How To Kill A Church
Calvary 10/9/2011 Ephesians 4:1-6 Psalm 133 3 John 1:5-13
We have a started a new series for the next four weeks and the topic is “Moving Things To The Next Level.” There are times in our lives, when we want to get one result, but we actually get something different and we may wonder what went wrong. Sometimes, the very things we are doing can produce the exact opposite result that we had in mind.
Even though we are going to be looking at the church, the same principles are going to apply in other areas of our lives if we want to move to the next level. We are going to look at “How To Kill The Church.”, “How To Heal The Church,” “How To Build The Church” and “How To Change The World.” I get to start the series off with “How To Kill The Church.” Now I know that Jesus said to Peter, “Upon this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Well I don’t believe that Satan has ever killed a church and does not have the power to do so. I do believe, the saints in the church are the only ones who have the power to kill it by ignoring the word of God. Satan may use us, but we have to choose to be used by Him by refusing to yield to Christ.
There will be times in our lives, when we are the source of a serious problem , and we won’t know that we’re causing the problem.
A couple of years ago, I noticed that I had a difficult time sleeping on Saturday nights. The other six nights, there wasn’t any problems. But on Saturdays, I would wake up at 2 in the morning with the worse pain in my stomach. I’d practically have to sit up in the bed to go to sleep. I took every stomach medicine we had in the bathroom.
Since this only happened on Saturdays, I assumed it was the devil attacking me to keep me from being rested for Sunday mornings. So I would rebuke the devil left and right. I would then pray for the pain to go away. I spent my hours awake praying so as to discourage the devil from waking me up. Surely the devil didn’t want me praying.
I finally went to the doctor and he gave me some kind of medicine to take for upset stomachs. I took the medicine and felt better. By Saturday I was really feeling great. But that Saturday night the whole process started all over again. It happened for the next couple of weeks. Pastor Toby would pray over me, but about 2am, I’d be in pain all over again.
Then one Saturday night as I was leaving from the bathroom to the bed, God had mercy on me. For The first time, I noticed my hand reached into this bag for some chocolate covered something out of a beautiful bag that someone had given to us as an anniversary gift a long time ago. Saturday night was the only night I allowed myself to get some of this delicious snack. I dropped it back into the bag without eating any of it. I slept that night with no problem.
That chocolate food in that bag had gone bad. Each Saturday night I was slowly poisoning myself. But because the poison tasted good, and the pain did not show up for our hours later, I didn’t connect the two events together. Yet I was feeding myself poison food and my body was trying to let me know I was in danger of killing myself.
We have a vision at Calvary, to be the people Jesus Christ is calling us to be and to grow this congregation to have an impact in our lives as well as in the lives of those who are on their way to getting to know God. Even though we may say we want to grow this church, we can have a part in killing this church and not even being aware that we are killing it. Just as I was getting what I wanted, what I wanted was hurting me. The same can be true in hurting the church.
One of the ways in which we start to kill the church is by not knowing what the church is. We think that we come to church. But we don’t. We actually bring the church to this building. It would be better if we had the name Calvary Presbyterian Building on the outside, and reserved the name Calvary Presbyterian Church only to be used when two or more of us are gathered in Christ’s name.
Otherwise we start to honor the building more than the gathering. Jesus never promised us, he would be in this building. The word of God tells us, that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. This building is simply a tool or a gift that God has given to us, to carry out his work in the world. The building is neither saved nor unsaved. When Jesus comes to take away the church, this building is going to be left behind.
Now we honor the building more than the church, when we have a problem with something taking place in the building, but not with the same thing taking place in the body. If someone curses in the church building, “we are ready to fight. How dare you curse in God’s house.” But if the same thing happens in the parking lot across the street in the same group of people, we simply let it slide.
Yet the same Holy Spirit is present, and the same type of disrespect has been shown in the parking lot. Yet people in the world will sometimes recognize us as the church quicker than we do. Now if you are living for the Lord, and people around you know it, they know you carry part of God around in you. They will apologize for cursing in front of you. They will deliberately stop doing things when you come around, because they know who you bring with you. They’ll say let’s change the subject, here comes------. All because they know that you take the church wherever you go.
We kill the church, when we put more emphasis on what happens in the building, than we do on the lives we live on the other side of the doors. The funny thing is, we actually think we’re helping the church by defending the building instead of by defending the true temple in which Jesus resides.
We will treat the building as a holy, and then go our and use our bodies for sin, when God truly tells us I’m not in the building, I’m inside of you. The Spirit that is released in a worship service is partly released out of ourselves. If we are not allowing the spirit to be released, we are killing it off.
Another way in which we can slowly kill a church is to forget the purpose of the church. The purpose of the church if for us to love one another so that the world will believe that Jesus is the Son of God who came from the Father in heaven. Somehow the devil has gotten us to accept that the church is the place where my needs are to be met, and my desires are to be catered to and my way of doing things is the way they should be done. Jesus told us, “whoever desires to be great among you, must be the servant of all.” How many of us came to this place with the desire to serve the rest of us today?
When we get the idea of the “church being us” wrong, it is very easy to slip into the church being “my church”. What do we mean when we say this is my church? What do we mean when we say this is “our church”? How big does the “our” extend to. Does it include those who disagree with us? Does “our church” include God. If it does include God, doesn’t that seem very prideful and arrogant , as though we had our arm around God boasting that his is our church as though we voted to include God? Or should we say this is “God’s Church.” After all, it was Jesus that said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”
In 3 John, there was a guy by the name of Diotrophes. Diotrophes had pretty much determined that the church was really his church. The bible said, “Diotrephes loved to be first.” Do you know what it’s like trying to put up with somebody who loves to be first? That’s another way of saying, a person who has to get his or her own way all the time. You either agree with them or you are wrong. They just have to have the last word. They actually believe their way is the best way and sometimes the only way to get a job done.
If you love to be first, you are making the lives of those around you miserable. You’re not demonstrating the love of Christ in your disagreements. Ask God to help you from having to have the last word. Pray that Jesus will keep you from insisting on having to win every argument. None of us are right all the time. Somebody else may have a better way of seeing a solution to a problem. Go ahead and admit their way could also work. God created us differently for a purpose.
If you had of asked Diotrophes, what’s your goal for the church, he probably would have said, “I want the church to grow and become all that God has for it.” But his very actions were killing the church. He thought his church was there to make him happy. It was suppose to do the things he wanted done in the way he wanted them done. The apostle John, tried to point out, the church is here to carry out the desires of Jesus Christ to reach more people with the love of God. There were some people there in the church who were making great sacrifices in terms of hospitality and finances to reach others for Jesus Christ, and the apostle John commended them for it.
When they tried telling Diotrophes, this is what being a Christian is really about, Diotrophes refused to listen to anything they had to say. Because he thought the church was all about him, he started spreading negative rumors and gossip about the apostle John and the other leaders in the congregation.
On his own, Diotrophes decided which people would be welcomed into the church and which ones were not welcome. If somebody was welcomed in by other members, and Diotrophes disapproved of them, he would not only put out the new people, he put out those who wanted to help the new people.
How many of you think Diotrephes had gotten off track and was killing the church? His selfishness was doing a lot of damage. Instead of seeking a change within himself, he attempted to turn the congregation on itself and its leaders.
We are called the body of Christ. The body can be hurt by an infection. Gossip and rumors will infect the church with a spiritual disease. Every church that wants to move to the next level has to have momentum. When a team has momentum everything seems to go right. When momentum stops, the team starts to drag.
Nothing stops momentum in a church quicker than a negative feedback loop going wild in a church. Bad news, rumors and lies, just travel faster than truth. Nothing is healthier for a church than for its members to stand up to infections. In our bodies, when we are infected, the white blood cells attempt to surround that infection and contain it until it is destroyed. Every church needs members who will refuse to allow malicious words and gossip to spread. They will surround the source, and refuse to allow it to work in the background. The apostle John pointed out to the church, the destruction that Diotrophes was causing and he let them know he had tried talking to Diotrophes first.
Being a follower of Christ means taking a stand for what’s right, even if you have to stand alone. What do you do with rumors and gossip that come your way? If people are always coming to you first with gossip and malicious talk, it says something about them, but it also says something about you? Jesus said, “ a new commandment, I give unto you, you are to love one another, as I have loved you.” Love does not let gossip and malicious talk go on. Nor does it pass it on to the next person in the form of a prayer request. Love forces us to take the side of Jesus Christ. Calvary can die from us choosing to be silent when we should speak.
The third way we can kill the church is to depend on others to do our part. We all take the same pledge to join the church. We all want the same rights and privileges once we join. In our New Testament reading, the apostle Paul wrote to us, “I urge you to live a life, worthy of the calling you have received.” We are all on a team. Now with the Browns , the Indians or the Cavaliers, there is a first string team and a second string team. What happens when a starter is doing a lousy job. First of all everybody on the team suffers, and finally they put in the second string person as a replacement.
The thing about a church is that God only has first string players. If you are in Christ, then you are on the first team. There is no second string players in the kingdom. If you are not up and doing the part that God has called you to do, the team is suffering. Nobody else can do what God has for you to do in bringing the church together on Sunday. If you choose to stay in bed, go play golf, watch a movie or whatever, that means all of Calvary’s first team is not showing up. We all know what happens when the first team is missing a number of players. We all lose.
Just not showing up is a good way to kill the church. Now I know there are times, when you can’t bring the church to this building. But if God placed you here, and you’re on the first team, you need to recognize your importance to the plan of God. God gave us pastors and teachers to equip us to do the work of the ministry of Jesus Christ. You can’t kill a church if its members make themselves available to be equipped to do the work of Jesus Christ and then go forth and do it.
What does it look like to be equipped for the ministry of Jesus Christ on a Sunday morning. I see people rising up on Sundays recognizing they are first team players, and it’s up to them to bring the church to this building. At home they are practicing loving each other and being patient with each other, because they know they will have to do the same when they reach this place. I see them entering the doors with a heart of service looking for someone to be a blessing to.
I see them eager to reach out to people who they may not know in order to encourage them in this journey of faith. I see them choosing their seats based on the needs of the church rather than their personal preference. I see them expecting to hear from God as they engage themselves fully in the worship experience. I see them saturated with God’s love which has ministered to them and they know their sins have been forgiven and that today is a new day. I see them ready to go forth in a renewed sense of strength and of hope to make a difference for God in the coming week.
Saints when we bring the church into this building we are bringing in a sense of power and of the presence of God that none of us can bring in here on our own. The Spirit of Jesus in you, needs the Spirit of Jesus in me, and the Spirit in me, needs the Spirit in you in order for the world to believe that the Spirit in each of us is the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ who was sent from Heaven above. That’s what the church is truly all about. Getting people who are unsaved, saved so that they too might know God.
How To Kill A Church
Calvary 10/9/2011 Ephesians 4:1-6 Psalm 133 3 John 1:5-13
We have a started a new series for the next four weeks and the topic is “Moving Things To The Next Level.” There are times in our lives, when we want to get one result, but we actually get something different and we may wonder what went wrong. Sometimes, the very things we are doing can produce the exact opposite result that we had in mind.
Even though we are going to be looking at the church, the same principles are going to apply in other areas of our lives if we want to move to the next level. We are going to look at “How To Kill The Church.”, “How To Heal The Church,” “How To Build The Church” and “How To Change The World.” I get to start the series off with “How To Kill The Church.” Now I know that Jesus said to Peter, “Upon this rock, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Well I don’t believe that Satan has ever killed a church and does not have the power to do so. I do believe, the saints in the church are the only ones who have the power to kill it by ignoring the word of God. Satan may use us, but we have to choose to be used by Him by refusing to yield to Christ.
We Can Cause A Problem & Not Know It
My Saturday Night Experience
God’s Mercy On Me
Poisoning Myself & Not Knowing It
We Kill The Church By Misunderstanding The Church Vs The Building
Calvary Presbyterian Building vs Calvary Presbyterian Church
Jesus Promise To Be In Us Not The Building
Building Not Saved—Will Be Left Behind
Honor The Building More Than The Body—Swearing
Unsaved Honor Your Presence—Will Apologize
Putting More Emphasis on What Happens Inside—Than Outside
Building Is Not Sanctified—WE Are Defend The Right Temple
Release The Spirit For Worship
Another way in which we can slowly kill a church is to forget the purpose of the church. The purpose of the church if for us to love one another so that the world will believe that Jesus is the Son of God who came from the Father in heaven. Somehow the devil has gotten us to accept that the church is the place where my needs are to be met, and my desires are to be catered to and my way of doing things is the way they should be done. Jesus told us, “whoever desires to be great among you, must be the servant of all.” How many of us came to this place with the desire to serve the rest of us today?
Church Being Wrong ----My Church----Our Church—Where’s God
Jesus Said I Will Build My Church
3 John Diotrophes—Love To Be First
Got To Have His Way, Agree Or Wrong, Must Have Last Word
Stop Hurting Those Around You.
Somebody Else May Have Another Solution
Diotrophes Thought He Was Beign Helpful—Protecting The Church
John On The True Purpose—Diotrophes Would Not Listen
Diotrephes Put Others Out
Diotrephes Turned The Congregation Against Itself & Leaders
How Do You Handle Gossip
Every Church Needs Momenturm
What Stops Momentum
How Body Fights Infections—White Blood Cells
Take A Stand For What Is Right For Jesus
A New Commandment I Give
Stop Malicious Talk --Speak Up
Third Way To Kill---Let Others Do Our part
Same Pledge, Same Privileges
Browns, Cavs, Indians, Crunch First & Second Team
God Only Has First Team
Team Suffers With No Shows
Nobody Can Do What God Told You To Do
Just Not Showing Ups Is A Good Way To Kill
Gave us Pastors & Teachers To Equip
Vision For Sunday Morning
People Rising Early First Team
People Practicing Patience People Coming To Serve
People Putting Me Second Body First People Engaging The Spirit
People Saturated With Love & Forgiveness, People Fresh Start
People Going Forth To Make A Difference
Jesus In Us Needs Jesus IN Us
Getting People Saved.
