Or, The Missing Tone from Too Much Ministry
Scripture: Colossians 3:12-17
Date: October 28, 2012
Speaker: Sean Higgins
We come to the last message in the life to life series this morning. We have been considering the joint efforts of the air war and ground war, how the coming together of different persons into a united community is especially like our Triune God, and how our God aims to change our lives through levels of accountability. He is transforming us into the image of His Son and it’s a group project.
For this final part, I’d like to talk about the tone of this work and a little about the trellis. In other words, the perspective we ought to bring and the plan we’re following to help it happen. I still won’t have said everything helpful to say by the time we’re done, but that’s okay since this isn’t the last week we’re going to work on it.
We know that Paul labored to present every man complete in Christ (Colossians 1:28). This sounds like a great ministry aim, but we seem surprised when that actually means that we are some of the everyones. Other times we seem surprised that the people around us aren’t further along than they are. This is the “wish you were here” perspective. Instead of thinking about how to help the group, we won’t participate in the group until the group gets its act together. We want to encourage someone who isn’t so low on the discouragement meter. “If you were more like Christ, then I could join you or help you be more like Christ.” Who is going to help them, then? Whoever it is, its someone else. But that perspective isn’t helpful, or obedient.
Consider Colossians 3:12-17. There are five imperatives in these verses.
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Colossians 3:12–17, ESV)
The imperatives are:
Let’s scratch at number four first. The result of obeying the command to be richly indwelt is “admonishing and teaching.” Those are the exact two verbs Paul used in Colossians 1:28. In chapter one, admonishing and teaching were part of Paul’s apostolic purpose. In chapter three, they are part of whose practice? One another.
What is the context of this one-another work? It isn’t paradise. It isn’t a 70 degree, sunny afternoon, sitting on a picnic blanket in the soft grass with a half dozen of your favorite people who just finished their quiet times and now everyone has a verse. This isn’t a blissful Bible study where everyone has a short devotional to share, while carefree calligraphers copy happy thoughts into their notebooks.
The admonishing and teaching is in the context of need. The context for this mutual ministry is flawed and unfinished people, just as it was in Paul purpose. This is in a context of short-sighted, little-faithed sinners who aren’t yet complete in Christ. People who need psalms often need encouragement in the context of their brokenness. Other people who need psalms need confrontation in the context of their hardheartedness.
When we get together with people, we should have something to say. Where do our lines come from? Our words come from, or are informed by, Christ’s Word. We will speak from the overflow of our hearts which is why we must get filled with good things from God’s Word.
Doesn’t this also mean that, if we are filled with the word of Christ, we won’t be able to keep it to ourselves? We will seek out a context, we will seek out people, to spill onto? We can’t teach and admonish without the word indwelling us, but the word isn’t indwelling us unless we are teaching and admonishing one another. Revelation is good for relationships. God doesn’t command us to load the chambers with Bible verse bullets so that our gun is heavier. We load the chambers to shoot!
What if we shoot at the wrong target? What if we use the wrong lyrics? “Whoever sings songs to a heavy heart is like one who takes off a garment on a cold day, and like vinegar on soda” (Proverbs 25:20, ESV). Job’s friends had a lot of theology that was ill-applied. We need all wisdom (Colossians 3:16). And we need to know the people so that we know what teaching and admonishing they need.
Think about the glorious passage from Lamentations 2:22-24 that we read for our call to worship. Those true verses are smack in the middle of the desolation of Jerusalem. Death and disobedience and disregard of God was the backdrop of hope. Think about our weekly votum; can you see that it is one application of Colossians 3:16? What a great way to start our Sunday morning worship by reminding each other that “our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.” When do we need to hear that? When it’s bad. When our souls are dragging.
Sad people, broken people, proud people, sinning people, need the Word applied to them by one another. It’s a mess. Sometimes the mess is aimed at us. That’s why we’ve got to forgive each other and bear with one another (Colossians 3:13); people sin against us. Why do we need to be ruled by the peace of Christ (verse 15)? Because it’s not always so peaceful, in our own hearts or in the community. Why are we reminded that we were called in one body? Because the body often seems splintered. Why do we need to be thankful? Because our tendency is to grumble. When things don’t go right, are you giving thanks?
Church people are some of the worst. Why does Paul tell Christians to kill sin, put off sin, and stop lying (Colossians 3:5-14)? Because we’re still being sanctified.
We have ostrich Christians who stick their head in the sand when they see problems or conflict. There are mercury Christians who squirt away whenever someone gets too close.
We act like we want to be Christians in a movie. We want to cast the right characters to be around us and give them a script with all the right lines. But we are not in a movie, we are in a war. We are not actors, we are soldiers. We need each other, we need others who are different than us, even if they have different problems than us, for our growth and for the sake of the bigger battle.
The tone that is missing from way too much ministry is thankfulness. Yes, there is a lot of work to be done in us and by us. We are not all working properly and building the entire body up in love. But the tone in which we work should be thankful.
Thankfulness does not mean blindness. We’re not patting one another on the head with verses forcing our lips to smile. There are problems, that’s why admonishing and teaching are necessary. But the tone of our help should still be thankful.
I’ve said before that we impress no one by pointing out all the things that are wrong or incomplete. We live in a fallen world, so complaining about all the fallen things is easier than shooting fish in a barrel, it’s like breathing air while shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone does that.
One of the things God intends to make us, and those around us, is thankful. We cannot sow grumbling, bitterness, or reluctance and think that we will reap thanksgiving. Our gratitude should belch and gush like runaway lava, carrying away small-minded criticisms and negative attitudes and spiteful squabbles. Our gratitude should be thick and sticky like a snowball gathering speed and size as it sweeps down the mountainside, uprooting every petty sapling planted in the path.
We won’t cause gratitude to abound by sharpening our complaints against crybabies; criticizing criticizers usually doesn’t deter them. Criticism ebbs as tides of gratitude surge. That consistency of gratitude will change a culture.
We desire to present every man complete in Christ, but how can we do that? Even though we are a small flock, whose job is it to admonish and teach? It’s everyone’s job. Pastors and teachers are given to equip the saints for the work of ministry. And we’ve tried to think about how to oversee and equip and encourage and participate in that work.
Every group of people, no matter what size, has some degree of organization. The key is to consider the amount of structure, not too little or too much. The motivation for organization, for trellis, isn’t for sake of the trellis, but for sake of the bigger goals, the health of the vine.
We think that a healthy vine means that we know Christ, love Christ, and obey everything that Christ commanded. We think that a healthy vine includes individuals increasing in Christlikeness and the corporate body increasing in maturity. Health looks like encouraging and equipping an army full of one anothers for this community work, not bottle-necking the work to a few professional counselors. Our health includes Trinitarian life, Trinitarian fellowship, Trinitarian joy, Trinitarian feasting.
To help toward those ends, though it can’t get us there all by itself, one of the mechanisms we employ are Life to Life groups. We have recognized men (co-leaders) and we have some scheduled meetings (calendar). These are some of the practical steps for sake of our overall health.
We are diversifying the labor rather than concentrating it. We are sharing authority and responsibility rather than hoarding it. We are trying to multiply influence rather than choking it. We’re not trying to distance ourselves from the work, we’re trying to spread it and get closer to it.
As the elders considered the health of our body back in the summer, we realized that some of our leaders could use more encouragement. We realized that, together with the L2L leaders, we were not as likeminded as we should be. So we added another time for the leaders (and wives) to get together each month for that purpose. We also decided to have the elders participate in one group for the entire year.
Some people have expressed concern that this leaves them out to fend for themselves. Or, it gives then opportunity to do the “one another” work themselves. It’s easy to be a consumer, hard to be a Christian who fulfills his obligations to one another.
We know that people are busy. There are times when busyness is wrong, but it’s okay to work hard as an image bearer. Because of that, we often need to schedule life path-crossings. We could call them P2C (planned or purposeful path-crossings).
We don’t live in tents, plowing fields next to each other. We live relatively close by car, but we work in different places and our kids play on different teams. That’s all fine, but it does require us to make appointments and have meetings.
Are “meetings” the answer? It depends. What do you do at the meetings? Check off the “we met” box, or share your lives, teach and admonish, enjoy fellowship?
Equipping and encouraging one another isn’t an option, right? Then how are you doing that? If your schedule is so free that you’re sitting around waiting for others to knock on your door for a couple hours of coffee, you’re probably going to be waiting for a while. We can lament the busyness, work to balance our busyness, and then plan to get together anyway.
Breakfast doesn’t happen without some planning. It takes list making and shopping and preparation. It doesn’t mean that the most important thing is the piece of paper that has your meal plan. Eating is the point, but without a plan, you may not get to eat.
When the bulletin says that Life to Life groups are “unscheduled,” that is meant to communicate something more than “free” or that “nothing” is happening. It’s meant to remind all of us that we are all connected and so do something.
Again, oftentimes that will require you to plan something. Plan to read a book together, or listen to a sermon together, or have dinner and ask how their Bible reading is going. Learn about them, their interests, their lives, their needs. Paint a fence together. Pull weeds together. Work at a soup kitchen together. Travel to watch a game together. Play some games.
The Trinity authorizes us to love a lot of different things. He loves all kinds of things: purity and unity, schedules and spontaneity, big groups and small groups, worship worship and work worship, Sunday mornings and Sunday nights and Wednesday nights, emails and coffee talks, air war and ground war. There is a place for the whole body to be together and a place for division of the body and times for small meetings of the body parts. We’re trying to love all types of opportunities and give you types of opportunities. It’s a false dichotomy to say that I don’t love my wife because I’m not with here while I’m buying a gift for her. It’s a false dichotomy to say that we don’t love the Word because we’re getting to know where someone else could use the Word or needs to apply the Word.
You may not like how many meetings we schedule, or when they are scheduled. You may not like that we don’t have enough scheduled meetings or enough scheduled meetings of a certain type. You may think that the sermons are too long or not the right subject. You may be right. But if you are not thankful, you’re wrong. You don’t have to like it. But you do have to do something and you do have to be thankful.
Wish you were here has a bad sense and a good sense. It’s bad if your obedient investment is conditional on the other person’s arrival at the level you expected for them. It’s good if your desire is to invest in others and have them invest in you/your family, wish you were here participating.
Does the sin of other people inconvenience you? Irritate you? Offend you? What did you expect? None of us are sinless yet, so we need to get our heads on straight and our hearts full of thankfulness as we go about dealing with sin, ours and theirs.
There is no turnkey program to Christlikeness. Life to Life group trellis, however it’s built, or no Life to Life groups at all, can’t guarantee growth in Christlikeness. No program by itself can solve our sin problems. We need grace, we need the Spirit, we need the Word, we need wisdom, we need one another. We need to put on love and be thankful.
Turning an aircraft carrier around takes time, turning around our understanding and expectations for church life takes time, perhaps generations. But if it’s the right thing to do, then we should do it.