We want to belong to something great. So what’s the greatest group anyone could belong to? By far and away the greatest. No group comes even close. Maybe you’ve guessed it.
It’s THE CHURCH.
And I’ll bet some of you, hearing that, immediately said in your head, “http://yeah...right” maybe with just the slightest mental sneer. The Church? Are you kidding me? In the United States, people can’t leave the church fast enough.
For every 10 people I know who even go to church, I can name you 100 that find any and every excuse to stay away. Why would anyone in their right mind dare to suggest that belonging to the Church is the greatest opportunity in the world?
In this sermon, Pastor Staff shares 5 reasons why there is no greater group to be a part of than the church.
One New Man #3
September 20, 2020 • David Staff
Social exclusion.
Marginalization.
Segregation
Racial injustice
Alienation
Disenfranchisement
Outcasts
What do all these terms mean?
They all describe something that happens when some people (who have more access and power) identify other people (with less access and power) as different, and therefore because they are different, they are to be sectioned off, segregated, and excluded in some way.
In Jesus’ day, if you were a Samaritan, if you were a Gentile, if you were a leper, you were avoided, ignored, excluded. They didn’t visit where you lived. They wouldn’t drink from your cup or eat food from your plates.
They had no interest in any kind of a relationship with you.
In India, if you are one of the Dalits, an Untouchable, you are considered someone a polluter of society. The same with the Burakumin of Japan, or the Baekjeong of Korea or the Ragyabpa of Tibet or the Al-akhdam in Yemen.
For too long in the United States, if your skin was dark brown or black, you were often excluded in thousands of ways, and by hundreds of laws. In sections of our country, even in major cities, you were told where you could live or not live, what schools you could and could not attend, whom you could marry or not marry, what motels were off-limits, what cafes you could not frequent, what drinking fountains you could or could not use, what restrooms were not yours and which ones were. If you took public transportation, you had to sit in the back.
Depending on your skin color, you were either pulled over and given a warning…or you were pulled over and jailed.
Even churches claiming to love God and follow Jesus followed suit. Some welcomed everyone, while others made sure social and racial dividing walls were not only erected, but maintained.
To deny these realities is to deny the truth. But not just here and not too long ago. The history of humanity – in virtually any society in every country -- is covered over with discrimination, inclusion and exclusion. Our world has always had its “insiders” and “outsiders.”
Does God care about these things?
One New Man #2
September 13, 2020 • David Staff
Someone has said that no one really lives until you’ve had to face death. Even more remarkably, Jesus insisted (Mark 8:33-36):
If you seek to save your own life, you will lose it.
But whoever willingly loses his/her life for My sake
and the gospel’s will find it.
In One New Man #1, the opening lines of Ephesians 2 what revealed what God has to do because the entire human race—every human being—begins and lives their lives (at least for a time) spiritually dead toward God. Dead in chosen transgressions of God’s holiness, dead in our following the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, following the spirit that gives marching orders to the sons of disobedience. We are very much alive to sin but dead to God. By nature deserving God’s wrath.
Having no personal power to reverse our deadness before God, WHAT God had to do was simply this. Rich in mercy, great in love, full of grace WHAT God does is what He alone can do. To raise us from the dead, to make us alive together with Christ, to seat us right now with Him in the highest of heavenly places.
By grace you/I have been rescued. Jonah said it from the slime of a whale’s stomach in the depths of the sea – “Salvation belongs to the Lord” (Jonah 2:9., cf. Psalm 3:8). Our broken world, the lost, often frustrated if not angry, persons of the human race desperately need this FIRST from the Lord. They need His life, His resurrecting power, His reversing our walking-in-sin deadness.
But all of that begs a 2nd question. WHY does God do this life-infusing raising? WHY does He save us the way he does, and to what important purpose?
That's what we'll explore in today's message.
One New Man #1
September 6, 2020 • David Staff
What is the right question to be asking these days, especially about the problem of our brokenness and hostility, our anger and relentless polarization? About our inability to live as if we are made in God’s image and treat each other accordingly?
On Wednesday this week, I made a driving mistake in the North Grand mall parking lot, and within 2 seconds the other driver shouted out his window, “You a---hole!!!” I didn’t even get a chance to apologize.
It’s on our streets; it’s in our homes; it’s in our hearts.. It’s in our politics, in our government, in our education, even in our churches. In us!
We want (we say) it to stop. We often think that more protesting, more press conferences, more laws, more calling out the others to shame them into agreeing and changing, more personal and national trying harder to have the right attitudes and act more righteously and justly—all of that and more is the solution. Let’s just demand even more forcefully that we all try harder.
Somehow, some way we just want all the wrongness to stop and all the rightness simply to kick in. And yet Bono I think is correct. We think we have the answers, but it may be the question we have wrong. So if I may, let me risk being thought a complete idiot and ask you what I think is the first right question. Here it is: Are you alive today?
Sure, I’ll repeat it. Are you alive today? You might be thinking, “What kind of question is
that?” Of course I’m alive. I’m sitting here, listening to you. I’m breathing. In a few minutes, God willing I’ll walk out of here and get on with what’s next in my life. Why are you asking me if I’ve alive?”
Well, I’m asking you about this because when it comes to identifying a solution to the messes, the key question for anyone is whether or not they are alive. Truth be told, vast majority of people in our world trying to solve the problem are not. Not alive. Not really. Not actually. Not truly alive.
Here’s the truth—we cannot begin to solve the problem of our broken, self-centered mistreatment of one another without being truly alive. And if, on our own and in our natural state, we are not alive,” then a 2nd question becomes even more important. Since we, on our own, are not truly alive, then Has God done anything about the death that dominates all human beings?
