Where is the Christian life lived out? That’s another way of asking where is the
truth that we read in this book given application? Where do all the ideas that we formulate concerning
God, and our relationship with Him, and what He has done for us, and what He
wants us to do for Him find their testing ground?
Well let me state the obvious. It’s not here in this sanctuary on Sunday
morning. If you were faithful to attend
church every Sunday morning for the entire year, you would spend less than 1%
of your life sitting in these pews. Even
if you stayed for coffee hour and offered to clean up afterwards you would only be
able to build it up to 1.5%.
Somehow that makes us feel uncomfortable. You may have been a member of churches where
people felt that their life did not have meaning unless it was within the
context of doing something at church. So
churches add evening services, Wednesday night services, special bible studies,
seminar series, weekend retreats. They
get so specialized that I used to joke that in some churches you could find a
bible study or weekly gathering for single unemployed men with beards.
But the reality is that most of our life, the majority of
our life is lived out in the workplace, in the marketplace, in schools of
learning, in our homes and neighborhoods.
And those places are hard places sometimes full of darkness, brokenness,
selfishness, and failure. But they also
happen to be where the majority of the people that the Father has created for
good live, they are not here today because we don’t have room to contain them
all if they showed up. Jesus attended
the synagogue when He was growing up, He went to the temple on those days
recorded in the law, but most of his life was spent being obedient to His
parents as part of a household, in working with His hands at a job, in
recognizing authority within his home and community, in going to weddings and
mourning at funerals because that is what it means to be human, to live in this
tremendous world that God has made.
We’d like to stay here sometimes, because it seems safe to
us, we are gathered together with like minded people, most of whom like us, we
find encouragement here, maybe even some wisdom we can use...this motivates us,
reminds us of our purpose, makes us feel like maybe we are worth something
after all. But if we spend too much of
our time in these walls we become very much like one of those hot-house nursery
grown flowers that really looks great, but try taking it and plopping it in the
ground in your front yard, and after one or two crisp Vermont nights it is
going to look pretty shabby.
That’s why you harden off flowers started inside when the snow is still
on the ground, because they are designed mostly to be outside flowers, to be planted
and thrive out there. Exotics may look
great, but they are the exception, not the rule, and so are we.
Furthermore, going to church is not the same as being the
church. It may be hard for us to break
years of habit, but we do not need a building or committees or organs or
sermons to do what God has called us to do.
Why is that so hard for us to understand? The gospel message is not a hot house flower
that has to be protected and cultivated inside warm safe places like this
sanctuary. It is robust, it is durable,
it is the power of God for the deliverance of the world and the gates of hell
itself cannot and will not prevail against it.
And believe it our not but your life, lived out there, not here on
Sunday, is the way in which God chooses to make himself known to your family,
your friends, your coworkers, even just the strangers you interact with each
day. I want to be the church, not just
go to church. I pray that we put this
time to good use this morning since we are here anyway and let God show us the
difference.
