What God Has Against the Church #6 - Faithful and Fruitful
Message Description
Senior Pastor, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund, continues the message series "What God Has Against The Church" teaching from 1 Corinthians. The church is called to hold fast and be faithful to God's truth, while at the same time being fruitful and wise to grow God's kingdom and spread the gospel.
Message Transcript
Good morning. Welcome again to Orchard Hill. It's good just to see so many of you, and good just to participate with our different campuses online in all the different venues. How many of you are excited about the Super Bowl? Anybody? Kind of, a little bit. Depends. You say, the Steelers lost early. So maybe not as much as at other times, but I got a text from a friend who said that he had a friend who had bought tickets to the Super Bowl, had paid $2,500, bought them about a year ago, they are on the 50-yard line, he was really excited, but he didn't realize when he bought them that it was going to be the same day as his wedding. And so, he was looking for somebody to take his place. And he said that if you're interested, you could go to St. Mark's Church today at three. Her name's Nicole, and she'll be wearing a white dress.
All right. That has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about, but I found it slightly amusing. Let's pray together. God, thanks for a chance just to gather in God, as we often pray as we start this moment, I ask that you speak to each of us. God, I pray that my words would reflect your word, in emphasis and in tone, and in content. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. There's a book that came out a week and a half ago by a man named Todd Rose. He's a professor, was a professor at Harvard, he's not now. It's called Collective Illusions. And he argues that in our current day, in our current culture, people are by and large believing that there's a majority view that many people don't agree with, but collectively we started to say those views are indeed the dominant view.
And so, his take is basically to say, because it's the dominant view and people think it's the dominant view, more and more people have decided to self-silence, or to, in essence, sit back and not engage in public discourse because they feel as if the view is a minority and shouldn't be spoken a lot without some kind of repercussion. And he says that he believes about two-thirds of people actively or consistently self-silence, meaning they don't say what it is that they think on issues that are in the public debate because of this majority thing. And he does some research and talks about this from a neuroscience standpoint. And this is one of those things that you go neuroscience. It sounds really impressive, but I could have told him this without his research.
He says that our brains are hardwired, that we believe that whoever talks the loudest and most often repeats their argument is actually speaking for the majority. And here's why I say you don't need neuroscience. He says that that actually works. That is just true. You sit in a room, and somebody talks loudly and often, or you hear it often you start going, well, maybe that's the majority view. Maybe that's what people really think. And since other people don't talk a lot, you start to assume that their silence equals agreement with what's going on. He says in his book that on Twitter, 80% of the content is created by 10% of the users. Again, emphasizes this idea that it's more people on the edges that are shaping the view.
And then he says that about 19%, again, he has data for this, of the likes and shares that take place on social media, are done by bots. Meaning they're done not by people who are actually saying they're agreeing, but they're done by artificial intelligence that's saying let's take the extreme positions and try and make them more mainstream. And his point is this, and that is what's happened is we've come now to a collective illusion as a nation to say what people believe, what's the majority, may not actually be the majority. Now you may say, okay, what does that have to do with me, or my Christian faith, or my journey, my spiritual journey? Well, we started a series at the beginning of January that we called, What God Has Against the Church. And we're working through the book of First Corinthians. It was a letter that the apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. And we said that Corinth was a very cosmopolitan city. And so, the church being there was a church that this letter is written as a corrective, hence the title, What God Has Against the Church.
And I was thinking about this because today I realize as I start that many of you will say, okay, this is nice, we're going to talk about the church and its voices in our culture. And some of you care deeply about that, and many of us are saying, I don't care that much. I just care about what's going on in my life today. And I'm hoping that this message addresses this. And this is one of the advantages and disadvantages of working through a book, is that sometimes it forces you into a topic that otherwise you might not say much about, like I know intuitively that if we want to have more and more people come to church that you start the first of the year, January series on how to have your best year ever, four weeks, get in shape physically, financially, relationally, that stuff works.
And then you come into February and it's like, well, there's Valentine's weekend. Let's talk about love and romance, and then in March, we'll get into a little bit of Jesus and the cross stuff, come May it's Mother's Day. And I know that works, but when you work through a text, sometimes you come to stuff like First Corinthians four, and it's about the church. And a lot of us are saying as the church, do I care that much? I'm here, so I care somewhat, but it isn't what I get out of bed in the morning going, how do I relate to the church? And so, I have this little tension as even we come to this, but here's what I hope that you've picked up during this series, at least in part.
In First Corinthians chapter one, verse two, it says the church of God. And in the original language, it's the assembly, the gathering of God. And so, the idea is that the church, wherever you find it, the true church is initiated by God, it belongs to God. And so, what you do, what I do in relation to church matters, because if it's of God, how we connect to and participate in the life of the church matters. And what I've tried to say during this series is that in a sense to think that you or I can stand aloof from the local church and be critics of it and say, because there are flaws I shouldn't be a part of it, is to miss the point of what faith is in the New Testament, because faith was a communal event and being part of the local church was the only category that was understood in the New Testament.
And so, what that means is if you're well along on your faith journey and you start to go, well, I'm seeing some flaws in the church. Part of the call is to say, how can I solve that? And if you're at the beginning of your faith journey, or not sure where you are, that saying, how do I relate to the church really does matter in terms of what happened. So, here's how I'd like to set this up today. And that is C.S. Lewis once said this. He said that pride is the worst of all vices. And the reason he said that is because it creeps into our spiritual life. That's what he said. And here's what I believe he meant. And that is that certainly there's pride in culture and in our world, but sometimes what happens spiritually is we become proud, and we want ourselves to be seen in a certain way. And that certainly happens when it comes to church.
In fact, in chapter three, verse 21, he says this, this is giving us context. He says, "So then, no more boasting about human leaders!" In other words, don't take pride in the camp that you're in and the identity that you can get. And then in chapter four, he addresses pride in a couple of different ways. He addresses it in verses three through five, I'll come back to that at the end. In verse 18, he talks about the idea of some of you have become arrogant. And what I believe that he's driving at in this text is this desire to say I'm better than somebody else because of how I do church. And in fact, if you're around the church for any length of time, what will happen is sooner or later, you'll have somebody come to you and tell you that there's a better way to do church than the way you're presently doing it. And if you just come to their church or their thing, that it'll somehow be better than your thing.
Now, to be fair, that might be true, there are clearly going to be times in life where you may say, you know what? That really is better than the way that this is happening here. But in a broad sense, what people have done is they've often divided into two general camps, and nobody thinks or says it this way exactly, but this is maybe a characterization on both sides. And that is, people tend to think that churches are either on what I'm going to call the faithful side, meaning we speak and keep the truth as our priority. And then on the other side, it's effective, or you could say fruitful side. And what people tend to do is they tend to say, you know what? We want to be a part of the church that teaches the truth, that's doctrinally pure, that always has the right doctrine on everything.
And again, nobody thinks that they're on the wrong side of that, by the way. And then on the other side, there are people who say what we're called to do, what we want to be a part of is a church that's effective, that's reaching people. And so, on one side, the validity comes from being right. And on the other side, the validity comes from being effective if you will. Now, this I believe is a false dichotomy. And I think that in a sense, this is what Paul drives at in First Corinthians four because what he's doing is he's saying, I want you to be like us as apostles, the kind of people who are both faithful and fruitful, that this is a false dichotomy.
And I got some of the ideas I'm going to share today from a talk I heard another pastor do years ago, but here's how you know that this is a false dichotomy just in life in general. If you're married, or you've ever thought about getting married, here's what I know is true. You care deeply that your spouse is both faithful and fruitful. And here's what I mean, effective. You don't just simply say, hey, we married. And as long as you never cheat on me, we're good. If your spouse says, you know what? I'm not going to contribute to this marriage in any way, I'm not going to care about your needs. I'm not going to work. I'm not going to participate financially. I'm not going to contribute to the keeping of our house, our family, any of it, but I'm faithful. You wouldn't say, awesome.
And if on the other side, somebody said, you know what? I contribute financially. I help take care of the home. I help with the kids. I do so much. I do way more than you. I'm the big contributor here, but there are a few days a year that I need to have things... Now, maybe some people have marriages like that, but for most of us, that wouldn't work, we would say, no, I want you to be both faithful and effective, fruitful, a contributor to what goes on. And somehow when it comes to church, people will end up in these camps. I'm either faithful or I'm effective as if this is what we need to do or to be. And here's where we see this in First Corinthians chapter four, I'm just going to read the first two verses, I'm going to focus on those two verses, show you some of how the thought plays out in the rest of the chapter. Here's what it says.
"This, then, is how you ought to regard us: as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries that God has revealed. Now it's required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful." So, you have the word faithful right in here, and you have the idea of a trust, which is actually in the original language, the word for a household manager, it's used in verse one, and again, in verse two, and then you have the word servant. And so, here's the way that I'm understanding or seeing this. The word servant I'm going to say is the faithful side. And over here, you have the idea of the household manager, on this side, the person who's responsible. And what I am referring to here is this idea that the manager, the household manager is somebody who was put in charge of the family estate, the family business.
When you and I think about a household manager, it's hard to understand, but in that culture, a household was often somebody's business, as well as their house. Meaning you had a little mini agricultural business or something like that. So, when you had a household manager, they weren't just somebody who you said, hey, take care of a few things. You trusted them to maximize your business, your resources, and everything about you. And so that was the fruitful side. And the word servant here is a word that, again, is used in our English in chapter three, but it was actually a different word in the original language.
Here the word that's used is a word that means an under rower. Like you think about somebody rowing in a boat, like if you have ever seen rowing and you have a little coxswain that's telling you how to row and everybody else is exactly on cue, well, in boats, they would have rowers who would be down in the hole of the boat, rowing on command, doing just exactly what they were told, not worrying about where they were going or what the results were. They were just simply rowing. That's why I say this is this. They're saying we don't care about results. We're just doing what we're called to do, nothing else. Now, I mentioned that there are different words for a servant. In chapter three when it says we're all just servants, the word that's used is diakonos, which is a word that means to serve, to serve people. And the word that's most common in the New Testament for servant is the word doulos, which means slave, to do somebody else's bidding, regardless of what we think about it.
So, when you take those words together, the picture of a servant is somebody who says, listen, my job is not to worry about results, it's to do the bidding of my master, whatever it costs me, whatever I think about it. And I just simply do the right thing. The manager, the household manager, is one who had to be concerned about maximizing resources and results. And so, what I'm driving at here is that the church and Christians are called to be both faithful and fruitful, or a manager. And the way that this ties to what we started with, talking about Collective Illusions, is sometimes in society what people do, Christians do, is they say, I just need to hold to the truth and speak the truth. Who cares how it impacts anybody, as long as I hold to the truth?
And on the other side, some people say, well, maybe I don't need to talk about all the hard truths. I just need to reach people, and then eventually they'll be turned toward what is true because I just want to be effective in helping people get there. Do you see what I'm driving at? And do you see how this impacts the church? Now, if you've seen me draw before, you know that I like to draw stick figures. Today I'm not drawing a stick figure, because the other thing I like to draw is two by two charts.
So, if you were to say that this is faithful. Now, again, you can't just say you're faithful or not, and this is less faithful down here, less faithful. And on the other side, you had fruitful or effective. So, you have more effective, and I'll just put an E here, less effective. What you have is you have this as your goal to say, I want to be faithful, and I want to be effective. I want to be fruitful. On this side you just simply say, I just speak the truth, and it doesn't matter how effective it is. Here you're neither effective nor being particularly faithful. And here you sell out a little bit of your truth in order to have an impact or be effective. And that is the challenge. So let me just take a few moments and walk with you through this idea of servanthood and being a household manager in terms of church and hopefully life. Here's what happens in First Corinthians four in verses 8 through 13. Paul is writing to the church here and at this point, he becomes a little sarcastic in my view.
He says, "Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have begun to reign-and that without us! How I wish that you really had begun to reign so that we also might reign with you!" Now, the reason I say this is sarcastic, he's saying, you're rich, you're reigning, you're bringing the kingdom of God so fully here and now that you believe in a sense that you have actualized all that God is in your life. And then he says this, "For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display like those condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to human beings." And so, what would happen when somebody was condemned to die, they would be brought into a public arena and brought as a spectacle at the end of a procession. And this would especially happen when somebody had been captured in war, they would be brought in and paraded in front of a cheering mob, cheering for their death. This is the image that he's employing here for the apostles, for himself.
He says, "We are fools for Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but you're strong! You are honored, but we're dishonored!" Then he says, "To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly." And then he says this, "We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world-right up to this moment." And again, these images are striking. The scum of the earth means what's swept up. So, if you clean your floor after it's been particularly messy, and you get a little pile of stuff. That's this image that he's saying, that's what we're like. And the garbage of the earth was actually, if you were scraping out a pan after doing the dishes, you know how when you get dishes and you get everything collected in your sink, if you don't have a garbage disposal and you have to reach down and pull, that's his image.
Now, why does he employ those images? I believe he employs those images because what he's doing here is he's saying, in essence, I want you to understand that being a servant will sometimes cause you to not be well thought of even among Christian circles because here he's debating with the church. In other words, being faithful sometimes will be unpopular, it'll certainly be unpopular in the broader culture. Martin Luther years ago, wrote about this in what he called the theology of glory and the theology of the cross. And what he said in essence was this. And that is some people hold to a theology of glory. And the theology of glory is that God will always give us victory, he will always deliver us, he will always give us what we want. We'll be rich. We'll reign. We'll be honored. We'll be well thought of. Right here in this text you see the tie and he says, but that isn't always how it works.
And when we hold to a theology of glory, what happens is we believe that if we believe enough, then God will always deliver us, always heal us, always give us wealth, always make us relationally happy. And what happens when those things don't work out is we end up with twice the pain. We end up with the pain of what's broken, but we also end up being upset or disappointed with God because God has somehow let us down. But the theology of the cross, what Luther was talking about, is an understanding that God doesn't promise us to be well received, well thought of, or have things go our way in this world.
And you see the servant moniker here helps us to understand and say that simply being a person of faith or being part of a church doesn't mean I'll be well received. Now, let me just apply this to the church for a moment. Because again, as I said, at some point you will have people who will say, how do you participate in a church as big as Orchard Hill? Because if it's big, it must be selling out in some way. And if you tend to lean toward this faithful camp, if I can use that phrase, I just want to challenge you on a couple of things. And the first is that smallness does not mean faithfulness. Simply by being small it doesn't mean that you've been faithful or proclaimed truth.
I also want to say, if you lean in this direction, it's important that you watch your tendency to be harsh. Sometimes you can be right, you can speak the truth, but you can do it in the wrong way and in a way that ultimately doesn't help people come toward Jesus Christ. And so even sometimes when you know you're right, either in the broader culture or in the Christian subcultures, Christian world, you can end up being right, but doing it in a way that isn't actually helpful. And then I just like to say, don't forget that you're called, if you're a person of faith, to not just be right and have a remnant mentality, but to actually reach people. This is what the great commission is about, Matthew 28, where Jesus said to his disciples, I want you to go into the whole world, make disciples. I want you to reach people. I want people to come to faith through you.
And then I would add this as well. And that is, be careful that the issues you become dogmatic about or need to be right about, or that you think are true issues are actually biblical issues. Sometimes what happens in Christian circles is people take maybe a belief that starts on a biblical belief. And then they add an implication and then maybe another implication, and maybe a third implication. And by the time they get out here, it's not necessarily biblical, it's not that it wasn't informed by their biblical thinking, but it isn't any longer necessarily a biblical issue. And they speak about it and hold it as if they're somehow defending Christ when what they might be defending is a personal interpretation that isn't Christ. And yet thinking that they're being faithful somehow. Now, again, we're called to be faithful and to stand on truth. And sometimes it will be unpopular, but make sure that you're actually standing on what the Bible says, not something that's additional to the Bible.
So that's the servant or the faithful side. Now on the manager side, this household manager side. What we find here is this idea of saying I'm responsible for resources. And here you see this in, again, the great commission, you see it in Paul, in First Corinthians nine, where he says I wanted to become all things to all people that by all means possible, I might win some. I might reach some. And what he was doing was he was saying, what God has given me is so precious that I have to find a way to have this be known by other people. You see this also in this chapter in chapter four of First Corinthians because here's what we see in verses 14-15, again, employing another image.
So, he has the servant, the manager, he has the spectacle, here you have the father. He says, "I'm writing this not to shame you but to warn you as my dear children. Even if you had 10,000 guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel." Now we may have different images of what it means to be a father, but at least in part, one of the things that a father tries to do when they're living in a way that is honoring to God in the home is they say, how do I take the resources that I have and help my family thrive? And what he's doing is he's saying I have been entrusted, in a sense, household manager, father, with spiritual things. So, I'm going to make sure that I'm helping other people thrive, not just simply throwing down the truth.
In fact, if you have been a parent, you know that some of what I just said about being right the wrong way, how easy it is to do that in the family, or you might have the right opinion, you might express it, but you might do it in a way that actually causes your children, your wife, your husband, your family members to say, I don't want to hear it from you anymore, because of how you went about saying it. And so here the idea is to say, we're called not just to be faithful, although faithful has to be true, but also to be fruitful, effective, to be a manager of what God has given us. I saw an interview recently with Nathan Chen. He just won a gold medal for figure skating in the Olympics. And he was talking about how his mother, he grew up in Salt Lake City, would drive him from Salt Lake City to California so he could learn to skate with a particular coach.
And the reason it caught my attention was he was basically talking about how much he appreciated his mom's belief in him and in how he wanted to honor her, not just by trying to win, but by giving his absolute best. Now, ice skating and the Olympics are a little tricky because you can spend a lifetime and slip on the ice and not win the gold, and no one ever talks about you. But when you win the gold, you get a chance to say, I invested what my mom poured into me. And I tried my best in what stewardship or managing what God has given is especially in this spiritual arena, is saying it isn't just that I'm faithful, but it's also, I use this in some way that becomes outward.
Now for the broader church, there are a couple of things that this means. One is that the church sometimes needs to understand that it's called to teach hard truths. One of the reasons that I do teach through passages instead of saying, hey, it's January, here's your best self, here's February love. Here's March, a little Jesus on the cross. Here's February, Mother's Day. One of the reasons that I don't do that is because by teaching through a text, sometimes it forces us to say, we're going to deal with this issue even if I understand that it's going to be unpopular. And if you read through First Corinthians, the next couple chapters, you'll see that there will be some weekends coming that will actually be pretty unpleasant, no matter where you are in the continuum, because some of the truths will be hard for us in our modern culture because of the collective illusions.
But sometimes even if you're a church that says we're committed to doing things in a way that's culturally relevant, not just doctrinally pure, but culturally relevant. We want to reach people. We want to be effective. Sometimes you have to say, we want to follow God even if it means teaching hard truths in a way that will cause some people to say, I can't be a part of this anymore, because I don't believe it. I don't want to be a part of it. And then I would also say that it's important to understand that numbers and outward success do not equal the blessing of God or the favor of God. And what I mean by this is sometimes, especially if you're more in this fruitful camp, what you'll do is you'll say, well, if a lot of people believe it, if a lot of people attend, it must be true, it must be right. But that isn't necessarily true because you can build something by saying what's popular, what works.
And sometimes it's not that you don't say certain things that are wrong, it's that you simply avoid topics, or you simply avoid anything that's difficult. And what happens then is you can start to look at something and say, because there are a lot of people, this must mean that God's in it. But Second Timothy four says to be careful, or be aware that in the last day’s people will, what? Heap teachers to themselves with itching ears, people will hear what they want to hear. And so sometimes bigness might actually be a sign of a lack of faithfulness. And so, it's important as people to just say, God has called me to be a part of a church, an assembly of the God of the universe that's both faithful and fruitful, both of these.
Now, I started with the idea of pride. Let me come back to this. I said I'd hit this in verses three through five. You see what happens sometimes is our pride becomes I'm faithful or I'm effective, I'm part of something that's big and effective. I'm part of something that's true and right, and doctrinally pure. And we borrow our sense of worth from what we're a part of. C.S. Lewis again, just said that pride is the worst of all vices and that it creeps into our religious life. Here's what verses three through five teach us. It says, "I care very little if I'm judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It's the Lord who judges me. Therefore, judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes, he will bring to light what is hidden in the darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God."
So, here's what he says. He says I don't care how I'm judged. I don't even judge myself. And then he says this little phrase, he says, my conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. A beautiful phrase, because this is his moment of saying my standing is not that I've done right, but my conscience is clear. I'm not innocent. My conscience is clear. It's God who judges me, not people who I'm going to care what they say or even what I say. Here's what he's doing, he's saying, my real sense of standing is in what Jesus Christ has done for me, not how I do things for Jesus Christ.
And so even when we're talking about being faithful and fruitful, you see what pride does, is it says I have value, I'm right, I'm good because I've held the truth, or I'm good because I'm effective. And therefore, we start to feel a sense of pride, but our real standing needs to be rooted not in saying I did it right one way or the other, but I'm right because Jesus has declared me, not because I've done right myself. And when that becomes true, then you're able to say, I don't care how I'm judged. I'm going to receive my praise from God. He will know the motives of the heart and I'm not innocent here today. And when you and I live there, we're not vulnerable.
You see vulnerability comes from pride. When I'm proud of how I relate to culture, I'm not willing to take a hard stand because I want the culture to see me a certain way. If I'm proud because I say I take hard stands, then I'm vulnerable because there's a piece of me that if I don't feel somehow justified in my stance, or in the way that I work things out, then I'll say I've been vulnerable, but our real standing comes from Jesus Christ. See, one of our drugs of choice for many of us is thinking that we're better than other people. And it creeps into the church by saying, I make some kind of a false dichotomy. And what Paul does here is he pulls it together and says, your Christian experience is not about the promises or the work that you do for Jesus, but it's the promises that Jesus has made for you and the work that he's done on your behalf.
And here's what I'm guessing is true for many of us. And that is when we think about our future, think maybe even about the end of our lives, what we want to be true is we want the people closest to us to say they were faithful and they were effective, and cast something into my life, brought something into my life that was strong and beautiful. One of the ways that we do that is by saying, I want to be the kind of a person of faith, the kind of a person who participates in the local church that although imperfect is both faithful and fruitful. And the way that I go and the way again that we ultimately get there saying my approval is not based on what people see, but it's based on how Jesus sees me.
I love this prayer from Robert Capon. This is meant to be sarcastic, but the reason I love it is it strips some of my desire to do things so that I feel better about myself. And this gets to this idea of I'm innocent, I'm not innocent, even though my conscience is clear, here's what he says, "Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that there's at least something we can do. Tell us that at the end of the day, there will at least be one redeeming card of our very own. Lord, if it's not too much to ask, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can congratulate ourselves. But whatever you do, do not preach grace, give us something to do, anything, but spare us the indignity of indiscriminate acceptance." Indiscriminate acceptance. My conscience is clear, but I'm not innocent.
And when that becomes true, then we don't find ourselves trying to define ourselves with these camps and pride and looking down on other people, but instead say I can be what God calls me to be, a servant and a manager of what God has given me. Father today, I ask that you help me and each person who's participating in Orchard Hill to see the places where we can be faithful and fruitful, but God, even more than that, to avoid making much of ourselves because of where we see ourselves, but instead, rest in and live in the reality of your indiscriminate acceptance through Jesus Christ. And we pray this in His name. Amen.
