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Commitment or
Convenience
Jonah 3:1-10
Please open your
bibles to Jonah 3 and lets start our time together hearing what God has
to say. Read text Jonah 3: 1 - 10 and then pray.
In the February 4 issue of Christianity Today, Frederica Mathews-Green
took a shot at churches who believe that the principle product of
Christianity is comfort. She went through the Yellow pages of several
larger cities in America where Churches are competing for memberships
and found church ads like this:
There were a lot of churches that claimed that they care, or that they
were a caring place. But some other churches went a step farther.
A church in Atlanta pleads: "Come Let Us Love You."
A church in Charleston claims that they are a church, "Where Jesus is
Lord and Everybody is Special."
But my favorite is from Nashville and is apparently trying to one up
everybody, "A Christ-centered church where you can make new friends and
form lasting relationships with people who care about you."
Don't get me wrong: I like comfort a lot it's one of my favorite things.
I like comfortable clothes, comfortable cars, comfortable music,
comfortable food. And I have to admit that I even like comfortable
religion. It's a lot easier on the soul, and the mind. But, as Ms.
Mathews-Green so bluntly put it, "What's wrong with us required much
more than a hug; it required the cross." And crosses just aren't
comfortable.
A church that says "Hey, you look lonely. Come to our church and let us
hug you," sounds so much more comfortable that a church who’s message
is, "Hey, you, you're a sinner. Come to our church and we'll tell you
what it means to repent."
I believe that when God issued His second order to Jonah, he was real
specific. Look in Jonah 3:2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and
call out against it the message that I tell you.”
Does that command sound familiar to anyone here today? God starts by
telling him to "Go.” That one word command is very similar to the
parting command that Jesus gave to His disciples: Go, Make, Baptize,
Teach.
But so many of us are guilty of never getting out of first gear. We like
to be comfortable, and we are comfortable where we are in our lives or
we are so busy trying to get comfortable that we never get past the
first command of going.
But God didn’t just tell Jonah to go he tells him where to go: to the
great city of Nineveh. He also gives us direction as well, Go into all
the world. So many of us hear that call and immediately think of the
plains of Africa. We know that we cannot all go to Africa but we can pay
others to do that for us. So we support missionaries and settle back
into comfort believing that we have done our job. But your next door
neighbor is included in that call as well.
Finally we see God telling Jonah what to do when he got there: Proclaim
the message I give you. It is not enough to go, and it is not enough to
go to Nineveh or to your neighbors, but God gives the most important
part of this command. Proclaim the message I give you.
As a church, we are pretty good at proclaiming, but all too often, we
proclaim the wrong message. We are just like the churches in the Yellow
Pages. Come join us and we'll be nice to you. Visit our church and
you'll find a forever friend. In a never ending effort to out promote
the then church down the road lots of churches have reduced the Lord's
Supper to a Happy Meal and salvation to the prize in the bottom of your
Cracker Jacks.
Now I am proud to have had the opportunity to grow up in the Churches of
Christ. And even though I am proud of my heritage I have to be honest
and admit that we aren't immune to faulty proclamation. Now before we go
any farther I need to admit that this is the part of the sermon where
some of you who share my heritage could get offended if you keep your
ears closed or refuse to listen. But in the whole time I have been here
I have tried to be faithful to show and acknowledge our faults with love
and compassion. If you are not willing to confront error, then just go
ahead and tune out.
If you disagree with me this morning I will be happy to talk with you
after services today and I believe that this is important enough to stay
until we all agree with the scripture. But if you love God and desire
more than anything in this world to be right with Him and live what the
Bible really teaches then please listen closely, because the possibility
that you might get offended isn't going to change what I'm going to tell
you.
Now I'm thankful to God that I grew up in this fellowship. And since I
grew up in it, I can be as honest about the church as I can be about how
goofy some of my relatives are. If you have anyone in your family, you
know what it is like to have some relatives that just torque you. I mean
they do something’s that you just can’t explain.
We all have an Uncle Leo that makes you wonder what God was thinking
when he allowed those sets of genes get together. And if he's your Uncle
Leo, you can say that. Let someone with a different last name take a
shot at the family, though, and there'll be a fight. But family members
get to tell the truth. And with all of the things that have been
circulating about the Church of Christ on TV since Matthew Winkler’s
death, I felt today we need to tell the truth about our family.
If you don’t know, what I am talking about let me read how we have been
described from some of the news shows over the past week.
The Church of Christ is a relatively new church. It was started about
150 years ago by Alexander Campbell. And it’s, unfortunately, a very
legalistic sect, and they tend to use methods of intimidation and
pressure tactics. They claim that they are the only ones going to
heaven, and all other people are condemned to hell. They claim that if
you’re not baptized by one of their ministers, in one of their Church
buildings, that you’re doomed to hell, even if you’re a believer in
Jesus Christ. For the Church of Christ folks, that’s not enough. You
have to be a member of their narrow sect. It’s a very exclusive group.
And if you’re not a member of their sect, you’re condemned. It kind of
is a borderline cult, in the sense of the exclusivism, the attitude that
they are the only ones who know the truth. The tactics that they use are
sometimes just -- not only un-biblical but unethical, and they can be
very ungracious, unfortunately.
I don’t know how that makes you feel, but when I heard it at first I was
angry. Close minded, Hateful, a Cult. I don’t believe that I am any of
those things. But the more I thought about what was said the less angry
I got, at least at the ones saying those things. You see this may not be
how the Church of Christ is but it very well may be how we have
portrayed ourselves. Communication is 20% of what is said and 80% of
what is heard. And apparently, we have communicated to lots of people
that we are close minded, hateful, and cultish. But how did we get from
the truth of the Gospel to where we are now?
We've spent a lot of energy through the years proclaiming a biblical
message. But I wonder if it was the right biblical message. You see our
message has been focused on church membership, church organization and
how the church is supposed to worship. Our message wasn't so much, come
to our church and we'll be nice. It was more like, come to our church
and you'll be right. And all the while we were doing it we called it
evangelism.
And this might shock you but that isn't evangelism. That's ecclesiology
(E-cle-see-ology). We spent a lot of time telling people who believe in
God how to do church. Ecclesiology may well instruct the ignorance of
the misinformed. It may clarify the confusion of the converted. It may
right the doctrinal wrongs of the already religious. But it won't -- and
it didn't -- change the hearts of the lost.
We have been guilty of spending so much time telling the Baptist,
Methodist, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Catholics, whoever that they were
going to hell because they don’t worship like they are supposed to that
we have communicated a close minded, hateful, cultish air. And we have
not brought any to repentance, in other words, ecclesiology won't make
the Ninevites repent.
If you want to convince our religious neighbors that pastors ought to be
called preachers, that instrumental music is not authorized in the New
Testament, and that they should take the Lord's Supper every Sunday,
that's fine, but don't call it evangelism. Because it isn't.
It may be a biblical message, but it isn't the message God told us to
proclaim.
Let me say that again just so, you don’t misunderstand me, and you can
quote me correctly. It may be a biblical message, but it isn't the
message God told us to proclaim.
The message God has given us is that human beings are sinners; something
between us and God is broken and we can't fix it. God sent his son to
die on a cross, rest in a tomb and rise from the dead. When we believe
that message, repent of our sins, confess his name and obey him in
baptism, God fixes what is broken. That's the message God told us to
proclaim as we Go, Make, Baptize, Teach.
And when we proclaim that message, God will do amazing things. I want
you to see what happened when Jonah took God’s message out to the world.
Look at vs. 4. "On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He
proclaimed, 'Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.' the
Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the
greatest to the least, put on sackcloth."
Now that’s a lot to process so let’s take it apart a bit for it to make
sense. Refusing to eat and wearing sackcloth were traditional ways of
displaying how saddened you were by your sins. It was a way of taking
responsibility for breaking the relationship between you and God. Even
the king of Nineveh did it.
But they did more than just go hungry and get uncomfortable. In vs. 8
the king issued a decree, "Let them give up their evil ways and their
violence."
The Biblical word for what they did is repent. The word Repent sounds
like something a sweaty preacher in a seersucker suit waving a big Bible
under an old tent on a hot summer night in Huntsville, Alabama might
say. Except he'd pronounce it with more than two syllables. Repent!
Actually, it's a rather sophisticated word. It comes from a combination
of two words: meta, as in metamorphosis. Transformation. And nous, the
Greek word for mind. Metamorphosis is a transformation of shape. Meta -
nous is a transformation of mind. It is discovery. Insight. Education.
Understanding.
The people of Nineveh saw the light. They changed their minds. And their
behaviors. They repented. And what did God do? God did what God always
does when people repent. He forgave.
Let's step back here for just a moment and reflect on what happened in
Jonah chapter 3. There has never been a more reluctant evangelist in the
history of the world. Jonah hated the Ninevites. They had conquered his
country, taken captive his people and plundered the riches of his
nation. So you can rest assured that when he walked through Nineveh
proclaiming the message the Lord gave him, he didn't do it with
enthusiasm, creativity or even love.
"Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned and I can’t wait."
But the whole city -- all 120,000 of them -- believed and changed their
minds. Now I'm not suggesting that we all strap on sandwich boards with
the letters REPENT written across them and wander the streets of Guin.
If we're going to change people's minds we'll have to engage them a bit
more critically than that.
All I'm saying is, if God could take a reluctant evangelist like Jonah
and use him to save a city, what can he do with 100 people who are
committed, excited and eager to obey his command to Go, Make, Baptize,
Teach? When we obey, God honors that!
We are so addicted to convenience in this country. And like everything
else, it has spilled over into the church. We have our assigned parking
spots, assigned pews, and we listen to the preacher go on for 20 minutes
about how someone needs to evangelize, and then we go home and get
comfortable and wait for the preacher to get busy, that’s why we have
him anyway.
But God never called you to a life of comfort, and we need to be
reminded of that from time to time. Since I have already made some of
you mad, today I might as well finish the rest of you off.
Over the past few weeks, I have heard some of the most hateful things
coming out of some of your mouths, and it reached a boiling point on
what was supposed to be a night of celebration. Three weeks ago, we were
privileged to host the area young people at a Winter Youth series, but
the bickering that went on between some of you sucked the joy right out
of the worship. All of the arguing over who was doing the most work, and
how that tables were set up, and that the fellowship hall wasn’t left
clean sounded like a bunch of two year olds complaining over who got the
most Kool-Aide. And the worst part is that I allowed some of you to drag
me into it. And for that, I repent. And some of you here today need to
publicly repent as well.
Anyone here this morning who has chosen to put Christ on has vowed to
give up a life of comfort and surrendered it all to God. And some of us
here have taken control back and need to surrender again. When we
surrender, God forgives and heals and restores. Maybe it needs to start
with you this morning. Is there some sin you need to confront this
morning? Some resentment you need to confess? Some hurt you need to
surrender?
Dealing with the things that separate us from God and from each other is
never a comfortable process. But without that surrender, we will never
know the eternal comfort He can give.
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