Men at Church

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No small thing, and oftentimes, I'm afraid our spiritual lives become divorced from our home lives.
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It becomes something that we do when we're away from home, at church or whatever.
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And when we get home, it's where we sort of separate ourselves.
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And it was good to be reminded of the most important things that we do at home.
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But now I have been tasked with directing our minds in a different direction.
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My task for this conference was to direct our minds to what happens in the church.
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And as much as our faith cannot be limited to what takes place in the church, it certainly cannot be divorced from what happens in the church.
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Yet that is what is happening and what I have seen happen, especially in the lives of men.
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And the church has become something that people can do with or do without.
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The idea that the church should be a priority in a man's life and in his schedule seems to be indicative of a bygone era.
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And there has been a strong movement in recent years of people who try to argue that the church itself is unnecessary.
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And certainly that's been that way for centuries, for unbelievers.
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But I'm not talking about unbelievers.
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I'm talking about people who identify themselves as Christians.
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Some of you are on Facebook, some of you aren't, but probably about a year ago I posted something about the fact that it is necessary for a Christian to be a part of a local church.
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And you would be surprised at the negative responses and the attacks that came on that post, not from unbelievers, because they don't care, but from people who would identify themselves as Christians.
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How many of you have heard someone say, well I don't go to church, I am the church? You heard that? That's the new thing.
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Used to, it was I'm not religious, I'm spiritual, but that sort of has gone away.
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The new thing is I don't go to church, I am the church.
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And that's super trendy and very, very spiritual sounding, but really what it is is spiritual nonsense.
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Because the word church means assembly, and you don't assemble by yourself no matter how big you are.
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You can't assemble all alone.
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You assemble with believers, that's the church.
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There's a sense in which the church does, it is all the believers around the world are made up of the body of Christ, thus His church.
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But when we talk about the word church in scripture, in fact the word church, ecclesia, it's over a hundred times is that word in the New Testament.
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In fact, you can look at New Testament books and they're written to churches, to church at Rome, the church at Corinth, the church at Galatia, the church at Ephesus, the church at Philippi, the church at Colossae, the church at Thessalonica, the books of Timothy and Titus are about how men are supposed to behave in leadership roles, where? In the church.
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In the book of Revelation is written to seven churches.
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Anyone who says the church is an unnecessary entity is making that claim absolutely in opposition to the New Testament.
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I say that without any shame or embarrassment.
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If somebody comes up to me and says I'm a Christian but I don't need the church, I say you must not need the word of God either.
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Because the word of God in the New Testament is addressed to the church.
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It's not given to you for your individual use, even though you can use it individually in your life.
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But it's written to the church, for the church.
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Now I don't imagine that many of you would argue today that church is unnecessary or else you probably wouldn't be here.
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So somebody might say, well, you're a pastor, you're preaching to the choir, you're just going to spend the next hour telling us why church is necessary.
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We agree.
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So let's skip that and get on to the barbecue.
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But I wonder, even if you believe church is necessary, if you know why, I wonder if you understand why and how necessary it really is.
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So that's what we're going to do today.
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In fact, I want to give an illustration as I get started.
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And you may have heard this before.
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It's an old pastoral favorite, so you may have heard it.
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But there was a pastor who visited a house with a woman who was making him dinner.
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And she brought out the dinner and it was a nice roast that she had prepared.
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And the roast had an entire end that was cut off.
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And he looked at it just a little funny.
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Why is it that you cut off a good piece of the meat? Why does it have a stump on one end? Why is it that way? And she said, well, that was the way my mother taught me to cook it.
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That was the way I've always been taught to cook roast.
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And he said, but that's a good piece of meat.
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What do you do with it? She said, I throw it away.
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He said, well, why do you throw it away? It's a good piece of meat.
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And she says, I don't know.
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So she goes to the phone and she calls her mom and she says, mom, you spent all my life, you taught me to cook the roast.
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And every time you cook the roast, you cut the end off.
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She said, he said, my pastor's here.
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He wants to know why.
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And she said, well, when you were little, we had a pan that was really small and I couldn't get the whole roast in the pan.
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So every time we cooked the roast, I had to cut the end off to make it fit.
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So she'd been doing something her whole life, never knew why.
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So today we're going to talk about the why.
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The why men ought to be in church.
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Why church ought to be a priority for men.
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For what purpose do we assemble? And my passage I'm going to show you is in Matthew chapter 28.
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So if you want to open up your Bible, this is the passage normally called the Great Commission.
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But I'm going to show you it has as much relevance in the church as it does outside the church.
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So we're going to look at Matthew chapter 28, verses 16 to 20.
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Matthew chapter 28, verse 16.
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Now, the 11 disciples went to Galilee.
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To the mountain to which Jesus had directed them, and when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted.
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And Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me.
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Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
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And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.
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May we pray.
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Father, by your mercy and grace, I pray that as I preach your word that you would keep me from error.
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As we discuss the subject of minute church, I pray that you would put on our hearts a true longing to understand our role and the reason why we should gather together.
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Lord, as we look at the subject of discipleship and what it means to be conformed to the image of Christ and what it means to be iron sharpening iron.
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I pray, oh, God, that you would, by your mercy and grace, implant within our hearts this word.
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And Lord, let it bear fruit in our lives.
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I pray that you'll keep me from error.
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For I'm a fallible man, I'm capable of preaching error.
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I don't want to.
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And I know the men of this church and the men that have come today that are our guests here.
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Lord, they are valuable.
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They are your men.
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They are worth hearing the truth.
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God, keep me from failing them and failing you.
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I pray this in Jesus name.
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Amen.
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Many people hear the Great Commission and automatically their minds go towards something that happens outside of the church.
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In fact, most missionaries focus on this passage and a lot of missionary work has been inspired by this passage.
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And that's good and that's all true.
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So nothing I'm going to say today should subtract anything from the value of the leaving the church, going into the world and making disciples.
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That should not in any way, what I'm going to say, detract from that.
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But what I want you to understand is this passage is no less true in the church than it is outside the church.
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We assemble for worship and in worship we read scripture, we pray, we sing, we study, we participate in the ordinances of baptism in the Lord's Supper.
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But that's not all that happens.
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That's what happens in the worship service.
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But also when we gather together, we engage one another.
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Sometimes it's small engagements, a welcoming handshake, a hug.
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A kind hello.
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Other times it's more engaging.
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Hey, can we go eat together and let's talk, let's set up a time where I can come over to your house and let's spend some time together.
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But do we consider this and do we understand that this is a time for discipleship? Are we being discipled? And are we discipling others? It is my contention in this message that we should be, because this is one of the primary reasons why we assemble in the first place.
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Consider for a moment the most famous passage people use for coming to church.
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Anytime somebody says, oh, Christians don't have to go to church.
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What's the one verse everybody mentions? Well, that's a good one too, but the one I hear a lot, Hebrews 10.
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Don't forsake the assembly, right? If somebody says, oh, you're supposed to come to church, don't forsake the assembly.
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And that's true.
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But why don't we forsake the assembly? According to that passage, I want to read it to you.
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Hebrews 10, 24.
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Let us consider how to stir one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging whether one another and all the more, as you see the day drawing near.
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Notice what the text says.
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The reason why we gather is to stir one another up to love and good works.
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Brothers, that's discipleship.
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That's why we gather.
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When was the last time you went out of your way? To make a disciple, and can we honestly say.
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It is the goal of the men of this church.
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To make disciples now with that question in mind, I want to look at three realities about discipleship that every man ought to realize.
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With those questions, when was the last time we made a disciple, when was the last time we were intentional about making a disciple, and is that really the goal of the church? With that in mind, I want to develop three realities about discipleship.
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Number one, making a disciple or rather disciple making is a command, it is not a suggestion.
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It is a command, it is not a suggestion.
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Look again with me at Matthew 28 and I want to focus in on verse 19.
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If you look at verse 19, go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them.
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And then it goes on to the Trinitarian name and then it says teaching them.
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If you look at that passage as one whole idea, it's important to realize there's only one main verb in that entire statement.
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A lot of times the focus of the main verb is the focus on the word go, you'll hear missionaries, they'll talk about go and it's all about going.
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But actually, that's not the verb.
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Go is a participle, baptizing is a participle, teaching is a participle.
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They're all tied to a main verb.
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The main verb there is make disciples.
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The going, the teaching, the baptizing are all tied to the main verb.
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The main verb is actually a verb which comes to us in what's called the aorist active imperative, which means that it is a specific, definite, decisive, now verb.
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It's urgent, like if I were to say to you, run, that would be urgent, right? Or eat, that's urgent, right? Usually we put an exclamation point on the end of that type of an urgent statement.
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Well, here's the word with urgency, disciple.
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That's the word.
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It's not even really make disciple, it's disciple, it's a verb.
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We say make disciples, no, it's disciple.
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And it is an active imperative, a right now.
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And it is a universal command.
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There is no sense in which this word is limited to any group.
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Some argue that this passage only refers to the clergy.
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It's only the pastor's job to go and make disciples.
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And they argue that based on the fact that only pastors are supposed to baptize, which I don't agree with that.
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But there are some denominations that only allow pastors to observe the ordinances of baptism in the Lord's Supper.
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And because of that, they'll say, well, if it's only the pastor who can baptize, it's only the pastor who can administrate the Lord's Supper, then it's only the pastor who's called to go and make disciples.
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That dog won't hunt.
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We look in the book of Acts and we see men who were not clergymen going and making disciples, and we see them baptizing, too.
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Philip is a deacon, not an elder, and yet he's baptizing.
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He's going, he's baptizing.
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He's making disciples.
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Priscilla and Aquila take Apollos aside and they disciple him privately, not as elders.
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But as disciples themselves.
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This command is a universal command.
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If you are a Christian man, you are called to be a disciple.
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Jesus said, pick up your cross and follow me.
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That's discipleship.
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But you're also called to be a disciple maker.
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And think of it like this.
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Some of you men were in the military.
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Some of you men had commanders.
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And when a commander gave you a command, you didn't have the right to say, no, my son's getting ready to go to the Air Force.
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Thankfully, he's never been too terribly rebellious to my commands, but I have a warning for him.
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He better be even less rebellious to the commands of his superiors when he hits basic training.
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Because when that commander gives a command, he's not going to wait for you to be ready to fulfill it.
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He's going to say, get up and you better get up.
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He's going to say, run and you better run.
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He's going to say, stop, you better stop, eat, you better eat, because the command from the commander is without question.
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My friends, discipling is our stated command from our commander in chief, Jesus Christ.
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He is our commander in chief.
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He has stated his purpose for us.
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He's told us what to do.
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He has given us our marching orders and he is the Lord.
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Therefore, we have a responsibility to disciple.
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Brother Mike mentioned the home.
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And he spent his time exegeting wonderfully Ephesians 5, talking about the ministry of the discipling of the wife.
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You understand that's where it begins.
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And I will say this.
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If you are a husband, you should be discipling your wife.
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In fact, first Corinthians 14, which I'm preaching on Sunday mornings in a few weeks, we're going to get to that passage where it says that women ought to be silent in the church and all the men.
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Until it says right after that, for if you have a question, you ought to ask your husbands at home.
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You know what that puts on you, gentlemen? It puts the responsibility of being able to answer her questions.
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It puts you in the position of discipler of your wife.
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So you disciple your wife, but it doesn't end in your home.
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It doesn't end with your children.
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Now, they may get the more focused right now because you may be in that season of life where your children are young and they take up a lot of your time.
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But it doesn't end with your wife.
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It doesn't end with your children.
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The command extends out of the home.
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It actually extends to the ethne or the nations, as we say, baptizing all nations.
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But I got to tell you, between your house and the nations is the church.
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Between your house and the world is your covenant community.
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And this is where the gathered assembly comes into view.
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It is impossible to fulfill the command of Christ that we see here if we never see one another.
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In fact, it's almost impossible if we only see each other once a week for an hour.
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But it has to begin somewhere.
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And if we're not even seeing each other once a week for an hour, that's a problem.
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But I want you to consider a point Mark makes in the Gospel of Mark.
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And I'm not going to have you go into a lot of passages today, but I do want you to look at this one just for a second.
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Turn to Mark 3.
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In fact, you're in Matthew, so just turn over a few pages to the right.
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Mark 3, verse 14.
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This is Jesus calling the apostles.
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Verse 14.
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And he appointed twelve whom he also named apostles so that they might be with him.
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Just stop right there.
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He appointed twelve men for what purpose? To be with him.
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That's where discipleship starts.
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You got to have time together.
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You got to spend time together.
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And here's the real tough pill to swallow.
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Brother Mike said earlier, he said this is going to be hard to hear.
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I would say something might also maybe equally hard to hear.
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Refusing to do this is sin.
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Because if you get a command from the commander in chief and you refuse to do it, that's sin.
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In fact, if you want a passage for that, just write down James 4, 17.
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Whoever knows the right thing to do and doeth it not to him, it is sin.
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Now, you might have came here ignorant today.
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You might have came here not knowing your job as the disciple.
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Guess what? You get to leave without ignorance.
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You can no longer claim I didn't know.
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That's right.
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You don't get to go home anymore and say, well, I didn't know I was supposed to do that.
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Therefore, you're now faced with a serious reality.
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When you refuse to do what you know is right, you're sinning.
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Therefore, I say my first point, disciple making is a command.
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It is not a suggestion.
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It is not something that's limited to the pastor, the elders or the deacons.
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It is a command given to all and by all, not by all, by Christ, to all by Christ.
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That's number one.
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Disciple making is a command, not a suggestion.
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Number two, disciple making is intentional, not accidental.
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Disciple making is intentional, not accidental.
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To fulfill the command as given by Christ, we have to be active participants.
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Discipling relationships do not normally come together by accident.
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It takes a willingness to actually care for another person and engage in their life.
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And this command includes the necessity of getting involved with each other's lives.
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As we looked at Mark's passage there, Jesus made a point that they be with him.
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He made that point because it was necessary.
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And so I want to give you a little thought on that.
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It can begin with a simple but intentional act of fellowship.
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One man says to another man, brother, I want to have you to my house for a meal.
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Brother, can we meet up soon and have coffee together and just talk? It doesn't mean there's anything wrong.
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You didn't catch him with another woman or something.
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You're not getting together with him just to call him out.
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You just want to engage him.
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Brother, when's a good time to grab lunch? Brother, can we sit in the church and talk? You know, I never close these doors before about one o'clock on Sunday because there's always folks sitting around talking.
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That's good.
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That's what needs to happen.
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See, fellowship often builds into a relationship which creates opportunities for discipleship.
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But I want to say something about that because I want you to understand this.
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I am not just encouraging you to make friends.
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Discipleship is not just friendship building.
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It's intentionally showing concern for one another and being willing to maybe get a little uncomfortable with one another to speak into one another's life.
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It begins with things like tell me about your life.
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Tell me about how you met your spouse.
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Tell me about how you met Christ.
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Tell me about how Jesus changed your life.
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You may be surprised just how many people enjoy talking about themselves.
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If you give them the opportunity.
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In fact, if you ever have trouble starting a discipleship relationship, just tell, ask somebody to tell you their story.
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And listen and care.
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But keep this in mind.
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It's easy to make yourself the focus and leave Christ out.
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When two men get together, especially when things in common, it can often become all about whatever are their shared interests.
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And there's certainly nothing wrong with having a shared interest.
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It's nothing wrong if you both like fishing.
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It's nothing wrong if you both like hunting.
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It's nothing wrong if you both like to talk politics or sports.
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But if that's all you ever talk about, you've abandoned discipleship for friendship.
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In fact, if you and your brother in Christ never get around to discussing Christ, it's more likely that you're not brothers in Christ.
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You're just friends who both happen to be Christians.
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I say it again.
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If you and your brother in Christ never get around to talking about Christ, it's likely you're not really brothers in Christ.
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You just both happen to be Christians.
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You say, what's wrong with just being friends? Well, here's what's wrong with it.
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I tell you, in short, we're usually not very honest with our friends.
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We lie to protect our friends' feelings.
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We lie because we're embarrassed or we don't want to embarrass them.
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We lie to avoid arguments.
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We lie to our friends.
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So you have to understand when you leave this session today, I'm not telling you to go make friends.
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I'm telling you to go make disciples.
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And making disciples is intentional and sometimes uncomfortable.
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You want to know how much people lie? Pamela Meyer is a deception expert, and she put out this study on how people engage with one another.
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It says when somebody meets a stranger, they usually lie three times in the first 10 minutes.
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Whether it's how much they make, how long they've been doing what they've been doing, how good they are at it, any kind of exaggeration or whatever, they usually lie at least three times in the first 10 minutes.
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She goes on to say this.
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By the time we enter the workforce, we enter a world which is cluttered with spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers.
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We live in a world that suffers from a deception epidemic.
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And if all you care about is getting somebody to like you and become your friend, you're not willing to be honest with them.
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That's why I'm telling you, you're not making friends, you're making disciples.
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If we think of someone merely as a friend, we will likely be unwilling to be as honest as we need to be.
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We'll have the tendency to shy away from difficult topics with them and maintain the relationship with us over the relationship with Christ.
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In fact, how many of you ever heard of friendship evangelism? A few years ago, I don't remember how many years ago it was, but a movement came out and it was an idea that this is how you evangelize.
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You have to make friends with someone.
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And the way you do that is you begin to develop a relationship with them and you begin to make friends with them.
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And over time, you start slipping Jesus in.
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You get them to like you first.
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And then you'll get them to like Jesus.
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Tony Miano is an open air preacher and he's actually spoken a lot on this subject.
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I've listened to him quite a bit on this subject because he goes out and he'll share Jesus with anybody.
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And people say, no, you have to make friends with them first.
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He said, I don't have time to make friends with that many people.
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I don't have time to make that many friends.
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Everybody that needs to hear about Jesus, I don't have time to be friends with everybody who needs to hear about Jesus.
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But here's the problem.
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And he points this out in one of his lectures and it was masterful.
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He says, here's what happens.
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He says, we say we got to be friends with them to tell them about Jesus.
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And then when we become friends with them, we can't tell them about Jesus because we're too good of friends.
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We don't want to offend them.
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So we kill ourselves at the beginning.
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We kill ourselves at the end.
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And I think the same thing happens with discipleship.
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The same problem happens with discipleship.
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Discipleship and evangelism really go hand in hand.
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In a sense, but the point is we come in and we want to make friends and we want to establish this friendship, but we never get around to talking about Christ.
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And therein lies the danger.
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Here's what you have to remember.
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Your goal in this relationship is not to try to get them to love you more.
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The goal in the relationship is to try to get them to love Jesus more.
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If my main concern is that you love me, I will be unwilling to point you to Christ when the time comes that you need it.
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Had a man come to me one day and he is a friend.
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I'm not saying don't be friends, by the way.
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I want to make sure that's clear what I'm saying.
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If that's the goal, you'll often be afraid, to be honest.
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Man came to me.
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He was picking up an order.
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I'd made some shirts for him and he was kind of hanging around.
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He and I know each other.
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We spend time together and have known each other for years.
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Not a member of this church or anything.
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We're standing there talking and I could tell he wanted to say something.
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I could just, it was just there.
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You know, you can tell somebody just it's hanging on his tongue, but he doesn't want to let it out.
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Finally, he says to me, I'll let you know.
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I'm thinking about divorcing my wife, man.
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I mean, that came out of left field.
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I never thought anything like that.
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And immediately in my mind, I'm thinking, am I going to disciple this man or am I going to try to be his friend? Because if I was more worried about his friend, I would have been more worried about the integrity of the friendship.
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I might have been, I might have said, well, I can understand things can get hard and wives can be tough and I'll be praying for y'all.
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By God's grace, and I don't, and I'm not making myself the hero of the story.
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This just happens to be something that happened.
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By God's grace, God struck me in the moment to say, disciple, don't be friends.
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And I said, you have absolutely no biblical warrant to leave your wife.
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You have no reason to abandon your family.
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And if you do it, you will be in sin.
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And you need to repent and go home and love your wife.
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And he just looked at me.
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And he was stunned, but he stopped and he said, you're right.
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He got in his car and he left a few hours later.
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He said, my wife and I want to come start counseling with you because you were honest with me.
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By God's grace, they're still married.
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This was quite a while back.
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Again, I'm not making myself the hero of that story.
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I'm just telling you, it could have easily went the other way.
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I could have easily allowed my flesh and my desire for that friendship to override my desire for what I knew was right.
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And I could have just said, yeah, I'll pray for you guys.
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I'm sorry to hear that.
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That's what a friend does because you don't want to get involved.
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Rather than just making friends, I need to be intentional about the relationship in pointing my brother to Christ.
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And this must be intentionally from the beginning.
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If our relationship is going to be one of genuine discipleship.
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Because it's not going to happen by accident.
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When you desire to disciple a person, you have to be intentional and sometimes even uncomfortable.
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So that's number two.
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Number two, disciple making is intentional, not accidental.
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I want to move to number three.
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And this one has a few parts to it.
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So take a few more minutes.
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But I might not take my full hour.
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Brother Andy, aren't you excited? I'm just teasing.
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I'm usually a 45 minute man.
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So when somebody gives me an hour, I get a little nervous.
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We've seen so far discipleship, disciple making is a command.
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Not a suggestion.
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Disciple making is intentional, not accidental.
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Number three, disciple making is difficult.
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It is not easy.
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It's difficult for three reasons.
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If you're writing these down, I'll give them to you right off.
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It's difficult for three reasons.
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Number one, I'm asking you to add something to your already busy life.
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Number two, I'm asking you to be vulnerable.
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And for men, that's difficult.
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And number three, I'm asking you to trust.
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And that's hard all in itself.
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So let's look at the first one.
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It's difficult because it requires you to add something to your lives and your life is already busy.
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I don't have to ask you if you're busy.
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We live in a busy time.
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We have so many things in our life that are supposed to make our lives less busy.
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And make our lives more open to frivolity and recreation.
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And yet our lives are now more busy than they ever have been.
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In fact, as a pastor, I'm afraid to ask you to add anything to your life.
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I always get nervous when I put a new activity on the calendar because I know just how busy most of you are.
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And I don't want to be the guy that you're afraid to come see walking towards you.
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Because you're so afraid I'm going to ask you to put something else on your calendar, whether it be a meeting or a gathering or an event or a conference.
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Some men rightly say, pastor, I work 50 hours a week.
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I have a wife who needs me at home with the kids.
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I have duties that I have to do at my house.
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I just can't add anything else.
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And I want you to know I appreciate the problem.
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I know the frustration.
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Just this year, my wife and I closed our business.
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We had a small business that we started on the side to try to help bring in a little extra income for the family.
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We have closed the business because it just took too much time away from my family and away from the church.
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And I was convicted about it.
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And so we just said no more.
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So I understand.
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And this is why I don't believe discipleship is going to look the same for everybody.
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There is no cookie cutter approach.
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There's no one way that works for everyone.
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But what we must consider is this.
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And hear me now.
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And please, if it offends you, as they say, if the shoe fits, lace it up.
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Because here it comes.
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Most of us do what we want to do.
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If we want to do it, we'll find a way.
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If we don't want to do it, we'll find an excuse.
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But it's the truth, isn't it, brother? I truly believe that most of us lack in our discipleship, not because we lack time, but because we lack the desire.
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If we were being honest, we'd say, I don't do it because I just don't want to.
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It's hard.
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It's uncomfortable.
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I don't like it.
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So I don't do it.
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How hard is it, really, to carve 30 minutes a week out to engage another man over the phone about his walk with Christ? People on Facebook, I see, spend 10 times that amount.
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How do I know you're spending 10 times that amount? Because I see your memes and all your posts and all the stuff you're putting out on Facebook.
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You spend way more than 10 times that amount of time reading through all your notifications, getting that shot of endorphins when you see a like because somebody likes something that you posted.
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I know how it feels.
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We don't have time to disciple.
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We have time for what we want to do.
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So I would say this.
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It is difficult to add something to your lives.
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Sometimes adding something means subtracting something.
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You just have to decide what's more important.
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Sometimes adding something means you subtract something that's less important.
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And remember this.
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One of my professors in school, Dr.
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Jerry Powers, he said this.
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He said, the devil will always give you something good to keep you from getting the best.
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The devil will always give you good to keep you from getting the best.
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So you've got to decide if you want to add something to your life, if that requires subtracting something, are you willing to subtract what needs to be subtracted if it isn't the best? It might be good, but it might not be what you need.
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It might not be what Christ needs for you.
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So adding something to our lives is difficult.
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And I admit it.
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But as Brother Mike said, I'm not standing up here saying this because I'm perfect in this.
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I'm standing up here because I need to hear this too.
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Number two.
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It's difficult because it requires us to be vulnerable with someone else as men.
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That is one of our worst fears.
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Discipleship is a relationship of honesty.
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And it goes both ways.
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In fact, I want to say this.
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And you don't have to go there because you know this verse.
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If I start it, you'll finish it.
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Proverbs 27, 17.
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As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
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Right? That's the passage.
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You know that passage.
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And what that reminds me is that discipleship is rarely I'm discipling you.
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It's usually we're discipling each other.
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It's a relationship of mutuality.
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Now there are times when it's a young Christian and an older Christian and the Bible does give us those pictures of older women and younger women and older men and younger men and the discipleship picture of Paul and Timothy.
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And we see that.
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And there's a relationship of the teacher and the learner.
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But, we are all disciples of Christ.
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And so we're learning together.
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And we're sharpening one another.
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And so the vulnerability comes from both sides.
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I know this is true of me and the elders.
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I mean, when I sit and talk with Brother Mike, Brother Andy and Brother Richard and Brother Jack, we're sharpening one another.
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I don't put myself and say I'm the pastor, so I'm going to command this or I'm going to establish that.
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I'm learning and I'm being taught and I'm being corrected.
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And that's the way it should be.
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Now, I want to say this.
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When I talk about being vulnerable, I am not asking you to give up the natural masculine qualities of being a man.
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I'm not asking you to be a girly man.
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For far too long, men have been encouraged to abandon their masculine nature and adopt a more feminine sentimentality.
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I'm not encouraging that at all.
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In fact, I'm saying the opposite.
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I'm saying be a man and talk to each other like men.
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We get so sensitive, hypersensitive, that he hurt my feelings.
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Oh, wah, wah.
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I get my feelings hurt all the time.
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Years ago, my wife wore make-up to church.
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And those of you who know my wife know she doesn't wear make-up very often, but she wore make-up to church.
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And not much, but she had a little blue around her eyes and a little make-up on.
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She stood right there and a lady walked up to her and said, you know with that make-up on you look like a whore.
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Stood right there.
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Yeah, so yeah.
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That hurt my feelings.
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But I'm still here.
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It hurt her feelings.
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But she's still here.
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That lady was crazy wrong.
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And she's gone, but that's not...
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But the point is everything isn't about your feelings.
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And that's the lack of masculinity in us.
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We've given in to the feminine by making everything about how we feel.
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We've adopted the liberal lie that if somebody hurts our feelings they must hate us.
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It's a lie of the devil.
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Being vulnerable means I'm willing to be hurt.
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That's what vulnerability is, right? I don't remember what movie it was.
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There's a police officer and he's like, talking to a crazy gunman and the police officer comes up and he takes his bulletproof vest off because in that moment he wanted to show I'm vulnerable.
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I want to talk to you and I'm willing to give myself up.
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And everybody said don't take the vest off he's going to shoot you.
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He said I got to make him he's got to trust me.
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So he pulls the vest off and he says here I am.
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Let's talk.
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That's vulnerable.
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That's manly vulnerability.
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That's not feminine sentimentality.
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I say I need to talk to you brother because you need talking to.
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I need to talk to you because you're on my heart and my heart is broken for you.
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I see the way you talk to your children and it hurts me.
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I see the way you treat your wife and it hurts me and it hurts God.
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I see the way you lack engagement and worship you just seem like you don't care to even be here.
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You're only here because you're expected to be here.
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Brother that is not why do you have such trouble worshiping? Maybe I'm wrong and you can tell me I'm wrong if I'm wrong but who's going to say it if it's not me? A man walked up to me in Walmart one day.
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He had left his wife he had left his adopted child and his stepchild.
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He had a stepchild adopted child and a wife and he had abandoned them.
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And he said and yet he was still playing music at the church he was at.
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He was still leading worship as a piano player.
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I knew about the situation and I was walking in Walmart and he's walking towards me and again that flesh comes up what does the flesh want to do? Duck it down an aisle I don't want to get into this.
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Right? Run! Because the flesh doesn't want to get involved.
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So he comes up to me and he goes hey! And he starts his little pleasantries and I said hey and he starts telling me about music he's playing and things he's doing and then he said you know there's some people in the church I'm at that don't think I should be leading music because of what happened with me and my wife.
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I said well those people are right.
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I said you don't even need to be leading music I said you don't need to be talking to me you need to be before God on your knees in repentance that you've abandoned your family.
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You know what he said to me? I thought you'd be judgmental just like them.
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I said brother I don't judge you the word of God has condemned you.
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I'm just pointing you to the truth.
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I don't hate you but anybody who tells you what you're doing is right does.
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They love themselves more than they love you if they're not willing to tell you the truth.