Before I truly get started I would like to say that I do indeed know that even Jesus’ preaching was rejected in His home town.  Not saying that I am Jesus (God forbid), but  I would ask that any truth that God speaks through me today would be seen for what it is, and the fact that it is me delivering the truth may be put aside for now.

I would also like to ask everyone to jot down whatever strikes you during this sermon on your bulletin. Later, I ask you to take out your bulletin and, by yourself, with a spouse, or both, to pray over what you have written, asking the Lord to use the sermon in your life. I promise you will be amazed at how the Lord will bless such efforts!

(PRAYER: "...Lord, may your
purposes alone be accomplished.")

I’ve titled this sermon:

"My Challenge to St. Paul’s,"

and I will spend most of my time on that topic.  However, one of my professors this semester, Reverend Petra Heldt, Director of the Ecumenical Theological Research Fraternity in Israel, said something that has become kind of one of my rules to live by.   She said, "In discussing matters of faith, it is often far more productive to tell people what God has done in your life than it is to tell them what to believe...at least with the former, no one can object."  So, this morning it’s on my heart to share with you important highlights of my testimony...for those of you who are a little fuzzy as to what a Christian’s testimony is, it is basically a telling of what you have seen Christ do in your life.  One of the main reasons I feel that the Lord wants me to share this is so that you will see that I have NOTHING to brag about!  After hearing my story, you will see that my hopes for this church can only justly flow out of a combination of a love for the church and, more importantly, humility.  Furthermore, my testimony is my main reason for belief in the Lord, and I challenge each of you, if you have never thought out your testimony and don’t know your reasons for belief, to write down how the Lord has worked in your life through the years.

The part of my testimony I will share starts a year and a half ago, with my first summer working as a Christian counselor at Camp Warwick.  Up until Warwick, I kind of believed in God, and wanted to do the good things, but it wasn’t a huge deal when I sinned and messed up.  Now, I’m gonna share a lot of things that may shock you.  Please remember that my purpose is not to shock anyone...I just want to bring glory to God...to show you where the Lord has brought me from.  So, a year and a half ago, I would fool around with girls, but, by the world’s common definition of the word, I remained a "virgin."  I drank, but, by the world’s definition, I didn’t get "drunk."  I tried pot three times and shroomed once, but it was just out of curiosity, so that’s okay, right?  I would mess around with pornography and masturbation, but that wasn’t any big deal, right?  Again, this isn’t about bragging or anything else...this is just letting you know where I was coming from.  Besides, if God redeems us and makes us completely pure and new, what have we to hide?!  Anyway, even with my sin and brokeness, I was truly a "good kid."  I was on Christian Fellowship exec, in plays, singing in choir, getting good grades...I was just fine ... right?

My first summer at Warwick showed me that I was wrong.  I was missing something in my "walk with the Lord," which was a new phrase to me.  I saw that I was settling for "second best" in my Christian faith, and I was determined to change this. In summation, I left that summer ready to be better than ever morally, and revved up on God.

So, I went back to school and I started talking about God to my frat brothers, and I started up service projects, and I started reading the Bible and praying...at first...and I planned to do this, and I planned to do that, and...I shut out God.  You see, I was trying to do everything on my terms and with my power. Without God’s power and guidance, I burned out...and I fell deep into sin.  I fell so deep in fact, that my life thirteen months ago included LOTS of alcohol, LOTS of lust, and LOTS of what should be in the 20-year-old college frat brother’s lifestyle...right?  Still on Christian Fellowship exec, I would go from our Friday night praise and worship meeting to a frat party, where I’d down anywhere from 7-13 drinks, try my hardest to appear sober in front of my frat brothers, and then go home and spend the night in the same bed as the girl I was dating at the time, and it was God’s strength alone that allows to truthfully say that I’m still a virgin by that same worldly definition, and that my frat brothers still respect my faith, something which I still don’t understand...for both of these things I humbly praise the Lord.

Thankfully, God finally got me to realize something was wrong.  He got my attention, and He did so with force.  At this time, a women named Bev Babcock, a leader with a ministry called Wild Life, a ministry to junior high school aged kids in the towns around my college, called me up.  She wanted me to be a leader, and I would have loved to, as I love youth ministry.  There was one catch...I could only serve with Wild Life if I gave up drinking...completely.  Let it suffice to say that I fought Bev tooth and nail...I came up with every justification for drinking there is..."I can be a better witness by drinking responsibly, than by not drinking at all," "My frat has drinking traditions that I can’t break," and on and on.  Bev stood firm...she loved me and sincerely sympathized with me...but she stood firm.  The Lord later showed me that my ministries were not to include Wild Life for other reasons, but my interactions with Bev had already shown me something.  You see, I was doing everything to excuse the sin in my life!  My sins were like little pebbles in the bottoms of my shoes, and the more I walked around, the less pain I felt from those pebbles digging into my feet.  I just adjusted my walk a little...no big deal, right?  God had shown me otherwise, and He started helping me untie those shoes, take them off, and remove one pebble at a time.

The first thing to go was drinking, and I can’t tell you how easy it was...God’s grace.  I’d like to tell you that the rest of my journey from sin was just as easy.  I’d like to tell you that after I stopped drinking, I stopped struggling with all the other sins in my life, some of which I haven’t even mentioned: lust, gossip, low self-esteem, and all other areas I needed to allow God to fill with the love of Christ.  On the contrary, it wasn’t easy, and I fought God’s attempts to bring me into a deep relationship with Him.  In fact, it was this "breakthrough" semester that served to witness my having porn e-mailed to me daily for three weeks thanks to a free Internet service; it was this semester that served to witness my obsession with looks that would cause me to spend near two hours in front of the mirror tweezing, shaving, and grooming almost nightly; it was this semester that served to witness my highly physical relationships--non-Christian relationships -- with four different girls.

I choose to end the story here for the sake of time, but not before I share what the Lord taught me in my struggles with sins, which I now will sometimes fool myself into believing have vanished for good, only before I find myself giving into a temptation I thought I’d already overcome months earlier.  Don’t get me wrong...there have been numerous breakthroughs and, as I look back over the past year, I can see how my strength has not been responsible for any single one!  Every time I took a step away from sin, a step towards the Lord, it only happened because God’s infinite grace got me to trust in Him enough to take that step.  In other words, I was like a man holding onto a cliff face with one hand with all my might.  Constantly, God was always saying to me, "Let go! I’ll catch you!"  Finally, my human strength would be depleted, and the Lord would gently swipe my hand off the cliff, and I would fall back into His arms, where His promise of catching me proved to be true.  God would then start to raise me up, and I would begin to panic, starting to inexplicably doubt God’s power, so the Lord would gently place me back on that cliff, proving how part of His promise to us is a free will, a true gift from a God that wants His servants to choose to serve Him, not be forced to do so.  This time, back on the cliff I would be a couple of feet higher, and a similar situation would occur...me holding on to sin...God saying "Let go!"...God helping me to let go...God lifting me up...me getting unsure of God’s strength...God allowing me to try to climb the wall with my own power again.  God is still waiting for that day when I will just let go of all my human inhibition and just trust His faithful, flawless arms to bring me all the way up to the cliff top, where we will truly be able to walk together...and I praise Him that I can trust that He will always be waiting for me!

God taught me so many important lessons, as I slowly made my way up the cliff face.  First, He showed me how He felt my pain and He shared in my emptiness.  To see me trapped in a world of sin, refusing to let Him help as much as He wanted to...it broke His heart.  He showed me that the Christian faith is not about the "good feelings" you get when you sing a certain song, or say that prayer...it’s about faith, trust, and truth...it’s about true service of our Creator King!  Most important, He made it clear to me that the life of a Christian is NOT about being perfect!  The life of a Christian is about being redeemed! As its been said by Ravi Zacharias, a world-famous apologetist (an apologetist is basically a defender of the faith): "Christ did not come to make the bad to be good, but He came to make the dead to have life!"  I was dead; God gave me new life!  Do you truly live out the joy, the hope, and the glory of such life-giving redemption?...or are you making the mistake I made for so long in only thinking of being morally better, when God wants to go one step further and give you a complete new life that far surpasses the old in its quality?  Strongly connected to this question is another: do we wrongly try to serve "good morality," when instead we should passionately try to show God how much we love the life of joy and hope He sacrificed to give us?

The parable of the pearl merchant is a parable I will always keep close to my heart...it has been a huge Biblical aid in my growth in the Lord.  I was at a Christian Fellowship retreat where, along with the registration materials received upon arrival, every student was given a cat’s eye marble (if you don’t know what a "cat’s eye marble" it, it is basically one of those marbles with a sliver of color in it)...this signified a blemished, imperfect pearl.  At any time during the week, you could walk to the stage where the praise and worship team was, drop your cat’s eye marble in a big plastic bowl, cross the front of the stage to another bowl, and pick out a perfectly clear, glass marble, signifying Christ.  This was built this up all week, and the main speaker was firm on this: make sure you know what sin in your life that the blemished pearl represents!  Make sure you know what you’re letting go of in exchange for a better relationship with the Lord!  There was actually an entire praise and worship session devoted to those who wanted to make the exchange publicly.  It was then that I fully grasped the pain and brokeness of sin.  One by one, students went up and near every single one held onto the cat’s eye marble, their hands shaking and rivers of tears running down their faces as they struggled to let go of that blemished pearl that was holding them back.  One student ran up, dropped his marble in the bucket, dashed across the stage, grabbed the clear marble, and ran to the back of the auditorium.  Here, he collapsed...he sobbed longer and harder than I ever care to see anyone sob again.  It was there that his fellowship, the student’s brothers and sisters and Christ from his school, gathered around him and prayed over him.  They huddled around him and lifted him up to the Lord for healing...many of them cried tears for their hurting brother in Christ.  I offer to you that Christ was there crying with this group of students...and He was starting a healing process in that young man that is probably still going on...and as I stand here today, I boldly proclaim that I have seen and experienced how Christ has healed me!  This parable made me see how I was holding on to several second-rate, imperfect pearls and, with God’s strength along, I have thrown many out of the path to the perfect pearl that is Christ...and every time you get closer to Christ, the closer still you’ll want to get!

It is here that I shift from the story of God’s work in my life and move to suggest some of God’s possible aspirations in the workings of St. Paul’s. When the verses of how the early church functioned in Acts were read, did you sense that the churches of today were somehow different?...maybe missing the mark?  I’m gonna pull several phrases out of these four verses and suggest how St. Paul’s can begin to take some pointers from the early church...

The first verse I will refer to is, "All who believed were together and had all things in common..." For this verse, I use the fellowship situation just depicted as an example of how to live this out.  The pain of one member of the fellowship was felt by the ENTIRE fellowship, but they clung together and focused on the Lord.  St. Paul’s, can we do that?  Can we share in each other’s pains and rejoice in each other’s joys in a more emotionally invested and time requiring manner than "daily prayer concerns"?  Is Christ enough in all of our relationships to help us work toward the one goal of worshipping Him fully and completely?  Do we know each other’s testimonies, recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and share in the same reasons for belief, which we should always know?  Pray for ways to make our community here at St. Paul’s a blessed, church community that can share in all these things, and not just a group of people that happens to end up in the same building every Sunday morning.  Congregation, do you know the concerns faced by consistory adequately enough to lift these situations up in pray? Going further in this, do we make sure the spiritual needs of all are met?  I stand before you as one out of a confirmation class of 13 that was confirmed 6 years ago.  I ask you to tell me why only a couple of the other twelve give their faiths more than a marginal place in their lives.  Did St. Paul’s do all they could to make sure their needs were met?  I truly believe from personal experience in my fellowship at Hamilton that St. Paul’s will NEVER become the blessed community God wants to make it until its members are joined together in small groups, working together in Bible studies, growing together in prayer partnerships, and fostering a new level of living for the Lord with discipleship relationships.  Our God is a relational God, and our faiths need to reflect that, and such a reflection needs to start with our relationships in our church!

Back to the Scripture:

"Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple..."

Do we spend time daily with the Lord? I’m not just talking about reading the Bible, I’m talking about spending time with the Lord, allowing Him to speak to us, and diligently seeking out His will in every aspect of our lives.  Knowing God’s will can only come through spending time with Him and developing that relationship with Him.  The greatest blessing we have is that Christ has redeemed us, allowing us direct access into God’s throne room from anywhere and at anytime!  Do we take advantage of that?  In other words, do we KNOW GOD, or are we content with merely knowing ABOUT God? In my life, it has been shown to me that merely knowing about God simply just sells yourself short of the greater life God wants to bless you with!  It’s knowing God that will keep your faith strong in times of strife and will make you proclaim in the words of Paul,

"I consider everything a loss compared
to the surpassing greatness of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord."

Back to the Scripture:

"they broke bread at home..."

Is Christ overtly present in your home?  Do you pray together as a family, and not just before meals?  Husbands and wives, do you bring all your decisions together before the Lord?  Do your kids see you loving the Lord? Do they see you reading the Word and allowing It to have authority over your life? Do you teach them Scripture lessons and Bible stories?...or do you mistakenly think that Sunday School and a week of VBS takes care of your Christian duty as parents?  Your children get sex-ed in school that barely mentions abstinence...do you give them what the Bible says about sex, God’s precious, mis-used gift to humanity?  Husbands, do your wives see you loving them like Christ loved the church?

Back to the Scripture again

"they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God..."

Perhaps my greatest prayer for St. Paul’s is my hope that it experiences true praise of the Lord...times of truly seeing the Lord high and lifted up and joining together in one bold voice, a voice of joy and thanksgiving, at the glory of such a sight!  As Sundee Frazier writes, a particularly energetic worship leader, "In worship, we become more passionate about God and God’s purposes; we draw close to God and are transformed to be more like him."  Do we accept this?  For those that don’t like contemporary music, have you ever put aside your dislike for long enough to hear the voice of the Lord in these new songs. Now, I’m not necessarily suggesting that St. Paul’s stop singing all old hymns. Quite the contrary!  In fact, I love the old hymns...I think they are deeper, more theologically sound, and richer in meaning than most any contemporary song.  My problem is this: do we sing these hymns, or do we use them to praise the Lord!  I challenge every member of this congregation to get a hold of your 5 favorite Christmas carols tonight...study them for ALL their meaning.  Then, I want you to think about how you sang these songs this past Christmas season and honestly decide whether you put enough heart and mind into what you offered to the Lord in your musical offering!

Back to the Scripture one more time:

"And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved..."

George Verwer, the founder of a missionary organization that is directly responsible for the salvation of thousands world-wide said this, "Everyone is either a missionary or a mission field!  There is NO middle ground!" You see, evangelism ISN’T a choice...it’s the responsibility of every human being who has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ!  Just look at the words of Christ:

"I will make you fishers of men;"  "I will make you as a light to the nations;" "Go, and proclaim my name."

Now, I raise a dangerous question: At what point did we as a church decide that the Great Commission, Jesus’ very last commandment to the apostles, wasn’t really our responsibility? Is it because we have slipped too far into the modernistic worldview of pluralism and relativity to know with certainty that only Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life that He claimed to be?  Do we not live in the joy God has for us enough to want nothing more but to see everybody we know have the same joy that comes only through knowing Christ?  Are we too full of pride to humble ourselves enough to minister to those around us in a way that will show them the very heart of Christ?  Now, it’s true that God doesn’t need to use us.  He could just descend His spirit to earth and bring all to faith in Christ through a series of miraculous events. In fact, if you ask any of the few missionaries that have been able to illegally sneak into China, they could tell you the truth that God is doing just this in this country!  Here, the faith is exploding at an incredible rate, despite Christians having to meet in secret, underground churches, usually having to share one copy of the New Testament among an entire congregation.  God could do such things here...but He would so much rather use us in achieving His purposes, allowing us the opportunity to be a vessel of God’s saving grace, which justifies our place in His kingdom.  St. Paul’s, I plead with you to not fall trap to a world that doesn’t believe in universal truth!  I beg you to be bold in your faith!  I ask you to see evangelism for what it is...completing people by bringing them closer to a relationship with the Living God! Remember: conversion isn’t our responsibility...that’s solely in the hands of the Father in heaven!  Meanwhile, humbly being a light to our family, friends, and community, and ALL PEOPLE, even to complete strangers, thorough sinners, and people we wouldn’t be caught dead spending time with before...being a light to all these people is certainly our responsibility in how we live and what we say!

I guess my main point would be:

HUNGER FOR THE LORD!

Hunger for Him in how you spend your time and your money, hunger for Him in how you treat all people, hunger for Him in all your relationships, hunger for Him in what music you listen to, videos you watch, and magazines and books you read, and hunger for Him in every decision you make.  If something’s stopping you, get it out of the way!  If it’s time, rearrange your schedule!  If it’s intellectual doubts, go buy some books that address your "problems with faith!"  If it’s sinful relationships, end them, or work on them!  If it’s failure to understand Scripture, buy a Biblical Dictionary or Encyclopedia to help!

While hungering for the Lord, learn to love Christ more!  Love how He loves you!  Love how He wants to give you a fulfilled life better than any other you could live.  Love how this "new life" is above the pressures of a sinful society.  Love the Lord in a way that brings a smile to your face, joy to your hearts, peace to your mind, and a desire to pass on the light of Jesus to all those in your paths.  If you don’t love Christ like this, put aside all you thought you knew about Christianity and dig into Scripture, spend time in prayer, and take a good, solid look into the fullness of Christ.  As a friend of mine this semester said, "Once you take a long look into the face of Christ, you can’t help but to fall madly in love with Him."

That’s what I want for you all...to fall madly in love with Christ...but, to be honest, for the past year and a half, I’d always got the sense that, although St. Paul’s was ready to explode in some aspects, it just wasn’t going to get there.  I’d feel that people didn’t believe in the power of prayer enough; that they didn’t believe in the importance of following Christ’s example of service enough; or that they didn’t trust God enough to allow Him to bring this congregation to the next level of worship, and I mean a worship that goes beyond just singing songs...worship involving the ENTIRE heart, soul, and mind!  For this doubt, I thoroughly apologize.  Who was I to make this judgment?  I apologize to God for doubting His power and I apologize to you all for doubting your ability to be touched by the Spirit.  Instead of judging, I should have been praying for this church, and I am truly sorry. Now...I am excited to say that I felt differently when I got back from Israel...it seems as if the explosion is indeed starting to happen.  It is my prayer for this church...the church in which I was confirmed, and the church I love...that it latches onto this explosion and enjoys the ride, as God takes St. Pauls into the deep relationship with Him that He desires.

The Scriptures make it clear that the Lord has a passion to know us in an intimate relationship, and I challenge you to make it your first passion to know Christ.  Meanwhile, at the same time, I ask you to remember what we all have probably learned at some point in our lives’ experiences: "passion" is closely connected with "pain."  Look at the life of Christ: His passion for us led Him to willingly experience the most humiliating and gruesome form of capital punishment the world has ever known.  He did this for us. What may we have to do for Him?  We must not forget the words of Christ, when He says to the disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."  For the apostles, this "cross" was more literal than we might think.  Historically, six of the apostles died by crucifixion for the sake of sharing the Gospel. Of the other six, two died by the sword, James was stoned, Thomas was speared, Thaddeus was killed by arrows, and only John died a natural death, although he himself was no foreigner to prison and persecution.  How about that for passion?  If that doesn’t make you question your commitment to sacrificing for Christ’s sake, than maybe this will: an estimated 160,000 Christians will be martyred in the year 2001 by refusing to denounce the name of Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

I suggest that St. Paul’s may be called to make their own sacrifices for the sake of the Lord. For some in the congregation, it may mean swallowing pride, for others, it may mean giving different worship styles a chance, for others, it may mean increasing financial giving, especially while the restoration still looms overhead, and still for others, it may mean taking charge in some outreach and/or evangelism projects in the community.  All of these things are indeed sacrifices, and all will indeed bring you some level of pain.  It was best said by an African missionary who had experience what it is like to have people try to kill him because of his work.  Several times, Muslims from the villages he was proclaiming Christ in tried to stone him, but each time God protected him.  Last week, at a large missions convention in Illinois, he said, "Christ gave ALL for us...should He ask, we should be prepared to give all for Him."  This message came right after the testimony of a woman who still passionately and joyfully serves Christ and continues her mission work in Central America, even after her co-missionary husband was brutally murdered in front of her and her two young children because of his work.  Is she crazy? No...she truly knows God.  For it is only when we stick our necks out there for Christ to be able to use our pain for the advancement of His kingdom, and that is indeed a glorious thing!  As Jonathan Tran writes in Faith on the Edge, "[Christians] are gamblers for God. On this one hand we stake our entire lives.  We are putting it all on the line, betting that God will come through for us.  After we win that hand, we put down more on the next.  We will not stop while we are ahead.  The stakes keep on rising.  We’ll keep on betting until there is no more betting to be done...[and all] things considered, placing it all on Jesus is a good bet.  Amazingly, his glory is wrapped up in your winning.  He wants you to win, and God knows how to win!  He created life and has a good idea how to live it.  Don’t play it safe.  Don’t leave the table even though the risks look scary and the odds are stacked against you.  Bet the whole house, you’ll win it all."

To end, I have no big Scripture verse, or no grand, long quote (you’re probably saying "Thank God").  Instead, I end with one simple question that was asked of the 20,000 students at the large missions convention I attended last week.  The questioner was a college sophomore, and the question is, "Is what your living for worth Christ dying for?"  To this question, I add,  "Is what St. Paul’s is striving for worth Christ dying for?"  Let’s make it so...and lets bet the whole house in the process.

Amen