Trinity Baptist Church

The Anatomy of the Church:

The Internal Systems #3

 

As you know, we’ve been studying anatomy for the last few weeks.  Not human anatomy, but the anatomy of the church.  And first we took a look at the skeleton.  Five major bones provide our structure. 

 

We must have

 

 

Then we started looking at the internal systems.  Altogether there are 16 components that provide us the necessary attitudes to be like Christ. The church is not to be mechanical and external in what we do.  There are some things that must be inside us that guide and motivate us. 

 

So first we looked at things like obedience, love, humility and unity.  Then we moved on to service, joy, peace and thankfulness.

 

And remember, I told you there is a flow to these attitudes.  One feeds off the other and it’s difficult to develop one without the others being affected by it, either positively or negatively. 

 

So we ended last week with thankfulness, and with the most natural outgrowth of thankfulness is where I want to begin today, and that is

9. The Attitude of Generosity

 

Jesus had so much to say about generosity.  For instance, in Matthew 10:8, He said, Freely you have received, freely give" 

 

Luke 6:38, He said, "Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you."

 

And when you think about it, it just makes all kinds of sense that a giving God would expect His followers and children to be generous.  

 

God is a generous, giving God.  Jesus taught us to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread..." We are the recipients of His giving.

 

James 1:17 reminds us that "Every good and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights"

 

God is so good to us and blesses us in so many ways,, but unfortunately while many receive from the Lord, they never learn the joy of releasing those blessings back into the lives of others. 

 

The attitude of generosity stems from a couple of key truths.  First, generous people remember that “the earth is the Lord's and everything in it."   We don’t own anything.  It’s not ours to begin with.

 

And the second truth is a companion to the first:

 

 

We are simply stewards or managers of God’s stuff. 

And the only reason God allows the good things to come to us that He does is not just so we can have a happy and blessed life.  We need to recognize that God's blessings are to be used for blessing others.

 

We see so many examples of that in Scripture:

 

Watch a woman who had the reputation as a sinner as she pours out her most valued possession, a precious oil, and anoints the feet of Jesus in worship and thanks.

 

See the Good Samaritan as he stops to assist a man that he didn’t even know.  He takes the time and uses the energy and spends the money so the man can be taken care of.  What a contrast to the priest and Levite, the religious folk, who had neither time nor interest in the man and left for dead.

 

Take note of the little widow as she gives her offering.  She teaches us that the key question is not, "How much should I give?" but rather, "How much should I keep?" When the widow gave, she gave all. The religious leaders' offerings were skimmed off the top, involving no sacrifice at all. 

 

Some say they would like to be more generous, but they don't have the money to do so. But God blesses us so that we can bless others. Listen: If God knows that we are prone to use our resources to bless

others, He is more likely to bless us.

 

The Macedonians didn’t give because they had great wealth, but because they wanted to give.

 

 

You don’t have to be rich to be generous.  In fact, my observation has been that there are a whole lot more poor people who are generous than there are wealthy. 

 

The key is not how much do you have, but how much do you love.  It is possible to give without loving, but it is impossible to love without giving.

 

A generous person gives because he has, and doesn't worry about what he doesn't have. He just trusts God.

 

God’s people, God’s church must have the attitude of generosity.  Billy Graham once said, "God has given us two hands - one to receive with and the other to give with. We are not cisterns made for hoarding; we are channels made for sharing.

 

There is an Old Testament story that really intrigues me.  It is found in Exodus 35

 

Notice verses 3-5a

 

The people of God are beginning a building program and God tells Moses to take up an offering.  Notice how the people responded:

 

Verses 20-21, 36:3-7

 

Is that not amazing?  We know now that the children of Israel weren’t Baptists!

 

Could you imagine that ever happening?  We’re having Sunday morning church and at the time for the offering I stand up and say, “Listen:  We don’t need to receive an offering today. 

In fact, I want to encourage you to please not give.  We have too much already!  We can’t spend it fast enough to keep up!

 

I hope you realize that if every person that claims to be a member of Trinity Baptist Church would develop an attitude of generosity that flows out of a heart that loves God and can’t wait to praise and thank Him through their giving, we would have more than enough resources to do anything that we ever dreamed of doing and more than we could ever realize in ministry and missions. 

 

I don’t think we’ve begun to scratch the surface of what God desires to do through us! 

 

Let me share another one with you.  And again it is just the most natural progression.  People who have been given much have much to give. 

 

Question:  What has God given to you more than anything else?  I would suggest it is forgiveness.

 

10.  The Attitude of Forgiveness.

 

Listen:  you can’t survive without forgiveness.  You may exist for a while, but eventually you will die and split hell wide open if you never receive forgiveness from God for your sins. 

 

But listen to this:  Neither can the church survive without the attitude of forgiveness. 

 

Why is it so important?  Because we’re human.  We make mistakes.  We say the wrong thing.  We act and react the wrong way and we create tension in the body of Christ. 

And if you can't forgive and in particular if you can't forgive the one who sins against you, then you've got a cancer in the body of Christ.

 

Remember what Jesus said in the Disciple’s Prayer? 

 

Matthew 6:12

 

Every sin committed by us is a debt owed to God which could only be paid by the perfect sacrifice of Christ.

 

And the request is not just for forgiveness of our debts, but it is contingent upon us forgiving others. 

 

Lord, will You please forgive us as we forgive others. It’s a really simple principle. 

 

If you are willing to pass it along, God will extend forgiveness to you.  If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

 

In other words, if you don't forgive, He won't.

 

Now let’s be clear:  this is not talking about redemptive divine forgiveness. This is talking about  relational human forgiveness.

 

Redemptive, eternal forgiveness is ours in Christ; but what we find here is between humans.  It’s what keeps the lines of fellowship open and pure and blessed.  And Jesus says it only comes to us if we forgive others.

 

So if you don't forgive somebody, you can’t be forgiven. 

 

You may say, “But you don’t know what they did”.  No I don’t know and I don’t care. 

 

It doesn’t matter what they did to you, if you don't forgive them, then you have a cancer in you. I believe that an unforgiving heart is the reason for an awful lot of tragedy. In fact, I think the body catches the soul's diseases; and there are a whole bunch of sick folk walking around today simply because their soul is sick and they can’t find it within themselves to forgive. 

 

If you want to know what it is to walk and live every day in sweet fellowship with God then you must learn to forgive others. 

 

And by the way, just who do you think you are not to forgive somebody anyway?  After all God has forgiven you of you have the audacity and gaul to go around mad and somebody because of something they said of did?

 

Remember the parable in Matthew 18 of the man who owed 10,000 talents, and he came and said, "I don't have it. I don't anything to pay," and the king said, "I forgive you everything," and then he went out and found a guy who owed him 18 bucks and strangled him and threw him in jail and said, "Stay there till you pay me"? And the Lord was saying, "Who do you think you are?  You who have been forgiven an inestimable, unpayable lifetime accumulation of debt; and you won't forgive somebody else 18 bucks?"

 

It's Ephesians 4:32, "Be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake has forgiven you."

 

Listen, we ought to be anxious to forgive, because we've been forgiven so much! The church, the blood-bought redeemed of God, ought to be, of all the people in the world, the most forging of anybody!

 

And not the progression:

 

Only obedient people who are filled with love and humility and desirous of unity will forgive. 

 

Only those who desire to serve others and seek peace and joy will forgive.  Only those who are truly thankful for all God has done for them will generously reach out to others in forgiveness. 

 

The attitude of forgiveness.   Here’s number eleven:

 

11.  The Attitude of Self-Control

 

How important it is that we understand the need to live a life of self-control.  Unfortunately, and to my discredit and the discredit of preachers like me, we very seldom preach about this subject.

 

At its core, living a life of self-control or self-discipline is simply saying “no” to sin.  Or to say it another way, it is living under the control of the Holy Spirit and saying “yes” to good and righteousness.

 

 

 

 

Now obviously that's not too complicated a definition but it captures the truth. The disciplined life understands the law of God, and says no to anything outside the bounds of that standard and yes to what is contained in that standard.

 

Now to see an illustration of that, turn to 1 Corinthians 9:24.

 

We are to runt to win the prize. That's the reason you're in the race. That’s the objective. So we, as believers, have been called to a race, and as we run this race, we are running to win.

 

 

Now, what is necessary to accomplish that goal?

 

verse 25

 

What does the phrase “temperate in all things” mean?

 

It means the person running is exercising discipline.  He’s got himself under control.  His focus is on winning, therefore he does what is necessary to accomplish that goal.

 

And by the way, that’s the reason I placed forgiveness before this one.   We are running a race, and as Hebrews 12:1-2 tells us, we must lay aside every weight the sin that drags us down in order to run.

 

Listen:  you can’t run carrying all the baggage of an unforgiving spirit. We need to unload so we are free to run.  And Paul says we are running to win.  

 

Obviously, a guy is not serious about winning if he’s 30 pounds overweight and out of shape.  He’s got to train and develop muscle and eat the right things and avoid the wrong things and by doing so he demonstrates through his discipline that he’s serious about the race he’s involved in.

 

And that is the picture Paul is using to describe his commitment to being a Christian.  He is saying, "Look, I'm in a race, and I my desire is to win.  So in order to do that, I've got to get myself under control.

 

Then notice verse 26

 

In other words, "I know where I'm going. I stay on course." And whatever it costs, I’m going to do it.  I want to win, therefore I give a maximum effort.

 

And then in all comes together in verse 27

 

In other words, I don't want to be sinning and lose out on the spiritual victory anymore than an athlete wants to be sinning against his body and against his training and lose out on a physical victory.

 

We're in a race to win, and we've got to be disciplined to win and we've got to live a life of obedience to God's will in a matter of purity. That's what Paul is calling us to.

 

And I will admit to you that one of the great concerns of my life as a pastor is that in Christianity, in our time, there seems to be such a lack of discipline. God hasn't changed His standard. God hasn't changed the narrow way or the narrow path but Christians tend to have widened it and decided that we know better than God how we ought to live. 

I think about the impact that our decisions as adults are having on our kids.  Somehow we believe that we can live any way we want to and do anything we want and there won’t be any repercussions from it. 

Far too many parents give little or no supervision to what their children are exposed to in movies and video games and TV, and then wonder why there behavior is so aberrant. 

 

Hey listen if you are going to make no requirements for purity in their lives now then don’t be surprised later when they have no interest in the things of God and want to live like the devil.  And don’t come crying to the preacher about what went wrong saying, "Well, we took him to church all the time.  I just don’t understand what went wrong.” 

 

Here’s what went wrong:  You didn’t model for them and teach them the importance of purity and self-control and modesty and morality and ethics. 

 

You cannot expect to cultivate Godly thinking in people who are never exposed to the things of God.  I promise you if you think you’ll just leave all that to the church you’ve lost the battle.  The hour or two at church once or twice a week is no match for the incessant, unending stream of filth and perversion and wrong-headed thinking the world wants to pump into your life. 

 

We must develop in ourselves, and as best we can in our children, the attitude of self-control.

 

Well, I’ve got to move on, so let’s look at another attitude.  This one will be number 12 on our list and it is

 

12.  The Attitude of Dependence/Prayer

 

I struggled with which term to use, so I’ll let you decide which you want to use. 

 

What is the connection?  I’m convinced the reason we don’t pray is because we are so independent.  And to effectively serve God there must be a sense of dependency upon God.  Or if you wanted to look at it from the opposite end, we must realize that we are insufficient to do God’s work in our own strength.

 

There must be this attitude of insufficiency that drives us to God in prayer and dependence. 

 

Now I would suggest that this doesn't come easy to capable people. It doesn't come easy to effective, God-blessed churches like ours. See, our church is sort of well-oiled, in a sense. The machinery moves. Things get done. We have competent people. We have hardworking people. We have creative people.

 

And if we aren’t careful, we can get to the point where we lose the sense of insufficiency. We lose the sense of dependence, because we've figured out how to do it.  And basically, that means we’ve eliminated God.  Now we would never admit that.  After all, we sing about Him and preach about Him and give Him the glory and all that.

 

But just to be real gut-level honest about it, maybe we don’t need God all that much.  It’s easy to get there in the kind of environment we have here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

 

 

But it’s not so easy to do that if you happen to be a little band of believers in a Muslim or communist country somewhere living every day in the fear of death with absolutely no resources at all.

 

But for us who have so much, who so very much have been blessed by God, who like Israel of old have come into the land and inherited a land we really didn't work for, and partaken from wells we didn't dig, we forget God; and we just move out in a flurry of activity and great ideas and bright hopes and challenging thoughts.

 

But regardless of the blessing or the drought around us, we must maintain an attitude of dependence.

 

So let me close today with a couple of companion thoughts from the life of David.    

 

Notice  Psalm 19

 

Now as David begins writing the 19^th Psalm, he is just overwhelmed by God.  And when you get to the end, it’s almost like he’s come to the invitation at the end of the service. 

 

Notice verses 12-14

 

Zero in on verse 13

 

Presumptuous sins.  It's so easy to just blast ahead without really being dependent on God, without searching for the heart of God and the mind of God.

 

 

We can just sit in a meeting void of prayer and direction and decide to do this or that, and go here or there and start this or the other and believe we are doing the work and will of God. 

 

But the great fear of my life and ministry is doing something that God is not a part of.  I always want to be sure that I'm just going along at the same pace in the same direction with the same goal that He has, because Christ is building His church, and I don't ever want to compete with Him.

 

David prayed to be protected from presumptuous sin. 

 

Now in contrast to that, turn to 2 Samuel 7

 

Now the setting in chapter 7 is David is now king.  And he begins to look around at his beautiful palace and then he look at the house of God.

 

Now David has this elaborate home and God was living in a tent in those days.  It was called “the tabernacle” but don’t be mistaken, it was a tent.  And so David, I think with very much good intentions, he says,

 

Verses 1-2

 

And in so many words, he is saying, “I’m going to build God a dwelling place.”

 

Then apparently between verses 2 and 3 he goes to the prophet, Nathan, and lays out his plans and Nathan says, “Very commendable”

 

Verse 3

 

And about that time, God reached down and got Nathan by the scruff of the neck and said, "Nathan, you didn't check in. Who told you to tell him that? I don’t want a house; I don’t need a house; It’s not my plan to live in a house, and furthermore I’ve never asked complained because he hasn’t built a house, and I sure don’t need you to be running around speaking for me when you don’t know what you’re talking about.  So you go tell David to kill the plans for a house.” 

 

Now I don’t know which occurred first, the writing of Psalm 19 or the events of 2 Samuel 7, but don’t miss the connection. 

 

David, and Nathan as well, presumed to know what to do and how and when to do it without consulting with God.  Theirs was a sin of presumption.  Either David learned a valuable lesson that day and worte about it in Psalm 19 or he disregarded the prayer that he had already prayed. 

 

But I will promise you, all you need to do to learn about the sin of presumption is start something by yourself that God isn't in and just get out on that limb and watch it get sawed off a few times. It helps to cure you.

 

Now as I said earlier, the real focus of learning dependence on God is prayer. So in our closing minutes together, I want you to look with me at John 14

 

You may remember the situation that we find in John 14.  The Lord is getting ready to leave. He’s in the Upper Room with the disciples.  He's promising them all kinds of wonderful things.

They're really afraid. They have depended on Him for everything.  They have followed him for three years. He made food that fed them. He caught fish so they could pay their taxes. He told them everything they needed to know about the Kingdom, about God, about man, about sin, about righteousness.

 

They were utterly dependent on Him and now He was going away and they were troubled. The understood their dependence. They needed Him desperately.

 

And when He announced to them that He was going away, it was panic time. But in the midst of that, He makes a promise.

 

verses 13-14

 

You can't get a better promise than that!

 

Now don’t be confused.  That doesn’t mean we must stick the old familiar “in Jesus’ Name” on the end of our prayer and it’s as good as done. 

 

That isn't what it means. In the Old Testament, God said, "My name is I am that I am." In other words, "My name is all that I am," and the name of Christ is all that He is, so you ask anything consistent with who Jesus is and what His work is and what His will is and what His desire is and what His plan is and what His purpose is, and He'll do it.

 

It doesn't mean you can ask for anything and slam down on the end of your prayer and get it. It means that, when you ask consistently with His will and His purpose, then He will do it.

 

And so we need to learn, as believers, to live in a life of constant dependency, the prayer of which is, "Oh, Lord, whatever is in Your will to do, that’s what I want also.”

 

That means there is no bitterness if it doesn't happen. There’s no disappointment if He goes another direction.  We’re dependent on Him to energize it and bring it to pass only if it's in line with His perfect will.

 

And in that way, God is glorified; because then the Father is doing what the Father wants to do for His own glory; and then the ministry that's being carried on is the ministry of God in the name of the Son.

 

In the Hampton Court Palace Gardens near London grows the oldest and largest known vine in the world.  It is a grapevine that is more than 240 years old and 120 feet) long.

 

It was first planted in a glasshouse built to house Queen Mary's collections of exotics from the tropics. Its roots were planted outside, and its branches were trained inside the glasshouse, which measured 13 x  60 feet. By the 1790s, the vine was thriving so much that the glasshouse had to be lengthened by a further 11½ feet.

 

In 1800, the girth of the trunk was about 1 foot. In 1887, it was already 4 feet around the base; today, it measures 12 feet around the base.

 

The Vine usually blossoms in early May with small and fragrant flowers and the crop is usually harvested in September. It takes the Vine Keeper around three weeks to remove all the grapes.

The crop averages 500 to 700 bunches of grapes that weigh from 507 to 705 lbs. The largest recorded crops of grapes from the Vine were 1,800 bunches in 1798 and 2,245 bunches in 1807.

 

The grapes were originally used by the Royal family as dessert grapes. But in 1930, King George V started sending the grapes to hospitals, and within five years they were being sold to palace visitors. Today, the full crop of black eating grapes is sold to visitors in the palace shops in late summer or early autumn.

 

It’s almost beyond belief that a single grape vine could survive for that long and still be healthy and produce.  But the keep is in the care it receives.  Take the time to read about it and you will discover they prune and fertilize and peel the old bark and provide just the right environment to assure it continues. 

But there is an even greater story of survival and thriving and that is the church of Jesus Christ. 

 

In fact, Jesus describes the relationship that we will enjoy with Him with the same picture I’ve provided you today. 

 

He is the vine; we are the branches, and the success of the church and it’s ministry and success down through the years is always and only because of the care He provides. 

 

And, beloved, that is what I want in this church. I don't want the ministry of clever men. I don't want the ministry of creative people. We want the ministry of the Spirit of God in the name of the Son of God for the glory of God Himself.

I don't know about you, but I don't want anything for me that God doesn't want for me. And to ever accomplish that, there needs to be a sense of insufficiency to know what to do and how best to do it that drives us to dependency on God, where in the midst of our prayers we call out for that which Jesus wants done.

 

Let's pray