Being Compete

When we talked about home coming it made me think about church and how church works. The most often used model for a church in the bible is a family. That model works well for a church.

We recently celebrated the graduation of some of our church members. They are part of our church family and part of their biological family. As members of a family we go through stages, we have parts to play, things to learn and things to teach at each stage. We reach certain points where we complete stages of our lives but we never stop being part of the family. Our role in family may change from baby to child, from child to adult, from adult to elder but as long as we are alive we are part of the family.

It is the same in the church. We may have different roles and graduate from different stages but we are still a part of the family. Just like in our biological family we advance through a process. Although all kids are not the same and all do not have the same childhood we all spend our time as children. All adults are not the same but we do age from childhood into adulthood and face many of the same challenges and changes. All seniors are not the same but if we live long enough we all become one.

In the same way there is a progression through the church, directed by Jesus Christ that we go through.

Philippians 1:6–11 NASB95

For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. For it is only right for me to feel this way about you all, because I have you in my heart, since both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of grace with me. For God is my witness, how I long for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

On the day you were saved you were admitted into the family of God and every day since you have been growing as a member of that family. Just like your physical and social growth was directed by your parents and you will feel their influence all of your life your spiritual growth in directed by Christ and you will feel his influence throughout eternity. Just as some children grow up faster easier than others some Christians grow up spiritually faster or easier than others. There is a goal, there is a graduation, there are points along the way that everyone must reach. It is a process, like growing up.

So what is this process like, God explains it to us in Philippians.

Philippians 1:9–11 NASB95

And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

First that love may abound more and more. Do you think that God was one day feeling lonely and said to himself I just don’t know what I will do unless someone exists to love me, so he created man. Of course not. For one thing God is love and God is loving with or without us. For another thing if God made us just so we could love him he has had to wait a long time for some very questionable results.

No God made man in his image. Since God is loving God made man a loving being. So what does God’s love look like? Is the love of God and ooey gooey kind of love. Like a freshly baked cookie that is so warm and gooey coming right out of the oven that it is just delicious. Your mouth waters just thinking about what your favorite cookie tastes like when it is hot and fresh and you just want to gobble them up. After they cool down they are still tasty but just not the same. A little time passes and they become hard and stale. There are still some tricks to try, warming them back up makes them better, put them in a baggie with a piece of bread and the bread gets hard and stale while the cookies regain their softness but eventually they just aren’t that good anymore, that is if they last that long. God’s love is not like that.

The love of God is a commitment, it does not change according to how attractive you are at the moment it stays the same. God’s love is a love that gives rather than a love that expects to receive. The love that God implanted in us should be the same type of love, a giving love, a love with a purpose other than just a feeling.

So what is that purpose, that your love would result in real knowledge and discernment. Now real knowledge is knowledge of what is real and true, in other words knowledge of God and his truth. That you would come to know God and be able to discern or choose between options. The knowledge that you have that is real and true should be used to pick between all the options available to you in the world, used to make choices. That implies that you will have choices to make and that you will have the ability to make lesser choices or excellent choices.

Mom used to tell me to make good choices but Jesus wants me to make excellent choices, not just choosing between the good and the bad but choosing between the good and the best. There are billions of choices to make in life and you can’t make them excellently unless you know the truth and see the options clearly.

In fact the word used for sincere here has the root word of a ray of light. In other words fully illuminated, nothing hidden, nothing secret, transparent. When you love God and seek to truly know and understand his word you will be able to see the choices in front of you clearly and correctly as if they are under bright sunlight and you will be able to choose between them using your knowledge and discernment, and your clear vision to make the most excellent choices, leading to the best possible results.

All of that will allow you to live a life that is blameless. Notice I did not say sinless but blameless. This word blameless means a without stumbling or causing others to stumble. It is not the same as perfect. You may still sin but when you do you will get it fixed and move on, you may still have trouble but you will understand the trouble properly and know how to deal with it and overcome it. It is the goal of life, to approach life loving the way God loves, understanding things from God’s perspective, seeing the options before you clearly and truly and choosing the most excellent path available resulting in the most excellent life possible. That is what God wants for you.

If you will forgive the railroad analogy it is like a train. When I first studied how to investigate an accident on the railroad they taught me something about how trains work. Years ago most trains were much shorter and were pulled by one engine with a caboose on the back. This meant that mean rode on the front and on the back of the train and were handy if there were any problems and it worked rather well. Later on trains got longer and they added more engines to the trains but this created a problem.

You see train cars are connected by knuckles. These are big metal clips like cupped hands facing each other that ling together like this (example) and pull the train or push the train depending on what the engine does. Now if you take an average weight of 50 tons per car, which may be a little light depending on what it is carrying and you consider that the knuckle has to pull or push that weight you might understand why they are so big. But if you consider that as you connect more and more cars the first knuckle has to pull the weight of every car and there may be well over a mile of cars behind the train you can see that the weight really starts to add up making the average grain train weigh somewhat above 40 million pounds. That’s a lot for a knuckle to pull no matter how big it is, then consider that there is a slight bit of slack in each knuckle and when you have well over a hundred of them that makes for a lot of jerking and banging as the knuckles pull and all the slack is taken up or as they push to stop and the slack all moves the other way, one at a time.

Someone found out that if you put an engine at the rear of the train and push with it at the same time you are pulling from the front you reduce the slack issue and the tensile forces on the knuckles allowing you to pull more cars without the knuckles failing. Then they figured out that if you put an engine in the middle you can reduce these forces even more so that is how they figured out how to make longer and longer trains. Using the technology of today to link the engines together so that they all speed up and slow down at the same time and by distributing their power throughout the train they can pull longer and longer trains with and be much more efficient.

So how does that effect us. Think of the decisions in your life as train cars. You are going through life pulling toward your destination, sometimes uphill and sometimes downhill, some stretches are easy and some are hard and all along the way you are faced with choices. You can be a doctor or a mechanic, you can hook up to this car or that one, you can go to college or trade school, this car or that one. Some of the choices you make are like engines, they help drive you forward, some of choices you make are like train cars, they become a huge weight that you have to pull around with you. The better choices you make the more power you have and the easier it is to make it up the hills and to control your speed and your traction, the more bad choices you make the more of a load you have dragging you down. Just like train cars adding one bad choice to another multiplies the problem, it makes the stress on the knuckle much worse the more bad choices you drag along.

Of course as a christian you can go to Jesus at any time and ask for forgiveness for your sin and he is faithful and true to forgive us fully and completely. Wouldn’t it be great if that fixed all of the problems. Of course it doesn’t. If you went out drinking and met someone, went home with them and 9 months later a baby showed up and you had a child with someone you barely knew and had no intention of marrying you could be forgiven of that sin and of all the contributing sins that led up to that particular sin but the child would still be there and your life would still be complicated. If you did something that caused you to go to prison you can be forgiven of the sin and every sin leading up to it but that doesn’t necessarily get you out of jail. Even being forgiven of your sin does not erase all the consequences of your bad choices.

This is not what God wants for you, he doesn’t want you to drag a lot of baggage around for the rest of your life like train cars pulling you back and making things complicated, he wants you to live well, to choose excellently, to have the best and most excellent life you can. So he says love the way I love, see things the way I see them, choose the way I choose, understand the way I understand, that is how to have an excellent life.

You see as a pastor sometimes I get caught up in what the church wants or what the church needs, I am an administrator in the church so I think about the good of the church and that is good and right, but it is not the best, not the most excellent choice. You see you were not made for the church but the church was made for you, the most excellent choice is not about the needs of the church but the needs of the members.

You need a place of worship, you need a place to connect with God, you need a way to grow in the knowledge of God so that you can see clearly and understand truly and decide excellently so that you can lead an excellent life and not stumble or cause others to stumble. You need all of that, and you need it often. Everyone wants to live the best they can, make the excellent decisions and not stumble. Everyone wants an excellent life and the church is the means that God is using to help you get it. If you would come along with us on that journey then that would be. .............well...........excellent.