you would give us all a significant dose this morning of gospel honesty, that we would recognize that we are saved in no different way than anybody else in this room.
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It was you doling out your grace to an undeserving individual. And that stands for each and every one of us.
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Father, I thank you for this community that you have saved us into. And I pray for unity, church unity here.
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Father, I thank you so much for the unity that we've experienced over the years. And then for intentional service,
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Father, I pray that you would be moving among us to use our gifts and our abilities and our talents to serve others.
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That's the only reason we have gifts, talents, and resources. And so, Father, I pray that you would help us to be generous and cheerful and zealous towards serving others.