A simple look around your own church congregation and you probably won't have much difficulty identifying the following groups of people:
Add all these people together, stir them up, flavor with jealousy, pride, ignorance, and selfishness, let it simmer on low heat for a while, and before you know it, you've got congregational stew! It serves enough for everyone, but be forewarned...it's likely to burn, it tastes very bitter, and leaves a bad aftertaste.
Service to God's Kingdom was not designed to be so unpleasant. In fact, the first eight verses of Romans 12 give the better recipe for Service Soup...and God's concoction is tasty, satisfying, and aromatic.
Paul, the writer of Romans, spends the first eleven chapters building a doctrinal foundation for the practical recipe given in chapter 12. In fact, chapter 12 is the transition that starts off (and I paraphrase) with, "Okay, now that you know all that God has given you, I'm begging you to offer your whole selves to God -- in service, worship, and devotion." He explains that to do so is a reasonable expectation, based on what God has done in freely giving eternal life through Jesus.
Hit your pause button for a second. I don't think many would disagree with Paul's plea here. Most would agree at least in theory that serving God is a fair expecation for having received the promise of heaven and eternal life with Him. But theory diverges from practice all too often, resulting in the ease with which you can identify those folks at the start of this little stream of thought.
Why? (This is where you hit "play" again.) You can extrapolate the cause from verse 2 -- the things that we're supposed to do, not enough people are really doing. We are to not be conformed to the world. "Conform" means "to correspond in character." Our character is supposed to be markedly distinctive from the world's character. I don't think I'm slicing bread for the first time when I say we're not exactly doing a bang-up job on that account. We say "in and not of" all the time, but speech rarely matches practice. Literally, breaking down the word, "conform" means to "share the form of." God is telling us that when our form is the same as the world's, then you don't have to go too far to understand the problem.
Instead, we are to be transformed. This means, "to change markedly in character" or, to use the broken-down word, "have a different form." Church to church, you can probably honestly assess that the majority of ministries and ministers (and we're all ministers, lest you forget) are working with conformed, rather than transformed minds. Paul says at the end of verse two that transformation is necessary for proving (or experiencing in verifiable ways) the good, acceptable, perfect will of God.
So we're doing the equivalent of opening up the cookbook, putting together the ingredients, and then being baffled why the recipe didn't work because we cooked it at 75 degrees for 350 minutes, just like it said (or at least that's how you read it!). Keep reading to see how Paul, and ultimately God, leads us through an episode of Boiling Water, that results in a tasty casserole of Kingdom service, spiritual gifting, God's holiness, and congregational blessing.
Ingredients
As you read verses 3 through the end of the chapter, you see a simple command to mix together the ingredients for a healthy ecclesiastical experience. Something that you'll notice in this list is that the ingredients are intensely focused on the other person. Christ wants each follower to be committed to the pursuit of self-unaware. In circumstances regarding church life, that can prove to be amazingly difficult at times.
In conflict, the disagreement is often couched in terms of being "right" or even "righteous," thus fueling the fire for continued discontent and disagreement. Yet, Christ is just as concerned as "how" we disagree as "why" we disagree. In that, in the face of conflict, all you can control is yourself. And even in that, all you can really do is willfully place control of your "self" under the authority of the Holy Spirit. If you do this and focus on how you can be humble, how you can seek reconciliation and unity, you can affirm that your efforts are pleasing to the Lord. Ultimately, you do have a part to play in the continuation of God's work through the church.
God -- though more complex than any human could ever comprehend -- is also quite direct and simple: Do good, avoid evil. Pursue what is right, refuse to indulge in that which is wrong.
Your experiences will likely concur with my own -- I've never seen a church struggle when it was focused on other people. Divisions are caused when the focus is turned inward -- what "I" want, what "I" like, what "I" need. When a church is instead doing what it was designed to do (if Romans 12 is the "how" to do church," then acts 2 is the "what to do"), turned outward and training those who come in to go back out....well, that's the recipe for a church expience that leaves a person feeling satisfied in their experience.
January 19, 2005 3:36 PM