August 3, 2008 Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Series: We are the Body
Sermon Title: “Saved to Serve”
Text: Ephesians 2:1-10
Dr.
Delivered on August 3, 2008
“For we are what
he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand to be our way of life.” Eph. 2:10
Saved to Serve
Wow, it feels
good to be back in my home pulpit after being out for so long. As I begin this
morning, let me thank you for allowing me to go to
For instance, this time God taught me about how simple Christianity really is, and how much we tend to complicate it over here. Most African Christians don’t have church buildings, hymnals, screens, chairs, or even walls and floors. All they need is a few people, a tree to meet under, and, if they’re lucky, some drums to play. Most people you meet out in the villages can’t read or write and have never heard of or seen many of the conveniences we take for granted, so when speaking to them you are forced to speak in the same ways Jesus, Peter, Paul and the others spoke using agricultural imagery like seeds and reaping and sowing and images taken from first century family and work life. It’s very humbling when you are forced to give up your clever stories and your deep theological insights in order to share the pure unadorned Gospel of Jesus Christ.
My mission experience this year made me want to come back home and boil it all down to the basics. It made me want to simplify things without being simplistic. It made me want to make certain that here at NewSong we are still building our house on the foundation laid by the apostles and the prophets – the house where Christ is still the cornerstone and nothing, and no one else.
And so today
we’re starting a new series of messages called “We are the Body.” The
title comes straight out of the Bible: 1 Corinthians 12:27 says, “Now you
are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” The goal of
this series is to ground ourselves in a more organic understanding of the
church versus the institutional understanding, or I should say misunderstanding
we have in
As smart as we are it amazes me how backwards we get things sometimes. For instance, take our understanding of “organic.” If you go to the grocery store and buy organic food, you end up paying a premium for it as if it were something exotic. It seems to me that you ought to pay more for the non-organic food because that’s the food with all the preservatives and where all the chemicals have been used. A similar situation, for those of you who remember it, was when unleaded gas first came out several years ago. When unleaded gas came out it was more expensive than regular gas which had lead in it. The sad thing is the oil companies had to add the lead to gas to begin with to make it leaded. It seems to me that unleaded should be have been cheaper because they didn’t have to add the lead anymore – but it wasn’t. They added lead and then charged us to remove it.
But I digress….my point is that we have “added stuff” to the Christian faith, and its most obvious expression, the church and made it non-organic and more complicated than it really is. We’re going to peel away the layers to Christianity’s most basic, fundamental expression. We’re going to stick with the understanding that all other things being equal, simpler is always better. It was Albert Einstein, generally recognized as the most brilliant scientist to ever live who said, “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” That’s what I hope we can do. Perhaps we can come up with an E=Mc2 of our own. That simple formula revolutionized science; perhaps as we move through the month of August God will reveal to us collectively and individually what it really means to be a Christian and what it really means to be a church. We’re going to expose some myths and learn some new truths.
Today’s message,
called “Saved to Serve” centers around what it means to be called. The
biblical (Greek) word for call is kaleo, which means “to invite” or “to
summon.” The relationship between God and us is most clearly understood in the
context of call. God calls and we respond. Christianity is fundamentally about a
relationship, and that relationship is defined by God’s call. That’s the way
it’s been from the very beginning. In Genesis God called out in the Garden of
Eden, “Adam, where are you?” In the New Testament Jesus walked along the
shores of the
One myth I hope we can do away with this morning is that only certain people are called. I wrote in my newsletter article a couple of weeks ago about how the institutional church has came up with the notion that there is some kind of special private or secret call required minister in the church. That understanding undermines the priesthood of all believers. It creates a false hierarchy of clergy versus laity.
But in fact, all
God’s people are called. That’s actually the first of several truths I want us
to take away from this series of messages: Every believer stands under the
call of God. The ancient church had an ordination service for its members –
they called it baptism. On the 24th we’ll be baptizing several folks
out at
A book I once
read by Greg Ogden[i] included
a helpful way of understanding God’s call. In the book
A. God’s General
Call
The first of these is a God’s general call, which relates to who we are. God’s call to all believers at its most basic and fundamental level is not to do something; it’s to be someone, a Christian. Many believers get the cart before the horse and start trying to do stuff before they properly understand what it means to be Christian. Many churches wear their people out by trying to out do other churches, when being God’s people really starts at understanding what it means to be the people of God.
Perhaps this will become clearer when we look at three subdivisions under God’s general call.
1. Call to
Christ
The first of these is the Call to Christ. A disciple is someone who responds in faith to the call of Jesus Christ. Christianity begins with a call to relationship. Salvation is always the starting point in anyone’s relationship with God through Christ. A fundamental change occurs in your life when you are saved.
That’s what Paul is talking about here in the first part of today’s reading from Ephesians:
1You were
dead through the trespasses and sins 2in which you once lived,
following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the
air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3All
of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires
of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone
else. 4But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with
which he loved us 5even when we were dead through our trespasses,
made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6and
raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ
Jesus, 7so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable
riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8For by
grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is
the gift of God— 9not the result of works, so that no one may boast.
Paul says you and I “were dead,” we were by nature “children of wrath like everyone else.” “But God, who is rich in mercy…[has] made us alive together with Christ.”
Jesus said he came to seek and save the lost. When the religious elite questioned him about the questionable company he was keeping Jesus responded that he “came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).
Again, remember
we are keeping it simple, organic, and real. This is African kind of preaching
– it’s not about some system, or institution, or a philosophy of life. It all
starts right here with salvation. Again, I think we often take this for granted
here. When I was preaching in
2. Call to
Community
But God’s call doesn’t stop there. The next aspect of our understanding of calling is the call to community. God doesn’t call us out of darkness and into his marvelous light to go it alone. He calls us to community. Community – the church – is the supportive place where we work out our new identity as believers. It’s the place where we nurse our wounds, and are held accountable by others who love us. The call to community occurs simultaneously with the call to Christ. Look back at the text for today. Paul starts what he says using the singular tense, “You were dead…in which you lived…” But then he moves to the plural tense when speaking about those who are saved – look at verse 3, “All of us once lived…we were by nature…he loved us…” Everything after salvation is us, or we.
It should come as no surprise then that the Greek word for church, ekklesia, means “the called out ones.” The “called out” people are both a local assembly in a particular location (NewSong), and the church universal (in every place). Here’s truth #3, there is no call to salvation without a call to the body of Christ. To be in Christ is to be in the church. There is “one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph. 4:4-5). It is here, in the church, where our particular call (which we’ll talk about in a moment) is discerned, supported, and refined.
Again, not to harp on our shortcomings over here, but so often Christianity is depicted as some kind of Lone Ranger adventure. Believers hop from church to church desiring anonymity or looking for the latest and greatest show. Or worse, we come to church and hide our wounds or lie to one another by putting on our “church face” so no one knows we’re hurting or sinning. Why do we do that?
Friday night Donna and I had the staff of NewSong over for dinner. We sat at the dining room table and talked for five hours together. We laughed, we made fun of one another, we talked about everything – we were real with one another. We answered the call to community. We all need to do that.
3. Call to
Transformation
The third subdivision of God’s general call is the call to transformation. When we respond to the call of Christ and the call to community, we immediately enter a lifetime process of change which is the call to transformation. The call of Christ is a call to die to the old self in order to become the new creation. Paul says in verse 3 and following, “All of us once lived…in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses…” But now things are different, God has, “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places…” Later in this same letter he writes, “I therefore…beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…” (4:1). There are a number of different images used to describe this transformation. For instance it’s described as growing up, maturing, bearing fruit, and being led by the Spirit. The image that sums it all up however, is that we are to grow into Christlikeness. The goal of salvation is “to be conformed to the image of God’s Son” (Rom. 8:29).
Best of all, this process of transformation isn’t about gritting our teeth and changing ourselves. Look back at verse 4, who “raised us up?” It was God! How are we saved? We are saved by grace through faith. God does it all. It’s not about being something you are not. Instead it’s about getting our false selves out of the way and letting His Spirit take us over so our true selves can shine through.
It’s like a statue that someone is going to carve from a piece of granite. Everything is already there in the block of marble to make a beautiful statue. All the raw material is there. But it takes an artist to come along with a chisel and a hammer to release the beauty and art that is contained within the stone. That’s how it is with us. But we’re not the artist – God is. God comes along and he begins to chisel away extraneous fragments of marble away and slowly, surely, what God intended all along begins to be exposed.
B. God’s
Particular Call
All this – the call to Christ, the call to community, and the call to transformation – falls under the being part of being a Christian. When we move from God’s general call to be a Christian to His particular call, we are moving from “being” to “doing.” This particular call is what Paul was talking about in the final verse of today’s passage: “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (2:10). We are called to ministry or service. We are saved (being) to serve (doing).
For each one of us this calling takes on a particular shape depending on the ways God has gifted us. There is a consistent, inner self in you and me that was shaped by God from before the foundations of time – we were created that way – that is to be our “way of life” as Paul puts it in verse 10.
And don’t miss that last few words – “way of life.” God’s particular call isn’t about your job in the church, or your secular job. His particular call has shaped you entirely so that it is to be your “way of life.”
There’s another myth of our culture that has to do with the “it’s all about me” way of thinking in the world today that suggests that each day brings new and unlimited possibilities in which we can wake up and say, “What do I want to be today?” I’m reminded of this when I pick up the latest copy of Reader’s Digest and other magazines. The myth is that somehow overnight the molecules in your body can rearrange themselves to that we greet the new day with a vastly different temperament, set of abilities, skills, and desires. Yes, skills can be taught. Yes, character can be molded. Yes, we can change (thank God!) but there is an essential “us” that God has created that he means to stay that way.
When properly engaged this “inner self” will produce a flow of energy, excitement, joy and energy. When we operate in ways that are consistent with the way God has made you there is a spontaneous, yet deep release of joy that says, “This is what I was made for.” Our unique self gives the fundamental shape to our particular call from God.
Over the next few weeks we’re going to try to help all of us discover specifically what that is for each of us. I hope you’ll be with us throughout the month as we go on this journey.
As I close today and we prepare for communion, let me say it one more time. God doesn’t just call prophets, or apostles, or preachers. God calls everybody one way or another to serve him. It doesn’t matter whether you’re 90 years old, or a student in middle school. It doesn’t matter whether you are married or single. It doesn’t matter if your husband or wife won’t come to church with you. It doesn’t matter if you’re the riches buy in town, or the poorest. God wants you – he’s calling you today and every day. He wants you to say yes to a new life in Christ. He wants you to be a part of a community of faith. He wants you to be transformed by the renewal of your mind. He wants you to live out your faith by serving him through the ways in which he has gifted you. You are saved to serve. One way of another God is calling you. Are you listening? Will you respond?