Batteries Included

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Don Filcek; Romans 15:1-6 Batteries Included

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church.
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As Dave said, I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here. And I hope that you're just as glad as I am that we have the privilege to gather together in the name of Jesus Christ.
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How many of you are glad for that? You're glad to be able to gather together, I am. And the fact is, we need community in order to grow in faith and service.
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And we talk about growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service as the three things that we believe that every maturing
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Christian needs. And those are interconnected. Have you noticed that in your life? Often when you're in community is when your faith is challenged and you grow.
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And then it's also through community that you get an opportunity to use your gifts of service and the abilities that you have.
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And so those things overlap to a large degree in our lives, but they need to be expanding and growing. And that's what we're all about here at Recast.
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And wherever you're at on your journey with Christ, I hope that this church gathering today brings you closer to God by faith and closer to others in community and service.
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And so this morning, I'd like to welcome Spencer Valeri and his wife, Megan. They just moved up here from Ohio yesterday, drove the four and a half hours, got a lot of their stuff moved in, probably last night trying to find stuff in boxes still.
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Maybe they got a bed set up, I don't even know. But I look forward to having him up here regularly during the service.
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So you're gonna get to know him. He's gonna get up and he's gonna pray from time to time and do some different things. He'll preach occasionally in my absence and stuff like that.
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But this morning, I'm just gonna ask him to do the stereotypical stand up and wave, he and his wife, Megan. And so that awkward moment where he's like, what do we do?
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Are we supposed to clap? What do we do? But that also, one of the purposes of that is so that you guys can all tag their location and come up and mob them during connection time with questions.
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So you guys have that going for you too. But now you know where they're at and you can put a face with a name.
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And we're gonna get to know them over the coming years and months and look forward to what God is gonna do through Spencer and through his wife,
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Megan, and their daughter, Bexley, as they join us in the mission that God has called us to as a church of worshiping
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God and finding more worshipers for his name. That is our mission statement as a church. And we're gonna see that even this text this morning ties in with that mission statement quite closely.
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And so our text this morning in Romans chapter 15 is continuing on in a series through the book of Romans.
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I started that about a year ago and we're gonna be wrapping it up in the next few weeks. And so kind of mad dash through the book of Romans.
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I'm John Piper, I think took 260 some messages through this book and I've done it in about 46.
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Not that I'm better than him, but I'm just kind of driven to get through things pretty fast. So we've moved through Romans at a pretty good clip and there's obviously much more for you in your personal time with God and in his word to mine the depths of the book of Romans.
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I think you could spend years in the book of Romans and certainly not get everything that it's saying to us. And so I've entitled the message this morning,
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Batteries Included. Now some of you have heard those things where they're talking about an advertisement or whatever, batteries not included.
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In this case, the batteries are included because a central chunk of our text was written to show us the power source for our unity as a church.
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Where does the power come from that unites a ragtag bunch of people like us? People who may not in other circumstances even be friends.
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I mean, we might not have the same common interests. I say this often, for some of you, the closest that I might come to your life is walking down the cereal aisle at Meijer while I'm picking up my
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Lucky Charms and you're picking out your health cereal and we might just bump into each other and say, excuse me.
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And that would be the extent of our interaction were it not for Christ. And so the interesting thing is God is doing something that is bringing unity, a people with diverse interests and diverse backgrounds and diverse thoughts and feelings and emotions.
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And he brings us together in oneness and that's a glorious thing. And so that's what we've been looking at since the start of chapter 14 of Romans.
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Paul has been clearly focused on the need for unity in the church. And as he wraps up that section, this week's coming into chapter 15, really it's kind of funny how the chapters are broken down because the end of the thought happens at the start of a chapter, at these first six verses of chapter 15.
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But he makes sure that we understand where the power for our unity comes from. He will point us to the example of Jesus Christ in this text and his sacrifice that informs our much smaller sacrifices, that the way that Jesus Christ sacrificed himself for us helps us to understand how we can live and move and breathe as a church and relationships that can get messy and difficult.
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But he also points to the word of God that provides us with examples of endurance and examples of encouragement that shows us that we're in it for the long game in community together.
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But finally he acknowledges that all examples aside because examples are not sufficient, models are not enough to tame a wayward sinful heart.
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And so all examples aside, what we really deeply need, the greatest power source, the largest battery in our lives for unity in the church is the
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God of endurance and the God of encouragement that he would grant us harmony.
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That's where the text is gonna go. And this is not a message that concludes with Paul bashing us over the head, telling us to get along, you bunch of knuckleheads, okay?
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Paul isn't driving the proverbial minivan shouting in the backseat, don't make me pull this thing over while the kids are drawing an invisible line in the center of the seat saying, he touched me, he reached over the line.
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She did this, she did that, right? He's saying that the invisible line between the kids and the backseat needs to be broken down by God and by his power.
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And so we pray and we'll see Paul pray for that unity. Just as Jesus Christ prayed for unity in his church,
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Paul does that as well and we ought to follow that example and we strive for that unity. We study the scriptures for endurance.
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We study the scriptures to understand that sacrifice of Jesus Christ and for encouragement along the way for us.
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But ask yourself as we read this text right now, where is the source of our hope for unity here at Recast Church?
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So open your Bibles if you're not already there to Romans chapter 15 verses one through six. If you don't have a
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Bible, we're gonna probably start doing something where I'm gonna ask the elder on duty to bring in a stack of Bibles. You'll notice,
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I don't know if you've noticed, you probably haven't, but there's no more Bibles under the seat in front of you. What was happening is we were taking those chairs down and setting them up every week.
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They were falling, the binding was getting broken, they were getting tattered. And it's about a thousand to $2 ,000 investment for those
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Bibles. And they're not very good quality Bibles. And then we're giving them out to people and they're missing pages and stuff is, they're broken.
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And so what we're doing is we're leaving a stack of Bibles out at the welcome table. And right now, if you don't have a
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Bible or a means to navigate to the Bible, you could raise your hand and Mark would grab a couple of those for you and we can bring those in.
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Just rest assured, we still believe in the power of the Word of God. Don't get scared.
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Just the fact that we removed them from the bottom of the seat. I also have noticed a trend, by the way, that the majority of you, when I ask you to open your
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Bibles, do you know what you do? You grab your phone. So that's another reason for that as well.
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I recognize that technology has advanced in the 10 years since we became a church and the majority of you are navigating to the Bible on a device.
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And that's okay, that's okay. But let's read the precious and powerful Word of God. Recast, maybe the most beneficial thing that we do at all in our week is hear from the living
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God through His living Word revealed to us. And so, take this as the power of God for us in our gathering this morning.
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Romans chapter 15, verses one through six. We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.
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Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.
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For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the
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Scriptures, we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the
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God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Father, I wanna start off by thanking you and praising you for the unprecedented sense of unity that we have experienced here in this gathering over the last 10 years.
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This text identifies that you are the source and you are the power for unity in the church and so it would be foolish for any one of us or any group of us or some of us to take any credit for the unity that we've experienced here, but it is you and you alone.
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So we praise you for that and then we ask that you would continue that unity in our midst. And even as the text speaks of, with one voice, in accord with Christ, with one voice lifting you up and glorifying you,
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Father, I pray that that would be a reality in our songs this morning. More than just this hour on a
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Sunday morning, more than just this time of singing this half an hour of songs, more than that,
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Father, that we would sew our lives together in such a way that we're loving one another, we're bearing with one another, we're sacrificing for one another and that that is our lives tied together for your glory and for your honor.
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So Father, I pray that you would deal with each one of us here as individuals that make up a corporate body and that as you strengthen the one, the many are stronger and Father, I pray that that would be a reality in our midst this morning, that you would deal with each one of us, correcting us where we need correction, encouraging us where we need encouragement, loving on those who are broken and hurting right now and bringing to faith those who have no faith.
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We praise you and ask that you would receive these songs as worship before you this morning in Jesus' name, amen.
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Yeah, you can go ahead and be seated but if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice, there are no more donuts but there is more coffee and juice back there so if you need that, take advantage of that.
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You're not gonna distract me at all during the message and then if you need the restrooms, those are out the barn doors down the hallway on the left -hand side but I would ask that you please do me a favor and keep your
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Bibles open to Romans chapter 15, reopen to that, navigating your device back over to that if you lost your place but Romans 15 verses one through six so that you can see that the things that I'm saying are flowing out of the text.
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I'm taking these thoughts and these ideas and I'm expanding on them and trying to bring them to our culture and to our context but they're the ideas and the concepts that we find in the word of God here.
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I wanna start off by making a statement that I think all of us know to be true, relationships can turn pretty sour pretty quickly.
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How many of you didn't need me to tell you that to know that to be true? Like you know that by experience, you've lived a little bit, you've been around and so you know that that's true.
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We can grow jealous of the successes of others or others grow jealous of the successes we experience.
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We can tend to look down on those who don't think like us or act like us primarily because our thoughts are that of course our ways and our thoughts are the best thoughts and the best ways, right?
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How many of you know what I'm talking about? You wouldn't hold to a belief that you didn't think was the best belief and so you hold to things and you kind of cling to them.
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Relationships are susceptible to assumptions that is not enough communication but assuming that you know what they mean versus on the other side over communication, right?
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There's all different kinds of ways for relationships to fail. They're at risk of being too clingy or too passive.
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It really seems like the table of healthy relationships is very narrow and very small and it slopes in every direction.
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Do you get the image? Do you get the picture? It's very hard to stay on the table of a healthy relationship.
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It's very easy to slide off in multiple directions, multiple things and so with that in mind, it makes sense that Paul has taken so much time in the letter to the church in Rome talking about working through relationships together.
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He started back in chapter 14 talking about that and a church is a gathering of people. It's not a place, it's not a building.
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I mean, it's been glorious and great that we have this facility. I mean, for two years now, over two years, it's been great.
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We had those wandering years where we were in a storefront. We had the years in the elementary school where we're setting up and tearing down every week and how many of you are glad for this facility?
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But this is not the church. This is not the church. The church is us. We are and if this was to burn down,
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God forbid, but it was to burn down tomorrow, we would still be a church. We just have to find a place to meet. Are you getting what I'm saying?
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And so a church is a gathering of people and it's not just merely any gathering of people but it's a gathering of people under the lordship of Jesus Christ who are called into intentional relationships of love and care for one another, to help each other to grow, to hold each other accountable, to work through life together under Christ.
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But there's this reality that all of us know and we raised our hand earlier to kind of say, yeah, we've experienced this and that's that where people gather, there's plenty of room for disagreement and division, isn't there?
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Whenever you have people, whenever you have more than one person, as a matter of fact, I would suggest to you that even if you have one person in a room, you have plenty of room for disagreement.
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And some of you know what I'm talking about. You disagreed with yourself plenty, right? You know that where there is a person, there is conflict.
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There's a potential for conflict and there's the real possibility of division and animosity and war.
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And so our outline for these first six verses of Romans 15 goes like this. The priority of unity, verses one and two.
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The second is the power for unity, the preposition matters. The first is priority of unity, the second is power for unity, verses three through five and we'll be looking at three things in those verses that are batteries, so to speak, for unity.
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And then the last thing is the purpose of unity and that's verse six. And so yeah,
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I did alliterate just to show that I can. I don't usually do that and I don't always have three points either. So you're welcome.
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We got that done. But so let's start by digging into the priority of unity that we find in verses one and two.
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Dig into this and see what God through the Apostle Paul has for us. Throughout chapter 14, it's kind of good for us to set the stage here throughout chapter 14.
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Paul wove a discussion of two groups of people, those who are weak in their faith, centered around certain subjects, and those who are strong in their faith, centered around those subjects.
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Both groups he's speaking about are members of the body of Christ and that's what you need to understand from the get -go.
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These are both subsets of the Christian gathering where they understand that Jesus Christ died on the cross.
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They recognize him as their Lord and their King but they have different expressions because they come from different backgrounds and they've got different history.
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And how many of you know that from your history, you brought some things into the church already? You brought some baggage that nobody around you can see but you brought some stuff here with you that comes from your past, your upbringing, whether you were raised in an extremely strict household or your parents were the ones who bought beer for the parties or whatever it was, you come from a background that informs you and makes you think certain ways about certain subjects.
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And so that's what we saw in the early church in Rome, a very significant disagreement would arise over certain subjects and some of them came from a
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Jewish background and according to kosher law, they had followed that to a T. They had never touched crispy bacon.
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So sad but they remained in the conviction that from their upbringing, they shouldn't.
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It was their conviction in their heart that they just shouldn't do that, that that's one thing they could give up to honor God and so they chose to not continue or not to enter into a relationship with bacon and ham.
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While others who were in the text called the stronger in their faith recognized that God had removed those dietary laws and they felt free to order a great big side of crispy bacon at breakfast.
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And so can you imagine the kind of confusion that this would cause in the church? Can you imagine the difficulties and the distractions when the stronger in their faith would come to the weaker and would say, but bacon is awesome.
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It's a gift from God. It's delightful. Have you ever just heard the crunch, the sizzle when it's cooking and they're just pouring it on to the weaker brothers and sisters saying, bacon is it.
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I mean, we're free. And further, Christ died to purchase us these kinds of freedoms so enjoy the bacon and they're pouring the pressure on.
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Meanwhile, on the other side, you have the weak. Do you know that bacon, when you consume too much of it can clog your arteries?
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Did you know that it can cause obesity? Did you know that it can cause all kinds of health issues? Not to mention if you don't cook it well, you get trichinosis and you get all these things.
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So really the Christian should be very, very careful. Maybe never touch the stuff.
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Can you see the arguments on both sides of the equation? And can you see how it could potentially divide a church and you could eventually have the
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First Baptist Church of bacon and the First Baptist Church of non -bacon.
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And you could just divide and split down the middle and Paul is saying, no, no, this is a gray area issue.
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And on these gray area issues, we love each other. And there is freedom and diversity to believe different things about bacon.
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That's what he's getting at here. And he's using eating as just an example but Paul is using a specific example to generally address the way that we interact as a church in all of those gray area issues where there is no thus sayeth the
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Lord, where there is no clear instruction, where there's no clear defining role for certain things in our lives.
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In those cases, we are free to disagree. We're free to follow our own conscience and really as it said in earlier in chapter 14 to actually be convinced in your own mind.
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Not to just live willy -nilly but to actually pursue God and his desires for you and try to determine for yourself where you ought to stand on things like eating bacon.
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So with that context in mind, Paul places the priority in verse one here on unity by strapping the stronger in their faith, the ones who feel more free by strapping them with an obligation.
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You see it in verse one? We're obliged to do something. We who are stronger are to bear with the failings of the weak, the text says.
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Paul outright identifies himself, by the way, for the first time since he started the subject of the weak and the strong, he certainly alluded to placing himself in the strong camp but here he does so directly by the pronoun we.
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He identifies in we who are strong and he identifies himself in the camp of those who are more free in the faith but he also puts the weight on his camp to bear up the burden of unity.
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That is who bears the burden of unity within the church. And the bottom line to this call in verse one, what's this all about?
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At the end of the day, what's this unity about? What is this for? The stronger in their faith, they are not to please themselves.
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Do not please anyone. Wherever you're at in your faith, wherever you identify, the goal in this verse is that we would not please ourselves.
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I don't want to overemphasize, by the way, the word failings in the text. It's kind of glaring there, right?
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Like if somebody's failing, that doesn't sound like a very good thing, right? But I think that Paul is not painting the weak position in a good light.
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He isn't saying, hey everyone, just stay weak and that's okay. No, he says that the failure to appropriate the freedoms for which
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Christ died is failure. But not a failure that results in exclusion from the church.
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Not one that disbars you from being a member of what's going on here. What Paul is attacking in verse one is a lack of unity that comes from arrogant and selfish people doing whatever they want without a thought for others around them.
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Do you see that? That's what he's really getting at. And I can see how, in my own heart, that could be a tendency.
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And I'd imagine that some of you could see that, where it's like, I'm just living my life.
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I'll do what I want to do and you do what you want to do and let's not let those things come in conflict. But how many of you know that that's not a reality in community where you're really pressing into relationships, where you're doing life together?
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Where in this context, they're having potlucks together. Do you bring the bacon -wrapped figs and dates or not?
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Do you know what I'm saying? And so that's the kind of stuff that they had to wrestle through and figure out here in their gathering.
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Paul is attacking that kind of selfishness that does not consider others. We've been encouraged back in verse 19 of the previous chapter to build one another up.
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Both the weaker and the stronger living together in mutual respect and mutual encouragement. That's what we're being called to.
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And I want to point out that it is human nature. It is in our very bones. It's a part and parcel of what it means to be human in a fallen world that we want to please ourselves.
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Do you see it in you? I think to a person in the room, we know that to be true. It is a natural thing to pick the largest piece of cake from the buffet line.
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You ever gone through there and sized it up? That's my piece of pie right there. That's the big one. Do you know what
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I'm talking about? Or nobody sorts through the produce. For those of you who are more healthy, I had to throw a produce idea in here because some of you are like,
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I don't even like cake. And you scare me. If you don't like cake, sorry, you can come up and address that with me personally later.
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But some of you, maybe fruit is a better illustration and you don't go through the produce looking for the most bruised set of apples or the nastiest bunch of bananas.
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Those are for someone else, right? Built into all of us. What I'm saying is built into all of us is a sinful preference for self.
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Ourselves at the center. Ourselves deserving the best. So Paul is calling the church to consider, really in these first two verses, he's really putting a priority somewhat on the golden rule.
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Do to others as you would have them do to you. Words of Christ. And look at verse two. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good.
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Who should you be looking out for? Your neighbor, your brothers and sisters, those around you. And to what end?
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They're good. For the purpose of building others up. You see, the calling here in verse two is for the church to adopt a new standard.
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A standard that looks radically different than the world standard. The world standard is make sure you fix the oxygen mask to yourself first.
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Self -care. How many of you have heard the word self -care recently? A lot. It's a big word right now.
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It's a big movement in our culture and I'm not down on that in the sense that there is time, that you need some breathing space.
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That's why the whole Sabbath thing is a good idea. That's why God has instituted times of rest and seasons of rest and those types of things.
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But the fact of the matter is, I think we overdo it to a large degree. Emphasis on self, self, self.
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We're called to a unique standard as a people. We are to be a unique people who think and act according to the needs of others.
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And it's important that we temper this priority of unity with a phrase in verse two, for his good.
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That phrase matters a lot. Because we could easily go the wrong direction with this thought.
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How many of you have ever tried or gone through a season of being a people pleaser? How many of you know that that's not a good goal?
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That's not an attainable goal? If you're the kind of person who naturally wants to please everybody in your life,
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I'm sure you could get up and give me a testimony right now on the spot of how that's gone for you and it hasn't gone well.
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You can't please everyone, can you? And so what is the calling here? But it's for their good. That's what you have to have in mind when you think about this call to help others out and to be there to sacrifice for others and not put yourself on the pedestal, but let others have the priority.
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We can't make everyone happy. There's a limit to our ability to please everyone and that's absolutely true, but our calling is not in this text fundamentally to please everyone, but to seek the good of others, to seek their good, to build them up.
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And this may require, how many of you know that sometimes in relationship, the good that somebody else needs is rebuke?
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Did you know that? Sometimes that's the good that a person needs is to be told you need a different course of action.
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You need to repent of that. That is sin and you need to turn towards God and run towards him because you're running away in this area of your life.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? That's good. Our pleasing others is only ever with the purpose of their big
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G, capital G, good. And their good is always defined only. The good of others around us is only ever defined as the goodwill of God for a person as revealed in his holy word.
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We don't get to define what is and isn't good for another person.
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We discover, we discover what is good for another person through the word of God.
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See what I'm saying? Digging in here to know what is and isn't good for us and for others around us as well.
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But by these instructions in verses one and two, we see that God through Paul is placing a high priority on unity within the church.
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If we're going to be known by our love as a church, recast, then we will be people who seek to do to others what we want them to do for us.
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And that's proactive. That's not reactive. That's not responsive. We proactively seek to do, actively, the first initiator of doing good for others.
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It's an active unity. It is a community in motion looking for opportunities to serve one another, bearing with one another, considering each other, building each other up.
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So where does power for a unity like this come from? Because how many of you know that so far, this is a message that sounds a lot like pull yourself up by the bootstraps, fix yourself, love each other better.
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How many of you know that there comes an end to your feelings of loving one another? Do you know what
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I'm talking about? And so where does the power for a community like that come from? Is it just muster your own strength and get there?
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And that comes to our second section, verses three through five, where we see the power for unity, verses three, four, and five, each kind of highlighting a different battery, if you will, that gives us power for unity as a church.
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First, he points us to Christ. How many of you think that's a good place to start? Points to Christ. He is our savior, he is our king, and he is our example.
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Now, he's not merely an example. I would never start off with that, and I would never end with that, that Christ is our example because you cannot obey like Christ obeyed.
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You're not gonna be able to do that without his help and without his assistance. Jesus needs to be your lord, your savior, to give you a new heart, to give you a new purpose, to give you a new direction.
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So he gives that to us, but he is also the highest and best of all examples.
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He is the example of a person who lives in perfect unity with our heavenly father. He shows us what holiness looks like in a human life.
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You wanna know what a holy person looks like, a person who's in right relationship with God?
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Look to Jesus. Look at how he responded and how he interacted in his earthly ministry here.
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The example specifically that Paul appeals to is the way that Jesus didn't stand for his own rights, but took on himself the hostility and reproach that humanity meant for the father, and he took it on himself.
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So Paul escalates our little squabbles internally in the church and in the church at Rome, and he takes those and he escalates it quickly and just goes for it.
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He's saying in verse three, in essence, Jesus suffered and died on the cross for you. He didn't please himself, and so maybe you could give up a little bit of bacon occasionally to get along with your brothers and sisters in Christ.
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He goes and argues from the greatest of sacrifices to small and meager sacrifices, and he says if Christ could do this for you, then in his strength go and sacrifice for one another, to compromise and live in a way that is for the best and the good of those around you.
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See, Jesus serves as a powerful example. I hope you've experienced him as an example in your life now that you've come to faith in Christ.
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He need not suffer. He didn't have to suffer scorn. He didn't have to suffer any reproach, but he willingly took that reproach and scorn on himself so that you and I could be set free, and that's the extent of his love.
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That's the amazing, glorious grace of his sacrifice for us. So the fact that Jesus endured suffering and sacrificed himself should inform the way that we live together, recast, in community, the way that we interact with one another.
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I can only imagine that some of the church splits and the animosity, how many of you have seen some church splits and animosity over the course of your years?
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Some of you have experienced them. Some of you have been in them. Some of you have jetted just before them, got out just in the nick of time, but I've seen my share over the course of my 47 years on this planet, and I think that there's an informal thing that happens.
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I doubt that it ever formally happens. I don't think they ever get together as a congregation and ask
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Jesus to leave, but I think there's an informal invitation for that. We don't want your example here.
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We don't wanna walk like you walked here. Could you step out for a minute, Jesus, while we hash this out together?
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Do you know what I'm talking about? We're being called here to let Jesus be our example, to be our model, he who sacrificed all the way to the point of dying, and that's to be our model.
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That's to be the example of the way that we interact with one another, particularly in these gray area issues.
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How could we keep the cross central? How could we acknowledge that this verse, that chapter 14 and 15 is in the
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Bible and is contingent on our lives, is a calling on our lives, is a real command to us, and then argue over petty nuances like carpet color or the style of songs?
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A church cannot simultaneously, here's what I'm trying to get at. If you're taking notes, you might wanna write this down, but a church cannot simultaneously, and really a person cannot simultaneously consider the example of Christ and go to war over gray area issues.
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You'll have one or the other. You cannot at the same time be seeking to follow
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Christ's example and go to war over your preferences. But in verse four, we see a second battery that produces power.
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The first is that example of Jesus Christ and seeing his sacrifice for us that informs us and that fuels us and that keeps us sacrificing for one another, but Paul just quoted the
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Old Testament Scriptures in verse three, and that kinda gets, Paul has this mind that I can kinda see the way that his mind works as I've studied him over the years, and he gets diverted, sometimes a long diversion, and then he comes back, and sometimes a short one.
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Verse four's a little bit of a short diversion, but it is still a second battery that he's providing. Oh, by the way, I just quoted the Old Testament.
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Let me tell you about why in the world the Old Testament would matter in this. So he quoted the Old Testament Scriptures in Psalm 69, nine in verse three, showing that what
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David wrote actually should point our thoughts to Christ. And so he offers the
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Scriptures, remembering at that time, the only thing that Paul had access to was the Old Testament, and so he offers
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Scriptures as a source of power for our unity, and he does so in a unique way. It's all given for our instruction, he says.
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All of it, all the Old Testament is there to inform us, to help us along in this Christian life, but it offers to us two specific things that he wants to highlight in terms of our unity and the way that we interact with one another, because how many of you have been in a situation where relationships, it was just easier to duck and run or to ditch than to stay in it for the long haul?
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Relationships, every relationship comes up against the need for endurance, the need for encouragement, and so he is highlighting that here for us.
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The way that the Old Testament would give that to us, would bring to us endurance and encouragement, and I'll give you a couple of examples from the
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Old Testament. We see Joseph, favored by his father and given that bright, shiny coat, and sold into slavery by his brothers.
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We see his years of slavery in the house of Potiphar, then a false accusation after the sexual advances of Potiphar's wife, and an unfair and unjust stint in jail where he's left forgotten.
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And we see that in the end of the story, the end of the story of his life, he can see that God was working a much bigger plan of redemption, endurance.
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What do you gain from studying and looking and reading the Old Testament and coming into contact with these guys who
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God was working with and these ladies that God was working with over the course of decades of their lives, and you get a snapshot picture of the glorious endurance that they went through, identifying and eventually seeing the greater, grander, more glorious purposes of God that he was doing on the big picture.
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I doubt for a second that while he was in jail, that Joseph felt good about what
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God was doing in his life. But in the end, he said, I didn't realize it, but, bros, don't get all upset with yourself because God, you thought you were selling me into slavery, into Egypt for your own selfish gain, but in the end,
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God was working a much grander, much more glorious, much bigger picture in the endurance of my life.
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Another example, we see Moses. Moses, who was condemned to death at birth by a royal decree, but survived through God -orchestrated events and a wise mother.
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By the way, I don't know if you ever realized this, Moses' mother obeyed the edict of Pharaoh. She threw her son into the
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Nile River. She just happened to throw him in a basket with pitch on the outside of it so it would float. You get it?
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But through her wisdom and through his great and glorious plan, we see that the princess of Pharaoh, his daughter was the one to pull
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Moses out of the water. By the way, the name Moses means out of water. That's the meaning of his name.
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And he came up out of the water. And then his own mom was able to nurse him in infancy. Just the way that God worked out that glorious story.
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And I tell you what, if you were looking at the story of Moses from beginning to end without knowing how it was gonna end, you'd say,
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I see it now. I see how God's gonna do this. He's gonna raise Moses up within the royal family of Egypt to take the scepter one day.
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And he is gonna rule with power over Egypt. And is that how the story goes? Not at all.
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Because one day, walking out among the slaves, he decided to be a murderer. And Moses killed an
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Egyptian who was abusing one of his fellow Israelites. Bad idea.
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And he fled into the wilderness, running away from all of that power and authority that was his in that one moment of anger and spent 40 years in the wilderness.
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How many of you think that's endurance? As a shepherd from the king's palace to the muddy, dirty fields with the sheep.
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One day, you know how it goes, he saw a strange bush burning away on the hillside.
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God called and used this murderer to lead his people to receive the law, to speak to him as one speaks to a friend face to face.
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His is the face that shone with the glory of God to such a degree that he had to wear a veil before the people because they were terrified at his presence after he spoke with God, our very
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Moses. And if you're anything like me, then you receive immense encouragement that if God can use a murderer, maybe he can use me too.
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You know what I'm saying? How many of you find encouragement as you read those Old Testament stories? You find a cause for endurance there.
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Dig in, it's like a feast for your life now to give you the power and the strength to kind of continue on each day in the stories of the
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Old Testament and the way that God, not the myths of the Old Testament, the stories, the historical accounts of the way that God worked in real men and women's lives.
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So scripture provides us with endurance to be able to keep up, to give up rather, to give up our rights for a season for the sake of unity.
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And it provides us with encouragement that God is a God of grace and he is indeed a God of mercy. And this endurance and encouragement from the scriptures, it says in the text, unites us in hope.
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Our hope is the same here. You can look around you, regardless of your background, regardless of your baggage, regardless of your history.
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If you're in with Jesus Christ, then you're united in the same hope with those around you. Whether you're weak in your faith or strong in your faith, it's still the same hope.
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Whether you're young or old or male or female, our only hope is in God to rescue us and to forgive us.
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And the scripture points to an ultimate reality that defines our community. We are all broken down and busted sinners, saved only by the grace of God through the cross of Jesus Christ, by faith in him.
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Scripture reminds us that we have everything in common with followers of Jesus Christ, because our future that's coming for us comes from the only hope that truly exists,
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Jesus Christ our Lord. And the final battery that powers our unity ties it all together, is really the main power source that Paul turns to prayer in verse five to kind of get this one out.
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But he's still teaching us, even as he offers what some scholars would call a wish prayer here in verse five.
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And notice that he doesn't summarize what he said in verses three and four, which we might expect.
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When he prays, he doesn't pray, may the example of Jesus and the holy scriptures grant you harmony.
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But instead, this is what the request looks like in his wish prayer. He prays that God himself, may the
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God of all endurance and encouragement, grant the church to live in harmony with one another.
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Where is his hope for the church? What is he hoping? You see, far from telling us, just get along.
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And by the way, why don't you sprinkle some scripture in there and think about Jesus more? Which isn't enough for us.
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Paul is praying for us to get along. And this echoes the prayer of Jesus in his high priestly prayer in John chapter 17.
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Where there Jesus asked his father for his followers to be one, even as father and son are one.
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An intense and amazing unity that he's requesting to God on our behalf. He prayed for our unity, and now
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Paul also prays for our unity. They both are explicitly acknowledging that it's going to take
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God to make us one, we cast. It takes the power of God to bring us together and to keep us from warring and tearing apart the work that God is doing in our midst because of our own preferences and desires.
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They both explicitly acknowledge that it's gonna take God. You and I cannot go out and just live like Jesus.
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That's not enough. I mean, we can follow his example, we can get his example, but that's gonna come to the end of our power and our ability to trek after him.
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Our lives will not be in accord with Jesus in our own strength is what I'm getting at. And for this reason, a major application from this message is to pray for unity, to pray for the unity of our gathering.
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To pray that we would be united in endurance, we cast. To pray that we would be united in encouragement, united in hope, united in Christ.
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God has given us the model of Jesus and he's given us the glorious hope that comes from endurance and encouragement that was taught to us and is taught to us through his word, but that still doesn't have enough juice to hold us together.
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We need the God of endurance and encouragement to grant us to live in this type of harmony that we're being called to in this text.
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And for this reason, I think another application is in order here, we cast. Praise God for 10 amazing and glorious years here at this church of unprecedented unity.
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This passage is making it clear that this unity has come from the hand of God. He has given us harmony.
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He has granted us a love for one another that I've even personally benefited and experienced at this week as my wife had surgery last week on Wednesday and people have prayed for us and encouraged us and texted us and come over to sit with my wife and to bring us meals and it's just an amazing thing.
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It's humbling to see. But it's such an honor and a privilege to be a part of a church that loves one another, that really reaches out to those who are hurting and devastated.
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He's given us harmony. He's granted us a love for one another. And he's brought a group of jacked up people like us together.
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He told us to bear with one another, to look out for each other's interests and to live in harmony.
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And he didn't do this as some big sociological experiment. Hey, let's bring a bunch of jerks together.
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Tell them to get along. Sit back, watch it unfold. That's not the purpose.
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He did this for one glorious and amazing purpose. There is a reason given in verse six why we're talking about unity today, why he's bringing it all together.
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In verse six, we get a very short but powerful final point and that is simply this. The purpose of unity is the glory of God.
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Worshiping him together. It glorifies God when you get along with one another. It glorifies him when you care for one another, when you sacrifice your own selfish desires and get out and serve one another.
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It glorifies God. And it doesn't just glorify God among us, but it actually, in other texts of scripture, indicates that it glorifies
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God in the community. When they see us loving one another, they go, man, that's different.
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When they see us putting the priorities of others ahead of ourselves, they go, that's not the way it works at my workplace.
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That's not the way it works in my family. That's not the way it works in my neighborhood. Something's different here.
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And it testifies to the goodness and the glory and the power of God. The greatest power source behind our unity.
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See, unity is a really good thing, isn't it? When you dwell together in unity, is that good? How many of you, raise your hand, honestly.
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Raise your hand, I'll give you a second. Raise your hand if you like unity. Okay, good. That was an easy one.
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That was a softball. Just trying to wake some of you up. Unity is a really good thing, but it's not an ultimate thing.
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Unity is not the ultimate end of this text. Paul gets down to the most basic thing at verse six, as the purpose of our unity, the reason we ought to pursue unity, the reason we ought to value community, to bear with one another in endurance and encouragement, the reason we should follow the example of Jesus who sacrificed his own pleasures in heaven to come here and die for us.
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In verse six, it's crazy important. It's worth stating again. He prayed for harmony in verse five, so that together we may with one voice glorify the
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God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The glory of God is really the reason for any and all of the life of a follower of Jesus.
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You see, I would suggest to you that there's everything. I mean, when you come down to it, why should I, fill in the blank, why should
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I avoid stealing from my employer the glory of God? Why should I avoid?
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I mean, how many of you know there's a lot of reasons to avoid adultery? There's a lot of good reasons to not commit adultery, but the ultimate of reasons is the glory of God.
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There are all kinds of reasons why we should work hard for our employer, but the greatest of reasons is the glory of God.
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There are all kinds of reasons we should actively and vigorously pursue and pray for unity in our church, but the greatest and most ultimate of reasons is so that we may together, with one unified voice, spotlight the glory of our
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Father. That's the greatest of reasons. And despite the metaphor of one voice, which
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I think is actually metaphorical, he is not merely referencing the songs that we sang this morning, as if that's the only time that we're expressing this kind of unity that he's talking about.
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In context, he's been talking about the way we work together as weaker and stronger brothers and sisters in Christ. Our fellowship together, our unity, our bearing with one another, our following the model of Jesus, our taking encouragement from the scriptures, and our shared hope is like a lived out chorus of glory to God, the very
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God who is changing us day by day and moment by moment. Our mission as a church, our stated mission on paper is to worship him and to find more worshipers for his name.
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We worship him in our commitment to unity. We worship him by uniting our voices together, but beyond that, we also bring glory to him by our love and our sacrifice for one another.
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And so as we come to communion, ask yourself these two questions this morning. I want everybody to answer these. The first is, are your batteries charged for unity?
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The priority of unity is clear. The purpose of unity is clear. But look at that middle section.
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Are you looking to Jesus and his model of sacrifice as the pattern for the way that you live and work together with those around you?
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Some of you, to be honest, this is foreign enough that you recognize that I gotta do something radically different if I'm gonna do this.
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If I'm gonna lean into relationships with others because I've been conceiving of the church as a show that I take in on Sunday morning.
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I slide in the seat, I kind of sit there and look busy during connection time, and then
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I jet real quick because I don't want any of those messy things that they're calling relationships these days.
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And this is a call to lean into relationship with one another, to connect through community groups.
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There's all different kinds of ways to connect, and we would love to just see a culture here of mentoring one another, and where the older are not just thinking, well,
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I'm washed up and I'm over that, or it's messy to get into this, but where you're willing to give some to those who are younger around you, to connect, to impart some wisdom.
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And those of you who are younger are willing to sit down and listen. Be gone with this okay boomer junk, right?
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No, I'm being serious. At the end of the day, it's a joke that's gone. I think at the end of the day, it's unhelpful, it's unhealthy, because it actually is a bit of a division between the generations, and there is.
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And that's only gonna be broken down as you get to know one another, and you see that you're real people who have real loves and real likes and real desires.
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And there's real wisdom to be had in those who have gone before us.
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So I would just love for that to be a reality. What does it mean for you? I don't know, maybe you're a younger person here who literally is saying, you know, maybe it is a step for me to pursue somebody, to keep my eyes open in the church for somebody who you could approach and say, hey,
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I'd just like to meet with you once in a while. Or maybe it's an older person here who's just saying, you know what, I'd like to just kind of keep my eyes open for somebody younger that I could connect with and enter into a relationship with.
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Or maybe it's just peers. Maybe it's just something, maybe you're lonely, and you could come and talk with me if you're just kind of saying, how do
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I connect with people? And getting you plugged into a community group where you can test those relationships. By the way, community groups are, in one way, a means to an end.
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They're about uniting people. And we recognize that you might try one for eight weeks and go, that didn't work.
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That's okay. But give it a try. Jump in with both feet and check them out. Take encouragement and endurance from the scriptures.
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And there's this battery -charging thing about relationship, looking at the model of Jesus to enter into sacrificial relationships with one another.
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Taking encouragement and endurance from the scriptures, entering into a common hope that we all share.
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And a good application to that is just be a student of the word so that you can be a man or a woman of powerful unity, knowing the good that he desires for you and for others.
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But lastly, more importantly, ask yourself this question as we come to communion this morning. Do I have the batteries installed?
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How many of you can relate to this? More than one time in my life, I've gone to the coffee table and picked up the remote, felt a little light, clicked the on button, somebody has salvaged the batteries out of my remote for some other device.
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Anybody relate to what I'm talking about? More than one time that's happened to me and you pick it up and you're like, something's not right here.
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Which is sad because if you can recognize the weight and the feel of your remote control in your hand, there's maybe another issue there.
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It doesn't work without the batteries installed. According to Paul's prayer in verse five, he knew that God must be the center of our unity and therefore the center of a life that is going to feed into that unity.
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And I recognize that maybe even some of us here are not all in with Christ yet. You don't have that power source in your life because you don't have the new heart that's offered to you through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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And therefore you don't really have that ultimate hope and maybe today would be a day of receiving
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Jesus Christ as your savior, of actually saying, I want Jesus to be the center of my life. I want God to really empower me for relationships that are healthy and are moving in the right direction.
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And if that's you, I'm gonna encourage you. We're gonna do something different on a routine basis. Dan did this last week. I'm gonna start doing it too.
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We're gonna have some people down here praying and you can come down here and join us and we would just love anybody who needs prayer.
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If you are trying to figure out this whole Jesus thing, if you're here and you're saying, I'm going through some dark waters right now and I need somebody to pray with me, if you're just kinda saying, you know what,
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I just would love to come up here and pray on my own, well you can come up here and grab one of these seats as they clear out and just pray on your own or ask somebody if you have questions, you need some counsel, whatever it is.
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But today would be a great day to do some business with God in regard to prayer and we want to, actually part of this, by the way, is an initiative coming from the elders directly.
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We want to be a church that prays more. We just do. Praying for unity, praying for togetherness, praying for the difficulties and the hardships that people are facing and really lifting one another up.
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And I think that that's something that, honestly, I can confess has been lacking here over the years and something that really needs to be shored up.
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And so, if you're not connected with God this morning, let me encourage you to come over here if the service is over for prayer or you are connected to him but you just need somebody to talk to or to share with, take advantage of that.
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And I also invite anyone, this is important, that if you're already connected with Jesus, if you're not,
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I'd ask you to just skip this, take in the song, but if you're already connected with Jesus, then come to one of the tables in the back during this next song and consider the way that God has brought us into community through faith in Jesus.
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We take a cracker to remember that he let his body be broken for us. We take a cup of juice to remember his blood that was shed.
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Not just for me, but for us, to bring us in, to bring us together.
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God has saved us into community, recast. And we glorify God together in a way that we could never do on our own.
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How many of you know that one of the things, there are commands in scripture that you cannot obey sitting at home on a Sunday morning, like gathering together.
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You can't gather together on your own. And by the way, you don't sharpen yourself very well either. How many of you know that the very things that rub you the wrong way about the church might be the very things that God wants to work into your life?
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Do you know what I'm talking about? And you'll leave those rough edges on your own. You don't want the pain and the hardship that it takes to rub those off, but man, bring community into the picture and those sparks fly.
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Good sparks, productive sparks, removing the bad things from our lives, removing the rough edges from our lives, we need that.
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So I rejoice that he has brought us together, tough times and the bad times, the good times, the celebrations.
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I praise him for the harmony that he has granted us over the years, recast, let's pray.
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Father, I thank you so much. I do, I just thank you for the unity that I've experienced here, the love that I've seen poured out from person to person, the sacrifices that have been made, some even this morning sacrificing their time to come in early to make coffee or to get here early to prep classes and lessons and practice, praise, and Father, just so many ways that you have worked here in our midst to provide unity, and I don't take that for granted.
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It's not something that I could manufacture, not something the elders have manufactured, it is something you have done in our midst. We don't take it for granted, but we ask for it to continue.
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And Father, where there is conflict, I pray that you would help us to be willing to sacrifice and to be willing to invite
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Jesus in as our example, to invite your word in to provide encouragement and endurance and hope.
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Father, that you would continue to strengthen this church by your grace and your mercy. And each individual here, to consider what it means for them relationally, to lean into you and to lean into the church and to lean into the relationships that you're calling us to.
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Each person walking away with an application from your spirit to their heart. I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.