Pastor Edgar Mayer;
For more sermons and other writings check out pastors homepage: http://www.geocities.com/mayeredgar
A
Chequered Record
This mornings message is tricky because
you may choose to take offense. I hope not but there is a risk. The subject
matter is about regular Sunday morning worship attendance and please agree with me so far this is not our particular strength at Living Grace. Somehow most of us
struggle with the concept of making our way to the Concordia chapel on Sunday
mornings as a first priority in a determined and faithful manner week
in, week out (no matter what) for
worship and fellowship.
There may be comfort in the fact that we
are not the only ones. It is estimated that across the board in the Western
church on any given Sunday 20-40% of the regulars are missing. Colleagues at
the coast tell me that their church members see themselves as committed when
they come to worship about every 2nd or 3rd week.
So how am I going to preach on this? I
have had my own run-ins with unwelcome pressure to show up at church. When
Tatjana and I were students at Luther Seminary in
On a more positive note but one that may further compromise my preaching on
the topic today I remember that a few
years ago when I was still playing for the Uni team in the local soccer
competition, I announced to the congregation that I would shorten the communion
service because I didnt want to be late for the soccer final that afternoon.
One solid member of the congregation made a few comments about the evils of
Sunday sport but she had a twinkle in her eye.
Now with my own chequered record, how am
I going to preach on regular Sunday morning worship attendance? There seem to
be so many valid reasons for staying home or going somewhere else: camping trips, golf days, catching up on sleep,
finishing the home maintenance project,
Maybe it is best to read from the Bible
Isaiah 58:13-14 I read: If
you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my
holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight and the Lords holy day honourable,
and if you honour it by not going your own way and not doing as you please or
speaking idle words, then you will find your joy in the Lord, and I will cause
you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your
father Jacob. The mouth of the Lord has spoken.
What a strange sounding Bible passage
that is! These verses talk about the Sabbath day as a holy day a peculiar concept for many of us modern Christians
in 2007 and then the suggestion
or rather sustained confrontation is
that the holiness of the day can in fact be broken by human behaviour such as
doing as we please, going our own way idle words even. In these verses God sets up conditions for
showing favour to us: If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath,
if you refrain [original: and] from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
if you honour it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please
then
We are not used to that kind of tone
when we have come to expect a church culture where everything possible is done
to entice our attendance good
parking, morning tea, entertaining pace,
Besides,
are there not more easy-going Bible verses as well such as when Jesus said Mark
2:27: The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath
(cf. Romans 14:5-6). Jesus himself seems
to have stretched the strict Sabbath rules of his day when he allowed the
disciples to pick heads of grain and eat them. He was told by the pastors
Matthew 12:2: Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the
Sabbath. Jesus also healed people
on the Sabbath which was further stretching the boundaries Mark 3:2: Some
of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely
to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath.
However, I am not sure whether this is
helping us. Picking a few heads of grain for consumption on the way and healing
people are not in the same league of behaviour than staying away from worship
because of other priorities going
to the market or sleeping in.
The Bible says about Jesus Luke 4:16:
On the Sabbath day he went into the worship
centre [original: synagogue] as was his custom
Jesus when he was walking the earth
he made weekly worship attendance a
priority and the early Christians did not weaken that commitment but rather
increased it Acts 2:42-47: They devoted themselves to the apostles
teaching and to the fellowship
Every day they continued to meet together in
the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes
We remember that God gave his people ten
key-commandments and maybe now is the time to reacquaint ourselves with
commandment number three Exodus 20:8:
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and
do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God
the
Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
The seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do we hear? This is about God (a day to
the Lord) and not about us. This is
about taking time out one day every week to refocus on God a holy day for our holy God. We turn away from the business of the
previous six days we pause to turn away from our sin and seeking forgiveness we enter into his holiness on that holy
day. We worship him. This means that we do not go our own way. We do not as we
please but spend time with our God and give praise to him love him.
He is worthy of that time sacrifice or
do we not think so? Do we care to remember what we were before God granted us
faith? Our sin condemned us. The wrath of God was upon us and an eternity in
hell was waiting for us. We had nothing and no matter how hard we might have
worked every week including Sunday
trading nothing would have made a
difference from an eternal perspective. In the end it was God the Father in
heaven who sent us what he loved most his only begotten son Jesus Christ
and he agreed to the sacrifice of his son and to his death on a cross so that
by his innocent blood we would be cleansed from the unholiness of our sin.
This sacrifice of God was enormous and
selfless and loving beyond measure
and healing for us that we should not have to struggle with keeping
the seventh day holy to the Lord our God. He deserves the time sacrifice of one
day per week so that we praise him for his compassion on us and glorify him in all the world.
Now to some ears despite the worthiness of God this may still sound a little duty-driven and a little too serious for
a friendly gathering. However conceding the underlying seriousness of
Sabbath observance we may not too
quickly minimize Gods call for obedience. We are so used to be in charge of
the seventh day ourselves and we are so used to making our own plans for Sunday
that we may need to be startled back into reality. God is indeed God and when
he issues a commandment to humans, they are meant to submit to him.
God is not to submit to you but I am to
submit to God. We let that sink in and we meditate on that and only then after we confess clearly that the Sabbath day is
about God do we move on and embrace that
the Sabbath day by Gods design is
also about us. Look at it again. How can a rest day a holy day after six days of labour sweat and
toil not be a good thing? A day of
rest! Then, we have already heard that Jesus himself said Mark 2:27: The Sabbath was made for
people, not people for the Sabbath and
the Bible verses from Isaiah 58:13-14, which we read previously, likewise end
in a promising fashion I read again: If you keep your feet from
breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day
then you
will find your joy in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of
the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob
You will find your joy in the Lord. Yes when you honour the Sabbath day and worship a God and spend time
with a God who is love and passionate about people his creations then that love of God and his affections
for you will without fail make
you find joy in him.
For instance, the Sabbath day is primed
to verify Jesus words Matthew 11:28-29: Come to me all you that are weary and heavy burdened and I will
give you rest
you will find rest for your souls. One pastor wrote in his newsletter: I would venture to say that
your greatest problem is not overloaded muscles. In fact, most of us need to
use our muscles more. Most of us are too flabby. Our muscles are not overworked
our minds are. Were tired mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. You
probably need soul rest far more than you need physical rest. You need release
from worry, tension, stress, guilt, fear, bitterness, and anxiety. You need
soul rest. And thats exactly what Jesus promises you if youll come to him
(Rick Warren) and we may add: if you
will come to him especially on the Sabbath the holy day assigned for rest in
him.
Where do we usually turn when were
overloaded? When youre exhausted, depleted, and overloaded, who or what do you
naturally turn to for relief? The person from before writes in the same
newsletter: You may be a pastor,
but I doubt that your first choice is Jesus. You may turn to food when youre
exhausted. You may prop your feet up and turn to television. You may turn to a
drink or a pill. But none of these things can give you soul rest. Only God can
give you that.
The antidote for your overloaded soul is not a plan for time
management. It is not a program for stress reduction. It is not a philosophy on
how to simplify your life. It is not a pill. It is a person Jesus
(Rick Warren). Therefore dont stay away from Jesus on
Sunday mornings but come to worship. The Bible verses from before speak the
truth: If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
then you will
find your joy in the Lord [soul rest and other blessings]
There is much more to say about this but
right now we will not pursue this further because I want to move on to
something else and this very much concerns the future of Living Grace. There is
another dimension to the Sabbath which adds to what we have said so far. First
we said that the Sabbath was about God. Then we recognized that the Sabbath was
also about us you and I the individual person the joy and
rest each one of us needs. Now we
broaden our view and recognize that the Sabbath is also about us as a
community.
The command to keep the Sabbath day holy
was always a command that was given to an entire community, that is: the people of God. Accordingly, the Bible does not recognize any Christian that lives in
isolation from others. We are always church called out together belonging to each other and functioning as
a collective. The Bible consistently uses community images to describe who we
are together. For instance, Christians together are said to be a household (1
Timothy
The teaching is clear. We are meant to build
each other up and each one does the part which is appropriate for their role in
the body of Christ. And while this may sound like a lot of dry Bible teaching hearing one Bible reference after another , here at Living Grace as in other
churches this teaching is rather
practical because it means that there is another reason why we need to come
together on the Sabbath. We worship as one to serve God as one the body
of Christ interconnecting and building each other up.
I read again what Jesus modeled Luke
4:16:
On
the Sabbath day he went into the worship centre [original: synagogue] as
was his custom
and I read again
what the early Christians modeled Acts 2:42-47: They devoted
themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship
Every day they
continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their
homes
And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Fact is that our Sabbath observance on
Sunday mornings here in this worship centre is the key expression of our
community. There is no other meeting at Living Grace that comes anywhere near
the importance of this meeting. In many respects we are what happens
in worship Sunday by Sunday. The culture of the community is set here. God
speaks to us here stretching us
together and thus making us grow together. Key-moments
of our community life happen here such as when we repented of judging
each other over the use of worship banners.
What this means is that you and I need
to be regular in coming here. Otherwise we lose touch and drift away from the
body community of Christ. Two more observations and then we come to a close. What
happens here on Sunday mornings is indeed the expression of community life and
not a show which is to attract spectators. Churches across the nation do experience
the phenomenon of sporadic worship attendance by people who nevertheless have
high expectations when they come
jazzy band, flawless public speaking, no time lag between worship segments,
perfect sound and data-projector, inspiring messages, friendly faces, and so
on. The temptation for us at Living
Grace and any other church is to
give in to that sort of mind-set and thus become more and more attractive to
church consumers but so far we have resisted the temptation because that is not
who we are. While none of us here wants to be bored, we are a genuine community
and therefore everyone participates. Everyone is given opportunities to grow. For
instance, when a child reads a Bible lesson, you may not always understand
every word but is that always so important? The child belongs and grows up in a
supportive community.
The other observation is that we can
only build a community and by
extension: we can only build a growing church when people commit to coming every Sunday week after week (as far
as possible). This observation does come
at the end of todays message but is of utmost importance. When the early
Christians devoted themselves to the fellowship observed the Sabbath by
meeting together committed themselves to each other then this happened the Bible says Acts 2:42-47::
the
Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
No one can be added to us when we commit
to less. For instance, when we are in the habit of coming lat
to worship and talking to other pastors that
is again the universal experience of churches in our city. Visitors come
early because they do not want to be rude but often they are rather lonely
figures in the worship building until the service begins and then people keep
arriving 10-20 minutes into the service. What is that saying and how is that
helping in having numbers added to our community?
When I was a teenager my parents opened
their home for an outreach meeting every fortnight on a Wednesday evening. A
preacher would come from
Every fortnight personal invitations
would be written and posted or hand-delivered. Every fortnight people would be
followed up and cared for. Every fortnight the house would be cleaned and
prepared for the onslought of dirty shoes on our carpet. Every fortnight my mum
would make mountains of sandwiches and after the meeting my parents would not
linger for a chat with friends but get in the car and drive people home.
I do remember the frustration when on
occasion the personal letters of invitation did not go out and then many of the
people would not come. They either forgot or did something else even though
their lives were falling apart with broken relationships and alcohol and
despair. This community only grew with a relentless display of love and patience
and commitment to care for every visitor and every fringe member. My parents
were always there. And then people came to faith and a saving knowledge of
Jesus Christ. The youth loved the sandwiches but then even among them a growing
number gave their lives to God.
Living Grace is not my church and it is
not your church and we do not need to make each other feel bad. It is Gods
church but imagine what could happen if we had another look at keeping the
Sabbath, if we committed to keeping it holy worship and find joy in the Lord and then build on the church community. Imagine us growing.
The question is: How ruthless can we be
in eliminating everything that keeps us away from coming here on Sunday
mornings? How single-minded can we be? Hear the Bible reading one more
time Isaiah 58:13-14: If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day, if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the Lords holy day honourable, and if you honour it by not going your own
way and not doing as you please or speaking idle words, then you will find your
joy in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to
feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob
Amen.