Woe to you, Christians – Part 2 – How to stop the two main things that will cause your death

Imagine you have been invited to your pastor’s house for dinner and some leaders of the church are there.  It is a nice meal with pleasant dinner conversation.

Do you think you would take this time to point out all the things you didn’t like about the people around the table?

Some of you might!  Some would be mortified of doing that.

Jesus, in Luke 11:37-56 was invited to dinner with a Pharisee, and an expert in the Law was there.  Before dinner Jesus chose to forgo the traditional washing, and the Pharisee noticed and was surprised.  Jesus saw this as a cultural open door, and stormed through it.   Over the course of the next few minutes he proceeds to insult the Pharisees and Law Experts, using a prophetic Woe Oracle against them.  I introduced the concept of a Woe Oracle last week.  Woe Oracles used funeral language to proclaim “if you keep doing what you’re doing, you will die!”

I also said last week that perhaps the American Church would do well to listen in to this sharp conversation.  Stats have been telling us that we are declining.  Maybe there is something that Jesus was saying to the religious leaders of his day that could help us avoid death in our day.

So what were the Pharisees and Law Experts doing that was so wrong?  Two things.  They were being hypocritical and legalistic.  Read through the Woes again and you’ll see how they were not practicing what they were preaching (hypocrisy), and they were burdening people with extra laws (legalism).

Is it possible that the decline of the American Church is attributable, at least partially, to our own hypocrisy and legalism?

I know this is a difficult passage. These are hard and harsh words from Jesus. He is speaking to those who are living a lifestyle of hypocrisy.  I know that we are not the Pharisees, but don’t we all have areas of hypocrisy?  I know not too many of us are living lifestyles of complete and total legalism, but I don’t want to let us off the hook here either.  Instead I think we all should wrestle with a passage like this.  We are disciples of Jesus.  And Jesus certainly called out his disciples, who had areas of struggle, many times, just as he is calling out the teachers of the law here.  I think it is always good for us, as people who are disciples of Jesus, who desire to make our hearts more and more like the heart of Jesus, to take a hard and honest look at ourselves and see what areas we have improved in and what areas we still need to work on. We should always have teachable hearts, ready to make changes and to do the hard work to change attitudes that work themselves out into our actions.

To use the language of the parable Jesus told to the Pharisee, in what areas are we clean cups on the outside and filthy on the inside?  Are we living secret lives?  Are we hypocritical in any way? We need to get that out in the open, confess it, and change.

This does not mean that you need to be proclaiming all your junk to the public all the time – that is not what I am saying. I am saying that our hearts should be beating like Jesus and that will naturally overflow into our actions.

Additionally, we need to address any potential legalism in our lives.  If the Gospel is about grace through faith, not by works, we can hinder people from the Gospel by emphasizing rules.

Do we believe that following these rules define us as a Christian? If so, is it possible that we have led people astray by communicating to them the perception that they, too, if they want to be a Christian must follow those rules?

Let me give you an illustration. In the early church, in Acts chapter 15, the leaders of the church called a conference. At this point the church was maybe 10 years old or so, and it had grown a lot from the original 120 who started out. Guys like Paul and Barnabas had gone on mission trips and non-Jews from outside Israel had become Christians. Some of the Jewish Christians, including some Pharisees who became Christians, heard about these non-Jews becoming disciples of Jesus, and while they were happy, they felt that the non-Jews needed to start following the Old Testament Jewish Laws now. Especially the law of circumcision. Imagine that. These Jewish Christians felt that adult male non-Jews needed to be circumcised! Ouch!

Paul was totally against this. He argued that the message of Jesus was that the Old Testament Law was fulfilled in Jesus, and that Christians, disciples of Jesus, didn’t have to follow those Laws. Those Laws were essentially the treaty or the covenant between God and Israel, not between God and the church. Paul was right, and thankfully the leaders saw things Paul’s way and they did not require the non-Jewish disciples to get surgery. Whew.

Just like them, let us not put rules and regulations in place of faith in Christ and a life of discipleship!  What defines us as a Christian is that we have hearts that beat for the Lord. That we are his disciples, and our lives are totally arranged about being a disciple who makes disciples.

So in conclusion, the message of Jesus’ Woe Oracle to the Pharisees and teacher of the law is that we should remove hypocrisy and legalism from our lives. We should not be one person on Sunday at church and someone very different in our private lives.

Have you heard the story of the police officer who recently committed suicide because he had a double life? Two sets of families?  We don’t ever want to hear Jesus say Woe to you Church, and that means we should live a life fully for him. Ask him to reveal any hypocrisy in your life. And then remove it.

If there are rules you are imposing on others, maybe even unwittingly, would ask God to reveal them to you, so you can present a pure Gospel and not trip people up on legalism?

Woe to you, Christians! – Part 1: How a woe oracle could save the church from death

“Woe!” but not “Woah!”

What’s the difference?

“Woah” is an utterance of surprise, or a command to “Stop!”

But “Woe” is a wailing of sadness.  In the Bible there are Woe Oracles in the Old Testament.  That word “woe” was used in Israel primarily at funerals.  People would loudly proclaim “woe” at the passing of a loved one or friend.  From the descriptions we have in the Bible, it seems like a funeral could have been quite a boisterous, awful display.  Some cultures around the world still today have similar practices of mourning.

A common phrase in our culture is “Woe is me.”  We use this phrase to have a pity party for ourselves, to explain that we are feeling sad.  But in the Bible, the word “Woe” is most often directed at someone else.  In the Bible we don’t read “woe is me”, but instead we often read “Woe to you!”

The biblical prophets often uttered woe oracles crying out the word “Woe” as a part of their prophecy against a nation. In so doing, they were invoking funeral language over that nation.  “Woe to you, who are complacent in Zion” the prophet Amos declared, for the people of Israel lived lavishly while practicing injustice.  There are examples in many of the other prophets as well.  The gist of a prophetic woe oracle, then, was that the nation should be very sad because their funeral was impending!  Thus, a woe oracle is designed to shake people up, to make changes, so that their funeral could be delayed.

In our ongoing series through the Gospel of Luke, our next section is an episode in which Jesus joins the chorus of prophets and proclaims a bold woe oracle.  Who would he say this to?  Like the prophets of old, would he say “Woe” to the nation of Israel?  No.  There was a different group he focuses on.  The religious leaders.  You’ve probably heard of them: the Pharisees and the experts in the Law.

Why would Jesus give a woe oracle against them?  Take a look at Luke 11:37-53, and you can see what he has to say.

As you read this, try to learn why Jesus got so bold.  And then try to imagine what he might say to Christians!  Is it possible that Jesus might have reason to proclaim “Woe to you American Christians…”?

I think he might.  And I think it could be hard for us to hear.

Recently on the Today Show, the hosts each answered one of those “Would You Rather?” questions.  A “Would You Rather?” situation asks you to choose between two options, neither of which is completely desirable.  In this case, the question was “Would you rather know the time of your death or the way you will die?”  I can imagine that the knowledge of either of those could lead to lots of anxiety.  Which would you choose?  I lean toward knowing the way I will die.  But really, I don’t want to know when or how I will die.  When a prophet proclaims a woe oracle they are doing something far better than the “Would You Rather?” question.  A woe oracle is saying “People you will die if you continue living this way!  So make a change and live.”  Therefore, I think we Christians should want to know the woes that Jesus might proclaim over the American church.  We’ve been hearing for years that the American church is in decline, dying.  Perhaps we need a bold woe oracle to shake us up and help us get healthy again!

On Sunday at Faith Church, we’ll study the woes that Jesus proclaims against the religious leaders of his day, and we’ll see if those woes might lead us to woes that he would have for us.

What if we’re totally wrong about what it means to follow Jesus – Part 2

My son walked up to our pantry closet in our kitchen, looking for a snack.  He quickly put his hand over his nose, uttering a muffled “Ugh! What is that smell?”

I looked over at him standing there, and said “What do you mean? Is it the trashcan?”  Our kitchen trash bin is right next to the pantry, which is maybe not the best location.  Because it can get stinky, I thought it must be the source of the smell.

But no, he said, “It smells like poop! And it’s coming from in the pantry!”

I got up from the sofa and went over to check it out.  I caught a whiff of something, which smelled a bit like poop, but not quite either.  It wasn’t strong, so I started to dismiss it in my mind.  I reached down and halfheartedly shifted some boxes on the floor of the pantry, and I didn’t see much beyond some dust.  Admittedly, I was pretty sure the smell wasn’t coming from the trashcan.  And I didn’t really want to deal with whatever was causing the smell.  So I said, “I don’t know.  Let’s not worry about it.”

And with that I put it out of mind, and a few days went by.

A couple days later, I saw my son standing in front of the pantry again with his hand over his nose.  In the ensuing days, I had stuck my nose in there a couple times when I, too, was snacking, and there was definitely an odor.  But it still seemed faint, and I didn’t want to deal with it, so I didn’t.

This past Monday morning, though, the odor had become strong.  Michelle pulled out all the boxes and containers on the floor and found a dead mouse caught in a glue trap.  I will confess that I suspected that all along, and did nothing about it.  We had seen mice sneaking around lately, and eventually caught three.  It took hardly any time or effort to vacuum up the remains of a snack bag a mouse had hidden in the back corner to feast on, as well as the accumulated mouse droppings (I guess my son was right about the poop!), and then wash the floor, and put the boxes back.

Why did I wait to deal with the foul smell in my pantry, when it was relatively easy and effortless to resolve?  Have you ever experienced that feeling of not wanting to deal with the junk of life?  Have you ever let it linger?

Last week I introduced Luke 11:14-36 by suggesting that we might be all wrong about how we follow Jesus.  In that section, Jesus casts a demon out of a man, and people in the crowd confront him with two questions: 1. Did he exorcise the demon by Satan’s power?  and 2. Would he show them a sign from heaven?  To give you a little preview of the answers, they are “No” and “No”.  But these answers gave Jesus the opportunity to talk about what it means to follow him.

I find it fascinating what he does not say.  He does not say “Believe in him.”  Clearly, believing in Jesus, trusting in him, is a good thing, but why would he not mention that?  Christians, and especially Evangelicals, have put a lot of emphasis on believing.  Instead, he says that if we are to be his followers, we should have no neutrality about him.  We are either with him, or we are against him.  And when a person in the crowd shouted out “Blessed is your mother!”, Jesus responded with “On the contrary! Blessed are those who hear God’s Word and obey it.”  Jesus is saying that following him will affect our choices, our behavior.  Following him is not just about belief.  Instead his followers will show what they believe by hearing his word and doing what it says.

There are two primary applications of this, the inward and the outward.  Or as Jesus said “Love God and Love your neighbor”.  Inwardly, God wants to enter the smelly closets of our lives and clean them out.  He wants access to our secret thoughts and actions, our perversions, our addictions, to transform them into something far better than we could ever imagine.  As someone has said, we too often hear Jesus knocking at the door, let him in, and just hope we can hang out with him in the living room of our lives.  We know the place is messy, and we’re embarrassed about showing him around.  But he says “I think I smell poop coming from the pantry in your kitchen.”  And we respond “Nah…it’s no big deal.”

That sinful habit, that addiction, that undisciplined mind, that attitude, that complaining spirit…we know they’re in our lives, and we have a halfhearted desire to allow Jesus to clean us up, but we put it off.  Maybe we have become accustomed to the stink, and we don’t smell it anymore.  Maybe we think that it’s not so bad.  Maybe we’re afraid we won’t be able to change, and this is just who we are.  But Jesus says “hear my word and obey.  Either you’re with me, or you’re against me.”

There are also the outward ways we show that we’re with him.  Particularly, he said “Make disciples.”  The primary way we show that we are his disciples is to make more disciples.  But so many of us are not making disciples.  We say that we believe in him, but we do not do the major task he called us to do in his word: “Make disciples”.

So do you need to allow Jesus to clean up that stinky closet in your life?  Do you need to make disciples?  Are you hearing his Word?  Are you obeying what he says? 

What if we’re totally wrong about what it should look like to follow Jesus? Part 1

We are about to head to the polls again. Who are you for, and who are you against?  Republican?  Democrat?  Third-party?  As the presidential race heats up, who are you for and who are you against?

“For or against” is more than just a way to approach politics.  It is a common way we look at many aspects of life.  Who are you for and who are you against in the World Series?  The Royals or the Mets?  Who are for or against in the big football game?  We use “for or against” reasoning when it comes to reality TV show competitions like The Voice or The Amazing Race.  We use “for or against” reasoning when it comes to our favorite brands, restaurants, and certainly, religion.

So what about Jesus?  Are you for or against him?

You might think, “Against Jesus? Why would you even ask that, Joel? This is a blog introducing a sermon. People who listen to the sermon obviously come to church because they are for Jesus!”  Maybe.  Maybe not…

If you’re thinking something like that, then I hear you. I know that most people who read this blog and come to church are Jesus people and we are for him!

But here’s the concern I have:  what if we think we are for him, but he would look at us and say “You’re not with me. You think you are with me, but you’re actually not”???

How many of us would want to be surprised when we are standing before him and hear him say that?

If you think “Well, that’s not possible, is it?”, I think it is pretty important to raise the question. Is it possible that we would be surprised to hear him say “You think you are for me, but you are actually not”???

In Matthew 7, Jesus tells the story like this: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”

Jesus himself says that there will be people who will be surprised to hear him say “I never knew you.” Those people will look at him shocked, and say “Wait a minute…we prophesied in your name, we drove out demons and did miracles even. That’s a lot of great religious stuff that we did in your name. How can you possibly say that you never knew us??? That makes no sense, Jesus. That is wrong!”

But Jesus says “I never knew you.”

So this Sunday, as we continue our study in Luke, we come to a passage where Jesus addresses this very concern.   And guess what?  You can know whether you are for him or against him. On Sunday we find out how.

Prepare for the sermon on Sunday by reading Luke 11:14-36, and then join us at Faith Church as we discuss this further!

How the Lord’s Prayer Matters – Luke 11:1-13

Can you recite the Lord’s Prayer?  Go ahead, give it a try…”Our Father…”

Need a hint?  Click here.

How did you do?

How long has it been since you recited it?  Maybe you recite the prayer often.  Or maybe your church worship uses the prayer weekly?

What does the Lord’s Prayer matter?  Are we supposed to receive some kind of blessing if we pray it?  Is this why people want prayer back in school?  Will our nation be blessed if we require students across the land to recite the Prayer?  Is it actually an incantation that forces the Lord to bless us?

Wait…aren’t we against empty, ritualistic prayer?  Didn’t Jesus have something to say about prayer that is nothing more than meaningless babble?  In fact, he did.  Just before he taught the Lord’s Prayer, he said this:

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.“

Is it wrong then to recite the prayer?

No, not if our heart desires the prayer to be a meaningful communication with the Lord.  But perhaps there is a lot more to the prayer that just a brief recitation.  Is it possible that Jesus was teaching a format for prayer?

 

How to escape the crushing busyness of life, Part 2 – The Solution

So last week I introduced the sermon from Luke 10:38-42 by asking if you feel defeated by the busyness of life?  Do you feel that way?  Do you wish you could escape the busyness, find some freedom, some space some peace?  As we looked at the story of two sisters, Mary and Martha, Jesus taught us how to find that space and peace.

What we learned is that Martha was distracted by the busyness of life, by lesser things. Not bad things, but lesser things. Houses need to be cleaned and cared for. Cars need to be maintained. These are important things. But like Martha, these things can distract us to the point of being overburdened and anxious. But there is something greater. That something greater is making space for Jesus in our lives.

Jesus said that Martha was worried and anxious over lesser things, and that Mary had made the right choice by focusing on learning from Jesus.

Jesus tells Martha that Mary chose better, and that will not be taken from her.

How many of you have desired to grow closer in your relationship with Jesus, but you’ve thought “I can read more from the Bible, when the kids are out of the house. When school is done. When the big project at work is finished. When the project at home is done. In the winter when there is no yard work.”???

We have great plans for growing in our relationship with Jesus, and yet we put it off. We can be distracted by lesser things. How many of you watch spend lots of time watching shows on Netflix or TV, but barely give any time to reading the Bible. Sitting at Jesus’ feet? Listening to him?

How many of you spend loads of time on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat, but the Bible app goes unused?

Are you distracted? Are you over burdened? What are you doing with those burdens?

Are you more like Martha or Mary? Again Jesus says that Mary chose better.

So how do we change? We have to actually do something. We have to choose better. We have to make changes. We talk a lot about these things. We talk about not wanting to become legalistic, and so then we do very little. But we can joyously, graciously, non-legalistically change how we spend our time so that we sit at Jesus’ feet more and more often.

It could mean lowering your standards for how clean your house needs to be so that you can free up time in your life to spend with Jesus.

It could mean less TV and more time reading your Bible.

It could mean, like the guy in the video last week suggested, changing how busy your family is, particularly how much the kids are involved in. Less running around can mean more free time for family and Jesus.

As a family, make it a priority to have dinner together.   And bring God into that. In our house that means pulling out the Bible and reading a chapter after dinner. It’s nothing fancy. Usually we don’t discuss the chapter.  I just read.  One small piece of advice I would recommend is that you use a contemporary translation. I use The Message version because it is so readable and easy to understand.

Finally, make participation in worship, Sunday School and small group a priority for your family. It is in those times where we gather together with a community of believers to hear from the Lord together.

How to escape the crushing busyness of life, Part 1 – The Problem

How many of you have heard yourself say lately “I am too busy!”?

How many of you have thought “I’ll never get this all done.”?

How many of you have felt like there aren’t enough hours in the day?

Remember how the Good Samaritan made time for the injured man. But the Levite and Priest did not make time. I want to repeat a few words from my sermon last week. “It would have been amazing if the priest or Levite would have stopped. But they didn’t.

People have speculated why. It is good to talk about because there are plenty of times when we could help out in a situation and we don’t. In our day, one of the major reasons we walk by on the other side, is that we are so busy. Our lives are so jammed that there is no time to be a Good Samaritan. Or at least we feel like there is no time.”

In fact one person has suggested that this is the biggest problem the church of today is facing:

.

What do you think?  Is he right?  Do you feel the crush of busyness in your family?

Busy lives are not necessarily better lives. In fact your busy life and mine could be a huge problem. Our busy lives could be doing great damage to us.

But it is possible to make a change! In the next episode in Jesus’ life we’re going to meet two people, one who is distracted by the busyness of life. One who has made a change. There is hope for you. If you are living a crazy busy manic life, we are going to learn how to change, how to free up space.

So if you want to get a preview, read Luke 10:38-42.   Then join us at Faith Church for worship where we’ll look into this further!

Moving from “fail” to “faith” means learning to be a better neighbor – Luke 10:25-37

Last week I asked the question, how do we move from Christian “Fail” to Christian “Faith”?  While there are certainly loads of Christians striving to be faithful, there are many fails too.  Jesus once told a famous story to instruct us how to be faithful to his way.  The story is called The Good Samaritan, and you can view a wonderful dramatic presentation of it here:

You wouldn’t pick this up in the video, but as Jesus is telling the story, after he talks about the priest and Levite walking by their beat-up Jewish brother, when he mentions that next a Samaritan arrives, the people listening to Jesus tell the story would have been thinking “The Samaritan just showed up…uh-oh, now this beat-up guy is going to die FOR SURE!”

For years and years of hearing this story, we have made it so nice. The GOOD Samaritan. What a nice guy. But the only reason we call this the GOOD Samaritan is because the Jews considered all Samaritans to be BAD. So the Samaritan in Jesus’ story would either finish the guy off as easy prey, or he too would just walk by. That’s just the way Samaritans were.

Why did the Jews hate the Samaritan so much?

It goes way back into the time of the kings of Israel. Some mixed breeding was going on. Samaritans then created their own homeland, their own Scriptures, their own places of worship. Jews would go attack a Samaritan church, and the Samaritan’s would retaliate.  Let’s just say that the result was a hyper-charged hatred of one another.

When Jesus places the Samaritan in the role of the good guy in his story, you could hear people in the crowd gasp and maybe spit and vomit. They would not have expected that, and it might have made them angry.  It should make us convicted.

You know the guy who recently killed those college students in Oregon? You know how he said that he was specifically targeting Christians? He’s the Samaritan.

And yet, there you have it, that’s Jesus’ answer to the question, what does it mean to be neighborly? Doo what the evil guy did. Not because he is evil, not because of the centuries-old racial tension, but because he took the time to love.

We Christians can get so wrapped up in ourselves. We cannot get to where the Samaritan was, ready and willing to serve selflessly in a big loving way, if we are not able to serve selflessly in small things. So we can start small, work on dying to ourselves in little ways, and then move on to bigger and better things.

This Samaritan achieves a high degree of selfless love. He is not just opening a door, or saying please and thank you. Those are great things, but note that he is going well beyond what is considered basic care. Look at how his loving care for his enemy is described in verses 33-35.

No matter what was going on in the Samaritan’s life, he made time for the hurting man. No matter the long years of hatred between Jews and Samaritans, he put it aside. No matter the cost of money, he gave it.

So, who is your neighbor?  And how will you be neighborly to them?

Neighbors are not just the ones far away, but our literal neighbors. A pastor friend told me about a video introducing Christian writer Hugh Halter’s book.  The video was very convicting.  Why?  So often we judge and condemn our neighbors before we ever get to know them.  The Samaritan easily could have done that.  In some cases we might feel justified condemning our neighbors.  They might be making choices we strongly disagree with, and we are concerned that if we are neighborly, we’ll be misunderstood as though we are affirming their lifestyle.  So because we don’t want to be misunderstood as condoning their choices, we distance ourselves.  Hugh Halter’s video challenges us that before we condone or condemn, can we first practice friendship?  Can we at least open a door for God to work?  Can we love like the Good Samaritan did?

Take a look at this challenging video and ask yourself how neighborly God might want you to be.

 

How to move from Christian “Fail” to Christian “Faith”

The words on the by-line were “Christian FAIL”.

I use two phone apps to read the news: Google Newstand and Flipboard, which are free newspaper, magazine and website article readers.  Earlier this week a Flipboard article with that by-line caught my eye. “Christian FAIL.” I knew what it was going to be about. Something about how Christians were being hypocritical or ridiculous.

Sure enough.  The brief description said this: “A Missouri pastor is accused of stealing more than $21,000 from his church to pay off his 20-year-old mistress.”

Then there was this by a blogger: “A friend she spent years of her childhood in a cancer ward, and recalled her friends dying on a regular basis. She said ‘Christians would come in and read us books about Jesus, and say he was going to heal us. You learned real quick that they were just there to make themselves feel good. Kids still got rolled out of the room in the middle of the night, and you knew they’d never come back’.”

For situations like this and others, there is an impression some in our society have of Christians, and Evangelicals in particular, that we are not loving and have not followed the teaching of Jesus.

Christians are doing a lot of good, and there are many who strive hard to follow Jesus.  But as we read about the Christian Fails, a healthy response is to ask ourselves if we are perpetuating the impression that Christians are not loving, not following the teaching of Jesus.  No one is perfect, and we Christians need to humbly admit when we fail.  Because we do fail.  And when we confess, we need to renew our commitment to the way of Jesus, and actually do what he teaches.

This Sunday at Faith Church we come to what is arguably the most famous teaching of Jesus: Luke 10:25-37, the parable commonly known as the Good Samaritan.

How many of you could tell me how the story goes without clicking on the passage and reading it? I suspect lots of you know at least the basics.  We hear about Good Samaritans in the news regularly.  That’s a good thing, because Good Samaritans are people who help others.

The danger with something familiar, though, is that we will check out and not listen. And in this case, if we do not listen, we could be in danger of many more Christian Fails.  And yet, if we do listen as we should to Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, we’re going to hear him challenge our thinking.  So I ask you to do some hard work and read this story as if for the first time.

There is a reason we Christians have gained a reputation for not being loving or not following the teaching of Jesus. And maybe part of the problem is that we have checked this parable off the list, because we know it so well, we just assume we’re doing fine. But maybe we’re not doing fine. Maybe we can be encouraged to think about The Good Samaritan in a new, different or deeper way.  We’ll see how the Good Samaritan encourages us to move from Christian “fail” to Christian “faith”.

So we would love to have you join us at Faith Church this Sunday to hear more!

How to stop treating people as projects, Part 2 – People of Peace & Missional Communities

Last week I introduced my sermon on Luke 10:1-24 talking about how we Christians can be guilty of treating people as our own little spiritual projects.  While I don’t believe that most Christians set out to make people into projects, in our eagerness to see people experience what we think is so amazing, namely, following Jesus, we can go overboard and treat those people as projects.

But they are people.  And we need to learn to treat them better.  So in Luke 10:1-24, Jesus teaches us a better way.  The story is that Jesus is once again sending out a group of his followers on a mission trip.  This time 72 of them, two-by-two, venture out to heal the sick, cast out demons, and tell people that God’s Kingdom is near.  We learn from Luke that they have a wonderful trip, and everyone is filled with joy.

Maybe it went so well because they followed Jesus’ teaching of the better way.  Maybe instead of treating people like projects, they put into practice the instructions Jesus gave them.  What was that instruction, that better way?

Persons of Peace.

Here’s what Jesus taught them in verses 5-7: “When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.”

Notice how Jesus describes the person. The person is open, receptive. It seems that God is already at work in their lives. On rare occasions we’ll meet someone like this in a passing connection like an airplane ride or a seat at a football game. But for the most part, they will be people we already know like our neighbors, co-workers, family members, or long-term friends.

I recently heard the story of someone who would pray for a person in their neighborhood for 6 months, then after six months approach them to see if they were a person of peace

Keep your eyes open for God to bring a person of peace into your life. Pray for them. Do you have a person of peace in your life?

When God is already at work in their lives, they are not your little project, but they are a person of peace.

Paul Mancioche recommends “the following steps where families can do this together:

  • Build predicable patterns of prayer & Bible, food and fun time as a family
  • Look for ‘people of peace’ (Luke 10:6) who feel called to join us
  • Invite them to orbit in and out of our rhythms
  • Disciple them to live in a way that passionately follows God, commits to community life and reaches out to others
  • Do this through shared lives and more formal times of processing together (which we call ‘Huddles’)
  • When they are ready, ask them to lead the same thing in their own homes

This is our 21st Century approximation of what we see Jesus doing in the gospels.”

Here’s how one church has implemented these principles:

Let’s be people of Jesus’ better way!