Ungrateful?

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Most of us would consider ourselves to be pretty grateful people, but the story of the 10 lepers in Matthew 17 challenges us to consider how grateful we really are.  In this message we consider not only the rightness of praising God for what we have received, but also the wonderful difference it makes to our lives to live gratefully instead of ungratefully.

Ungrateful

29/05/2011

Recap

Yesterday was the National Day of Thanksgiving.  Did anyone do anything special to express their thanks to someone?  I was going to write a letter to our local politicians to thank them for the great support they have given us this past year, but I got busy and forgot - sort of appropriate given our passage for today!

Earlier in the service we heard the story of the 10 guys who got healed from leprosy (Luke 17:11-19).

I want you to try and put yourself into their situation for a minute – imagine if you were one of the people suffering from leprosy.

Leprosy was a term used in the ancient world for a number of different skin diseases.  A common form of leprosy - now known as Hansen’s disease - is a bacterial infection that can lay dormant for years before showing symptoms.  Then it will generally attack the skin, nerves, bone and cartilage of a person’s extremities – arms, legs, nose, ears and so on.  If it’s not treated it will cause severe disfigurement as limbs and features are eaten away by the bacteria.

It’s still fairly common in the two-thirds world but is fairly easily treated today using antibiotics.  In Jesus’ day it was untreatable and usually very contagious.

Of course, since it was untreatable and contagious, anyone suffering from it was immediately quarantined – sent away from mainstream society to live in leper colonies. 

So imagine yourself in this story.  You have a family, home, friends, a job and so on, then one day you discover a kind of rash on your skin.  You’re worried, so you keep it clean, dry and covered up, but it grows.

Reluctantly, you go and show this to the priests – and they confirm that you have leprosy and need to be quarantined immediately.  They suggest you repent of whatever sin caused you to contract the disease and beg God for mercy, but there aren’t many examples around of people who that has worked for.

You have a horrible feeling that you will end up unable to have any real contact with the people you love.  You will be disfigured and unable to provide for yourself, dependent on the mercy of those you cannot touch.

It’s heart-breaking.  But it’s real life and there’s no avoiding it.

Can you imagine yourself in that situation?  It’s scary isn’t it.

We live in a country where good healthcare is something we take for granted.  We tend to think that most things that go wrong with us can be fixed, but it’s not always the case.  It’s not the case in most places in the world and it’s not always the case even with the best medical technology & healthcare available.  Sometimes we get bad news.

These guys had been living with bad news – they’d been experiencing the effects in their bodies.  Then Jesus turns up.

Again, imagine how you would feel having heard about Jesus the miracle worker and then seeing Him in the distance.  Suddenly there’s hope!

You call out “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”  You want to fall at his feet but you’re not allowed to approach anyone.

You desperately hope that He will come over to you and lay his hands on you for your healing.  He doesn’t.  Instead He calls back “Go, show yourselves to the priests.”

You look at each other.  You can still see the disease!  Disfigured features, discolorations on the skin, lack of feeling in your own extremities – you’re not healed, why should you go see the priests?

How humiliating to have to walk up the town calling out “unclean” so people can flee from you.  When you get there you’ll need to call for the priest to come outside and inspect you.  Why do that when clearly you are not free of the disease?

However hope is stirring in your heart.  You believe that Jesus knows what He’s doing.  So you nod, and so do the others.  You turn and make your way toward the town.  As you cry out people run terrified from you.  Children are rushed inside as mothers stare hatefully at you for risking their contamination.

At some point along the way you feel a change in your body.  You can actually feel your fingers and toes!  You can wiggle them for the first time in ages!  Your skin tingles and is free from the ugly splotches.

You know that you are healed, and now you can’t wait to see the priest.  Jesus has told you to do it, and now you know that you are going to pass the inspection.  There will be some cleansing ceremonies you’ll need to do which will take over a week to complete (Leviticus 14:1-32), but you’re only moments away from being allowed to have contact with healthy people again.  Your family and friends will soon be restored to you – you can’t wait to take them in your arms again.

Stop the story!

This is where paths diverge.

This is where one man separates himself from the crowd.

How do you think those 10 guys were feeling?

Elated, excited, overjoyed…… grateful?

I’m sure that later on when they thought back on what happened, they would be full of gratitude to Jesus for what He did for them.

I’m sure that if someone had tapped them on the shoulder and said “Do you feel grateful for being healed?”, they would have all responded with “Of course we do!”

But 9 of those guys did not go back to Jesus and say “thankyou”.  Some of them may have had the thought in the back of their minds that one day they would seek Him out to say thanks, but first they wanted to just get on with experiencing what they had longed so much for.

Let’s look at how this story finishes:

Luke 17:15-19

¹⁵ One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. ¹⁶ He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

¹⁷ Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? ¹⁸ Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” ¹⁹ Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.” ^[1]

Now here’s the interesting point – all 10 of those guys had faith in Jesus, and all ten were healed.  But only one praised God for what He had done for them.

Does it really matter?

After all – the 10 all got the healing they wanted.  They were all winners right?

Before I answer that, I want to share with you a very strange old folk tale.

The Story of the Ungrateful Son

Who’s heard of the Brothers Grimm?  They are famous for writing down a huge collection of folk tales that they collected from across Germany and published in a series of books.  Some of the stories included favourites like:

• Cinderella
• Rapunzel
• Hansel and Grethel
• Sleeping beauty
• Snow-white
• Rumpelstiltskin
• Tom Thumb

This is one of their less famous short stories, which is called “The Ungrateful Son”.

A man and his wife were once sitting by the door of their house, and they had a roasted chicken set before them, and were about to eat it together. Then the man saw that his aged father was coming, and hastily took the chicken and hid it, for he would not permit him to have any of it. The old man came, took a drink, and went away. Now the son wanted to put the roasted chicken on the table again, but when he took it up, it had become a great toad, which jumped into his face and sat there and never went away again, and if any one wanted to take it off, it looked venomously at him as if it would jump in his face, so that no one would venture to touch it. And the ungrateful son was forced to feed the toad every day, or else it fed itself on his face; and thus he went about the world without knowing rest.

After reading that story I thought to myself – why was he called “the ungrateful son”?  Why wasn’t it “the greedy son” or “the selfish son” or “the unkind son”?

The fact is that if the son had gratitude in his heart for what his father had done for him over the course of his life, he would have been happy to share his feast.  He would have enjoyed a meal with his wife and father in loving fellowship.

As it turned out, his ingratitude turned what should have been a blessing into a curse that made his life miserable.

Is it possible that you or I could find ourselves in that kind of position?  Is it possible that things that we should be enjoying and sharing with others can become ugly monsters that control our lives?  I think it is.

Whether it happens or not depends on whether we are grateful or ungrateful people.

We have no idea what happened to the 9 men who did not return to thank Jesus.  Did they become better for the experience?  Were they sympathetic to other people with illnesses since they knew what it was like to suffer from a disease?  Were they generous toward the poor as they knew what it was like to lose a livelihood?

We just don’t know.

But we do know that there are many people who experience blessings in life but do not appreciate them.  If you were to ask them “Are you grateful for….” they would undoubtedly say yes, but they do not stop themselves to consider their blessings and give thanks.  There are people who have much but want more.  There are people who whinge and complain about their struggles despite the fact that they’ve had things relatively easy.  There are people who just feel entitled to stuff, somehow expecting others to give but never feeling the need to give of themselves.

Could that be you or I sometimes?

You might think “I’ve never been blessed with anything like a miraculous healing”.

Really?

Let me tell you about a man named Narsappa, who lives in India.

Narsappa was just 10 years old when he was told he had leprosy, but the news changed the course of his life forever. People in his Indian village immediately began to shun him and told his parents that he had to leave. He says his mother started grieving for him "as if I was already dead". Shortly afterwards, his father took him to a hospital two hours away from home and left him there. No one ever came to visit him and Narsappa never went home again.[2]

Narsappa is now 42 years old – this article was published only 2 months ago.  Despite the fact that India has officially wiped out leprosy there are 130,000 new cases there every year and medical support for sufferers is decreasing.

Have you ever taken a course of antibiotics?  Narsappa would have loved that opportunity when he was a kid!

Do you ever stop to thank God for the blessings you have received?

Sadly, many of us are so focussed on satisfying our selfish desires that we don’t stop to realise how grateful we should be for what we’ve already been given.  We don’t stop to think about what blessings we could share with others like Narsappa.

We could list our blessings all day and still not come to the end of them.  However I want to bring our attention to the big one.

One reason that we celebrate communion every Sunday is that we never want to lose sight of the most important blessing we have received.

When Jesus met these 10 lepers, He was following a winding route toward Jerusalem.  He was heading toward His own crucifixion.  In the following chapter, Luke 18, we read of Him explaining this to His disciples.

We have been given eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ, because of His death and resurrection for us.

We know that whatever suffering we experience is temporary.

We know that eternal joy awaits us.

We know that we get to receive this despite the fact that we have sinned against God and do not deserve His love or His acceptance.

We know that it is purely because of His grace that we have eternal life.

And we should be grateful.

Like the Samaritan in this story we should praise God in a loud voice and fall at the feet of Jesus in worship and thanksgiving.

It’s the right thing to do.

But not only is it right to do that, it actually makes a huge difference to our lives.

At the University of California they’ve been researching the impact of gratefulness for quite a few years.  Some of their findings[3] include:

• People with a strong disposition toward gratitude have the capacity to be empathic and to take the perspective of others. They are rated as more generous and more helpful by people in their social networks (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002).
  
  

• Grateful individuals place less importance on material goods; they are less likely to judge their own and others’ success in terms of possessions accumulated; they are less envious of others; and are more likely to share their possessions with others.

Do you want your friends to think of you as caring, generous and helpful?  Most of us do! 

Do you want to be happier and more content with what you have?  Would you rather be generous with what you have or envious about what you don’t have?

All of these things are affected by how much or how little gratitude is part of your life.

Listen to this wisdom from Psalm 92:1-8

¹ It is good to praise the Lord

and make music to your name, O Most High,

² to proclaim your love in the morning

and your faithfulness at night,

³ to the music of the ten-stringed lyre

and the melody of the harp.

⁴ For you make me glad by your deeds, O Lord;

I sing for joy at the works of your hands.

⁵ How great are your works, O Lord,

how profound your thoughts!

⁶ The senseless man does not know,

fools do not understand,

⁷ that though the wicked spring up like grass

and all evildoers flourish,

they will be forever destroyed.

⁸ But you, O Lord, are exalted forever.

According to this Psalm, foolish and senseless people look at what others have and are envious.  Their attention is on what they want but do not have, and they forget that all such things are temporary.  They forget what Solomon discovered and wrote about in Ecclesiastes, which is that achieving these things brings no satisfaction anyway.

The wise person praises the Lord and fills his or her heart with gratitude for all that God has done and all that He is.  Our hearts become filled with joy and peace and our lives become characterised by a generosity of spirit that reflects the character of God.

Philippians 4:4-7

⁴ Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! ⁵ Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. ⁶ Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. ⁷ And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

By all means present your requests to God.  Believe that He can answer your prayers and give you the desires of your heart.

But never leave out rejoicing in the Lord.  Never leave out thanksgiving.  If you do, your heart will become selfish and your desires will not be in line with what God wants for your life.  You will become ungrateful.  You will be like the man with a monstrous toad on his face, surrounded by blessings but unable to really enjoy them.

God knows what you need, and he loves you so much that He will do what is best for you.  Trust Him and be thankful for what He has already done for you.  You might think that’s easy for me to say, but you would be wrong.  But never mind about me, I’d like to finish by telling you about a guy who lived about 400 years ago.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Martin_Rinckart.jpg)

German pastor Martin Rinkart served in the walled town of Eilenburg during the horrors of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. Eilenburg became an overcrowded refuge for the surrounding area. The fugitives suffered from epidemic and famine. At the beginning of 1637, the year of the Great Pestilence, there were four ministers in Eilenburg. But one abandoned his post for healthier areas and could not be persuaded to return. Pastor Rinkhart officiated at the funerals of the other two. As the only pastor left, he often conducted funeral services for as many as 40 to 50 persons a day—some 4,480 in all. In May of that year, his own wife died. By the end of the year, the refugees had to be buried in trenches without services.[4]

Listen to what he wrote as a prayer for his children to recite before meals during this terrible period.

1.            Now thank we all our God, 

               with heart and hands and voices, 

               who wondrous things has done, 

               in whom this world rejoices; 

               who from our mothers' arms 

               has blessed us on our way 

               with countless gifts of love, 

               and still is ours today.

2.            O may this bounteous God 

               through all our life be near us, 

               with ever joyful hearts 

               and blessed peace to cheer us; 

               and keep us still in grace, 

               and guide us when perplexed; 

               and free us from all ills, 

               in this world and the next.

3.            All praise and thanks to God 

               the Father now be given; 

               the Son, and him who reigns 

               with them in highest heaven; 

               the one eternal God, 

               whom earth and heaven adore; 

               for thus it was, is now, 

               and shall be evermore. 

Martin had learned the power of gratitude.

In the midst of terrible suffering he wanted his children to be reminded daily of God’s good gifts to them in this world and the next.  He wanted his children to learn to praise God even when circumstances were horrible.

Everyone thinks they are grateful, but are you really grateful?  Is your life showing that you are grateful?

Don’t ever think that more and better stuff, better relationships, easier circumstances will make you happy.  You will keep pursuing them but the monster of an ungrateful heart will never be satisfied.

Gratitude isn’t something that just happens inside when things are going well, it’s an attitude of the heart that we must choose.Choose to have an attitude of gratitude and whatever hardships you may experience in this fallen world, you will know the joy and peace of God which will guard your heart and mind and help you to be the person God had in mind when He made you.  A person who gives Him praise.  A person through whom God blesses the world.

We live in a marketing-driven culture where we are being pressured every day to be ungrateful for what we have and lustful of what we don’t have.  We are conditioned to keep pursuing happiness instead of being thankful for the blessings we have been given.

Make Psalm 92 (and plenty of others like it) your lifestyle:

Psalm 92:1-4

¹ It is good to praise the Lord

and make music to your name, O Most High,

² to proclaim your love in the morning

and your faithfulness at night,

³ to the music of the ten-stringed lyre

and the melody of the harp.

⁴ For you make me glad by your deeds, O Lord;

I sing for joy at the works of your hands.

It’s good to be grateful.  It’s good to praise the Lord.  It’s good to recite His blessings in the morning when we rise and at night before we sleep and at all times in between.  He makes us glad & fills us with joy.

That’s the life I want.

---

^[1]The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984 (Lk 17:15). Grand Rapids: Zondervan.

[2] http://www.bt.com.bn/features/2011/03/27/leprosy-indias-hidden-fatal-disease-plagues-nation

[3] ^{http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/Labs/emmons/PWT/index.cfm?Section=5}

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rinkart

Discovering Jesus Pt 36 - John 14:15-31

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John 14:15-31 - Audio 

“The Right Equipment”

Jesus makes clear the link between love & obedience. It takes more than just having the knowledge, but to show your love is to act in accordance with the values of the one you love. So, the right response to God is to love Him by doing our best to obey Him. In our faulty human nature, we can’t discern the right way to obey or understand the truth of God, so the Holy Spirit shows us the truth, and gives us peace in spite of troubles. The resident presence of the Spirit brings wholeness. There is so much more that the Spirit does, which we will discover over the coming weeks, just as having a set-top box on your TV reveals the programs you can’t watch without it. Without the Holy Spirit, we can never grasp the truth of the Gospel.

Discovering Jesus Pt 35 - John 14:1-14

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John 14:1-14 - Audio 

 M.B.H.A

Jesus emphasised the truth that to know Him was to know the Father. When we know the person we follow, and the teacher we listen to, we can trust & believe them. Jesus spent time “hanging around” with the disciples, so that they would know Him, and He would know them. In the 1982 corporate management classic, Peters & Waterman coined the phrase “Management By Wandering Around” or M.B.W.A.  Often our most effective ministry to other is just by “hanging around” & spending time with people, just as Jesus practiced “Ministry By Hanging Around”, or MBHA. Our investment of time into others earns us the right to speak truth & love into their lives.

The Process of Truth Spoken in Love

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The Process of Truth Spoken in Love - Audio
 

Having established the unique power of speaking the truth in love in helping people grow into maturity in Christ, we now turn our attention to the process of speaking truth in love. ; We want to make sure that we are doing it well so that it builds up rather than tearing down, so we need to pay attention to the Bible's instructions for us.

Growing Together in Christ pt 2

The Process of Truth Spoken in Love

Matthew 18:15-20; Matthew 7:1-6; Mark 8:31-33

8/05/2011

Introduction – The Power of Speaking the Truth in Love

Last week we discovered that speaking the truth in love is powerful and effective in helping us to:

• Glorify Jesus as we put pleasing Him above pleasing others
• Be freed from the destruction of sin in our lives and in our church
• Each grow up into maturity in Christ as our lives are transformed by His truth.
• Witness more truly to those around us for the salvation of all who believe.

Sadly for the Church, Satan has succeeded in preventing most of us from exercising this important ministry.

We don’t want to:

• Be like those terrible people who are ungracious, self-righteous and judgemental – and we don’t want people to think that’s what we’re like even if we’re not.
• Cause offense and ruin relationships
• Start fights
• Turn people away

So we miss out on the life-changing power of speaking and hearing truth spoken in love, because we have seen or we imagine how badly it can go when it does not happen well.

We need a process for speaking the truth in love and for hearing truth spoken in love so that we receive it’s blessings and avoid the pitfalls.

The process for speaking truth in love is contained in Matthew 18:15-20.  It’s a passage which provides for us an extremely valuable framework for dealing with issues of sin.  Remember that speaking truth in love also applies to speaking up about good things that we see in each other – let’s make sure we are doing that all the time!  Read Philippians 4:8 and put it into practice in the way you speak.  However it’s dealing with the bad things that we tend to have the most trouble with and what we will explore today.

Stage 1 – Speaking Truth One to One

Matthew 18:15

¹⁵ “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.

This verse raises a number of issues: first, it says “if your brother” – who is in mind here? 

Well Jesus is talking to His disciples on this occasion.  They are a group of Jewish men.  A group of Jewish men who sometimes quarrelled with each other about silly things like status and position.  In their minds the word “brother” could refer to any other Jewish man, but particularly to one another.

With all other Jews they shared a foundation of ethnic and cultural identity, but more importantly they shared the ethical foundation of God’s laws.  They shared an understanding of what was right and what was wrong.

With each other as followers of Jesus they had the additional bond of Jesus’ own teaching.  Jesus brought them a whole new understanding of God and His ways which made sense of the law.

Before going through this process of speaking truth in love, we need to recognise who this process applies to. 

In our situation, it applies to how we deal with fellow believers – our brothers and sisters in Christ.  Many of the principles apply to our relationships with unbelievers as well, but we need to remember that there is a difference.  There is not the shared foundation of what is right and what is wrong.  There is not the shared desire to please Jesus.  There is not the shared Spirit who lives within God’s people, convicting us of truth and helping us to see and overcome our sin.

So today we’re dealing with speaking and hearing the truth in love in the context of the church.  By all means apply many of these principles in other relationships but be aware of the differences.  I’d be very happy to discuss in more detail how these principles apply and which other biblical principles apply to those situations with you personally.

Let’s keep going in verse 15…

“If your brother sins against you

What is sin?  It’s anything that falls short of the glory of God.  It’s anything that does not reflect His perfect goodness. 

Are we going to treat each other in ways that fall short of God’s goodness?

You bet we are!

This process we’re looking at today is not something we keep locked away in case we ever need to use it – it’s something that we need to use all the time!

Do you ever neglect to include someone in a conversation – not noticing that they feel on the outer?

Do you ever say things that are unkind about someone else?

Do you fail to turn up to something that you were supposed to be helping out with?

Do you not stop to consider how your actions or words are affecting others?

Of course – and that’s just some of the thousands of sins we commit against one another!!

And as we spoke about last week, the way for us to grow out of these things and grow into maturity in Christ is if we hear the truth when we do them so that we can train ourselves out of them.

So we all sin, but does this process only apply when someone sins against us personally?

The short answer to that is “No”.  There are a number of reasons for that, but the simplest is found in Galatians 6:1 which says:

Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted.

In other words, if we catch someone out in sin – whether it’s a sin against us or not - we need to restore that person as long as we have the spiritual maturity to do so.  If we don’t, then we need to seek help from someone who does, which is stage 2 of our process.

Matthew 18:15 tells us:

“If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you.”

Why just between the two of you?  Firstly it keeps sin small.  Sin spreads so easily and does so much damage.  Sweeping under the carpet is never the answer – although many churches have tried it.  All that does is allow sin to spread under the radar where it continues to do damage and is never properly dealt with.

No, sin must be dealt with but it’s better to deal with it promptly and with as few people involved as possible.  Rejoice and share the good news once it has been dealt with, but don’t let it spread.

Secondly, if we love each other we will want to make each other known for good things, not for bad things.  We will want our brothers and sisters to be honoured for the way God has changed their lives, not embarrassed by the residue of sins not yet overcome.  Romans 12:10 tells us to “Honor one another above yourselves.”  That needs to be true all the time, even when we stumble.

Thirdly, dealing with the matter quietly builds mutual respect and trust.  The person knows that you are not out to get them and make them look bad in front of others, but that you genuinely care for them and want what honours God and what’s best for them.  It gives them permission to share truth with you when you need it also.

Who should do this? – that’s a key question!

Galatians 6:1 emphasised the requirement for spiritual maturity.  It is not always appropriate for a person to go and speak to another person one to one about sin issues.

Let me give you an obvious example.

If you are a parent, you should be teaching these principles to your kids as part of their training.

Let’s say one of your kids is doing something they shouldn’t.  One of their siblings witnesses this or is on the receiving end of it – do you want them to come and dob to you about what the other child is doing?  Sometimes, but not usually.  We teach our kids to use their words with each other.  Don’t get into a fight, speak the truth in love.  If they work it out, all’s good.  If they don’t, they move to stage two which is to get a parent involved.

But if one of my child has an issue with an adult, I do not want them trying to work it out one to one without any consultation with a parent.  It’s not appropriate.  It may not be respectful, but it’s also not an even discussion.  There’s an imbalance of power.  Remember Jesus was talking to a group of men who would become leaders in His church.  They would pass this teaching onto others, but we need to recognise that not everyone is in the same situation.

If one of my kids feels sinned against by an adult or sees an adult do something wrong, they need to come see Carolyn or myself to work out what to do about it. 

In a similar way, a couple of days ago I heard about a situation where a vulnerable person was sinned against by a church leader.  It really upset her and was possibly a key reason that she left the church soon after.

She needed someone to help her deal with that situation well.

So as we explore how to deal with the situation one-to-one I want you to keep in mind that sometimes we need to involve a spiritually mature person to help us go through this process; and to decide with us whether it’s appropriate to speak one-to-one or whether we need to have them along with us or even to go for us.

What are we doing when we go speak to the person?  We’re going to show him his fault!

That’s easy to do right?

It’s easy to talk about other’s faults.  It’s not so easy to talk to others about their faults.

How do we do it?

1.  Prepare Yourself

a) Should I even be addressing this?

Matthew 7:1-2

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. ² For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Johari Window – you want to see things the way God does.  You want to be speaking real truth, not just your own judgemental opinions.  Could it be that what you are seeing in the other person is just a difference of personality or culture?  Is it just a reflection of how God made them?

All of us have strengths and weaknesses.  At what point do our weaknesses become sins that need to be dealt with?

Matthew 7:2 says the way we measure that for others is how it will be measured for us.

Do you want to be part of a church where every week someone is coming up to you to tell you what you’re doing wrong?  I don’t!

But do I need to hear that sometimes – of course I do!

So should we go talk to people any time we feel offended by them or hurt by them?  Apparently not…

1 Peter 4:8

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

Instead of trying to change other people so that they don’t bug us, we are to…

Romans 15:7

Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.

So if we don’t measure sin according to how we feel about a person’s conduct, how do we measure it?  How do we know what we should speak to people about and what we shouldn’t?

2 Timothy 3:16-17

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,  ¹⁷ so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The bible contains the truth from God that we all need to know in order to be transformed to be like Him.  Notice here again how the goal of using Scripture is not to make other people easier to get along with or less offensive to you – it’s to equip them to do good works which are pleasing to God.

When we go to someone to point out a fault, we do it not so that person won’t hurt us or bug us anymore or wreck what we’re trying to do.  In most situations our love for them can cover over the offence of their sin.  We do it because we love them and want them to grow.  We do it because we love Jesus and we want His church to be pure.  We do it because we love those who need the Church to shine brightly as a witness to Christ.

If the Bible speaks clearly to the situation and our love for the person compels us to speak, then the answer to the question of whether we should address this is “yes”. 

b) Am I ready to address this?

Matthew 7:3-5

³ “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? ⁴ How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

If you’re not first hearing from God, you’ve got no business speaking to others.

It doesn’t matter how many people agree with you – it’s what God thinks that matters. (My Bible College experience).

If you haven’t given God the time to address the sin in your own life, how dare you think that through you God can address sin in the life of someone else?

Far more likely is the possibility that in speaking to them about their supposed sin, you will in fact be sinning against them.

c) Is our relationship ready to address this?

First of all, is there a bond of faith in Christ?

Matthew 7:6

⁶ “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.

Jesus again uses a ridiculous picture – like the log in the eye – to get a point across.  We don’t give precious things to dogs or pigs.  In a similar way it’s not fitting to try and apply God’s precious truths to people who do not acknowledge His lordship.  It’s against their nature to submit to God’s ways, and trying to make them do it is only likely to stir them up to an angry response.

So if you’re dealing with an unbeliever, don’t expect them to value the same things you do.  Don’t expect them to want to do something just because God says to.  That will just frustrate them.  You’ll need to find other areas of common ground to work on.

But even within the church, we need to be aware of what our relationships can handle in terms of sharing truth with one another.

Mark 8:31-33

³¹ He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. ³² He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

³³ But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”

The relationship Jesus had with Peter could sustain some pretty brutal honesty!  Jesus knew Peter well enough to know what Peter needed.  Peter knew Jesus well enough to be secure in Jesus’ love and concern for him, regardless of being told off rather soundly!

I recently heard relationships described as being like a bridge.  The stronger the bridge is the more it can carry.  The stronger a relationship is the more truth it can handle.

If you have built up a good level of trust with someone, you can share some pretty confronting truths with them knowing that they will trust you enough to listen.  They already know that you love them and want the best for them.

2. Do it!

Well there are 4 stages to this process of dealing with sin by speaking the truth in love.  We’re halfway through the first stage right now!

We’ve looked last week at the reason why we need to do this, and this week we’ve focussed on preparing ourselves to do it.

Now we’re ready to actually go and speak to the person about the sin issue.

I’m going to provide you with some resources very soon that will give you some very helpful principles and advice for how to have that discussion.

I want to remind you that this is meant to be a normal part of the Christian life.  Stage 1 of the process of dealing with sin in the church is something that is always going to be going on, because none of us is yet perfect.

So I want to encourage you this week to be a person who prepares well to speak the truth in love.  I will provide you with some resources soon that I hope will help you actually go and do it, and down the track a bit I hope to teach through the rest of the process so we can see how to respond if someone refuses to accept the truth that is spoken in love.  As always I’d love to chat to you about your specific situation if that would be helpful.

The Power of Truth Spoken in Love

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The Power of Truth Spoken in Love - Audio
 

We all need to hear truth. The Bible teaches us that it is in the renewing of our minds that we are changed from the inside out be new people.  This message explores the powerful role that we can all play in one another's growth to maturity in Christ as we share His truth in love to one another.

The Power of Truth Spoken in Love

Ephesians 4:11-16; Revelation 3:14-22

1/05/2011

Introduction

“Your arrogance sickens me”

How would you react if someone got up in your face and said that to you in front of a whole group of people?

I just stood there a bit dumbfounded as one of the students in my year at Bible college unloaded on me.  I don’t know how long it had been brewing but he let me have both barrels that day!

I already knew that he didn’t like me.  He certainly never bothered to hide that.  He was a guy who was not backward in speaking his mind, and loudly.  Funnily enough, I considered that to be very arrogant, but never had the guts to say anything about it.  I’d heard him pay out on people, apparently not concerned about their reputations or what their side of the story might be.  That frustrated me.  Now I was in the firing line.

But you know what?

I deserved it.  That morning - like many other mornings – I’d struggled to stay awake in one of our lectures.  To be frank, the pace of the lecture was too slow to keep my tired mind interested. 

I was a late-night person.  Part of that was due to my social life, but part of it was that late nights were the best time to get into the library or to get work done in my unit on campus.  At other times I tended to get distracted with questions from some of our overseas students.  I enjoyed helping them come to grips with language to really understand what they were reading, or the questions they needed to answer for the essays they were doing and so on. Besides that, I liked to be pretty thorough with my assignments and I would often find myself going into the early hours until I was satisfied with what I'd done.

So whether it was due to helping others or lack of discipline, I often found myself working into the early hours of the morning, which made it very hard to appear interested during lectures that seemed to drag.

Whatever the reason for it though, it was simply not respectful or considerate to the lecturer; nor was it a good personal discipline to be inattentive during class.

Yes, you could even say that it was arrogant of me to consider my other activities more important than getting a good night’s rest in order to be ready to receive what the lecturer had prepared to give us.

So did the confrontation help me?

Nope.

In fact it just reinforced the barrier that existed between me and this other student.

It reinforced my opinion of him as a opinionated, self-important, loud-mouthed lout.  That’s not a flattering opinion, nor is it fair, but that’s what my defensive heart fixed on.

I didn’t pause to consider what truth I could discern from what he said.  My guard was up.  Even years later I would sometimes replay the incident in my mind – except this time I would respond in a way that would demonstrate my righteousness and expose that guy’s arrogance!

It wasn’t until quite a few years later that I looked back more objectively to see some truths about myself that I wish I had seen back then.

As someone who is called to teach I would hate it if you all turned up on Sunday after a late night on Saturday, bleary-eyed and unable to concentrate.  It would break my heart, because every time I get up to preach it’s with a conviction that God has something to say to every one of us who is present.  Yet that’s exactly what I did to my teacher week after week, and that was not OK.  Who knows what life-changing lessons I missed out on through my lack of personal discipline?  I needed someone to help me change my lifestyle; and I needed the wisdom and humility to accept that help.

What about you?

Do you have it all together, or are there some truths that you need to hear?

Last week I read in a newspaper article that there was going to be a little wedding happening in London; and Romans 12:1-2 was to be read out during that service.   I’d like us to have a look at that passage also.

Romans 12:1-2

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. ² Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. ^[1]

This is one of those key passages that we tend to mention often because it sums up a lot of key truths in a few short sentences.

In this church we give priority to the teaching of God’s word because we want to help you to worship profoundly in your day-to-day lives.  By nature we conform to the pattern of those around us – the pattern of this world.  Like everyone else on the planet, we are sinful.  We tend to want to do the same sorts of things that every other sinful person wants to do. 

But we have been freed from sin and called to live a new life.

We live that life as our minds are renewed by God’s truth.  Renewed thinking leads to renewed attitudes and actions.  These new attitudes and actions are pleasing to God and they also prove to us that living God’s way is best.

So we come to the theme verses for our studies over the next two weeks in Growing Together in Christ.

Ephesians 4:7,11-16

⁷ But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.

Paul has just been writing about the things all Christians have in common – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Spirit, one Father, one hope… these are the things that every believer shares equally.  Yet there is a type of grace that has been dispensed by Jesus according to His specific plan for us and for the work He has called us to.  We read more about this from verse 11…

¹¹ It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, ¹² to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up ¹³ until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Paul lists 5 gifts which are all concerned with the communication of God’s truth.  God has provided people in His church with gifts in communicating His truth so that we can all have our minds renewed, our nature changed and our behaviour guided just as Romans 12 talked about.

¹⁴ Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.  ¹⁵ Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. ¹⁶ From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

According to Ephesians 4 my job today is to prepare God’s people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up.  Specifically, I want to challenge and encourage you to do what verse 15 tells us: to speak the truth in love to one another so that in all things we will grow up into Jesus.

I want to tell you that the Scriptures teach us that speaking the truth to one another in love is powerful.  It will change lives for the better.  If we truly love one another then we will speak truth to one another.

Speak the Truth, Even if Your Voice Shakes!

A couple of weeks ago I shared a principle from Scripture that is absolutely critical for us: We need to remember who the real Judge is.

So often we are more concerned with what others will think about us and what they may do to us, when it is really Christ’s opinion that matters.  He’s our Lord.

I want to share with you a passage of Scripture which features Jesus as Lord of the Church speaking to a congregation of believers via the Apostle John.

Revelation 3:14-22

“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:

These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. ¹⁵ I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! ¹⁶ So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

Let me fill you in on a bit of history here!  Laodicea was a wealthy commercial centre along an important trade route.  It was very close to two other cities: Colossae, which had access to water from fresh mountain springs; and Hierapolis which had hot mineral springs.  Cold water is great for drinking; Hot water is great for bathing.  Laodicea’s water was lukewarm – it was carried via aqueduct and was warm by the time it arrived in the city – ancient historians also tell us that it was full of sediment.

Jesus uses this picture of their substandard water supply to illustrate their condition in His eyes.  Unlike hot water for bathing or cold water for drinking, lukewarm water is not great for either use.  It must be either heated or cooled.  In the same way these Laodicean’s need to be changed if they are going to be useful in God’s service.

However the Laodicean’s have a different view.

¹⁷ You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. ¹⁸ I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.

¹⁹ Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. ²⁰ Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.

²¹ To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. ²² He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

The Laodicean’s thought they were going along alright – they needed to hear the truth or else they were headed for judgement.  Jesus loved them enough to share that truth with them.  He loved them enough to rebuke and discipline them.

If He did not do this they would continue on in their spiritual limbo, self-righteous and self-reliant.  They would not experience the joy of a living relationship with Jesus.  They would not glorify God or build His Church.  Instead they would receive a terrible shock when the time for them to stand before Christ.

Jesus loves them too much to leave them to that fate.  So He rebukes them and disciplines them so that they have the chance to repent.  If they receive His truth and are changed by it they will be restored to intimacy with Jesus and become overcomers in Him.

Here’s something interesting about this story though.  Jesus does not share this rebuke with the Laodiceans directly.  It was not to one of them that He appeared in a vision, it was to the Apostle John.  John wrote the vision down and sent it to them as he was instructed to.

So it was not just Jesus speaking the truth in love to them, it was also John as a messenger of Jesus.

*NB the sermon video & audio recordings contain a discussion on the Johari Window as a helpful tool for thinking about ourselves, what we reveal to others of ourselves and what we need to hear from others about ourselves.  In particular, we emphasise the fact that the only one who truly knows us is God - we need to hear what He has to say to us so that we may be changed by His truth.  We need to recognise that just as He did with the Laodiceans through John, God often speaks to us through His people.

Are you willing to hear truth spoken in love for your growth in Christ?  I needed it.  The Laodiceans needed it.  Will you acknowledge your need of it or will you allow pride to get in the way?

Are you willing to speak the truth in love for the building up of God’s Church?  Is your love strong enough that you will speak up for the sake of the one you speak to?

We’ll talk about the “how to” next week – both how to speak and hear the truth spoken in love

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^[1]All Scriptures from The Holy Bible : New International Version. 1996, c1984. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.