Monday, May 21, 2012

Top 4 Reasons to be in Church… Reason # 4


An Attitude of Gratitude—Heb. 13:11-15
             When we are a third party looking on, I don't think we ever appreciate ingratitude. I have an acquaintance who was working at a camp one time, and he saw a situation that was really ugly—a fellow counselor whose son was attending the camp was having trouble with him.
            He was acting spoiled—like a basic ingrate. He was smarting off and sassing her. He was refusing to show her respect.
            My acquaintance had had enough, so he walked over to the kid. He told the boy to hold up his shirt. The boy obeyed. He pointed to the boy’s belly button. He told the boy, “Tell me what that is.”
            The boy was stunned. He finally mumbled out the answer, “A belly button.”
            My acquaintance said, “I want you to know that for nine months you were connected to that woman.” He pointed to the boy's mother. “And fluid flowed out of her body into yours, and she kept you warm, and she kept you safe, and she kept you alive, and she went through a great deal of pain to bring you into this world, and she went through all of that to give you a beginning here. Now you treat her with respect. You treat her with gratitude.”
            By the time he finished, that boy felt pretty bad. He should have; hopefully he changed his behavior.
            It is not nice to see someone who has been the recipient of much blessing, treat the source of great blessing with ingratitude. It is especially not nice for God when God is the source of that blessing.
            Ungratefulness is the source of all vice. When a person does not have the recognition of a higher source, he takes everything for granted and recognizes no authority, and his actions are not accountable.
            Back in the 1980s, a top defense lawyer in the Northeast, was very successful taking the cases of death row criminals and getting them off. By the mid 80s he had gotten off 78 convicted first-degree murderers.
            He made this statement, “Though I am committed to these men, I do not admire them. Of the 78 men that I have freed from the electric chair, I have not received so much as a thank you card. The common factor to these murderers is they are all natural ingrates.”
            Three decades ago, Tommy Nelson spoke about how Israel was to be an appreciative nation. They were a highly accountable nation.
            God consistently reminded every Israelite—every day, every week, every month, every season, every year, every seven years, every 50 years—he pounded into the nation the essential truth that the nation of Israel created and owned nothing, but were responsible for everything.
            Do you know how the day started in Jerusalem? With a sacrifice when the sun came up, and it ended with a sacrifice at twilight. It showed that God gave them that day. They thanked God that the sun came up.
            Every week Israel observed the Sabbath. They rested in recognition that the plants, the animals, the sun, the moon, the stars, the basic creation, the heavens, the earth, their families, and they themselves all came from God. God made it all; therefore, they rested on the seventh day.
            Six times in the Israelite year, they had a feast. For example: you celebrated the new year, you celebrated the independence of the Jew–the Passover, you celebrated the first fruits of the harvest, you celebrated the end of the harvest–Pentecost.
            You had six offerings. They included the grain offering to celebrate the harvest, when God blessed you with financial provisions. You made a burnt offering whenever your child was born, which meant you offered an offering to God to thank him for this child and to tell him it was God’s child. You had a thank offering when something good happened to you. You had offerings when your heart felt full of praise.
            Every seven years you had a sabbatical year. Anybody who owed you money was forgiven that debt, and it was in recognition that all money and all prosperity was from God.
            Every 7x7 years, every 50 years, you had a year of Jubilee. And all land that you had received would go back to its original owner, because God would not let anyone in Israel have a monopoly on the prosperity, and in recognition of the fact that the land was not yours, it was God’s.  
            Do you see what I mean? Every day, every week, every month, every season, every year, every seven years, or every 50 years, God pounded and pounded and pounded into Israel’s brain with tithes and offerings, that “your grain, your animals, the sun, moon, stars, your independence, your salvation, the kid from your womb” is God’s.
            The word thankfulness is used 166 times in the Bible. There's one guy in the Bible who every time he eats a meal, he prays. He prays eight times in Scripture for food. You know who it is? Jesus. Eight of Jesus prayers are over a meal.
            And so this preacher is finishing up this letter to the Christians of Hebrews, and he is trying to give these people a good motivation, a mature motivation, for following God. He is trying to give them an attitude of gratitude for following Jesus. He's trying to help them appreciate the grace of God. He’s telling them, after the cross, it should be as if our gratitude is on steroids:
            11 After the high priest offers the blood of animals as a sin offering, the bodies of those animals are burned outside the camp. 12 Jesus himself suffered outside the city gate, so that his blood would make people holy. 13 That’s why we should go outside the camp to Jesus and share in his disgrace.
            Now, here is the gist of his encouragement. Verses 11-12 reference the sacrifices of the Old Testament. When you were offered an animal sacrifice in the Old Testament, your priest took the remains of the animal and took them outside the camp and burned them.

          The skin and flesh of the bull, together with its legs, insides, and the food still in its stomach, are to be taken outside the camp and burned on a wood fire near the ash heap (Lev. 4:11-12.) CEV

            The remains of the bull and the goat whose blood was taken into the most holy place must be taken outside the camp and burned (Lev. 16:27.) CEV
            To a people about to quit, the Preacher attempts to resurrect an attitude of gratitude. He points them back to the cross. He takes them to the Old Testament teachings, upon which the cross was based.
            In Jerusalem you would take the remains of the animal and take them out to the ash heap, the city dump-outside the city-to a placed called Gehenna. The burning was ongoing. Sometimes that word in the New Testament is used, and we translate it in a different way—“hell.”
            The Preacher of Hebrews wants you to see this image of Gehenna—where the Romans would crucify the criminals. There would be skulls and bones everywhere. It was a place like this where the Lord was crucified.
            Question: how should you treat the Creator of the World? If the Creator of the World must die, how should he die?
            They crucified your Lord and mine in a place that was at the crossroads where people would come by from all directions, and they stripped him naked.            They would have taken his body and thrown it onto the trash heap to burn it: were it not for two men with power, influence, and money, Joseph of Arimethea and Nicodemus. They took that body, wrapped in a shroud, and placed it hurriedly in Joseph’s tomb.
            I like what one writer said about all of this,
            “I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap… at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died and that is what he died about. And that is where churchmen should be and what churchmanship is about.”
            --George McDonald
            McDonald is talking about the place where Jesus was crucified. Jesus never won “man of the year” from the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce. He never won any commendations from the Jerusalem City Council. Jesus did not die in a cathedral. He died on a trash heap, next to a marketplace. He died stripped naked, in shame, those were the circumstances surrounding his death.
            The writer of Hebrews wants you to see all of the foul and decay this fallen creation has to offer surrounding Jesus. He wants you to see the flies on the degraded bodies. He wants you to smell the foul odors of decaying flesh.
            Isn’t it interesting that the most sacred place on this planet… was at the city dump?
            We have become so accustomed to seeing pictures of Jesus on the cross. They seem detached from us; removed from our experiences. They are safe and distant.
            I knew a guy who went to the house of a fellow, and there was this huge painting of Jesus on the cross. It was very vivid. It was well done; the fellow said it was probably the best one he had ever seen. As a Christian, his the first thought was “Praise God. That should have been me.”
            Later, he began to think himself, what if a secularist came into that guy’s house? What would he have done when he saw that painting? Agnostic people are so far removed from a biblical understanding, they have no appreciation of what the Bible teaches about the cross; so what would he think?            
            What if we visited the house of a Buddhist who had a giant painting of a monk burning himself alive?
            What if we visited the house of a fundamentalist Muslim, and we saw the picture of a Muslim man being killed by mob violence by “Christians” during the crusade? And it was in vivid color? And all of the gruesome details were included?
            How are you going to react to that? What if the owner of the house says, “Want to stay the night? Igor, prepare a room for our guest.” Make you feel a bit creepy, would it not?
            Our lovely truck broke down the other day, and I was with two of my girls; we walked about a mile back to our house. Various people offered help. It was very nice of them. It was morning; the sun was up; it was a beautiful day.
            What if it had been at night? What if it had been pouring down rain? What if we had experienced thunder and lightning? What if a man stopped, rolled down his window, and had hanging on his rearview mirror a toy-like model-very precisely done-of a man dying in electric chair? What if the precision was so detailed, we could see the wisps of smoke coming out of little guy’s head? And what if the driver asked, “Want a ride?”
            How do you think we would feel?
            Those are probably close to the emotions that some of these people in the cultures surrounding these Christians of Hebrews felt as they observed this group of people, who were dedicating themselves to following the fellow who had been crucified. It was just flat-out weird. Jesus was just another criminal. He was not somebody to be respected, much less love and adored.
            (Ancient graffiti details the God of the Christians being crucified on a cross. He had the body of a man—and the head of a donkey.)
            These were some of the challenges the Christians were facing.
            Jesus died at the city death, and he bore all of the scorn and disgrace. We follow a Savior who endured. He was reliable. He calls his people to do the same.
            I have seen evangelistic Bible studies that imploded because the CHRISTIANS were not reliable. At times the non-Christians hung in there because they wanted to learn something about the God. It was the Christians who were not reliable.
            But Jesus was reliable. He was not buried with a flag on his coffin. Instead, he was faithful… despite the scorn. Verses 14-15 tell us:
            14 On this earth we don’t have a city that lasts forever, but we are waiting for such a city. 15 Our sacrifice is to keep offering praise to God in the name of Jesus. (Heb. 13:11-15.) CEV
            We offer sacrifice and praise. We do it everyday. We have offered something well pleasing in God's sight.
            Here's where it really comes down to it. This is the challenge. Verse 13–let us join him outside the camp. Let us identify with him. Your will be done not my will.
            That… is… so… hard.
            Jesus says—I know. My prayer in the garden was “let this cup pass… but not my will be done; you’re will be done.”
            Can we reach that point? Can we pray that prayer?
            It is so costly. It is so scary. It is counterintuitive. It is not what we want to do. It forces us into a corner.
            And the Preacher of Hebrews says, “Do you want to get in or not.” It is so hard.
            You say, “I don't want to be an ingrate. But I want to grab as much as I can have in this life.”
            He says, “You got to make a choice.”
            Now, the interesting thing is that does not necessarily mean God will not entrust us to manage things of this world, or organizations in this world.
            Our leadership, however, will mean nothing to us if we are not serving God. There will be no ulterior motives of grabbing all that we can out of this life. It'll be property management—for God.
            Remarkably, all of this is very liberating. When you play for an audience of one, you are truly free. People cannot hurt you. They cannot say anything to hurt you. Ultimately, while you offer them basic human respect, their opinion means nothing; God’s opinion means everything--you play for an audience of one.
            That's why Hebrews says unapologetically to devote yourself to the most important group in the world. You're not losing anything, if you lose everything. The great philosopher Don Meredith once said, “Them that ain’t got it can't lose.”
            To be candid, I don't lie awake at night wondering what the people of New Guinea think about me. I don't lie awake at night worrying about what the people in China think about me. I rarely worry about what the people of the United States think about me.
            How about you? What if I told you that everyone in Christ is a leader. Not necessarily in the church, but in this world.
            Frankly, some of these people did not feel positive emotions. They were called to make a decision with the will. It was tough, but they were called to practice agape love.
            What if we parented like we live our Christian lives? What if we did everything based about whether or not our kids liked us? We have a term that describes that parenting style–child abuse.
            No, we practice agape love; we seek what's best for the child. We sacrifice. We are willing to surrender their good opinion of us, the opinion of others, and status; we will do what it takes.
            That makes us leaders in the culture. Every Christian is a leader in the world. You may be thinking, “No one is following me.”
            The world defines leadership by who is following;
            the Bible defines leadership by who is leading.            
            What that means is if God is leading you, and no one else is following you, that trumps somebody else who has a ton of followers but is not following God. If you are following God, GOD is leading. By the world’s standards, Jesus was a failure as a leader when he died on the cross, he had virtually no followers… except for the fact he was following his Heavenly Father. Because of who he was following, I would say this was the greatest moment of leadership in the history of the world.
            That's how we are supposed to live for God. That's what this letter is about. We sacrifice the opinions of others, we do what's best according to our benefactor, God, and we live in agape love. We play for an audience of one.
            Last week I saw a movie about Margaret Thatcher—THE IRON LADY. I was stunned that the people in the Motion Picture industry were as faithful as they were to the events of her life, and that they treated her with respect and even admiration.
            Here was a woman, who from the very beginning had to live her professional life surrounded by men, which meant she was a novelty. Most did not respect her or her opinion. They certainly did not like her.
            She was isolated and marginalized in so many ways. What those experiences did, though, was form her character. She learned to function without the admiration of those around her. She learned to diagnosis solutions to societies problems and proclaim them. This was unusual. All other government officials and political leaders were posturing for position to gain a political settlement or to gain votes. Great Britain was at an economic and cultural stalemate. It was in a mess and falling.
            So she up and announced, “Here is what we need to do, and I want to lead.” Stunningly, she won leadership of her party and then the nation.
            She was not flawless, but did you know that she is the first living prime minister to have a statue in the House of Parliament?
            All of this was because she was willing to stand alone and lead. We need to offer ourselves to lead a fallen world.
            How do we cultivate this attitude of gratitude?
            How do we summon the God-given power in our will to follow God stand out from culture?
            Well, in Hebrews, the Preacher says–
1. We meet with the church.
            We don't care what everybody else says, we go to the most important group in the world and we hear them tell us once again what is most important. Because God is speaking through them.
            It is not as hard as you might think to know whether he is pleased with us, because
2. We get into his Word. And we do that through the Bible. One of the reasons why we should get into the word is because it helps us understand what God wants.
            Finally,

3. We express our concerns to the Heavenly Father. This is called prayer. We offer God our thoughts, our yearnings, our questions, and our laments.

            Doesn’t it make you feel good to know that of all the groups on the planet, if you are in Christ, you are part of the most important one?
            I hope that thought gives you strength for tomorrow.

Thanks James Thompson, David De Silva, and Tommy Nelson
            

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