Expectations 4 - Expectations of Others

Scripture: Mark 9:38-50

Mark 9:38–50 NIV

38 “Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” 39 “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, 40 for whoever is not against us is for us. 41 Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward. 42 “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea. 43 If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. 44 45 And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. 46 47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, 48 where “ ‘the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched.’ 49 Everyone will be salted with fire. 50 “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt among yourselves, and be at peace with each other.”

9/29/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Ministry Celebration

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 4: Ministry Celebration

Jeannie Swinehart Sharing about Emmaus Walk

Opening Prayer:

Redeeming Sustainer,

visit your people

and pour out your strength and courage upon us,

that we may hurry to make you welcome

not only in our concern for others,

but by serving them

generously and faithfully in your name. Amen.

Expectations of Others

The Cross

In the gospel of John, Jesus called some of the Jewish leaders liars and murderers and compared them to the devil. He didn’t win any friends that day. He told them:

John 8:44 NIV

44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

My evangelism professor in seminary taught us that sometimes you put pressure on others by taking it off. In reference to Jesus, this often means not shoving Jesus in their face but letting them see the dark and broken places their doubts or desires lead them without Jesus. And then they discover a need they never knew they had before. You’ve heard the saying that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink... well, they got that saying wrong. You can force them to drink but can’t make them like it. You can’t make them thirsty. Our thirst comes from God: recognizing who He is and what we suddenly realize we are missing.

What I find curious, though, is that Jesus does not take the pressure off in the gospels. As you read from His birth to and through His resurrection, He seems to keep adding pressure, a little at a time. He challenges us to grow and serve, and then He points to the cross, tells us where He is going, asks us to go with Him, and gives us our own crosses to carry. And there is no point where He tells us we’ve carried it far enough and that someone else can take it. Instead, our cross seems to grow with us.

Those crosses are not comfortable. They poke and prod us with every step, carving away at our minds, hearts, and souls. It is a wonder that we still use them as symbols of our faith.

I grew up reading comic books about superheroes and learned that symbols are significant in those stories. If you have ever watched a movie or read a comic about Batman, you probably know that his parents were shot in front of him as a young boy. That began his journey into becoming a crime-fighting vigilante. However, all faithful depictions of Batman are missing one image: a gun. Guns became a symbol of death and evil, and he refused ever to use one. Unlike Batman, we, as Christians, have taken the instrument that slaughtered our Lord and Savior and made it into a beloved decoration. We make it into jewelry, ornaments, and candy, sing songs about it, and mention it in our prayers. There are probably hundreds of sermons preached on it every Sunday. It is almost as if it has no power over us.

But it does have power over us. It still works on our hearts, minds, and souls, taking us where we don’t always want to go. And even if the devil has been behind making it into a brand symbol for our faith, trying to make it look cute and pretty and removing the power from it, Jesus is still putting those crosses in front of us, challenging us with what they mean for our lives.

After we discover we cannot push them away with our arrogance and misguided ambitions, we learn to deflect them onto others around us, trying to take the pressure off ourselves by putting it on to others that we judge to be a little worse than we are. But Jesus teaches us that this is not the way to follow Him. We are to judge others based on their relationship to Jesus, not their relationship to ourselves.

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Judging Others

The disciples were hard at work, deflecting their insecurities about the cross by looking around outside the group. “But Jesus,” they said, “we saw these other people that we didn’t recognize performing miracles in your name. Shouldn’t we stop them the way you stopped us? Shouldn’t you have that talk with them about carrying their crosses the way you’ve done with us?”

Jesus, let them know that no one can do such deeds in his name in one moment and then turn around and say something against him in the next. It makes me wonder what slow change had undertaken the twelve disciples that they could move from healing, casting out demons, and preaching and teaching the good news to becoming stumbling blocks for Jesus, standing between him and the cross at Jerusalem and refusing to let him go forward. What changed? Where did the doubt creep in?

When we get so used to doing things a certain way, it becomes challenging to see things another way. When you’re a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail, and you want to treat everyone the same way. If you are a baker, cookies are the cure for everything. There seem to be no problems in the world that cannot be fixed with cookies. Until Jesus leads you to a problem that cookies will not fix. Then suddenly, your eyes are opened to a world of people who help in many different ways that we cannot understand because we are so used to doing one thing. And, like most of the gifts Jesus gives us, sometimes we don’t know what to do with it. It’s not easy learning a new skill in ministry. It’s easier to judge others based on our experience and understanding.

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Redrawing the Boundaries

There is only so much one person can do, and we focus a lot on ourselves and what we can do. When I was a brand new Christian in my late teens and early twenties, I was willing to do anything for Jesus. I didn’t always know if I could do it, but I would try. I filled my life with church jobs, and I worked to turn my classes and extracurricular activities into ministry opportunities. I carried that spirit into the first small churches I served, where I was the pastor, secretary, worship leader, and all other positions as needed. They were small churches and had stayed small for decades because they always had two or three people who handled everything for the church.

My experience in larger churches was the same. There were still two or three, maybe four, people who appeared to do almost everything. Every time I came to church, I felt like a new cook walking into a kitchen filled with people spinning plates on their fingers. Some were doing it well, and others were about to drop everything. It was all I could do to hold myself back from picking the two or three plates about to hit the floor and grab them, jumping in to be part of the team. That was my natural reaction because I was used to doing everything for Jesus. But that was not what Jesus was asking me to do.

Jesus wanted me to lead. That meant not jumping in to fill a gap myself but prayerfully working, training, and equipping the cooks already there in the kitchen. After that, it also meant prayerfully recruiting, training, and equipping new cooks for the kitchen. Not only was that the only way to keep existing ministries going, but it was the only way to grow them and grow new ministries. For me and the church, I needed to learn to lead instead of just doing everything myself. More importantly, that was what Jesus was calling me to do. I must stop looking at what everyone else is doing, judging how I could be doing it better, and pick up the cross Jesus gave me and carry it well.

By telling myself no and looking at what Jesus was doing in the lives of others around me, I discovered that some people felt called to serve in significant ways but were waiting for someone to ask them personally and then lead and teach them to do it well. Jesus didn’t want them just stepping up and serving on their own. He wanted them to connect to the church with mentors and peers who would encourage them in their work and faith. He wanted their service to be an output of gratitude in response to the church caring for them and helping them grow closer to Jesus.

Some of you have experienced this yourselves and can recall a prayer prayed for you, a hospital visit, a personal letter sent, or a cup of coffee and a listening ear that made you suddenly decide that you wanted to be part of the family, stepping up and serving in a way that Jesus had been talking to you about for awhile. It was not about a particular person in the church. It was recognizing that maybe the church was more than you first thought it was and that God was at work within this family, doing something bigger than all of us.

We need more tools than we have in ourselves. I’m not the solution. I’m not going to be the key to making things grow. But if I take I M (I’m) out of the place of focus, suddenly, the impossible becomes possible because God is not just working in me. He’s working in and through everyone else around us as well, all the time.

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Saltiness

So what must we do to have the right expectations of others? Two things:

Repent from anything in us that keeps us from Jesus, and

Learn to be people who see the work of Jesus in others.

Jesus taught about this repentance in a way that I always remember as his pirate illustration. It’s hard for me not to think of a pirate when Jesus talks about a man missing an eye, a hand, and a foot. He needs a big hat and a parrot on his shoulder to accompany his eyepatch, hook hands, and peg leg. But I know these pirates didn’t exist back then. Instead, I think Jesus was referring to some common laws about sin and body parts. At their best, the law of the Gentiles required equal compensation when crimes were committed. The Old Testament expanded on this and redeemed it a bit, but we remember its basic format as an eye for an eye. If someone hurts your eye, you get to hurt theirs back. Even in modern times, stricter laws might give you the right to take the hand of someone who has stolen from you. In some cultures, runaway slaves or prisoners might have their feet removed as a punishment.

Rather than focusing on getting justice from others around us, Jesus teaches us that repentance is turning that justice in on ourselves. What causes you to sin? Remove it from your life. It may feel like and look like a punishment, but Jesus tells us that it’s better to be a peg-legged pirate in heaven than to be whole in hell. We are to keep that judgment focused upon ourselves, specifically on the things that come between us and Jesus.

When it comes to what we can expect from others, we should also look for Jesus. Not for what is getting in between them and Jesus because we often don’t fully see how he works in their lives. Instead, we must focus on where we can see him working in, around, and through them.

These two things, repenting and looking for Jesus in others, allow us to encourage them in a way that aligns with God‘s will instead of our own intentions. Having that relationship with others is essential in serving Jesus because we cannot do all the work ourselves. We each have our part, but we are only one instrument of grace in God’s orchestra, one tool of redemption in His toolbox, and one child of His enormous family that reflects His image the most when we all encourage each other to grow closer to Jesus.

Then Jesus ends with salt. We will all be salted with fire…a fire from the Holy Spirit that purifies us more than salt alone and makes us the salt of the earth. And if we lose that saltiness, there is nothing we can do to get it back because there was nothing we did to get it in the first place. That spirit, that purifying presence, comes from God and him alone. He gives, and we receive. That’s how it is with ourselves. That is how it is with everyone. Wherever we or anyone else is not working against Jesus, he is at work in and around and through us all. They are someone facing their own cross, just like us, trying to figure out how to pick it up and follow Jesus faithfully.

Who do you struggle to see God working through?

What part of your life holds you in sin and away from Jesus?

If you cut that part of your life loose from you today, how would that change the way you see others around you?

Closing Prayer

Lord, help us to see like You. Open our eyes to see ourselves as You see us. Open our ears to hear Your voice speaking in and through others around us. Help us recognize Your voice and filter out every other voice that tries to pull us away from You. Forgive us for when we have closed our eyes and ears to You. Give us the strength to carry our crosses together as we follow You into new life. In Your Holy Name, Amen.

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