How healthy are we?

Introduction

For those of you who don’t know me, I am Josh Cook. Until a month ago, I was the pastor of Pleasant Ridge in Hueytown. I stepped down as the pastor to follow God’s guidance into Associational Missions. I am the new Church Revitalization Specialist at the Birmingham Metro Baptist Association, which is 180 church from Birmingham and Bessemer partnering together for the Kingdom. So, I bring greetings from the churches of the Birmingham Metro Assiciation and our Executive Director, Dr. Chris Crain. It is an honor to be here this morning.

Pastor Mike called me yesterday when they found out Mrs. Glenda has COVID. She says that she feels better and Pastor Mike said that no other staff has symptoms. They just wanted to quarantine this week and will be back next Sunday barring any symptoms.

Before we jump into our text, I want to share something with you. My family and I have been here in Hueytown for almost 6 years, and one thing I quickly discovered was that Union Hill has an amazing pastor and staff. Pastor Mike is absolutely one of the best pastors that I have ever known. I can’t tell you how much your pastors have encouraged me and made me better as a pastor and man. I am so grateful for this church and for your pastors.

We are going to look this morning in James 4:1-10. Please turn your Bibles there. We are going to read the text and then we will walk through it together.

Before I was full time in the ministry, I worked for UPS. I worked there for 14 years and eventually became a driver out of Montgomery. One day I was delivering in a weird corner of Alabama. I was really in the middle of nowhere in the forsaken hunting land where Chilton and Coosa County meets. I was driving down this little pig-trail of a road that was grown up and appeared to be basically forgotten. I had been in the area a lot and had never been down this road. Everything started getting closer together and all of the sudden I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. Everything cleared up and there was a church. This church was long abandoned. It was a sneeze away from collapsing, but it was there and it was haunting. This was the place where people had celebrated weddings and buried their loved ones. It was a place where people met God and their lives were changed, but a few generations later and it was forgotten and nature was crowding it out.

Here’s the thing, the church itself didn’t capture me. When I pulled up on this church, I realized something. Maybe it the Holy Spirit prompting my heart to ask—how quickly could this happen to my church? I was pastoring a small church in Montgomery. Most churches are just a couple generations from being abandoned. So the question that I want to ask you this morning is—How healthy are you? How heathy is your church, but also how healthy are you personally.

James 4 gives us a list of symptoms of spiritual un-health. These symptoms are early warning signs that our personal relationship with God is not what it should be, and if these symptoms are left untreated, they are church killers. So, this morning as we walk through our text, I want to show these three symptoms of spiritual disease, but I also want to show you the cure.

Symptom 1: An obsession with ourselves.

James is writing to the church, in particular he is writing to Jewish believers who have been spread across the known world, and we see very quickly that the problems that the church was facing in the first century are the problems that still plague the church. When we look at verse 1, James says, you all are constantly fighting and quarreling and this is why: selfish passions—the desire to serve and satisfy ourselves has become the ultimate motivation for everything that we do. We live in a society today that tells us that our personal happiness and security is the preeminent cause of our lives and it is very easy to allow this poison to seep into our subconscious and into our church.

When this attitude takes hold, we end up coming to church the way that my kids went to truck-or-treats last night. We came here last night. You all did wonderful. Thank you for having something last night and for being so kind to us. We came because my kids wanted free candy and to see some decorations. They rated the places we went based on what we got. You all rated pretty high. They were happy when we left. However, if everyone would have showed up last night expecting to get candy, everyone would have been disappointed. As Christians in Christ’s church we are not called to come in order to get, we are called to come and to give ourselves away to one another. This is Christ’s church and when we substitute our preferences for Christ’s commands we are slowly poisoning the body and we will get weaker until we die.

When you catch yourself thinking about yourself (I statements) in church, it is symptom. When a church forgets its community and only focuses on the things that make it comfortable like its traditions, preferences, and heritage, it is a symptom that the church is dying.

Symptom 2: Weak and ineffective prayers.

James isn’t done. He says you don’t have because you don’t ask, and your prayers aren’t answered because your motivations are wrong. There are two issues that James address—a lack of prayer and mis-motivated prayer.

Prayer is one of the most powerful things that we can do as believers, and it is also one of the most neglected. As a pastor, there was a season where I really felt God was leading me to call the church to prayer. We had a Wednesday night prayer meeting, but it was (1) a time to gossip through endless prayer requests and (2) a Bible Study. It was dishonest to call it prayer meetings. So we started meeting to pray and people would say, “Are we just going to pray?” I learned that the quickest way to kill a service was to make it a time of prayer because we have forgotten what it means to really pray specific, God-sized prayers.

When Paul closed out the letter of Colossians he mentions someone

Colossians 4:12 ESV

Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.

Epaphras was with Paul who was in prison and he couldn’t do much for the church in Colossae, but he was battling for them daily. Please listen to me church, we are facing challenging times. Thom Rainer and others who study the church are saying that as many os 1 in 5 churches will not come back after COVID. I have attendance data for Alabama churches from 2008-2017 that shows that about 83% of our SBC churches are either plateaued or declining. There is a war going on around us for the eternal destiny of our friends and neighbors and somehow we believe that we have done our duty when we pray “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food” before we eat, or when we say the Lord’s prayer before the football game, or pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

When you notice that you are struggling spiritually or that the church is slowing down, look at your prayer life. When you start getting a lot of NO’s in your prayers, look at your heart.

Symptom 3: A desire to compromise for comfort.

There is a downward spiral in the passage that takes us to symptom 3. We become selfish and want to satisfy our flesh, so we pray improperly motivated prayers that are denied, and since we don’t want to admit our own sinfulness, we look for other ways to attempt to get what we want. So, we end up compromising with the world. We compromise a little to make life easier for ourselves.

Many of the churches that will close post-COVID are mainline churches. These are churches in denominations that compromised years ago and now they don’t stand for anything. When you read revelation, you find Jesus cautioning several churches against compromise. They were doing a good work, but they were allowing things that they shouldn’t have allowed. Jesus tells them that He will come fix it if they won’t.

Jesus said we can’t serve two masters and I can tell you this, in our lives and in our churches, we are either seeking to please God or we are seeing to please the world, you cannot do both. I am so thankful for pastors like Pastor Mike who stand firm on the Word of God because spiritual compromise leads to death.

Prescription: A relentless focus on Christ

What should we do in order to be healthy and flourish, to avoid selfishness? James tells us:

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Submit to God & Resist the Devil

Paul describes this in

Philippians 2:3–11 ESV

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Here is the beauty of the way God designed the church—if you spend all your time trying to fulfill your lust and trying to get. you will end up bitter, divided, and angry. You will leave church saying, I am just not getting what I need, and you will never find it anywhere. However, if we come to church and we give ourselves away and we dedicate ourselves to serving the kingdom and sacrifice our personal preferences and desires, then God has promised to give us the fulfillment that we need.

Pursue God

One of the primary ways that we pursue God is through prayer and Scripture reading. He promises us that when we draw near to Him that He will draw near to us. He won’t reject us.

If we want to see flourishing and blessedness, we have to learn again how to pray. We have to actually start praying and we have to pray Kingdom prayers. There is nothing wrong for praying for yourself and your family, we are called to look to God as our provider. So we should pray for provision and blessing, but that should be the sum total of our prayers, it should be a small part.

If you want to be a blessing to your pastor and the staff here, start praying for them. Find out how you can specifically pray for them. Ask them how you can be praying for them and for your church. It may surprise them at first, but keep asking. You may have to prove to them that you are the type of person that can trust with their prayer requests, because there are some people in the church that you can’t trust with your personal business.

Listen friends, we are the church that stands on the promise that Christ is building His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against us. It is time we start praying like it.

Eliminate the compromise & Mourn over sin and its results

Matthew 5:8 ESV

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

When we think about compromise, we think that these are little things, that they don’t matter. However, God is concerned with the little things. He understands that little compromises can cause huge failures. So, He calls us to love Him and follow him wholeheartedly.

My older daughter plays softball and it is so frustrating when a parent starts screaming base-running directions to their kids. The coaches are saying one thing and the parents are screaming something else. So, you end up with an 8-year-old stuck in no-man’s land not sure which way to run.

The world screams at us to run one way while the Holy Spirit is calling us to run a different way. If we want to be healthy, we have to learn to key in on the Spirit in the midst of the screaming.

Humble yourself.

Ultimately humility is the key to it all. Biblical humility is actually God-centeredness. Biblical humility is making sure that God is the center of your life, He is your focus and your strength.

Is it really that simple, focus on Jesus and submit to Him and we will thrive?

As we close, I want you to hear what John says.

Revelation 1:12–19 ESV

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades. Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this.

later in chapter 4 he tells us

Revelation 4:8 ESV

And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!”

Revelation 4:11 ESV

“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”

This vision of Christ is the cure for church death. This is how we prevent our church dying on our watch. We have focus ourselves on this Christ and understand that He alone is sufficient.

Conclusion

This morning you may be looking at your life and thinking that this is impossible, and you are right. It is impossible for you, it is not impossible for Christ. He has paid the price to redeem you and the make you a new creation and He is waiting for you to stop resisting Him.

For the church here this morning. Our community desperately needs the strongest, healthiest churches possible. We may not be able to do anything about the church down the street or the person down the pew, but we can do something about us. How healthy are you? What can you do this week to be stronger?