Sermon Tone Analysis

CENTRAL TRUTH EXPRESSED (MAIN POINT):

To always reform is to return to the foundation

To always reform is to be continually be made into the image of the founder

GOD'S HEART REVEALED:

That we would remember and be made into the image of His Son

OUR RIGHT RESPONSE:

Repent and believe

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ME:

Yall, it's October 31st!

You know what day it is?

Yes that’s right it’s Reformation Day! It’s also Eddie’s Birthday… And of course it is also Halloween :)

Tonight I will be mixing two metaphors…

Last week, Renaut was up here sharing his story of what God is doing in his life during a difficult season of life and Ministry.

He used the metaphor that God used from Jeremiah 18…

Read Jeremiah 18:1-4

How beautiful is the example of a potter living in his craft, forming and reforming the vessel… but how easy is that for the clay?

Renaut shared that as the clay he has felt like God has in this season went splat, and began to reform him.

Have you ever felt like that?

We will come back to this divine metaphor…

There is another story I wanted to share with you, and I think between these two stories there is a lesson that I believe God desires for us to learn as individuals and as a church…

Once upon a time there was a house, put together by a master craftsman.

The home he built was not large.

In fact, it was quite small, more like a one bedroom flat with a kitchenette and small bathroom.

Still, everything from the foundation to the crown molding in the room was done with care and intention.

The building had just begun.

That one bedroom flat was actually just a livable model to be replicated as the home would become a mansion.

However, moments after the tile was laid in the kitchenette the craftsman left and left the beautiful home in the care of his apprentices…

His apprentices were given both the example of the home to analyze and some readings on the philosophy of architecture that they should follow to ensure the house was built consistently and excellently.

However, these apprentices were not master craftsmen.

Regardless of their efforts, they would always remain inconsistent.

Sometimes building with the same precision as their master, sometimes they took pieces of cardboard and used them to build an expansion room and decorated it so that it looked as beautiful as the rest of the house, sometimes they got the style and asthetic all wrong to the point it was unclear if they had ever even looked at the readings of the craftsman.

The craftsmen apprentices were indeed inconsistent.

Room by room they continued to add on for the decades to come, eventually passing on the care of the building to the next generation and the one after that.

Every few generations there came one or two hurricanes that would soak and blow away the rooms made of cardboard that looked authentic but were all just a facade the whole time.

Every few generations there was a waking up moment seeing all the shoddy craftsmanship that had been passable for years but was clearly not a reflection of the center bedroom resting in the middle of this inconsistent mansion.

When this waking up moment arrives, and the realization of inconsistency and facades are pointed out, how would you respond?

YOU:

You can attempt to tear it all down.

Where brick by brick tile by tile you go into a space of demolition.

Tearing up each room, moving ever closer with a sledgehammer to the heart of the mansion until not even the Craftsman's Room is left intact.

As we look back at the history of the church, this has often been the temptation.

Because we humans are broken in our sinfulness and forgetful of God’s goodness, there has always been a constant tension between the life, teachings, and ethics of Jesus versus the life, teachings, and ethics of those who either claim to or genuinely DO follow Him.

What happens when we fallible, imperfect, broken image bearers of the master craftsman are called to represent, embody, and emulate the infallible master craftsman to the world around us?

Deconstructing faith has become a much discussed concept over the last decade  Especially among millennials and Gen Z.

We have seen the polarization of our country and seen what seem like facade walls begin to be exposed in various aspects of church life, culture, politics, and more.

For many this has led to a journey to discover a faith that is well examined, authentic, real, and raw.

I realize that even in this room there may be individuals who are currently on a deconstruction journey.

I have no desire to stereotype what that has looked like for you or what your posture has been in that journey.

As I have heard various deconstruction journeys though there has been one unfortunate side effect for many… the personal destruction of the room at the center, the one bedroom flat built by the Master Craftsman, which is The Gospel.

I have not shared this from a stage before but this was the trajectory of my deconstruction journey.

When I was 18 years old, raised in the church, saw the brokenness of my childhood church, saw the facades of some of Christian culture, and I began to ask many of the deconstruction questions… Why do I believe what I believe?

I remember literally crying out to God at night, wondering if he was real.

If he actually loved at all.

Why did he let such broken people represent him?

As I took a sledgehammer to each room of the facades, I was getting very close to the Center Room.

I sensed my motivation was rooted in trying to prove everyone wrong, trying to undo everything I was taught, trying to deconstruct for the sake of demolition, not genuinely for the pursuit of truth.

As I tossed and turn at night with my sledgehammer held high, I began to ask a question I hadn’t asked before… is there a better way?

GOD:

504 years ago today, a Catholic Priest named Martin Luther posted 95 concerns that he had discovered as inconsistencies between the teachings of the Scriptures and the teachings of the Catholic Church at the time.

These were 95 facade walls and shoddy building projects that had accumulated rarely questioned for generations.

This was the result of a personal journey in the spiritual life of Luther.

As he began studying the book of Psalms and the book of Romans in the Bible.

He saw the true beauty of the Gospel, he discovered the beauty of the room at the center and he wanted in.

Luther was the clay on the potter’s wheel and the POTTER was reforming him so that through the ministry of Luther the community of God would be literally REFORMED.

God began to do a mighty work in his heart, reforming him, reshaping him, making him new!

What Luther experienced was not simply deconstruction for the sake of itself but deconstruction for the sake of Reformation.

The work of reformation is not to tear the building down.

It is literally to expose what is facade and return back to the foundation.

When the Protestant reformation was launched it was not out of the desire to destroy the Catholic Church but to tear down any of the walls that were facades, and return back to the writings of the Master Craftsman and His example in the Center Room.

Our temptation as humans is to simply evaluate a system of belief based on the current generation or last few generations of followers.

The heart of reforming is to evaluate based on the Center Room of the belief.

This reminds me of a central passage of the Protestant Reformation that came from Paul’s writing to the church in Ephesus..

Read Ephesians 2:19-22

Now you know where I got my metaphor from.

We stand in a long line of tradition in the history of the church.

While there are sometimes facade and shoddy rooms built, the true house has continued to be built by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus was the cornerstone, laid down first to give direction and structure for the foundation, which is the early church and the apostles… so that now we can continue the building

The only problem is WE aren’t perfect.

That while we are made saints through the blood of Jesus, our every action and intention is not consistently saint-like.

Sometimes we are deceived.

Sometimes we are selfish.

Sometimes we want glory.

Sometimes we are prideful.

Our deep desire to define good and bad on our own terms.

We can look at the actions and legalism within the church and use that as a cause to redefine good and bad on our own terms, paying more attention to what “feels authentic” than what we discover God calls good and bad within the Scriptures.

The title of today’s message is Semper Reformanda… This comes from a writing from an earlier reformer which means “always reforming” or “always being reformed”

A full translation of his sentence though is, “The church is Reformed and always [in need of] being reformed according to the Word of God”

The church is Reformed = at its core, the true church, as a collection of believers, is meant to be rooted in the Craftsman's Room, being built in its example, being built with his writings in mind.

Always in need of being reformed = the journey of sanctification is an ongoing journey with Jesus.

Being ever made in his likeness both individually and as a collective.

So we need to have the humility to not believe we have no room to grow in Intimacy with Jesus, in becoming more like him, in understanding all there is to know about God, his desires, or ethics.

It also means that we need to see ourselves as both part of the problem and part of the solution.

That like Luther who experienced personal reformation into the true Gospel and then helped lead the church into reformation back into the true Gospel, we need to be careful to not just throw stones but instead continually be reformed personally, and see what God does through us collectively.

The potter is constantly forming and reforming us.

It’s not so easy when you are the clay.

I have felt that over the last 18 months, God’s hands continue to reform me.

Teaching me how to depend on him, teaching me the heart of the shepherd Jesus, teaching me to pursue unity for His church, teaching me to refuse to believe that the church has to live DEFORMED and polarized, teaching me about what it looks like to love my family in this hectic season.

How do I know that it is by the potter’s hand and not my own?

Because ideally it is not according to my wisdom but HIS.

According to the word of God = this is the most important distinction between deconstruction for the sake of itself and deconstruction for the sake of truth.