CMLC 2023-10-08 Sermon

Howdy.

Fancy meeting all of you here today.

I wanted to kind of talk about what it means to repeat yourself a little bit.

How many times have you either had to tell the kids the same thing over and over again,

or you were the one who needed to hear something over and over again?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I definitely know it's more of the view in the back row over there.

Yeah, definitely, definitely for sure.

When I was a kid and I'd be playing with the Legos, and every once in a while I'd be thinking,

there's a piece, I know that this piece is somewhere here, and I need that to complete what I'm working on.

I'd just be sitting there digging, trying to find that one piece, and then all of a sudden down the hall I'd hear,

and I would realize two things.

Number one, I think my dad found my Lego with his foot, and two, maybe that's the one I was missing.

But oftentimes with that is then, my dad would remind me again, you need to pick up your Legos.

Okay, okay, I promise I will pick up my Legos, and then what would be happening,

sometimes the next day, sometimes later the same day.

And time and time again, we see that we have to hear the same words over and over,

because we keep going down the same best-up path.

And that's what we end up seeing today with our Philippians 3 passage.

So Paul, go ahead, switch to the next slide real quick.

Paul is making sure that he tells everyone, I'm going to repeat this.

It's probably going to be for your benefit.

And the reason he says that is because this lesson is what he has to say over and over again.

To beware of those who make the law into what we focus on,

and those who want to ignore anything to do with the law and how we live.

One of the things that we see here is it discusses what we see with circumcision.

Now Paul is basically very, very upset at what people have been doing with circumcision.

There was a group of people that were called the Judaizers.

And they were spending so much of their time with what made them look righteous,

rather than asking what it meant to be righteous.

And so oftentimes they would take things that were meant to be an outward sign of worship,

but they would substitute it for what was going on in the inside.

So especially in those times, whenever a young boy was eight days old,

that they would bring this child to the rabbi and go through circumcision.

But the thing is that if it doesn't have any true meaning, then why in the world would you do that?

And he even goes so far as to describe people as mutilators of the flesh,

because they were cutting without any true meaning.

And that's the thing with this, is that when we're looking at practices like this,

is that we sometimes miss the question of what's happening on the inside.

You see, back then they would be focusing on circumcision for the young men,

but now we have the opportunity of bringing young children to God through baptism,

both men and women.

But do we do so and then just take it for granted?

See, oftentimes we can take baptism and focus so much on it,

and somebody might say, how do you know that God has saved you?

And a person might say, well, I belong to this church.

I've gone to it since I was five, whatever it might be.

Or I was baptized on such and such a day,

and we can take something beautiful that has planted the seed of faith,

and we can completely misunderstand it.

For example, if you were to look at your significant other,

and you were to say, do you love me?

And they were to say to you, well, I married you, didn't I?

Would that be a really great way to start an anniversary?

If someone is saying, well, I did it, didn't I?

That's kind of missing the whole point, is that they want to know,

well, tell me what's in your heart.

And oftentimes we can do the same thing with the outward signs that we have

with God's church and with worship,

is we can end up missing out on what it was that baptism connected us to

in the first place.

You see, Paul, he had done all the things he was supposed to do.

He was the perfect man of God in religious circles,

and yet this very perfect person was out there killing people for following Christ.

Completely missed the forest for the trees.

Spent so long being grateful that he was a good Jewish man

without asking, what in the world am I doing with God's people?

And the thing with this is that oftentimes we can end up trying to look good.

We can try to act good.

There are even the times whenever we're trying to be successful,

and not just making sure we have food on the table,

or making sure there's a roof over our heads,

but we need to make sure there's a certain status.

We need to make sure that somehow we have proven that we're successful to others.

Maybe the second home that we have, or the vacations that we took,

or whatever it is that we may be wearing or showing to others,

because that somehow shows that we are good at life.

Or even more than that, even just making sure that we have a beautiful family.

We can do the best at their sports.

Have they managed to get into the right college?

Have they managed to somehow get the best boyfriend, girlfriend?

Do they know how to show everyone else that we are good parents,

and that we know that as long as they are good kids,

then nobody has anything to point at us for?

We can spend so much time trying to look for the things that are on the outside

that we miss out on asking the question of what's happening on the inside.

I taught physics for six years, and I still remember the private school that I was at,

and one of the pastors was on the board and had helped to found the school,

and I would teach his kid in the back row every day,

and I knew that of all the kids in that room,

that was the one that was causing the most trouble.

But you couldn't say anything about it.

Exactly.

Because spending so much time making sure that things looked good on the outside

instead of asking what's happening in the kingdom of God on the inside.

The thing is though that Paul, Paul was striving.

Go to the next page.

And what we see is that he puts out this idea of striving for a goal.

Now, I want to put in front of you though,

that sometimes we think of this as how we become good enough,

and by so doing we miss out on what Paul is trying to get across to us.

If you were to say that you're a musician,

does that mean that you are a concert pianist?

Does that mean that you have played alongside Elton John?

If you were to say you're a musician,

does that mean that you have a record deal?

Does that mean that you've got your own following?

No, a musician is somebody who plays music.

Someone who is growing in their craft,

someone who wants to learn more, who wants to pursue it,

but it's not a question of how far you've gotten in it,

it's just a question of which direction are you going?

And that's the thing about what Paul is trying to get across here,

is to not focus on where you've gotten, but rather is saying who it is that you're following.

Because here's the thing about Paul, he says,

I'm going to let go of the past.

But why is it so important to let go of the past?

Because remember, this is the person that every time he preaches,

and the Jewish community sees him,

they see the guy who helped them put Christians to death.

Every time that he speaks to a church or an apostle,

and he knows that he may very well have persecuted their friend or family.

And that every time he is living out his faith,

he still has that thing nagging in the back of his mind.

Don't we oftentimes have that, that thing that nags us,

that as much as we get over it, it's still somehow there,

it's still somehow gets us.

But you see, there's another side of this that Paul wants us to be wary of.

Go ahead and flip to the next slide real quick.

Is that God is showing us truth,

is making sure that we are aware of what he wants us to see.

You see, more than that, is that following after Paul is meant to be following after Christ.

You see, sometimes we can spend all of our time thinking about,

have I done everything perfectly?

But let's be honest, there are other times in our life,

times where we're really not that concerned about what we do or don't do in our life.

It oftentimes happens at the end of high school, through college,

the times where your parents call you up, how are you doing,

oh, I'm just fine, you don't really want to tell them where you were partying the night before,

and you don't really want to tell them what's been going on, yeah.

But it oftentimes continues throughout our life.

Is that we will have times where we say, this doesn't matter, this is okay.

We'll take little boxes in our life and say, you know what, this isn't so great, but you know what, it's okay.

That part's acceptable.

And if someone were to say, well, yeah, but don't you want to grow through that,

oh, I'm saved, Christ has done everything.

I'm sure he understands that this part, that's just not always going to be good.

But every time that we look at giving in to the cravings that we have,

the desires, the things that we focus on, where we can't get over it,

the times where it might be something physical or something emotional, something mental,

something where you just have to have what you want.

But we sometimes separate that from what our life is in Christ.

You see, God is not looking to just make sure that we've gotten marked and then we're done.

But our entire life is to grow and to change.

See, that's the thing about what we see with following after God, but also with his community.

There's a really weird guy in my life who sells mortgages.

I try not to compliment him too often because he's going to get a big head and it's already kind of big.

But he recommended that I read the book Atomic Habits.

I'm about through nine chapters of it.

And one of the things that he keeps bringing up in there is that oftentimes we end up living up

to the expectations of those who are around us.

Whoever it is that we surround ourselves with, those are the ones that we end up living up to.

Think about this.

The times whenever you have struggled the most in your life, who was it that was around you?

And that's the thing is that oftentimes we end up getting egged on.

But that's the thing about Christ bringing us together as his people,

that we're meant to encourage the best with each other, not to just sit around and laugh about all the dumb, stupid things

and then just kind of leave it at that, yeah, we have our moments, yeah, we have our ups and downs,

but when we hear somebody going down a path that we know is going to hurt them, do we just laugh at it?

Or do we actually encourage them to grow through it?

And that's kind of the hard part, because sometimes then we have to say what nobody else has said.

See, we've got a lot of the small groups that we've been building up, not just the classes on Sundays,

but during the week.

But one of the things we try to make sure is that it's not just go sit in a room and read the Bible

and make sure you've understood it and then you move on, but also have you actually talked to the people there?

Have you actually connected with them and what they're going through?

A few weeks ago, there was a friend of mine who's in ministry who had to send out an email saying,

hey, you know this person that we've been volunteering with for the last few years?

He murdered his wife in front of his kid.

And knowing that the person that was right next to us, I'm in pictures with this guy

and that I had no idea what he was going through that led up to this moment

that I cannot possibly explain.

And that's the thing that we see here is that Paul is looking at a community saying,

your life matters.

And we're here to encourage that with one another.

And that's the piece that I want to leave you all with here,

is that oftentimes we can focus so much on did I get you into church on Sunday?

Did we make sure you came and took communion? Did we make sure that you checked off wherever the box is?

And you know, those are good things.

But if we haven't actually connected with you as a person,

if we haven't actually cared for you and your life in Christ, then we've let you down.

So for that, I'm sorry if we've done that.

I'm hoping and praying that we do better.

Not because we're ever going to get to some point where we say we've got it all figured out,

because that's what we should strive for.

We should strive for that as a community and we should strive for that in our own lives.

So if you've had a chance to connect with us and we've been able to do that with you,

really, really glad and I hope you can do that for others.

But if you haven't, come find us.

You don't need to do life by yourself.

As God's people, as fellow believers, we get a chance to bring joy to one another,

not by ignoring the issues around us, but by walking through them together.

So with our last slide, we acknowledge to you that whatever you may be struggling with,

whether worrying that you haven't gotten everything perfectly down yet,

or ignoring what life in Christ might be, as the people of God,

may we bring you back to our Messiah who has saved you and gives you a new life in His name.

Thanks be to God.