Turning Houses Into Homes - Part 4
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund concludes the series Turning Houses Into Homes speaking about creating a Gospel Culture at home and 3 results of the love of God overflowing in your life.
Message Transcript
Good morning and welcome again. It's great just to see all of you and so many of you who are starting to return. It's good to be together. A special welcome to those of you online, in Butler, and the Strip District, as well. Hey, before we jump into the teaching today, I want to just highlight a couple things. First, just great job on love Pittsburgh, not just the walk yesterday that so many of you participated in, but I've seen pictures from groups who've gone online and looked at some of the opportunities and said, "Here's something we can do, we can be a part of." Many of you, I know have done some of the individual things that are suggested in this time to just say, how can we love our community better and so way to go as a church to be part of that.
Also, just want to highlight next weekend is Memorial Day weekend, which is a traditional time here where we honor veterans, especially those who've given their lives. We think about and consider how being a Christian in this country lives itself out. For years, Ken Carlson has been a person who's been part of our church who's led that celebration. Last year, Ken decided to transition away from Orchard Hill Church, and we're so thankful for the years and appreciative of the way Ken has led that celebration. Next weekend, Kay Warheit will be leading that celebration for us as a congregation, so we're excited for that as well.
Let's take a moment to pray together and we'll jump in. Father, thank you just for bringing all the people who are here, in the Strip, and in Butler together, those online. God, I pray that wherever we're coming from, whatever our week has been, that you will help each of us just to hear from you. God, I pray that my words would reflect your word in content, and in tone, and an emphasis. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about Turning Houses into Homes. What we've said is that many of us will spend a lot of time and a lot of energy improving our houses or our living spaces. Even if we don't own the living space, if we're in a dorm room or in a transitory place, we'll spend time and energy trying to make the space that we live in beautiful, trying to make it nice. I believe one of the reasons that we do that is because we hope that by creating a nice space, that what we'll do is create beautiful moments for ourselves and for people we love, for family and for friends who gather.
What drives us a lot of times to work so hard on our houses or our living spaces is this vision, this dream of being gathered with people that we love and the moments that it can create. But here's the truth. It's easier to work on the house than it is to work on the home. The reason it's easier to work on the house, you may not enjoy it as much, but the reason it's easier is because it's very tangible. If you say that you're going to do this project, you can say, "I'm going to do this project." Either you do it, you pay somebody, you invite some friends, whatever it is. You say, "I did that project," but with a home, with relationships, nothing is ever done. You work at it and you think about it, and you consider it, and it just takes time and years to build the kind of homes and relationships that we really want.
Let me just ask you, as you reflect back on the last five or so years of your life, what is it that you look back at and say, "I've really improved this." Is your physical house better than it was five years ago? Is it bigger than it was five years ago? It is your bank account bigger? Is your waistline bigger? Here's the real question, is your heart bigger? In other words, do you find yourself loving more than you did a few years ago? We've been basing this teaching in Colossians chapter two, verses six and seven, that it's not written about houses and homes, it's written as a general exhortation to people of faith because it says this, it says, "As you've received Christ Jesus, now live your life in Him or walk in Him," is what the original language basically says.
Then there are four participles that tell us how to live our lives in Christ Jesus if we've received Him. What we've done each week is we've taken one of these participles and we've tried to unpack that for what it means in general, but then specifically how it applies to our homes, our houses. We talked about being rooted in Christ Jesus and how that is an agricultural metaphor about the choices that we make establishing us in truth. We talked about being built up in Christ Jesus, which is an architectural metaphor, and some of the things we can do to build our homes and our lives. Then we talked about being strengthened, which we said was an athletic metaphor.
Today, we're going to look at this participle that says overflowing with thankfulness. The image is really simple. You've had something overflow, sometimes maybe unintentional, where there was more liquid that wanted to go into a container than the container could hold and so it started overflow. Sometimes that's a crisis. If it happens in the bathroom, it's a crisis, right? If it happens somewhere else, maybe it's a good thing where you have something and you say, "I've got more of this than I need." The picture is saying that somebody who's received Christ can be so moved, so taken with the love of God, that they're overflowing with thankfulness. In other words, they can't contain it.
Now last weekend, we talked maybe a little more specifically about the role of parenting. This weekend, we're going to talk a little more specifically about romance and love. Certainly, this will have broader application. I know anytime that we talk about these things, that there are different people here. There's some of you who are single and say, "That's so far away. I don't want to talk about it." Some of you are single right now and it's painful because you're coming out of something and you say, "I don't want to talk about this." Some of you are in crisis right now. Some of you are just in a really happy, easy place and you say, "I got this one down." What I'd like to say is that thinking about and considering how overflowing with thankfulness can enhance your relationships, not just your romance, but any important relationship in your life can be more helpful to you than maybe you're even anticipating.
Now here's the challenge. In our culture, the dominant way of thinking is to say, "Well, if I'm unhappy in a romantic relationship, if I'm not feeling love, the issue must be that I'm with the wrong person." What we do is we say, "Well, I need to get rid of the wrong person, find the right person and then everything will be okay in terms of what happens." Now, it is possible, by the way, to marry the wrong person and to need to get out. I'm not saying that that's never a possibility, but so quickly what we tend to do in our culture is we say, "I have to find the right person and whoever I'm with, if they're not the right person, I need to get out of this."
This is how you know it's true. If you've ever been to a wedding and almost always at every wedding, people say this phrase. Somebody will stand up at some point and they'll say, "You two are perfect for each other." I've often wanted to stand up in that moment in a wedding. I've never done this because it would be socially unacceptable, but I've often wanted to stand up at that moment and say, "No, you're not. Nobody's perfect for each other," because we're not perfect for each other. In fact, there was an article that was written in the New York Times a few years ago by a British thinker named Alain de Botton. This was an election year and the reason I mentioned that is this was the most downloaded and shared article for the New York Times in the year that it came out. That's important because compared to all of the other news, this is what people were like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to read this." His title was basically you always marry the wrong person.
Now, he's not writing from a position of faith or anything. This is just observational. This is just his way of looking and saying, "Okay, we all marry the wrong person." Here's what he says, "Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't yet know who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future that they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating." He says, "We will marry others who are not perfect, but we mustn't abandon him or her. Only the founding romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based on in the last 250 years, which is that a perfect being exist who can meet all of our needs and satisfy all of our yearning."
Do you see how we think about this? If I find the perfect person, then I will be happy. I'll be whole. He says this, "We need to swap the romantic view for a tragic and at points, comedic view. The awareness that every human will frustrate us, anger us, annoy us, madden us, and disappoint us and we will, without any malice, do the same. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness, but none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for."
In other words, you will marry the wrong person. Now you may say, "Okay, so are you sure?" Here's how you know this. When you get married, you have this moment and it happens somewhere down the road, sometimes it happens before marriage where you're thinking, this is going to be great and then you're like oh. You do that. You think that. You said that "Oh." It's the oh moment that you have this choice to say, "Am I going to give into pessimism or am I going to choose something else?" I would like to say to you that the answer is not what Alain de Botton says, which is in a sense, a little bit of a romantic pessimism that says you can't actually have what it is you're wanting, but it actually goes back to this idea of overflowing with thankfulness.
They may seem disconnected, but here's why they're connected. When you are overflowing with thankfulness because of what God has done, you will live differently in every key relationship of your life. I like to say that this is what I call gospel culture. In other words, when you invest in creating a gospel culture in your home, in your marriage, in your romance, in your dating relationship, then you will have a better chance of having the relationship you want then if you don't know.
When I say gospel culture, you may say, "Well, what does that mean? Gospel is a word in the Bible that means good news. The announcement of good news. You have the gospel according to Matthew. The gospel according to Mark. The gospel according to Luke. What that means is it's the announcement of good news according to these writers who were eyewitnesses to the events. When the word is used in the text of scripture, what it means is this is the announcement of the good news of what God has done.
A gospel culture means that you are so filled with the understanding of what God has done, that your culture has a different feel to it. You're overflowing with thankfulness. It means that the vibe, the feel, and the tone in your relationship will be one that's filled with a different feel. Your values, your priorities, the aroma of your home, will be different than if you don't have an overflowing heart with thankfulness. There'll be honesty, and freedom, and gentleness, and humility, and cheerfulness because of how you see what God has done on your behalf.
Let me just ask you, would you rather live in a relationship that is characterized by honesty, freedom, gentleness, humility, and cheerfulness, or one that isn't? It's an easy question, right? I mean, you know what you'd rather live in. Here's what gospel culture is based on. First, it's based on what I'm going to call gospel doctrine. Here's where we see this. This is first John 4:10. It says this, "This is love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sin." Gospel doctrine is the idea that all of us are sinners, and that there's a God who has created a standard and has made it possible that we can be right with God because of what Jesus Christ has done. Jesus is the atoning sacrifice.
Now, in our day, our age, as in most ages, people object to this idea of sin. What most people like to do is they like to say, "Well, I'm not really that bad. There are other people who are sinners." Like you are sinners, but we don't think of ourselves as sinners. Maybe we think of our mother-in-law or something as a sinner, but we don't tend to think of ourselves that way. What we tend to do is we say, "Compared to other people, I'm okay. Whatever God is like, if there is a God, I'll be okay." Gospel doctrine says everybody's sinful. Everybody needs a savior and Jesus is that savior. If you come to embrace Jesus Christ as your savior, then you have the announcement of good news. That's what leads to gospel culture.
First John 4:11, "Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to also love one another." Why do we love? Not just because somebody loves us, we love because of how God has loved us. Overflowing with thankfulness, we can love in a way that we can't love any other way. Here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to just talk about three results of embracing gospel culture in your key relationships, or three results of having the love of God be overflowing in your life.
Here's the first, and that is when we've embraced gospel culture, or we have the love of God overflowing in our lives, we will be free to admit, rather than hide our failures. We'll be free to admit, rather than hide our failures. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just reference three different gospel stories that talk about this, but I've already just mentioned this idea of sins being something that our culture tends to not accept, but here's what sins are. It's the idea of missing the mark. That's literally what the word here in first John means, that we missed the mark. To admit, rather than hide our failures means that we will both to God and to people in our lives, be willing to say, "I have blown it. I have messed up. I missed the mark."
Here's why this is so important. If you don't have gospel culture in your heart, gospel doctrine that leads to gospel culture, what you will be tempted to do is to pretend that you are very close to perfect. You will be attempted to protest when somebody close to you points out something in you that is not perfect because you can't, in your self-knowledge, accept the fact that you aren't close to perfect. Whenever something happens that isn't great, you're going to blame shift.
In other words, let's say you get angry and you're going to say, "Well, the reason I get angry is because of what you said, what you did. I wouldn't have gotten angry and lost my cool if you had not." The reason that it works this way is because our self-knowledge says I'm good and if there's a problem, it must be you. We pretend, we protest. We blame shift rather than saying, "I can admit that I've missed the mark with God and with you in the way that I have handled things." There's an incredible freedom in this that doesn't exist when you can't admit this. When I say admit this, I'm not referring to a flippant, like, "I'm sorry, I'm not a perfect person, or mistakes have been made, or I'm sorry you felt that that wasn't up to your standard."
I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about an admission that says, "I have not been able to be all that I want to be in this relationship." If you insist that you're perfect and that others approach perfection, what you will do is you will create a miserable environment, a miserable culture in your home and in your relationship because what will happen is you'll start to say, "I'm perfect. I can't admit that I'm not and you better be perfect, or there's something wrong here." Instead of being able to say, "We are people who missed the mark and that's part of what we do."
In the gospel story, you see this. Jesus told the story, this is Luke 18, about a tax collector and a Pharisee who went to the temple to pray. The tax collector, in that culture, would be like somebody who sells drugs to preteenagers in our culture. It'd be like one of the few things that you look at and say, "That's not a good person." The tax collector comes up to the temple. When the tax collector gets there, he says, "God have mercy on me, a sinner." The Pharisee goes in and prays. When he goes in, he says, "God, I thank you that I'm not like other people. I'm not like this guy." Then he recites all of the things that he does that he thinks give him standing with God.
The whole point is at the end, Jesus says, "I want to tell you this man," talking about the tax collector, the one who was the bad guy in the story, he says, "He went home justified, not the other person." You see the point over and over in the Bible is that the people who receive grace, who receive mercy, are the people who come to God and acknowledge their failures. It's one of the things that allows us to connect deeply with one another.
Let me just ask you this. If we were to take just 10 people at random from the group that's gathered here, Butler, Strip District, Online, and we were to say, "We want you to come and tell us your greatest successes. Just tell us the greatest victory you've had in your life." Here's what would happen. You would find it mildly interesting for a few minutes and by the third or fourth person, you'd be like, "It's time to call this. I want to be done. I don't care what your big victory was." If we said 10 of you come and share your greatest struggle, your biggest heartbreak, your biggest failure, do you know what would happened? You would lean in because there's something in us that feels drawn and connected to the admission of our weakness, our failures. Part of a gospel culture is being able to say, "I can admit that I have not been all that you want me or need me to be, and I haven't been everything God has called me to be."
Self-righteousness kills gospel culture because we can't admit what's wrong with us or what we've done that hasn't been right. John Wesley, a generation or so ago, talked about this. He didn't call it gospel culture. He was talking about church groups, but he said that we need groups or in other words, places, environments, where we're able to speak as freely, plainly, and concisely as possible to show the real state of our heart. In other words, here's what you long for, is a place where you can be completely honest about what's going on. That only happens in a gospel culture.
Ray Ortlund put it this way. He said, "The deal breaker in a gospel sure is not sin. It's not failure. It's not weakness, but it's words that make the environment unsafe for sinners." In other words, we end up feeling somewhat justified to look down on people when we don't embrace this idea of gospel culture. That's the first thing. Here's the second thing. When we embrace gospel culture or are overflowing with the love and thankfulness for what God has done for us through Jesus Christ, we will forgive rather than hold on to slights. We'll forgive rather than hold onto slights. Have you ever had one of those dry erase boards somewhere where you write on a board and then you erase it? Sometimes what will happen on the dry erase board is you'll have a bad pen or a bad eraser. You'll have little marks and smudges left on it. Then you spray it with the little stuff and all of a sudden you wipe it again, and the whole thing comes clean. The picture of forgiveness in the Bible is the picture of something that is completely wiped clean, a slate that is completely wiped clean.
Jesus told the story again, the gospel according to Matthew, the good news, according to Matthew in Matthew 18 about a man who owed a king a huge sum of money. It was such a big sum of money he could never have repaid it. The king forgave the man. Then the man goes out and he finds somebody who owes him a relatively small amount of money, a couple months of wages relative to what he owed. The man demands that this guy pays him back, even after he's been forgiven much. He has the man thrown in a debtor's prison and what happens is some of the people who knew him went and told the king. The king was blown away because he said, "How could you not forgive this man when you've been forgiven so much?" Here's why gospel culture forgives rather than holds on to slights because we understand how much God has forgiven us. When we experience a slight, or a hurt, or something that somebody does to us, that's really cheap, what we're able to do is say, "I forgive you."
Now, I'm not saying that there's not a place for boundaries, especially in our romantic marriage relationship. There is a place to say, "You can't keep doing this to me." Okay? I'm not talking about that, but I'm talking about when you're annoyed, when you're hurt, when something happens that you say, "I'm going to hold on to this." When we hold onto things, what we're doing is we're not embracing the message of Jesus Christ. Instead, what we're doing is we're saying, "I'll forgive as long as the offense isn't too big." What that does is it creates challenges. I have been a pastor for over three decades now. I like to always point out when I say that, that I started at age 12. Here's what I can tell you from years of doing this. I have seen more marriages, more homes broken, more relationships with parents and kids, siblings broken because somebody can't forgive than any other single reason. It's usually not the first event. It's usually the inability to forgive.
Now, again, I'm not saying there aren't some events that are so egregious that you don't walk away, but what I'm saying is so many times what happens is people will be hurt and annoyed by little things, and they'll just cumulatively not forgive, not forgive, not remembering how much they've been forgiven. As a result, there will be a spirit inside that relationship that doesn't say we wipe the slate clean, but it says I keep score and right now, I am not in a good place relative to you because I know how many times you've wronged me.
Again, Alain de Botton in writing about this, again, not from a position of faith or perspective of faith said this. He said, "The capacity to tolerate differences with generosity is the true marker of the not overly wrong person to marry." Then he said this, he said, "Compatibility is the achievement of love. It must not be its precondition." Love that phrase, that line, compatibility is the achievement of love. It must not be its pre-condition. If you live in any kind of family relationship, you will have people do things and say things that are hurtful.
Just this last week, I had something happen where somebody in our extended family said something that wasn't overly positive about me to one of the other people in our extended family. Of course, that makes the quick round back to me. My immediate thing was, are you kidding me? I can't wait to tell them, and show them and let them know, but God has a funny sense of humor because I was writing about forgiveness. I realized once again that this plays itself out hundreds of times over the course of a year where you have a decision to make. Will I hold onto a slight and decide I'm going to somehow get even either in my aloofness, my coldness, or in my words, my actions or will I choose to forgive? Gospel culture says I'll choose to forgive rather than holding on to slights because I know how much God has forgiven me.
Then here's the third thing that we see. When we embrace gospel culture or the love of God in such a way that we're overflowing with thankfulness, we will look to God's love to decide how much to give rather than to what our family or our friends give us. What we'll do is we'll look to God's love to decide how much to give rather than to our family or to what people have given us, when that's where we live. Years ago, Elizabeth Elliot wrote something about marriage, and she was writing to young women. Here's what she said. She said, "The fact is that your provider may lose his job. Your knight in shining armor may experience public defeat. Your husband may make a serious mistake that you warned him about. Your lover may become a helpless patient, sick, sore, sad, needing your presence and care every moment of the day and night. This isn't the man I married, you will say, and it will be true, but you married him for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Those tremendous promises took into account the possibility of radical change."
Here's what Elizabeth Elliot is arguing for. What she's arguing for is she saying that part of making a commitment, a vow is to say, "I know that I can't predict the future and so even if things change, I am making a commitment to be with you for the rest of my life. I'm making a promise, taking into account the idea of radical change," but here's the problem with what Elizabeth Elliot says. There's no problem in the sense that sometimes it's just I made a commitment, I'm keeping it, but here's the problem and that is any commitment that you simply keep because you're keeping it will be very hard to keep over time.
What we naturally tend to do is we tend to think, well, if you give to me and I give to you and we both give at just the right amount, then we can have this great relationship, and you can. If you give, and the person you're with gives in nice proportion, you can build a really good relationship, but a gospel culture is different because in a gospel culture, what happens is you start to say, "This isn't about how much I give relative to how much you give. I give out of the abundance, the overflow of thankfulness that I've been given from God, therefore I can give to you."
In Romans 12:10, we're told that we're to outdo one another with honor, with giving honor. What would it look like to so be consumed with honoring the people close to you in your life that you tried to outdo one another with honor? Again, the human problem is if I try to honor somebody and then they don't honor me, what do I do? I'm like, "I'm out. I honored you yesterday and now I'm done because you haven't honored me." You know what I'm talking about because you do it too. It's like, "Hey, last month I made dinner one time. Come on, where's my honor?" A little too close to home? We don't naturally say, "Let me outdo you with honor," but what the Bible encourages when we understand gospel culture is that were overflowing with God's love for us in such a way that we can say, "I will honor you, even if it doesn't feel like you're honoring me. I will give to you, even when it doesn't feel like you give to me."
The gospel of Luke, the good news according to Luke, he tells the story of a woman who came to a dinner party. This is Luke 7:36 and following. The woman comes to this dinner party with all these religious leaders and Jesus is there. The woman comes in and, and when she comes into the dinner party, she's so overwhelmed with who Jesus is that she begins to weep, and her tears go on Jesus' feet. The way people would sit in those days, is they would sit, and their feet would be behind them on the ground.
Then she does something that's a cultural taboo in that culture. She undoes her hair, which to have probably our closest equivalent would be like a woman in our culture taking her shirt off at a dinner party and saying, "I'm going to wipe this man's feet with my bosom." She was wiping Jesus's feet with her hair. The religious leaders are sitting there, and they're shocked by this. They're like, "Doesn't he know that that's an inappropriate gesture? Doesn't even know what kind of woman this is?" Because the language says that she would have been a woman kind of the city. A woman who was around.
Simon, who was one of the people who was hosting Jesus starts thinking. He says, "If Jesus was really a prophet and he would know what kind of woman this is, and he would understand it." Jesus poses a question to Simon. He says, "Simon, who do you think loves most? Somebody who had a small debt and was forgiven very little or somebody who had a big debt and was forgiven a lot?" Simon says, "Well, I suppose the person who's forgiven a lot." Jesus says, "you've judged correctly." He says, "When I came in, you basically snubbed me. You didn't take my coat. You didn't offer me a drink," I'm modernizing this a little bit, "But she never stopped loving me." Then Jesus says, "The person who's been forgiven much, loves much."
Now, obviously that's in reference to Jesus, but here's what's true. The more you understand the love and the goodness of God for you, the more you will have an abundance to offer to other people. The more you are consumed with the idea of your goodness and your self-righteousness, the less large your heart will be. What you'll be able to do, what I'll be able to do is we'll be able to build a bigger, nicer house, maybe increase our bank account, but we won't be able to say my heart is bigger, more tender for the people in my life than if I'm overwhelmed by the goodness of God.
Now, how do we get there? Well, the image of overflowing with thankfulness is in a sense, an image that you can't completely manufacture, but what you can do is say how do I get my container, my heart into a place where I'm getting the inputs in such a high degree that I'm overflowing with thankfulness? The way that you and I will ultimately experience that is by coming to worship and celebrate who Jesus Christ is, what Jesus Christ has done in such a way that we can't help but say, "I can admit my failures rather than hide them. I can forgive rather than hold onto slights, and I can give out of response to what God has done rather than to what others have done." That will change your home, your environments, your relationships with your kids, your young kids, your adult kids. It will change your dating. It will change your sibling relationships. I know that some of us who are gathered here today are saying, "I don't know about this whole Jesus Christ thing. Do I need Jesus? Do I really want Jesus in my life?"
Here's one of the reasons that Jesus makes sense, not just because of what he's done for eternity, although that's true, but he also makes sense because when you embrace this gospel culture, it will change and produce in you what you really want, rather than something that you say, "I guess this is as good as it gets." Now, the problem of course, is that as people, we'll always fail. We'll revert back to all kinds of things and behaviors, but when you've embraced gospel culture, what do you do? You say, "I blew this today. Here's what I did. I'm sorry." You savor God's forgiveness, and you move forward. There is hope that our houses can be beautiful, but our homes can be even more beautiful.
Let me pray. Sometimes here, we just encourage you if you're comfortable, just to open your hands in front of you as just a way to say to God, "God, I'm open to what you want to do." If you're comfortable right now, just open your hands in front of you. God, we come to you right now and we acknowledge that there is a need for all of us to embrace gospel doctrine and gospel culture in our most important relationships.
Dear Father, right now I want to pray for those who are single, maybe never married. Maybe it feels far away. I pray that even right now, you would be birthing in them, an understanding of what it is to be a follower of you that would build a foundation for the kind of home, the kind of family that they might one day have. God, for those who have young kids and feel like all they're doing is giving, and serving and just running from thing to thing, I pray that there would be an awareness that the environment that they're creating in the home is creating something that is radically informative of how somebody sees faith and sees you.
Father, for those who are in relationships right now that that feel troubled, feel in jeopardy of even making it, I pray that there would be an embracing of gospel culture by both people in such a way that it would change the environment of that home. God, for those who are in a place that is fairly healthy and good, I pray that there would continue just to be growth, to embrace what it means to be a follower of you in a relationship. God, for those who, as we've talked today, just feel some pain because of past failures, things that have happened that they've done or not done that have contributed to maybe a breakdown, I pray that the message of your love, and your renewal, and your goodness would bring hope and healing to where there's been pain. God, we pray all of this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
