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Under compulsion

I Corinthians 9: 14 – 23

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 17 Jul, 2005

I HAVE a great deal of respect for the Assemblies of God, considering how they have pulled themselves from being a minor sect to being one of Australia’s biggest churches.

But I also have my concerns about some of the directions they are taking. There seems to be a growing self–centredness in their attitudes. There’s a lot of emphasis on, “What can I get out of my faith?”

The press is picking up on their “Prosperity Gospel” teachings, but that is only one aspect. And, when Christians become self–focused, they lose touch with the power of the Gospel.

I don’t want to bag out the Pentes. I have found the local Assemblies of God people to be generous and supportive, with a keen heart to see the gospel preached. I appreciate the time Pastor Barry Saar gave me when I used them as a case study for Evangelism at College. But I have seen how, over and over, churches abandon the core values that they were built on, and they might continue as organisations, but they cease to be churches. It would be sad if that happened to the Assemblies of God churches.

I also want to add that what a church becomes is a reflection of what its people are.

If we are self–centred, our church will be self–centred; if we are sinful, our church will be sinful; if we are faithful, our church will be, too.

If there are concerns for the Assemblies of God, how much more should there be for us Baptists!

So today I want us to consider what it is that motivates us, and how that motivation impacts on our devotion to proclaiming the gospel. Paul said,

...when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, for I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!

He was so gripped by a passion to proclaim the gospel, that he could not rest easily if he didn’t do it.

Our calling is to proclaim Christ, and our motivation must arise from our inner need to tell about him.

We need to ask ourselves what our compulsion is and what happens to us if we neglect that compulsion.

Soon after I arrived at Marrickville, I saw how badly we had been mauled in one way or another by life. There were so many hurting people. Whether it was childhood events, whether it was abusive workplaces, whether it was the daily grind to survive, no one was untouched. Our church itself has struggled and barely survived.

When I was went to the annual Pastors' School of Theology twenty odd years ago, we had a professor of evangelism from some Texan Theological Seminary as one of our speakers. He spoke about how the Bible says we should evangelise, so the secret to getting an evangelistically active church was to keep telling people to do what the Bible says.

In the question time, I asked what do you do about a church which has tried over and over and failed, a church so demoralised it was about to throw in the towel? What do you do when people say, “We know what the Bible says, and we have tried and tried, and nothing works. Why try again?”

Sadly, all he could tell me was what he had said in his talk. He didn’t have an answer to the question of motives and motivations.

We still struggle with the impact of our history, of the people who have come and gone and helped with one hand and hindered with the other. We still struggle with the fact that we are wounded people.

Over the years, our sense of direction as a church has been confused and subverted by the efforts of a few good people troubled by bad compulsions. How many plans for growth have we laid down, and someone came up with a “Yes, but...”? They let us buy the car, but hid the keys from us!

What kinds of compulsions drive us?

We need to be transformed. We need to learn how to be driven by an inner compulsion to preach Christ.

I was talking to Bruce on Friday about our ministries, and how much unrealised potential we have. I mentioned that my topic for today is Paul’s compulsion to preach the gospel,and the lengths he would go to, to do what he felt called to do. I believe that this sense of what I should preach fits in very well with issues Bruce wants us to think about today as we meet to plan.

But I want to say also that I was telling John and Bruce that same night how much ability and talent there is among us. We have artists, we have writers, we have theological thinkers, we have people with loving hearts, we have letter writers. John, Cat and Joyce are showing the way with using the gifts you have. But they also have many useful gifts still unused in the proclamation of the Christ who died and rose again and will one day return to judge the world.

You have heard me preach about transforming our world, and I have no doubt that that is what our calling is about. We are called to bring the conditions of God’s Kingdom to light.

St Francis prayed about Kingdom ministry when he said,

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Peace, love, pardon, faith, hope, light, joy, consolation, understanding, pardon — all are Kingdom conditions. Just as Jesus said,

LK 4:18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to release the oppressed,

^{LK 4:19} to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

our ministry is to be the same. The Kingdom of God is at hand, and we still call people to repent and believe the good news, and to begin living in accordance with the good news of the Kingdom.

Never — never ever — forget our goal to bring every thought into captivity to Christ, and to bring every knee to bow before the risen and exalted Christ.

We are here to preach Christ in season and out of season, in wealth and in poverty, in times of ease and times of hardship.

We are here to declare Jesus.

I would love to be rich. But being a Christian will never guarantee my wealth.

I would love to know that my closing years will be fully paid up and worry free. But that’s not something that faith ensures.

What faith ensures is that God will never abandon us; that our heavenly Father knows our basic needs before we ask, and will add these things to those who seek first the Kingdom of God.

My grandfather often quoted Psalm 37;

PS 37:25 I was young and now I am old,

yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken

or their children begging bread.

And many people have found that to be true in their lives.

But the moment we let the thought slip in, “I will follow Jesus because of what he can give me,” at that moment we become pagans all over again.

As soon as we give way to that, “What’s in it for me?” attitude, we begin abandoning the true gospel.

Juan Carlos Ortiz is a man I have mentioned before. He was the preacher who preached the same sermon twice one morning, when he stood up and said,

“Love one another.” and sat down. When they didn’t begin doing it, he stood up and said it again, and some of the people caught on and began doing it. And the church began changing from that day.

Although this is not what I want to say about Ortiz, if you think about it, to love one another is not prosperity gospel. Love gives, even at personal loss.

Ortiz said something along these lines: “We have a wrong attitude to Jesus in evangelical churches. We tell people to ask him into their hearts to be their own personal saviour. But the Bible talks about receiving him as Lord. When he comes to us as Lord, then we receive salvation. But to talk about receiving him as saviour and never think about him as Lord is like a wedding where the groom says, ‘I take this woman to be my lawfully wedded cook and ironing lady.’ If a man loves a woman and takes her as his lawfully wedded wife, she might cook and iron, but she isn’t even going to hang around for the rest of the wedding service if he only wants her for what she can do for him.”

And that’s the kind of attitude that drove Paul. He does not think of what he can receive from Jesus — he is passionate to give for Jesus. And, in that, he is a model for us, too.

I am encouraged that so many of us have a desire to share Jesus and, as opportunity arises, to urge people to change.

But I wonder if we are all perhaps torn between asking “What can Jesus do for me?” and asking, “What can I do for Jesus?”

Or maybe, for someone here, the truth is that you have moved on from asking, “What can Jesus do for me?” and now you are merely asking, “How can I get what I want out of life?”

I thought about what Paul says,

1CO 9:19 Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20 To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.

I thought I might talk about some of the evangelistic opportunities we all face. Maybe someone here could have a ministry to Jews or to outlaws or whatever. But I think we really need to look first at the more basic and underlying issues.

What Paul is saying here is that he was prepared to move outside his little cocoon of safety and adapt to meet the needs of people who did not know Christ.

In other words, his commitment to Christ over-rode his desire to live comfortably.

Paul had grown up a very orthodox Jew, but, as a Christian, he had become free of the legalisms of orthodox Judaism.

Yet he was prepared to live as an orthodox Jew if that was what it meant to reach orthodox Jews.

You might think that that would be easy for Paul.

Think again! He had gained freedom after a lifetime of bondage! It would be like asking a Long Bay lifer — if there is such a thing — to return to prison life so that he could show others how to get good behaviour points.

The first church I attended was rather legalitic about alcohol. Some of the members had been alcoholics. So I became teetotal for some time. Then one day I realised that I had become a legalist myself, and was judging people on whether or not they drank alcohol.

Breaking free from that legalism was difficult; but it would be even harder for me to accept restriction again, even though I perhaps drink a glass of wine a month.

I'll get in ahead of you here: I know the old story that the Russians only drink, on average, 5 litres of vodka a year — the only problem is that they drink the whole lot on the one day. No, I don’t drink four bottles of wine each birthday. But, regardless of how much or how little I drink, I would find it very difficult to come under bondage in that respect again.

But if my ministry was among practicing Muslims, or among Mormons, then I would have to think very hard about whether I would change my behaviour so that I was not giving them offence and pushing them away from the gospel.

On the other hand, Paul also became like one outside the law so that he could win those who were outside the law.

In other words, when he ministered among gentiles who didn’t know the Jewish law, he lived as they did.

That, too, would not be easy for a converted Jew like Paul.

I grew up a vegetarian. For over 30 years, apart from two or three occasions when I ate some chicken at a wedding, I was a vegetarian. When I became a student pastor, I changed that habit so that I could eat much the same as everyone else in the church, and could be a guest at anyone’s home without causing food–related problems.

But I still find oysters and mussels very off–putting, and the whole idea of black pudding — that sausage made from blood — is pretty revolting to me. Paul would probably have had very similar feelings. These were unclean foods to a Jew. But he blended in to the gentile society of his day, in order to win some for Christ, and if that meant eating “unclean” foods, or not ritually washing before meals, he made the change so that, by all means, he could win some.

Here’s how I want to challenge us all today.

First, I want us all to examine our motives. Are we compelled by the love of Christ, as Paul was? He said,

^{2 Cor 5:14} For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.

Second, I want us each to ask ourselves, “How far am I prepared to change, so that the gospel can really go out unhindered through me?”

How we answer those questions will be vital to the life of our church and to the proclamation of the gospel from this place.

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)