The Good Church Wants Other Churches to Grow | The Church God Calls Good | Pastor Weihrauch

Second Thessalonians chapter two,

verse 13 through chapter three, verse five.

But we ought always to give thanks to God for you brothers beloved by the Lord,

because God chose you as a firstfruits to be saved

through sanctification by the spirit and belief in the truth.

To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain

the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions

that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.

Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and God our Father,

who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace.

Comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.

Finally, brothers, pray for us that the word of the Lord

may speed ahead and be honored as happened among you,

and that we may be delivered from the wicked and evil men.

For not all have faith, but the Lord is faithful.

He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.

And we have confidence

in the Lord about you that you are doing and will do the things that we command.

May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God

and to the steadfastness of Christ.

Well,

welcome to the weekend gathering of Christ Community Chapel.

My name is Zach.

I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm so glad you are here with us this weekend.

And I'm going to break a rule that I'm not supposed to break normally

on Thursday nights and use the word night.

We're so glad you're here at night.

The reason I don't normally say night

is because sometimes we use this video on Sunday mornings,

in our East service, and I'm not supposed to give away that it's at nighttime.

But I'm doing that here because actually, in all of our weekend services

this upcoming weekend.

So all of our Sunday services will be watching this video of the sermon.

That's not normal.

So if you're a guest, normally I would be in person,

but you're watching video because this Sunday, I'll be hanging out

with the students of Casey at their fall retreat.

Over 200 middle school and high school students at Camp Carl can't wait

to hang out with them.

And in some ways, I'm not going to be with you to be with them, to let you know

that's how much value I place on your high school and middle school students.

Can't wait to hang out with them this weekend

and tell them about how much God loves them in Jesus.

So thanks for hanging in there with the video.

But we are going to continue our sermon

series, going through first and second Thessalonians.

We're almost done, almost to the end of our ten weeks that we've been spending

in these letters on the series, we're calling

the church that God Calls good.

That's because these letters, first and second Thessalonians,

are overwhelmingly positive.

The apostle Paul is writing to a young church in Thessalonica,

and he is proud of them.

They are doing great, and we're leaning in to what it was

that made them so special, what it was that had God saying about them.

And to them.

You are a church that I call good, in the hopes that we might become

more like that and become increasingly a church that God is happy with.

So if you have a Bible, would you take it out and open it to Second Thessalonians?

We're going to look at the end of chapter two, the beginning of chapter three.

Take out your phone or your tablet or whatever device you want to use.

And hey, also, if you're here and you maybe didn't bring a Bible,

maybe you aren't super familiar with the Bible,

you know you're never going to find second Thessalonians first.

I am so glad that you're here.

Thanks for hanging out with us this weekend.

I want you to know that this service is for you, and I hope you enjoy it.

But I also want you to know if you want to follow along in the Bible,

you can, just by reaching in front of you and grabbing the Bible

that's in the pew in front of you or in the back of East Hall.

And I preach from one of those Bibles just for you,

so that I can tell you that today's reading is on page 930.

It also be on the screen, behind me.

If you don't want to follow along and just read it there.

All right. As we're looking at this passage,

there are three things that I want to pull out.

To show you three kind of points I want to use as mile markers to guide our time.

They're very simple.

They go like this. I want to talk about proof

power and potential.

Proof power and potential.

All right.

Let's start with the first one. Proof.

Now when I use the word proof here,

I don't so much mean, necessarily proof to win an argument.

Like when, pastor talks about proof, you would suppose maybe I'm going to get

into the scientific argument for God or

how you can know Jesus rose from the dead.

And there are great arguments for both of those things that I hope

you'll check out.

But that's not what I mean this time when I use the word proof instead,

I mean a little more, what I'll call proof of concept.

Proof of concept.

It's when you show somebody enough for them

to think what they didn't think was good is actually good,

or what they didn't think was possible is actually possible.

Like, like an example that comes to mind for me is in the past, when my wife and I

have been looking to buy a house, we are very different home buyers.

So we walk into our house, she sees

what will be when she gets done with it.

Okay, I see what is okay.

So when I walk in, if it's in disrepair and I am not handy at all, like

if you came to my house and said, Zach, do you have this tool?

I would have to have you show me a picture of that tool

before I can answer that question so I don't see what will be.

I see what is.

I see broken things that I couldn't fix.

And I, I think most people must be like me because I've noticed that now

when you buy something on Amazon or, or various other websites,

they actually have a feature where you can place that thing in your house.

Have you seen this?

So like, you're gonna buy a couch and you don't know if my wife can look

at that couch and go, oh, that will look great in our living room, I can't.

So it's like this augmented reality thing where you take your phone

and you can position the couch in your living room to see it.

And that's because they know

people like me are never going to buy it until there's proof of concept.

Proof that what I think might look good is actually going to look good.

That's what this passage is about.

See, the Apostle Paul is a missionary.

He his job is to travel all over the known world

and to tell people about Jesus and to start churches.

So this is a letter from a missionary to a church that he helped

start in a city called Thessalonica.

But they're important to him for this reason.

Look at what he says in verse 13 and 14.

He says this.

But we are always to give thanks to God for you brothers,

beloved by the Lord, because God chose you

as the first fruits to be saved

through sanctification by the spirit and belief in this and the truth.

To this he called you through our gospel,

so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He says to this church, you are the first fruits.

And what he means by that is, you are one of the first cities

that I went to and preach the gospel, and a church was formed,

and you are the first evidence

of what God is doing, the first evidence that our message is true.

You are our proof of concept.

So Paul says, I'm traveling all over the world telling people about Jesus.

And you got to remember in Paul's day, Christianity is a very new religion, okay?

It's totally new.

Paul is showing up and saying that a guy named Jesus was the Son of God,

that he lived and died and rose from the dead, ascended into heaven,

and he is now the only way to have a relationship with God.

But he is the way anyone who wants to can have a relationship with God.

It's a totally new religion.

It's an outrageous claim.

And what he's saying is, as I travel, I point to you

as evidence that what I'm saying is true.

You are first fruits.

You are my proof of concept.

And that's important because people have a hard time

believing something they can't see.

They have a hard time buying into something that they haven't experienced.

So Paul's saying, it's important to me that I can point to you

as my proof of concept.

Let me give you an example that illustrates what I mean.

There's a guy in Hollywood a couple years ago, decade or so ago,

and he had a script that he had written

about his experience as a jazz drummer.

Okay.

He was a drummer in a jazz, group.

He went to a jazz music school.

He lived in that world.

And, and he wanted to make a movie about his experience.

Not not a biography, just a movie about the experience of being a jazz drummer.

And he wanted to make it a movie about the pursuit of perfection.

Like, like the work you had to put in to be really, truly great at something.

And he wanted to drive at the question of how far is too far?

How maniacal should you get in the pursuit of being great at something?

And more importantly, how much should you let other people

push you in your pursuit of being great?

He wrote the script and he took it to every movie studio

he could get a meeting with, and no one would buy it.

No one was interested.

Everyone thought, you can't make a movie about jazz drumming.

That's too niche, that's too esoteric.

No one will want to watch it.

No one really cares.

No one would buy it.

Which you think would make him give up. But.

But he believed that there was a great movie there, and that it was.

It was just that they couldn't see it.

So what he decided to do was he made a short film version of the movie

like a five minute version of the movie, that he could show the movie studios

so that they could see what he had in mind, that they could catch the vision

that he had for.

Why this movie would be so poignant for people.

So he makes the short film, and he starts taking that to the studios,

and the minute he does that, they buy it right away.

They buy it.

That movie, by the way, went on to become the movie whiplash.

Maybe you saw it.

That movie won three Oscars.

It was nominated for Best Picture.

It took $3 million to make, and it made $50 million globally.

So in other words, when this guy has a script, he has a $47

million script, an Oscar winning, Oscar worthy script,

and no one can buy it because it's really hard to buy what you can't see.

They couldn't see it.

So he realized, I need to give them a glimpse.

I need to give them, a sign.

I need them to be able to see my vision.

And if they can just see a little bit of it, I believe

they'll see the beauty of what I have to tell.

That's what Paul is saying,

that Christians and churches

are meant to be proof of concept for the message of Jesus Christ,

that their lives, that their community, are meant to be a kind of vision

for people who are not yet Christians to look at and say,

wow, there's something compelling there.

There's something interesting there.

Paul is saying, listen, I'm taking the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Paul is writing the New Testament, but he's saying, I am dependent on this.

I have a message, but you are my proof of concept.

You are my proof of concept.

Well, I want you to think second point about why that's so important.

What's the power of a proof of concept?

Why is it so important that I can visualize a couch in my living room?

Why is it so important that I watch a five minute short film

to be able to understand what it's because seeing is believing.

It's because we can see something and realize,

oh wow, what I thought wouldn't work actually works.

Now, the best expression of this actually is in the book of Psalms.

It's this beautiful verse in Psalm 34, verse eight,

which says, this taste and see that the Lord is good.

Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.

Other translations will say, blessed is the man who trusts in him.

The psalmist is saying that this is how most people work.

You have to taste and then trust.

You have to see and then believe, experience

and then buy in and taste and see, he says.

And then you can trust.

Now when I read that verse, I can't help

but think about a particular experience I had a few months ago

at this annual get together of pastors that I go

to every February in San Diego.

I know it's hard to go to San Diego in February, but somehow I make it through.

And when I was there at this past time, there's a guy who leads the group

that I go to. His name is, Larry Osborne.

He's a phenomenal teacher and preacher, has written a lot of books.

And actually, one year from right about today, he's going to come preach here.

I'm very excited for you to meet him.

You're going to really like him.

But we're standing in the kitchen of the house where we meet,

and we're getting ready to leave to go somewhere.

But everybody's putting together a lunch really quickly, and I see Larry

working over the counter at something that I assume he's going to eat.

And so I say to him, Larry, what are you making?

What are you going to eat?

And he goes, oh, I'm making a mayonnaise, peanut butter and pickle sandwich,

which I thought was about the grossest thing I've ever heard of

in my entire life.

And I shared that opinion pretty strongly with Larry,

both in my body language and my face and in what I said.

That's disgusting, Larry.

I said, why do I fly across the country

to learn from a man who would eat something like that?

And the thing is, Larry, in his wisdom, he didn't say anything.

He just grabbed another piece of bread out of the

the loaf of bread, put it on the counter,

started spreading peanut butter and then mayonnaise and pickles on it,

folded it up, handed it to me and said, all right, big shot, try it,

try it.

He's calling my bluff, so I did.

I tasted the mayonnaise, peanut butter and pickle sandwich.

And I'm here to tell you it was one of the top ten experiences of my life.

Okay, that might be an exaggeration,

but it was awesome.

It was awesome.

Mayonnaise, peanut butter and pickles.

Sandwiches are delicious.

They're delicious.

I know it sounds disgusting, and I know some of you are never going to try it.

Others of you are going to go home and try it as soon as you get home.

And when you do, you will see how magically these flavors work together.

It's like three things you didn't know belong together, but really do.

That's what I think of every time I think of the psalmist saying taste and see.

And the reason why is because in that moment I had zero

belief, zero confidence, that a mayonnaise, peanut butter

and pickle sandwich would be good at all.

And Larry said to me, taste

and see, taste and see.

And when I did, I realized just how good it can be.

Now you're Paul and you're traveling over the known world.

In the first century, you're preaching a religion that no one has ever heard of.

You are telling them that everything they thought they knew about God is wrong,

that they can be forgiven through Jesus, that they can have a relationship with God

through Jesus, that they have to turn from their sin and follow Jesus.

You're preaching a message that to most people

is a mayonnaise,

peanut butter, and pickle sandwich.

It's not something that they're interested in.

You can see that, by the way, in this passage.

Look at what he says right after he says, oh, you're my proof of concept.

And he says this in verse 15, 16 and 17.

He says this.

So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions

that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.

Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and God our Father, who loved us

and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts

and establish them in every good work

and word.

Now that's quintessential biblical language.

Stand firm.

Good works, good words.

He's telling them, keep doing these things that God is telling you.

Be obedient.

Surrender your life.

Do the things God is telling you to do.

And I'm telling you, as a guy who's spent the past 20 years of his life

preaching similar things to people, for most people,

that message is a mayonnaise, peanut butter, and pickle sandwich.

I feel that when I get up here

and preach messages like two weeks ago on judgment,

or four weeks ago on death,

I feel that when I get up here and say

that God knows best how life works and that he's telling you

that, for example, being generous leads to greater happiness than being selfish.

I know for most people that's mayonnaise, peanut butter, and pickle.

But when I say that God tells us

that that relationships work best when they go straight to marriage,

and not when you get on the relationship escalator and begin sleeping together

and then living together and then doing things at your own pace.

I know for most people in their 20s and 30s, that is a mayonnaise,

pickle and peanut butter sandwich.

Most of what the Bible has to say doesn't sound very appetizing to us.

Most of what the Bible has to say doesn't sound like or feel like good news to us.

The message that God knows best, that God wants good things

for us, that we need to zig when we've been zagging.

The message of surrender, the message of repentance,

the message of forgiveness through the life and death and resurrection

of Jesus is, for most people, something they're not interested in.

Which is why Paul says it is the job of every Christian to live their life

in such a way that the gospel of Jesus is proven to be true.

That's what he said.

He's saying, listen, I'm traveling all over the world

telling people about Jesus.

But what I'm dependent on in my preaching, what I'm dependent on, in my message,

is that you are inviting those around you to taste and see

that you are surrendering your life, that you are pursuing

obedience, that you are giving control to Jesus.

And as a result, those around you are able to see how he leads you

to goodness, to stand back and say, wow, I didn't think that

would lead to happiness, but there it is.

I didn't think that would be good, but there it is.

I couldn't see it.

But now I can. Brother and sister in Christ.

Do you realize what Paul is saying?

That what he's saying is that your holiness, your pursuit

of righteousness, your obedience to Jesus, is not just about you.

It is evidence

of the reality of the gospel.

In other words, it says, you and I surrender to Jesus

that we become living testimonies to the goodness of his authority.

We become living examples of the grace that he extends.

We become living, breathing examples of his goodness as a king.

We are ourselves.

The invitation to our neighbors and friends and family members

to taste and see.

Which is why the church that God calls good is not just a church

where the preaching is true and right, or the music is true and right,

or the Bible studies are true and right.

The church that God calls good is a church that yes, is preaching truth,

singing truth, teaching truth, and living truth.

Because the reality is that if I stand up here, for example,

and I say that God is telling you that sex is only best expressed

in the covenant of marriage, where you're not using each other,

but you're committed to each other

because God desires for you to have a relationship full of intimacy.

And if you don't do it his way, you will suffer

a lack of intimacy as a result.

If your friend turns to you and says,

do you believe this mayonnaise, peanut butter and pickle stuff

and you say, never tried it.

They have no interest in it anymore.

You see, it's our willingness

to step into obedience

that is the proof of concept God uses

to bring those around us into a place

where they're willing to taste and see.

It's the testimony of your obedience

that gets your friend to come

and hear what

whoever is up here saying has to say.

Because they've seen the evidence, they've seen the power.

It's the short film that will lead them to watch the movie.

It's spreading the peanut butter and mayonnaise that will get them to taste

and try it and enter into the idea that perhaps there is a God who loves them,

and he does have a plan for their lives, and they can meet him today.

And that well, leads me to my third point, which is to say, do you see what Paul

is saying?

That it's

preaching and the power of your life that increases the potential

that the nations and your neighbor will buy into Jesus?

Look at what he says in chapter three says it so well.

He says as finally, brothers, pray for us

that the word of the Lord may speed ahead

and be honored as it happened among you,

as it happened among you.

I love that he says, hey, pray for us.

We're going to keep taking the gospel out.

And what we're hoping to see

is that the same thing that happened with you will happen with them.

We're preaching the message, but you, the power is in the proof of concept

of what God has done.

He says this, by the way, in first Thessalonians chapter one, when he says

everyone is talking about the change in your life,

he is saying, I'm going to preach it, you're going to live it.

And when you put those things together, the potential is unlimited.

Now it means two things here, and I want you to hear me say them.

The first thing I believe that he means is that the reason, Paul,

you understand if you read the book of acts.

Paul was chased out of Thessalonica.

Paul has been beaten.

He's been shipwrecked.

He's been snake bitten. He's been lied about.

He's had to sneak out at night.

And sometimes I wonder what kept him going.

And I think the first thing he's saying here is what kept him going

was the proof of concept in places like Thessalonica.

Let me just be super vulnerable with you for a minute.

The last two weeks for me have been incredibly hard ones

as a pastor.

I mean, Joe could tell you I popped in his office

just the other day and said, man, you gotta help me with this.

This has been really hard.

Being a pastor sometimes means being in your living room

or your hospital room at some of the hardest moments of your life.

And listen, that's a privilege I want you to hear.

That's a that's a privilege.

It's an honor to be with you.

But it's hard

and it's heavy,

and sometimes it's hard to get up here and preach about judgment

or death or something.

You know, people aren't going to like, just the other day, my daughter was right

at the house going, dad, somebody called you stupid on YouTube.

And it was my wife.

No, I'm just kidding.

It can be hard.

But what Paul is saying is what keeps pastors going,

what keeps missionaries going, what keeps preachers of the gospel going,

is the evidence of the reality of the gospel in your life

and in God's grace.

Just this week, I got stories from, a Monday night ministry

we have called Region of People's Lives that are changing.

There's a testimony Joe shared with me a couple of a couple

who's getting married here at the church, and the guy was an atheist

when he started coming.

And Jesus has just changed his life.

And you read those and you say it's working.

Paul says, pray for me.

Here's my prayer request that everywhere I go, everywhere

I preach, what I saw happen with you might happen there.

Listen, your pursuit of Jesus is what will keep me preaching for the next 20 years.

In God's grace.

But the second thing he means.

Is that the power of gospel

ministry is in preaching.

And in your life.

You can have an effective ministry just by having a phenomenal preacher.

You know that.

And I know that we listen to the same people.

We watch the same YouTube channels.

Okay, you think they're awesome?

I think they're awesome to.

You can grow a church just on the strength of an effective communicator.

You gotta have a really good one. But you can do it.

You can also grow

a church on the strength of changed lives.

Even if the preaching is not interesting or boring.

You can grow a ministry

just by showing the effect of the gospel in the lives of people.

But if you want to take the gospel from Jerusalem on the day of Ascension,

the day of Pentecost to Thessalonica, to Rome,

to the ends of the world, you need both.

You need both.

You need powerful, unapologetic preaching,

but you need a congregation that is living it out.

That is saying to people, I know it sounds like mayonnaise,

peanut butter and pickle. I know it sounds gross.

I know you don't think God is for you.

I know generosity doesn't sound great.

I know surrendering authority to Jesus doesn't sound great.

I know on the surface it isn't appealing.

But watch what he's doing in my life.

Because I'm telling you, it's transforming me.

It's preaching and testimony.

That's what this passage is all about.

Paul says, here's what keeps me going.

Here's what keeps me preaching.

Here's what keeps the gospel advancing.

It's the story of Jesus.

It's the truth of the gospel, and it's the proof of concept in the lives

of men and women and families and churches that are being changed.

It's when you forgive that family member you've been bitter towards,

and when they ask you why, you tell them Jesus and they go, what does that mean?

And you go, I don't know how to explain it. Come with me.

This weekend there's another guy who would tell you all about it.

It's preaching

and proof of concept.

It's preaching and the power of changed lives.

If that can take the gospel, hear me on this.

I'll end with this.

If that can take the gospel from Jerusalem to Thessalonica

to Rome to Hudson, Ohio, it can reach that family member.

You're so desperate to come to Jesus.

There's not a

single person in your family or in your circle, beyond the potential

of what the gospel can do, if it is rightly preached

and rightly lived.

Don't you want that?

I know I do, I know I do.

That's what makes a church

good. Let me pray for us.

Father God, thank you so much for this passage and what it teaches us.

Thank you that you have given each one of us proof of concept

in the lives of people around us, in the the lives of people we know,

in the stories that we've heard that led us to be interested in Jesus.

God make us those kinds of people.

Make us a church full of preachers and teachers and evangelists and

and children's ministry volunteers who accurately

and excitedly share Jesus with people, but also make us a church

full of people whose lives are being transformed by the gospel

so that

one might feed into the other and vice versa.

We ask this because there are people we are desperate

to see come to faith in Jesus, and it's our hope

that you will use our lives as a vehicle to make that happen.

In his name we pray. Amen.