Does it ever feel like the church never changes, or at least that if it does change, then the wheels of change turn very, very slowly? Does it ever feel like the church is timid, afraid to take on new challenges? Does it ever feel like the church is so busy just holding its own, surviving, that it would be foolish to think of taking on grand new projects or even launching out into new regions where the gospel has never been preached before?
When we have those feelings, then there is an important part of the church that’s missing. The gospel has been brought to every nation on earth. Grand projects have succeeded throughout the world: hospitals, schools, orphanages and beautiful churches. The church can be very powerful. But often there is something missing.
Last week we started talking about the topic of the spiritual gifts that God gives to his people. Every Christian has a gift or several gifts from God, a deep motivation to serve, an area of service in which God especially empowers them to be useful and effective. Last week we talked about the gifts in general, in an overview. This morning I’m going to start working my way through those gifts to put a little more flesh and bones on them.
And this morning we will start with the gift that is listed first in Paul’s list of spiritual gifts in Ephesians 4, the apostle.
Would you please stand for the reading of God’s word? Our text for today is, again, Ephesians 4:7, 11-16.
7 But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift… 11 The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. 14 We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. 15 But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.
What’s an apostle? Many years ago my mother mentioned apostles in her Sunday school class with little kids. One of them brightened up right away and said that sometimes his family has apostle for dinner. But when she asked him about it she discovered that they had opossum for dinner, not apostle. Apostles aren’t really for eating.
What’s an apostle? The Greek word means literally, “someone who is sent out.” Long before the New Testament was written it came into use to describe a naval expedition; a group of ships sent out from their home port to do trade or deliver cargo or attack an enemy. They were sent out for a purpose.
Jesus called twelve men to be with him and learn from him and mostly we call them the twelve disciples. When we think of them as learners, then we call them disciples. But sometimes he also sent them out for the purpose of healing the sick and announcing the good news of what God was doing. And when that was the context, he called them apostles.
In Mark 3:13-19, we read that he called them to be “with him”, so that they could really have something of Christ to share, to be “sent out” to do things that just wouldn’t happen otherwise, to “proclaim the message,” they were accountable to God that the good news about Jesus Christ was to be preached, and to “have authority,” he stood behind them to bless their efforts. The power was there for success. As eyewitnesses of what Jesus taught, they had special authority to lay the theological foundations for the church. Any legitimate Christian endeavor honors the teachings they laid down.
Now, I’m doing this series to help you recognize your own spiritual gifts. But I don’t want anyone getting the idea that they are this kind of apostle, the kind who has the authority of first hand contact with the teaching of Jesus. Every once in a while the church has someone pop up and announce that Jesus has personally given them a whole new revelation and new teaching, which improves on the Bible, and everybody else is supposed to take it as from Jesus. That kind of business is nothing but trouble.
You may remember Jim Jones, the cult leader who led his congregation to the jungles of Guyana in South America and wiped them out with poisoned Kool-Aid years ago. Several years before that tragedy, back in California, there had been a Sunday morning when he threw his Bible on the floor and told his congregation that they paid too much attention to the Bible and not enough attention to him. Every one of them should have walked out right there.
But it wasn’t long before another type of apostle showed up in the Bible, now in the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters. Jesus appeared to a persecutor of the church, Saul of Tarsus and personally called him into his ministry, and soon he had switched from his Jewish name, Saul, to a Greek name, Paul, and he was recognized as an apostle to the Gentiles. His job was to take the good news about Jesus and take it to people outside of Israel. Barnabas is called an apostle. And at the end of Paul’s letter to the Romans he mentions a man and a woman, apostle, maybe husband and wife. He says “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.” That’s all we know about them.
So the word, ‘apostle’ is broadening, to include people who hadn’t necessarily walked with Jesus during his ministry on earth. That means that they have some less authority. But the core thought of apostle remains, someone who is sent out, usually as a missionary.
In this sense of the word, we can see many apostles through the history of the church, pioneer missionaries who dared to do great things for God.
Let me tell you a little about St. Patrick, the apostle to Ireland. Did you know that he wasn’t Irish? We don’t know exactly where he grew up, but it was either in England or Wales. His parents were devout Christians. When Patrick was 16 years old pirates attacked his village and kidnapped him. Then they sailed over to pagan Ireland and sold him as a slave. He was abused; he was forced to work long, hard hours. His captors made life miserable for him. He barely survived.
The day came when Patrick was able to escape from Ireland. But God called him to go back and bring the gospel to the Irish people. He focused his entire life on that one task. He went to school to get a proper theological education. He went back to Ireland and he preached and he preached for the rest of his life. He faced great opposition from the ancient Druid priests. His life was often in danger. But it is estimated that he planted 200 churches. He established the church in Ireland. And the Irish people will be eternally grateful.
This kind of apostle is a person who dares to dream big dreams, who dares to take on large, seemingly impossible tasks when God calls. They have incredible vision and single-mindedness. They are willing to make great personal sacrifices to see the vision fulfilled. They may not be happy until they have a challenge that will take all of their energy.
I’ve been privileged to meet a number of people who could well be called missionary apostles.
One was Christy Wilson, who grew up as a missionary’s kid in Iran at a time when missions in Iran were very difficult and missions in next-door Afghanistan were impossible. But Christy knew that God had called him to the Moslem people. He got a doctorate in Islamic studies. In the 1960s he got wind that the Afghan government was recruiting foreign teachers for their number one high school in Kabul. He applied and was accepted. He started an eye hospital. His wife started a school for blind children. They founded the International Afghan Mission. A few Afghans became Christians. It all happened with many government officials dead set against him. Every project ran into opposition. His life was in danger. He was able to build one church building, for the international people living in Kabul, but it was later bulldozed to the ground and even the foundations were dug up because the government had heard rumors of an “underground church.” Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand people would have given up many times. But he hung in there. He loved the Afghan people in the depths of his heart and he loved his Lord, so no sacrifice was too much.
And today there are still not very many Afghan Christians. But there are men who were his students years ago (and unfortunately they were all males in those days) who came from influential families and now are in important places who know the purity of his heart and the door by which the gospel can enter Afghanistan was opened just a bit. And we get a prayer letter from the mission he started and I am sure that they still face many restrictions from the government, but I’m amazed at all the wonderful projects they are doing today. None of it would have happened without Christy Wilson.
When we think of movers and shakers in the world, the entrepreneurs who build the great business empires, they are often the Donald Trumps who have no qualms about trampling on people and taking advantage of people. But Christy Wilson was nothing like that. He was one of the most gracious, warm, loving people I’ve ever met. One of the reasons that I went to seminary out in Massachusetts was that after Christy was expelled from Afghanistan for the last time he became a professor at my seminary. He was the one who carried a heavy load of teaching at the school and encouraging missionaries all over the world, but also prayed through the student directory, praying for each of us one by one. He always had a smile and a moment for anyone who approached him. To use the values that the Apostle Paul used in the first part of Ephesians, chapter 4, Christy Wilson just radiated humility, gentleness, patience, and love.
Instead of accumulating real estate and trophy wives for himself, Christy Wilson focused on some of the most vulnerable in Afghan society, the blind, and the children and those struck by famine.
Kathy and I remember listening to his sermons in the Kabul Community Christian Church and commenting that they were never all that profound or stirring, but that God would speak to us when he preached. He flowed with God’s Spirit.
When I see the stereotypical entrepreneurs of the world, obsessed with winning, cold-hearted, keeping score by nothing but money and the personal fame they get for themselves, leaving a trail of used and bitter people behind them, I often wonder if these aren’t people to whom God had given the raw material to be his apostles, the high energy, the drive, the ability to see a vision of a future very different and to push until it becomes reality, but people for whom these natural gifts never became spiritual gifts because they never allowed their hearts to be changed by the love of God.
And what do people like this have to do with us in a quiet middle-sized church here in Oak Lawn? The Apostle Paul taught us that the church is like a human body where every part is necessary. God’s apostles are often the pioneers who first bring the gospel to a new area, as Paul was to Ephesus. Are they irrelevant to us now? It’s easy for us to sit back in the comfortable USA and forget about people like them, but we would be terribly irresponsible if we did that. Today there are still huge areas of the world where there is not yet a church planted which can effectively witness to its own people. There are pioneering missionaries in many countries. Their work is so important. And we need to support them. We can pay our full apportionments. We can adopt missionaries and pray for them and encourage them through the mail and send supplies and financial support. They are today’s heroes and heroines of the faith. We can’t afford to abandon them. They need us.
Are there any apostles like that here at First United Methodist Church, in Oak Lawn? Probably not. They would probably get frustrated in a small town because the challenges just aren’t big enough.
But I believe that God could very well bring someone to this church that would be an apostle for Oak Lawn sized visions. The idea of being an apostle doesn’t have to be limited to big jobs. The idea is being sent away from home, but I think we can broaden it a bit to include those sent out of the normal to start something new.
Every church needs some people who will dare to be initiators, visionaries, people who will not be content with the way that things have always been in the past, people who have it deep inside of them to shake things up, make new things happen.
A lot of churches drive those folks crazy. They talk about starting some new ministry, to youth, to people who are hurting in the community, and it takes forever to get people to even pay attention to the thought of a new ministry, let alone to get all the permissions that are required and to get financial help and volunteers. They can get buried in a flood of those comments like “we’ve never done it that way before” and “where are we going to get the money.” I suspect that a lot of the people who have a God given gift to be the initiators in the church just give up and leave in frustration because it can be so hard to get churches to change.
But I want to say this morning what an important gift this is, to be a pioneer, a visionary, an initiator. In Ephesians, Paul lists this as the first of the gifts, and that only makes sense because if nobody takes initiative then nothing new will happen. The church needs these people so much. And it is so important that we be a permission-giving church, to treasure new ideas and visions from God. When someone dares to dream new dreams, it can be very important to help them refine those dreams and make them practical, and to help them learn to promote their vision in love. But that needs to be done in an encouraging way, not an obstructionist way. These people need our support. This morning we baptized little Ryan Driscoll. May God bless him and God bless this church with initiators who will move our church to respond to the challenges of the future, help us to dream big dreams and really make a difference in the world so that this will be a vital and effective church for all time.
The Spirit of the living God has called us together to flow through us to be blessings in more ways than we can imagine. One of the blessings that he gives his people is those who are gifted to initiate, to pioneer, and to dream big dreams. Such people are a very special gift from God. AMEN
