"The Stockpile Factor" Sunday, May 20, 2018 - 9 AM

The Stockpile Factor - 2 Kings 7:3-11 Bascomb UMC / May 20, 2018 / 9 & 11AM Pentecost Focus: The riches of our faith because God has transformed us & redeemed us. Function: To encourage believers to share their life-changing faith with others. 5 Purpose Outcomes of the Church: Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship, Evangelism, Service 2 Kings 7:3-11 (CEB) The siege is broken 3 Now there were four men with skin disease at the entrance to the city. They said to each other, “What are we doing sitting here until we die? 4 If we decide, ‘Let’s go into the city,’ the famine is there, and we’ll die in the city. But if we stay here, we’ll die just the same. So let’s go and surrender to the Aramean camp. If they let us live, we’ll live. If they kill us, we’ll die.” 5 So they set out in the evening to the Aramean camp, and they came to the edge of the camp. But there was no one there because 6 the Lord had made the Aramean camp hear the sound of chariots, horses, and a strong army. They had said to each other, “Listen! Israel’s king has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to come against us!” 7 So they had got up and fled in the evening, leaving their tents, horses, and donkeys. They left the camp exactly as it was and ran for their lives. 8 So these men with skin disease came to the edge of the camp. They entered a tent where they ate and drank. They carried off some silver, gold, and garments, and they hid them. Then they returned and went into another tent. They took more things from there, went away, and hid them. 9 But then they said to each other, “What we’re doing isn’t right. Today is a day of good news, but we’re keeping quiet about it. If we wait until dawn, something bad will happen to us. Come on! Let’s go and tell the palace.” 10 So they went and called out to the gatekeepers, telling them, “We went to the Aramean camp, and listen to this: No one was there, not even the sound of anyone! The only things there were tied-up horses and donkeys, and the tents left just as they were.” 11 The gatekeepers shouted out the news, and it was reported within the palace. Once again, the Christian calendar and the American calendar come together in an incongruent way (I used a BIG word) --- so that today we celebrate graduations and we also celebrate Pentecost by emphasizing the growth of the church. The transition I’ll attempt today is the commencement speaker. We all sit through them at this time of year. Many high schools and colleges go after big names and celebrities (esp. if they graduated from there or the college is offering an honorary degree). My main job today is motivational as well. I’m hoping that between now and the end of June we can discover our motivational base for sharing our faith with the people around us. I want us to be motivated as invitational Christians. If just one or more of us caught fire in this community the graphic shows – many more of us have the potential to catch fire along with them. It’s the perfect kickoff for Pentecost! Conan O’Brian took over the Tonight Show for Jay Leno, but Jay and the network decided he return and in 2010 Conan lost the Tonight Show. So here is Conan O’Brian in 2011 as a commencement – motivational speaker. Video Clip - Conan's 2011 Dartmouth Commencement Address Hey! Don’t you feel motivated now? Well, let me take the pressure off, church – God is doing the work of the kingdom. He who “never slumbers nor sleeps” is always at work calling people to come. I just want to heighten your spiritual antenna a bit and see if WE can participate in this wonderful work God does in the “here and now.” Today, I want to start by asking the why question. What motivation is there for putting energy into communicating our faith? I want to jump right in and offer you four reasons why every one of us should be motivated and stay motivated in his or her own mission of spreading the faith to the people around us. Before I get to the major motivators - let me start with number three (because I never was good at counting). We Christians believe in an afterlife – that concept is KEY to our faith – KEY to our appreciation of Christ’s resurrection – and KEY to our understanding of Judgement. But to motivate people by FEAR – by preaching everlasting fire and punishment, even though it may get some short-term results, it will NOT last. However, before I move on, Jesus DID give us a parable of life after death in Luke – poor man Lazarus suffered in this life and the rich man saw it and did nothing! So in the next life, justice rules and the rich man wakes up in torment and Lazarus is in the bosom of Abraham (wow, so there ARE Jews in heaven – right?). The point I focus on here is the rich man suddenly wanted to become an evangelist! He pleaded: “…send Lazarus to my father’s house. 28 I have five brothers. He needs to warn them so that they don’t come to this place of agony.” Luke 16: 27-28 (CEB). I believe in more life to come after this, I believe in a coming judgement and I want to spend eternity with God – not apart from God – and I want to take others with me. Backing up to number two. We are God’s witnesses, God’s ambassadors, agents, and WE are “PLAN A” in the plan for reaching the world. He chooses to use us humans. God doesn’t even have a “PLAN B”! I’m IT – I’m “PLAN A” and you are “PLAN A.” In the middle of your uniqueness, your personality, your gifts, talents, abilities, and your particular arena of influence, you are called to be God’s mouthpiece, to speak on behalf of the gospel to people – and all people matter to God. Imagine if you were sitting in Sunday school or Bible study to learn how to do open heart surgery and you knew! You knew the very next day you would be in the operating room performing that same surgery – life or death is in your hands! Would you listen a little more? “Hey preacher! Sorry, I was looking at my phone for that last part – where do I make the first incision?” Life as God’s agent (should you choose to accept this mission) is an adventure! May we EXPECT God to use us out there and may we be prepared to speak! Numbers one and four go together. Number four is the reward of influencing somebody to follow Christ. If you ever get the chance to influence somebody for the gospel, if you draw someone closer to God by the way you live your life and the witness you give to your faith, then, I promise you, you will want to do it again. That why I love working with children and youth. This year I sat in front of four of our students and overheard their prayer to God – deciding, right then, to make a decision and become a disciple of Christ – to stand before you and maker a public profession of faith! I can’t get enough of THAT! Give me more Jesus – let me experience that incredible feeling over and over again. But not for me – NO – I’m convinced that the Christian faith is a stockpile of GOLD. I hear testimony after testimony about the difference Jesus makes in lives. I can call a dozen names in this place who know they would not BE where they are if Jesus hadn’t intervened in their life. Number ONE - the “Stockpile Factor” is based in our scripture text today. The King of Syria gathered his army and went up and surrounded the walls of Samaria – the capital of the northern kingdom of the Hebrews - called Israel. There was a great famine in Samaria. People has resorted to cannibalism! And people who were lower down on the ladder than the shepherds who saw Jesus in the manger were in quarantine outside the city – they were lepers! They knew there was no food inside the city gates, so they decided to take their chances with the Syrian army. Hey! They might kill us (we’re going to die of starvation anyway) OR they might give us food and we could live. So they entered the camp and found what? It was EMPTY! And it was full of food! What I want us to focus in on is that it was the abundance of the provision that led them to go back and make the announcement to the people back in the city. So much food! Such an amazing miracle - a miracle so exciting and the news so wonderful, that they just said, “We’re not doing the right thing by keeping silent. Let’s go tell the others the good news.” Silence was an unthinkable crime at that point. While running errands one day, a well-known pastor ran into a man from his church who wanted to share something with him. The minute the guy began talking, he started tearing up. He said, “God did something in my life over Good Friday and Easter that was so rich, so cleansing, and so powerful in my life. I feel like I am just about ready to explode!” What he was really saying was that we have a spiritual stockpile that is so huge and so wonderful, it can hardly be contained. Do you have that understanding of your spiritual inheritance? The results should be that we can’t contain our joy! We can’t stop ourselves from spilling over into other people’s lives! One of the most effective ways to develop a contagious faith is to keep the good news of the gospel’s work in YOUR LIFE up on your radar. Never take it for granted. Here we seek to reclaim the wonder of the God we worship. Here you and I should celebrate the amazing miracle of transformation in our lives. We have been taken from being strangers and we have been converted into sons and daughters of God. When you keep that awareness up in front of your conscious life, the size of your spiritual stockpile is something you can’t help but share! You’ll find yourself saying to anyone who will listen: “I don’t know about you, but I know that as for me and my house, we serve the Lord!” And they can see evidence of that – YES! More and more these days, I’m finding it difficult to watch people go from bar to bar, toy to toy, fun-fix to fun-fix, lover to lover, fad to fad, trying and crashing and then trying again and crashing again! I feel like telling every “scavenger” I meet out there: “Stop picking at refuse piles! There’s a stockpile in the kingdom of God. There’s plenty of God’s grace, there’s plenty of God’s favor, there’s plenty of God’s love. It’s spilling over in my life and you could probably live happily on just the overflow if you’d open up your life!” But many times, even when prompted by the Holy Spirit, I stay silent. Oskar Schindler was a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party who lived most of his life as a selfish opportunist motivated by profit. He’s remembered for having saved the lives of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. Schindler grew to care deeply for his Jewish workers and he began to protect them from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps. Time after time, Schindler had to give Nazi officials larger and larger bribes and gifts to keep his workers safe. By May of 1945, he had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black-market purchases of supplies for his workers. Schindler's List comprised the names of 1,200 Jews. Here is the closing scene: Video Clip: “I Could Have Saved One More” from Schindler's List What if my judgement and your judgement, by God’s grace - standing safely inside heaven’s gates, we were still required to see the names and faces of those who were never told about our faith – the family, friends, & coworkers that never knew what a stockpile of riches we have from God? It was our mission from God (Plan “A”) and we said nothing……let us pray. Bless the Lord - O my soul - Worship His holy name Sing like never before O my soul I'll worship Your holy name You're rich in love and You're slow to anger Your name is great and Your heart is kind For all Your goodness I will keep on singing Ten thousand reasons for my heart to find -- Page 7 of 7