5/11/08 Crossing Generational Barriers

Before we return to our study of Spiritual Growth

and Peter’s comments to us in the first chapter of his second letter

I have a few random thoughts I want to share with you,

things that have been bouncing around inside me for a number of weeks now.

I suppose if I were to attempt to put a name to what I want to do this morning

I would call it, “Crossing Generational Barriers In Our Presentation of Jesus Christ”.

The problem with that title

is that it’s way too academic sounding for what I really want to do,

but at least it may help you know where I want to head.

I am your Pastor and your most visible Bible Teacher here at PBF.

You are the people God has chosen to entrust into my care at some level.

It is a trust I take very seriously,

one that often leaves me feeling tremendously inadequate,

probably mostly at those times when I begin to hold myself responsible

for doing those things in your lives that only God can do.

But I mention this because I have recently become aware

of an aspect of my responsibility to you

that I have not previously thought about much.

But let me back up a step

and try to set the stage for what I’m trying to say here.

When our Lord departed following His resurrection nearly 2000 years ago

He made it clear that it was His purpose,

His design to create on this earth

what He called “the Body of Christ”.

It was and still is to this day

one of the most revolutionary and remarkable concepts ever to enter into human thought.

He made it clear that He was not simply attempting to gather followers to Himself.

He wasn’t looking for converts to His belief system

or faithful adherents to His teachings.

He wasn’t even just looking for those

who would receive His offer of forgiveness

through their trust in His death for their sins against God,

although that is certainly the doorway into everything else He has to offer us.

But what He revealed to us

both through His own comments

and then through the teachings of His Apostles

was that He was going to create on this earth

a literal living creation

that would be His physical body on this earth,

a living creation made up of millions of individual parts -

individual members.

Some would serve as the eyes,

some as the mouth,

some as the heart,

some as the ears,

some as the hands and feet and so on.

And He Himself would serve as the head.

Paul talks about this body concept repeatedly throughout his writings.

In Ephesians he says, 4:15-16

...but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.

To the Corinthians he said,

1CO 12:12 For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ.

And if we took the time we could spend all morning

seeing how this remarkable truth is developed throughout the New Testament.

Our Lord then went on to tell us that He would personally indwell each and every member

and equip each of them to fulfill the specific roles for which He had designed them,

and that He would literally live out His life through each of them on a daily basis.

The whole concept sounds like something

out of the most bazaar science fiction story -

millions of people all indwelt by one Spirit, lead by one mind - one central intelligence,

and yet it is exactly what our God has done.

This whole amazing organism, the Body of Christ,

is His Church here on this earth.

If everything works as He designed,

our Lord then takes this one Body

and divides it up into thousands and thousands of smaller groups,

placing each of them into unique local settings -

different cultures,

different sub-cultures within those larger cultural groups,

each with it’s own unique daily expression of the Jesus Christ who dwells within all of them.

Of necessity,

each of these local churches

then clothe themselves in the external forms of the cultures in which they have been placed.

This clothing process involves a multitude of different factors -

everything from the buildings we meet in,

to the way we dress,

to the songs we sing,

to the way we pray out loud

and the tools and techniques we use in our attempts to present Christ to those around us.

This cultural “clothing” is deeply affected not only by the external culture as a whole

but also by our own personal religious heritage,

and the specific group of people we are seeking to reach,

and the unique gifts we possess, and on and on.

Now, if this clothing process works as God intends,

it will be a very fluid process in our lives.

By that I mean that

as our culture changes,

and as the people we minister to changes,

so should our cultural clothing.

If we’re doing it the way God intends,

we should be in a constant process of listening, and shifting, and changing

in ways that make us increasingly equipped and effective in the expression of the life of Christ through us.

The problem we run into, of course,

is that change is often hard stuff for us,

growth is hard stuff for us,

and if we do not understand the difference between our cultural clothing

and our true purpose as the living Body of Christ on this earth,

we can easily find ourselves clinging to an external structure

simply because it’s familiar and comfortable

and because it reminds us of the good old days.

It is a tragic but true observation

that in any given culture

the last institutions to change are always the religious institutions.

Typically cultural changes find their earliest expressions in philosophy,

and art,

and music,

and entertainment,

and then filter down into dress and business and education and other aspects of the life of the society,

and then usually a full generation later

those changes will have some impact on the organized religious structures.

Now, please do not misunderstand me here.

I am certainly not suggesting that we should allow the culture around us

to determine who we are or who we should be as the people of God.

But what I am saying

is that if we do not have a clear, conscious concept

of who we are,

and of what our role in society is,

and especially of which things are absolutes

and which are simply cultural clothing,

we can easily find ourselves clinging to forms and communication styles

that rob us of our effectiveness in our efforts to reveal the person of Christ to the world in which we live.

I’ll give you just one example to help you understand what I’m trying to say.

I grew up in a culture

that, for the most part, still accepted the concept of absolutes.

By that I mean that people still believed that there were absolute truths,

revealed to us by our Creator,

truths that were applicable to every generation, every culture, every person.

Certainly there were endless discussions about just exactly what should and should not be included in those absolutes,

but the basic concept of the existence of some universal truths

that had universal application to everyone was a fixed foundation of our society.

In that society

if a person quoted a passage from the Bible

it was accepted as truth.

But in our world today

the concept of absolute truth is nonexistent.

“Truth” in our culture today is simply whatever seems to work in our own personal life.

We as a culture today have no problem at all

with something being “true” for one person

and not “true” for the person next to them.

Truth, as we understand it culturally,

is now a relative concept, personal, individual, private,

and our only cultural obligation to one another

is to respect each person’s concepts of truth as they choose to define it.

OK, I mention this simply because this change in our culture

should have a profound affect on the cultural clothing we as Christians put on.

By that I mean that it should cause us to reevaluate the way in which we go about

presenting the ultimate truth of Jesus Christ to our culture.

Whereas 50 years ago we might have stood before our culture and said, “The Bible says...”

and been met with a positive response,

now when we say, “The Bible says...”,

our culture responds by saying, “So what?...so who cares WHAT the Bible says. If that’s what you’re into, fine, but don’t try to cram it down my throat.”

Does that mean that what the Bible says is any less true,

or any less relevant?

Absolutely not.

But it does mean that we must begin our communication with the pagan society around us

from a very different place,

demonstrating the truth of God’s Word through our own lives

and the reality of His love for them through our relationships with them.

And only when an individual has come into a personal union with their Creator

will they have a basis for accepting the absolute truth of what that Creator has said to us.

And once again I think I may be making this whole thing

more complicated than I intended.

What I’ve wanted to say so far is simply this -

we are the literal physical body of Christ here on this earth,

and as such we bear the calling of communicating the truth about God

to the cultural setting into which our God has placed us.

To do that

we must clothe ourselves and our message

in the cultural clothing that makes us most effective in fulfilling that role.

But we should never allow ourselves to confuse the clothing

with the truth we are called to present,

nor should we cling to the clothing in a way that suggests either to the pagan culture around us

or to the next generation of Christians

that there is something about it that needs to be preserved.

It is a tool and nothing more.

And, with whatever leadership role I have in the family of God,

my obligation, at least in part,

is to do whatever I can

to help create a physical structure - the cultural clothing

that makes it easiest for us here, now,

to fulfill the roles God has equipped us for and called us to.

But one of the things I want us to see this morning

is that this cultural clothing we put on,

this external form we function in

should be something we hold very loosely,

something we recognize as being simply a tool, not an absolute.

The history of the family of God over the past 2000 years

is filled with countless examples

of groups of believers who fell in love with their cultural clothing,

believing that their forms and traditions are not simply helpful tools for the fulfillment of their calling,

but rather that they are in some way sacred, untouchable, unchangeable,

and that their responsibility to the next generation

is to find some way of getting them

to pick up and perpetuate that same exact form,

even telling them that their faithfulness to God

and their highest calling as Christians

is to preserve and perpetuate what the past generation created.

And increasingly I have found myself asking myself,

“What is it I really want to pass on to the next generation?

What do I want to show them and tell them really matters,

and what does not?”

In the past few months,

four separate times I have been in conversations

with four different young Christians,

conversations in which

they have expressed to me how they feel about the church structures they see around them,

and about the relevance they see those structures having to their generation.

And in their own ways

each of them has told me that what they see

has almost no relevance at all to them personally,

or to the world they live in,

or to the needs they see their generation facing.

They didn’t use any of those words,

but the message was there.

Which has led me to wrestle with questions I’ve never wrestled with in quite this way before.

Most of all

it has caused me to ask myself

what it is that I really want to offer both to this generation and to the next

as being the core of the message we as Christians are called to communicate.

Where can I say to my young friends,

“Feel free to throw out all of the cultural trappings and the religious traditions from my generation that have no relevance to you,

but these things are non-negotiable,

these things are universal,

and, if you and I do it right, these things will be clearly evident

both in what we have done in our generation and what you do in the next.”

And the answers I’m coming up with

are both freeing and unsettling to the extreme.

They are freeing because I am beginning to realize

that what I am called to pass on to those who come after me

is not nearly as complicated as I once thought.

And it does not require from me

anything other than what my God has equipped me to do.

But at the same time it is unsettling

because it has forced me to face honestly

how much of my Christian experience is simply a temporary cultural tool.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

In fact, it’s part of what God’s Spirit seeks to do with each new generation -

to take the universal heart of our message

and then teach us how to apply it to our unique cultural settings.

But the truth is that we can and often do become deeply attached to our cultural clothing.

It just “feels” right to us,

and because if feels right to us

it is all too easy for us to assume it must be right for others as well.

And then we look at the next generation

and we see them have no interest in the forms and structures we have produced

and we wring our hands and moan, “What in the world has happened to the youth today?

Why won’t they come to our meetings?

Why won’t they carry on our traditions?”

Do you know the first time I was ever aware of hearing comments like that?

It was in the late 60's when adults were saying it about me and my generation.

And our response to them then was that we had no interest in their meetings and their traditions

because their meetings and their traditions had no relevance to us and our world.

And we were right.

And then we allowed God’s Spirit

to reinvent the external structure of His body in our generation

in ways that frequently terrified our elders

and yet fit perfectly with what He wanted to do in us and through is

in the last half of the twentieth century.

I mentioned to a young friend of mine this past week

that when our church fellowship first started

we were considered by many to be revolutionary to the extreme -

no offering,

no building,

no elevated platform up front,

no hymn books,

no membership,

no business meetings,

no organ,

no evening service,

and open microphones where anyone could get up and say anything they wanted about anything the wanted.

And it was obvious from the look on my friend’s face

that the idea that there could ever have been anything even remotely revolutionary about us

was an amazing new thought to him.

I like who we are as a church.

In fact I like it very, very much.

I like both our structural framework and our doctrinal framework.

And because I like it so much

it’s sometimes hard for me to understand

why others, and especially the next generation of Christians

wouldn’t like it as much as I do.

But the truth is that they very likely won’t

because what God needs to do in them

and seeks to do through them

will differ dramatically from what He’s wanted to do through my generation.

So, having said all of that,

let me share with you what I’ve come up with so far

as being the non-negotiables,

the core message and values of the Body of Christ

that I believe must be present within us

and must be passed on to the next generation.

And at present

there are only three things on my list.

The first two concern the message we’re called to present,

and the third concerns the structure we are called to pass on.

And let me start with the one that matters the most,

the one that is at the very center of both or purpose and our calling.

And when you first hear it,

I think you will probably respond by saying, “Well, of course, that’s obvious. That’s no big revelation.”

But I hope you’ll keep listening long enough

so that you understand what I’m really seeing.

OK, to understand this first one,

let me begin by showing you how I got there.

This may seem really obvious,

but the truth is that somehow it seems to get missed so often

when we get near the world of organized religion.

As we’ve seen already,

we are the literal body of Jesus Christ here on this earth.

Which means that,

to understand our purpose and calling

we need to look at the purpose and calling of Christ Himself.

If we clearly understand what God is seeking to do through Christ,

we will be able to clearly understand what Christ is seeking to do through His body.

And the answer to what God is seeking to do through Christ is obvious -

Christ is His ultimate, perfect expression of His love for us.

Through Christ

God is communicating just one thing - “I love you!!!”

JOH 3:16-17 "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”

ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

To see Christ correctly

is to see the love of God.

And to see the BODY of Christ correctly

is to see the love of God.

Which means that our first, highest, greatest, central calling as the Church

is to effectively communicate the truth about the love of God for us.

And we do that in two ways.

First of all, we fight our way through to our own personal discovery of God’s love for us,

and then we live the reality of that love boldly before the world.

We do not live lives before the world around us

that project attitudes of fear or condemnation before our God.

To do so is to deny the very heart of the most crucial message entrusted into our care.

And I’m certainly not suggesting

that fighting our way through the septic system of religious sewage swirling around us

to the point where we can honestly see the love of God is in any way easy.

I’m just saying it has to happen

and until it does

we can’t even begin to fulfill our calling as the Body of Christ.

And then second, after discovering His love for us personally,

we then love the people around us.

We demonstrate the truth about Jesus Christ

by allowing Him to do through us, one person at a time,

what He did in person when He was here.

Which means we train ourselves to always look past the externals and see their need.

We see beyond their language,

beyond their clothing,

beyond their sexual orientation,

beyond their physical appearance,

beyond their attitudes,

beyond anything and everything that is different from us

and we love them.

That is what the Body of Christ is here for -

to communicate the reality of the love of Jesus Christ

by discovering His love for us personally

and then by demonstrating that love to those around us.

And the only cultural clothing that has any value

is the cultural clothing that helps equip us to do that.

If what we do here on Sunday mornings does not help equip us to do that

then it’s just more worthless religious sewage.

And when we speak to the next generation

what we want to tell them is this:

it doesn’t matter whether you choose to perpetuate any of the organizational structures that now exist.

But it does matter that, whatever you end up doing,

you do it because it enables you to better discover the truth about God’s love for you personally,

and because it allows you to demonstrate the reality of that love to your own generation.

And then the second core message

that I see as applicable to all generations

is really just the application of that first message

as Paul expresses it in Romans 5:1-2.

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand...

Peace with God,

and this grace in which we stand.

Those are the two greatest by-products

of our acceptance of the love of God for us.

And whatever we do structurally

must reinforce those truths.

Without a doubt

one of the saddest and most tragic statements I’ve ever heard

came from a fellow Christian who told me,

“You know, I never really feel as though I’ve been to church unless I come away feeling guilty.”

And then, finally,

what is it we want to hand to the next generation

as far as practical rules of conduct for life?

Where is our bottom line?

And it will come as no surprise

that we are given the answer to that exact question in Scripture.

It is the answer the Jewish believers gave to their new non-Jewish brothers and sisters.

The Jews were the most rules-oriented group of people in history at the time of Christ.

They had defined and refined the moral law of God

until there was a rule of conduct for every conceivable situation.

And don’t you know that there were many Jewish believers in Christ

who wanted very much to take the whole system

and dump it onto the non-Jewish believers,

in much the same way

as we may find ourselves wanting to package our Christian system

and dump it onto the next generation.

So many rules,

so many traditions,

so many obligations the truly faithful followers of Christ should fulfill.

But listen to what the Apostles said.

ACT 15:24-25, 29 "Since we have heard that some of our number to whom we gave no instruction have disturbed you with their words, unsettling your souls, it seemed good to ...the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials: that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication; if you keep yourselves free from such things, you will do well. Farewell. "

They called them to break their ties with their old pagan religious practices,

to avoid drinking blood and eating things that were strangled because it was so offensive to their Jewish brothers and sisters,

and to bring their sexual conduct in line with what God has said.

That’s it.

Which means, of course,

that in the end they were willing to trust

that the Spirit of God would develop in the Gentiles

all of the other rules and boundaries that were right for them,

just as we must do with the generation that comes after us.

And I can guarantee you one thing with certainty -

what God does in them will not look right to us,

and it will not be what we would have tried to give them.

“They need to come to our Bible studies,

they need to come to our meetings,

the need to have daily devotions,

they need to love our music,

they need to keep our precious forms and structures going...”

No, they don’t.

All they need to do

is to listen to and follow their Lord,

and all we need to do is to get out of the way and let them.

And whatever He does in them will be exactly right

for the world He is preparing them to reach.

And with that I will end,

with just one final comment.

This whole area of thought is very much a work in progress in my own life,

and I reserve the right to revise what I’ve said

if I find myself seeing things with more clarity in the future.