Lord, today we thank you that you are all we need. We thank you that in the midst of our brokenness and heartache, in the midst of the challenges we all face, we stand here humbled by your grace and your love and your mercy. We don’t deserve it, God, but you give it, and you give it freely and continually and no matter what. We thank you for that.
I pray as we open your Word that you would speak into all of our lives and all of our hearts, because all of us are broken, even this pastor who stands before this crowd today. Lord, I’m broken, and there are hurts and pains that I experience just like everyone else in this room. God, I pray that you will speak to us. Speak your peace, your joy, your love, your comfort, your encouragement to every one of us today so that we will be truly changed, truly transformed, and truly living out and believing that you are all that we need. God, do that in our lives today. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
Last week we looked in Mark 1, verses 16 and following, and we found a pretty important passage about what it means to be a follower of Christ. As you know, this last couple of weeks have been kind of back to school for many of us. People are going back, getting back into the fall/school mode and all of the class work and assignments and sleeping in class and late homework and all those things that go along with school, so I thought that last week and today and maybe next week we, as a church, could go back to school to revisit, to be reminded, to rehearse what it means to be a follower of Christ, and in Mark 1 we get probably the clearest picture of what that means in all of Scripture.
In Mark 1, as Jesus walked by the shore that day, He looked at Simon and Andrew and said, “Follow me,” as they were about to go out and do what they did every single day. He said, “Follow me,” and immediately they dropped it all, they turned their backs on everything they’d known before, and they followed after, they ran after Christ. And we talked last week about our mission statement here at Thomas Road that goes right along with that passage. Our mission statement says, “To change our world by developing Christ-followers who love God and who love people.”
Whether you are a part of your church or not, those are great statements that you can apply in your lives. In fact, that mission statement is not something that I came up with on my own or got together with our team to figure out what our mission statement ought to be. Those words come directly from the words of Christ. You remember in the Gospels Jesus said, “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel,” that’s to change the world. He told us to make disciples or Christ-followers of all the nations. He also said, when asked what’s the most important thing that you can do, the most important commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and to love your neighbors as yourself.” That mission statement comes directly from the heart of God to each and every one of us.
Can you imagine what would happen if people who claim the name of Christ, not only in this church but literally around the world, would adopt that mission statement into their own lives? That in everything they did, in the way they treated other people and the way they acted toward others and the way they did their work and the way they showed up at the workplace and the way that they responded to their neighbors or to people in need in their communities, if in everything they did, they went about it with a passion to change the world by being Christ-followers who just love God with all of our hearts and love everybody else as we love ourselves? It would change the world. I know it would change this church if that is what we would all do.
So last week we talked about what it means to follow Christ. We pointed out some statements in that passage that really apply and help us to understand what it means to follow Christ. Now here at Thomas Road, what we do is we take that statement and we, through six values that we hold dear at this church, it’s how we carry it out; it’s how we live it out each and every day. And I just want to share those six values with you today because they can also be applied in your life, whether you are part of this church or not.
Those values start with an important statement, and that is that we are committed to the Word of God, committed to Scripture, believing in our hearts that it is the infallible, inerrant, inspired Word of God. That there is not one mistake in the pages of this book, that every letter, every word, every verse is directly from the heart of God, directly to the heart of man to help us know how to live. Do you believe that? That is what we’re passionate about here at Thomas Road.
It says in Philippians 2:16, “Hold tightly to the word of life so that when Christ returns I will be proud that I did not lose the race and that my work was not useless,” was not in vain, because we truly sought out direction for every day from the Word of God.
Our second value is to be a culture of prayer. We want to be people of prayer. Jesus said in Matthew 21, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ yet you have made it a den of thieves.” I want to make sure that in everything we do here at Thomas Road that we are known as a house of prayer, believing in the power of prayer, believing in the results of prayer, the consequences of being a praying people. That is what I want this church to be, and I hope that is a desire that you have in your heart as well, to not only that this church be known as a house of prayer, but to let your life be known as a house of prayer.
The third value is a lifestyle of worship in everything we do. It’s not just about the music; it’s how we live, so that when others look at us they see a life of worship, they see someone who has been radically changed, radically transformed by God through His Son Jesus Christ when He died on the cross for our sins, was buried and rose again. In Hebrews 12:1 it says, “Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” and all of us are, not only the heavenly witnesses, but we are all surrounded by people who are watching everything that we do, especially if you claim the name of Christ. It goes on to say, “Let us lay aside every weight, everything that holds us down [everything that stops us and keeps us away from living for God] and the sin which so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” A life of worship, of making sure that we do not allow anything to come into our life that will keep us from experiencing and keep us from walking with the God who saved us through Jesus Christ.
The fourth value is a connection to community, realizing and understanding that God wants us to do this together; that God did not intend for us to go about this all by ourselves. The next one is a heart for serving, that we want to earn the right to be heard, that we have a passion to go out there and actually minister to the people in need in our community, earning the right to be heard, allowing them to see in us someone who cares, genuinely cares about what they are going through.
And the last one, a passion for sharing, because when we serve, we open the door so that we can share. Last week in our Danville campus, Pastor Scott and the team there had a Saturday event where they had over 3,000 people from the community show up, and our church got to minister to them and opened the door to share the Gospel. It’s why we do all the things we do here at Thomas Road; it’s why we’re so passionate about it, because we want to let people know who God is and what God has done. And so those values that we hold dear, we understand and realize that is how we carry out the mission that God has placed us on.
Today I want to take a few moments talking about the fourth value, connection to community because my fear and what I see often as a pastor is that a lot of us are trying to do this thing, trying to walk this road with Christ, trying to be a Christ-follower all by ourselves. We are out there, isolated from the world and isolated from other believers, other followers, other people who have the same struggles and challenges that we do, and we are not allowing all of our experiences and the things we’re going through to encourage one another and to build each other up.
Proverbs 27:17, I know it’s a verse you know, says, “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.” In the New Living Translation it says, “As iron sharpens iron,” I love this, “a friend sharpens his friend.” In other words, just as iron sharpens iron, a friend can actually come alongside and help his friend who is losing it, who feels alone, who is struggling, who is challenged, who feels like no one else cares. When a friend shows up, a true, genuine, authentic friend, someone who loves that person, it changes everything. The greatest tool that we have, the greatest opportunity we have on a human level for us today to be successful followers of Christ is to connect with other followers of Christ who are doing this thing together and doing this thing as well.
You see, influence that we have from others, whether good or bad, is the single greatest human factor in how we walk and how we follow Christ. It’s peer pressure. It can be good and it can be bad. It can lead us away from God or it can help us to cling to and run to God. And it’s important that we understand that regardless of where we are in our walk with Christ, when we build around us an insulation of people who love God and who walk with God, it can make us better, even in our own homes.
I heard a statistic today from Steve Sammons from Zondervan Publishers. He wrote in an article that in research that they have done, when the father in a home takes his family to church each and every week, when those children get older and out on their own, 44% of those young people will stay in church when they get older. You say that’s a sad statistic, why is it so low? Let me tell you, on the flip side, when that father does not take his kids to church each and every week to connect with other followers of Christ, only 2% of those children will actually stay in church when they graduate from college and start life on their own. Do you see the impact that we can make on others when we are truly trying to do it right and to do this life, do this thing, walking with Christ together?
I want to share two quick stories that we find in Scripture about friendship, about peer pressure, about the difference about what it means and how it makes a massive difference in how we walk with God. The first one is found in Job 2. Now you know the story of Job. The story of Job is a great story. There was a man who loved God, who walked with God, who served God, who followed after God, and Satan didn’t like it. He wanted to challenge, to prove to God that this guy was only following God because of all the stuff that he had. You know the story.
So God allowed Satan to test Job, but in Job chapter 2 we read the story here of some friendships that matter in Job’s life. Look what it says in Job 2:9-13, “Then his wife said to him, ‘Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!’” I loved when my dad read this passage he said, “I never understood why God just didn’t kill her.” In verse 10 Job said, “’You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God and yet shall we not accept adversity?’ In all of this, Job did not sin with his lips.”
Now listen to verse 11, because this is talking about community here, “Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this adversity that had come upon him, each one came from his own place—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. For they had made an appointment together to come and mourn with him, and to comfort him.” They had heard what Job was going through. They had seen it on Facebook, so they connected on Facebook and said, “Listen, do you know what Job is going through? Man, he’s having a tough time. He’s hurting. We have to do something to help him. We’ve got to go and minister to him and comfort and encourage him.”
So after they heard about what was going on in his life, verse 12 says, “And when they raised their eyes from afar, and did not recognize him, they lifted their voices and wept; and each one tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head toward heaven. So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.”
Three friends who had all the right intentions, all the right ideas, they wanted to help their friend, and if we stopped the story there, it would be a great story, wouldn’t it? That when we get to the place where we’re hurting and we’re broken we know there are friends that are out there, when they hear about it, man, they are going to show up and be so brokenhearted by what I’m going through, they’re going to surround me with their love and they will sit down and weep with me, mourn with me, wrap their arms around me. It’s going to be awesome, because nobody likes to be alone.
Many of you know that I’m a pilot. I love flying. It’s awesome because it’s great to be able to go out and jump in that 40-year-old airplane and take off and fly up into the sky and get all by yourself. No one can bother you. It’s awesome. A couple of years ago I took off and I’m flying and I get about 10 or 15 miles from the Lynchburg Airport and I’m loving it because I’m all by myself and then I realized that I lost all power in the airplane and I didn’t like being by myself anymore. I had no radio, no GPS, no way to connect with the air traffic controller to find out what to do. So I’m thinking, “Okay, I’ve got no power. I’ve got to get back to the ground. I’ve got to land.” I’m starting to think about what I can do. Maybe I can fly back to the airport, yet I can’t talk to them, so I don’t know if there are other planes flying around.
I don’t know what to do, so I decided I would get down to about 2,500 feet where I could use my cell phone. I got my cell phone out, called the tower, and was able to talk to them and tell them I needed to fly by because the problem is when you come in to land and put the landing gear down the landing gear goes down by what? Power. And I had none. So I didn’t want to land. I wanted to stay up there. I thought, “What if I just don’t land?” and I realized the alternative was not a good plan. I got the controller and figured it all out.
Listen, there are so many of us today that like that situation, we are trying to do life all by ourselves, we are flying solo, we’re not talking with anyone, we’re not connecting with anybody else, and we don’t know how to get back. We don’t know how to land. We don’t know how to truly live.
That story in Job 2 is an important story because he had three friends who showed up when he needed it the most. Now the problem is even though they showed up, if you continue reading through chapter 13, you see over and over again that those friends showed up and their form of encouragement, their form of comfort came by way of criticism and condemnation and complaining and condescension, and they told him about all the ways he’d messed up and all the things he’d done wrong. The wrong kind of friends.
Now let me take you to Mark 2, to another set of friends who showed up when all the world had walked away, who showed up when everything was broken and someone desperately needed help. Mark 2 it says, “And again [Jesus] entered Capernaum after some days, and it was heard that He was in the house. Immediately many gathered together, so that there was no longer room to receive them, not even near the door.” The makeshift church was packed. “And He preached the word to them. Then they came to Him, bringing a paralytic who was carried by four men. And when they could not come near Him because of the crowd, they uncovered the roof where He was. So when they had broken through [they tore the roof away], they let down the bed on which the paralytic was lying.”
I love what verse 5 says, “When Jesus saw their faith.” These are the right kind of friends. These are the kind of friends that when someone has a desperate situation, a problem, a broken heart, when they show up, they want to actually do something about it and help.
When I read these two passages, it reminds me of an illustration that I want to share with you, and that is an illustration that we use by looking at these two instruments. A broom and a vacuum. They both serve the same purpose, don’t they? They are both intended to clean the floor. We all agree on that. They clean up the mess that’s on the floor. The problem with the broom is that when you walk into a situation where a floor is dirty and covered with all kinds of sand or dirt or dust and you use the broom and you start sweeping, what happens? It goes everywhere.
I remember one Saturday a couple of years ago Nicholas and I wanted to clean the garage, so we went out and Nicholas had a broom and started sweeping. Of course we didn’t have dust; we had these little BBs that are soft, about 12 million of them in our garage, and so he starts sweeping and these things are flying everywhere. That’s what Job’s friends were. You see, Job’s friends showed up and they had a desire to help and they cared about what Job was going through and they wanted to make a difference, but they showed up with the broom and started sweeping and covered everybody around them with the dirt and filth and problems and the problems didn’t get fixed.
Now the converse of that is the vacuum cleaner. We all know what a vacuum cleaner does, right? It’s the same purpose as the broom, and when you plug it in and you begin running it over the floor, it doesn’t sweep it all over the place, it doesn’t spread it all over the room, it doesn’t make the room messier or continue to be just as bad as it was before. No, it sucks it all up and puts it in a bag that you can take out and throw away. It actually gets the floor clean. That is representative of those four friends who showed up in Mark 2.
Here is how we can apply this in our lives. Every single one of us is surrounded by people either like the broom or surrounded by people like the vacuum. We are surrounded by people either like Job’s friends or surrounded by people who were found in Mark 2. The problem is this: When we don’t surround ourselves with friends like the ones in Mark 2, what happens is we continue to wallow in the pain, wallow in the suffering, go through the same old stuff over and over and over again, and the criticism and the condescension and the complaints and all the gossip and all the stuff that goes on in today’s world that goes on through Facebook and text messages and whispering in the ear, it stays there. It continues and festers and gets worse and worse and worse and worse and we wonder why we’re not getting better.
We’re not getting better because we’re not surrounding ourselves with the people like from Mark 2, the kind of people who want to show up when our lives are falling apart or when we’re broken and we’re hurting. They want to scoop us up in the midst of our hurt and suffering and pain and take us to Jesus. That’s why we gather together in places like this; that’s why we have life groups that meet throughout the week, so that we can come together and scoop each other up and wrap our arms around each other and help each other in the midst of all the pain and stuff that we go through, all the issues we face and the suffering we experience. We can show up and take it to Jesus.
And so my question for you today is this: What kind of friends are you surrounding yourself with? Our value here at church is to connect in community, to connect with other followers of Christ, doing life together to encourage and to comfort and to strengthen. Who are you connecting with? Or are you even connecting at all? There are people who may have been coming to this church for decades, you walk into this room, it’s a large church, you come to this place and show up and sit down and then you leave, never connect with others and never build relationships with others, never do life together. And then you go out and face a crisis and feel like you’re all alone and you wonder why. It’s because you’ve not taken that deliberate step of connecting with people that when life falls apart will show up and be there. And they won’t be there like Job’s friends; they will be there like the friends from Mark 2 who are saying, “Let us take you to the Saving One. Let us help you get to Jesus because He’s the only one that can change what you’re going through.”
So the question is: Who are you connecting with? Where do you find yourself? The reason our value here at the church and the way we carry it in our mission statement is to be connected in community is because we know that God’s desire is not that we do life by ourselves; it is not that we are isolated. It is so that we can come together as people who are all broken, who are all sinners in desperate need of a God who loves us so much that He sent His Son Jesus to come to this earth to die and to be buried and to rise again, and He did that so we could have life, and He wants us to gather together and strengthen one another so that we can be all that God intends us to be. The question is: Are you doing it?
A second question: Are you a friend like one of Job’s? Are you one of those friends that when somebody is hurting you show up, but you’re not showing up to truly help; you’re showing up to just stir the dirt, to continue the mess. If you are, listen; I’ve got good news. You can change it like that. God will forgive you, God can change you, God can transform you, and then you can turn around and be the kind of friend that that person needs. We talk about what it means to be a Christ-follower, what it means to be a Christ-follower is this: We as God’s people show up as the people of God and the church of God to minister to other people of God, and reach out to the people who don’t know God yet so we can change this world for God because He’s the only one who can change it through His Son Jesus Christ who died, was buried and rose again, so they can become people of God and we can change the world by developing Christ-followers who love God and who love people. That is what we are here to do.
My heart is that we just simply do it; we do it together to change the world. My prayer for you today is that you will connect with the right people, because you are who you hang around, so hang around the true people following God. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your love. Thank you for all that you do for us. Thank you for the power that you put into our lives, the awesome display of your power through Christ, who died for us, who was buried and rose again, that because of that we can experience something that in a human form we could not experience without you. God, thank you for that. God, I pray that you would speak to us today. Help us to be the kind of people that are encouraging, the kind of people that minister, the kind of people who are connected, the kind of people who are involved in the lives of others in the right way and not the wrong way.
And I pray that today if there is someone that doesn’t know you, that they have never experienced the transformative power of the Gospel in their lives, that they’ve never been saved, I pray that through the still small voice in their hearts you would let them know that today is the day of salvation for them and they would come to know you, and God, we will give you the praise for it.
(Singing: “The Heart of Worship”)
Lord, we thank you for the change that you make and the transition you begin in our lives when we come to that moment that we realize that without you we are nothing, but with you we can have it all. I pray that you will continue to speak into our hearts and our lives. Change us, God, from the inside out. Help us to surround ourselves with the people of God so that we can carry out the work of God and grow in our relationships and faith, that we can walk this life together the right way, the way that you intend for us.
As you go out of this place today, don’t ever forget; always remember that Jesus is all that you need. God bless you. Have a great week.
