Hope and Giving to the Church

Hope can be inspiration for giving money to the church. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” I’ll be honest with you. I hope that members of New Hope will give money to what they hope to see God do in our church.

Fleda and I are giving 10% of our income to New Hope because

• We hope to see parents bring children to church so that they grow up in church and love it. • We hope to see people who are distant from God come to know and love God as we know God in Jesus.

• We hope to see people become students of Jesus and grow spiritually and emotionally as they read and understand the Bible.

• We hope to see New Hope Baptist Church become stronger and continue to be a growing, loving church family long after we are gone.

We hope for some more visible things like new buildings, too, but what happens in people’s relationship to God is most important.

Work of Faith, Labor of Love, Patience of Hope

We are in the middle of our Stewardship campaign. It is an attempt to get us all focused on giving to the church as a way of expressing our faith in God, our love for God, and our hope in Jesus Christ. We are looking carefully at the words Paul wrote to the church in Thessalonica, “I’m praying for you as I think about your work of faith, your labor of love, and your patience of hope in following Jesus.”

What is our work of faith? As I tried to say last Sunday, faith means all of us giving because we trust in God to use our efforts here at New Hope. Sometimes we may feel that our work in is vain. It is all too easy to get our minds focused on what is not going right: a person who seems never to respond to the call of love, a lack of funds to get done what we see needs to be done, evidence that while some are working hard to move our church forward, other members seem to prefer staying uninvolved. Don’t put you thoughts there. Put your mind on what God is doing. Faith sees the truth that our work is in God’s hands.

What is our labor of love? Our Long Range Planning Committee has been hard at work proposing that we begin a building program when we begin to make ends meet on a regular basis. We are working toward the day when we are giving enough every week to be able to put some money in savings for future ministries. But our plans are not about buildings. They are about the lives of people whom God loves. We want more people to know God as we know God in Christ. We want more people to come into the family of God’s love.

What shows our patience of hope? We don’t give up. We don’t grow weary in doing good work for God. Our hope comes from the fact that we believe God is at work to do us good. We can handle our present momentary troubles because God is renewing us from the inside out every day.

Do you see how God has been at work in your life? Do you see how God is working to lead our church into a bright future? What will you then give out of faith, love, and hope? Will you commit to worship regularly, study the Bible regularly, serve your church, and give out of your income as God has blessed you?

Henri Nouwen on Real Love

Nouwen starts with the love of God as a Spirit-given reality. He is thinking of Romans 8:15-16, which says, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God . . ..” Nouwen says, “The Spirit reveals to us not only that God is ‘Abba, Father’ but also that we belong to God as his beloved children. The Spirit thus restores in us the relationship from which all other relationships derive their meaning.”

All other relationships derive their meaning from our relationship with God who is our Abba. And Abba is a name for God that indicates closeness. The translation “Daddy” gets at our way of expressing closeness to our human fathers. I also like “Papa,” since I called my grandfather Papa, and he was my closest father figure when I was a child and a teenager. Thinking of God as Daddy or Papa helps us to think of God as embracing and nurturing care, without the “connotation of authority, power, and control that the word Father often evokes.” God’s love includes and goes way beyond “all the love that comes to us from our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and spouses.” Paul in Romans says our ability to call out to God as our Abba comes from the Spirit as a gift.

None of us would be here today if someone had not cared for us when we were infants. We cannot live without the love of our parents, sisters, brothers, spouses, and friends. Without love we die. This was clearly seen, Greg Baer points out when after WWI many infants orphaned in Europe we given good nutrition and medical care, but warehoused in big institutions. Infants were in crib after crib with no one to hold them except for feeding when some busy nurse found time. Three fourths of those babies died. Why? Because without love we die.

“For many people this love comes in a very broken and limited way. It can be tainted by power plays, jealousy, resentment, vindictiveness, and even abuse. No human love is the perfect love our hearts desire, and sometimes human love is so imperfect that we can hardly recognize it as love.”

How do we ever learn to open ourselves to Real Love, God’s Love when we have been wounded by those who love us with imperfect human love? We have to act on faith and trust that the Source of Real Love is God’s unlimited, unconditional, perfect love. We must trust that this love is not far away from us and is the gift of God’s Spirit both dwelling in us and available to us through many human channels.

Stewardship: Faith, Love, Hope

This November at New Hope we are thinking about stewardship under the themes of faith, love, and hope, using Paul’s words to the church at Thessalonica: “We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 1:3).

What does it mean to be a steward of the gifts God has given you? A steward is simply a manager of someone else’s property. We are taking care of what belongs to God. A man looked around at all the suffering and injustice in the world and cried out, “Dear God, look at all the pain and the distress in your world. Why don’t you send help?”

God responded, “I did send help. I sent you!” Our faith is that we are God’s stewards sent here to help.

The church is our reminder that everything we have is a gift of the God who loves us. We did nothing to deserve being alive today. Life is God’s gift to us, not because we deserve it, but because God gave it to us out of his heart of love. We can’t know the meaning of life if we believe that we are entitled to everything we have. God gave us this life.

Our hope is that God is going to use us to do good. We enjoy caring for each other in New Hope Baptist Church, but we are not angels. We are human beings, and we sin. Even the good we do can be marred by our failings. That is why we find hope in God’s forgiving love and in God’s power to use our flawed efforts.

Thanksgiving is not “Turkey Day.” We Christ followers use this holiday as a time to be thankful stewards. We aren’t fooled by the world’s values. We know that Thanksgiving is much more than eating lots of food and shopping for Christmas presents. It is thankfulness for faith to do the work God gives us to do, for the gifts of his love, and for our hope that we are serving God’s coming kingdom.

A Meditation at the Memorial Service of Phyllis Keddy on Oct. 16, 2010

Phyllis: Ready for Glory

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18; 5:1

Here is the passage of the Bible that I look at more often than any other, because I turn to it ever time a church member dies. It speaks so clearly of our hope of eternal life. It says that eternal life starts here. It started for Phyllis Keddy a long time ago on this earth. It started for her when she began to have her inner nature renewed day by day.

What is that all about? How do you get renewed every day?

There was a song in the musical Godspell that was called “Day By Day.”

“O dear Lord, three things I pray:

To see thee more clearly,

To love thee more dearly,

To follow thee more nearly

Day by day.”

That prayer is a pretty good description of living a life that gets renewed on the inside day by day. Because Phyllis was so faithful to New Hope Baptist Church – we saw her every Sunday in worship and in Bible study – we start there, assuming that she really wanted to see God more clearly as God has shown himself in Jesus.

We saw her growing in her love for God in her love for people.

We saw her wanting to follow Jesus more closely (“more nearly”) as she brought her sons and her daughters-in-law and other friends and relatives into her circle of influence and got them to church or to talk about spiritual matters.

The great promise of this passage from Paul’s second letter to the Church in Corinth, Greece is this: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure. . . .” Another way of saying that is this: “These little troubles are getting us ready for an eternal glory that will make all our troubles seem like nothing.”

The troubles we go through in our lives may seem very large at times, but compared with the glory for which we are being made ready, they are small.

That is why we are saying that Phyllis was getting ready for glory. She was preparing herself, by the way she loved God and by the way she followed Jesus, to enter into life and health and joy beyond our ability to imagine.

Let’s look at some ways we can see Phyllis getting ready for glory.

1. She cared for the people around her.

How many people in this room and up north and not able to be here today can testify to her caring about the happiness of other people without expecting anything in return for herself?

Here is what I saw in the relatively short time I knew Phyllis:

She cared for us here at New Hope. She came here because she wanted to be around us. Worshipping God with this little flock meant a great deal to her. She told me so, and she showed how much it meant to her by being here so faithfully. But that is not all. I saw how she brought some of you here.

And Phyllis told me the next to the last time she was able to talk to me how much church had meant to her life. She said that her parents didn’t go to church. It was church folks picking her up when she was a little girl and taking her with them to a Lutheran Church that gave her a sense of what church is meant to be. For her it became foundational to her life. The church was her spiritual family, extending out beyond her large biological family. In the tough times, when there were struggles, when there was illness, when there was a challenge to be faced – what the Bible calls “a slight momentary affliction” – she would reach out for support to all of her family, including her church family.

There is a law of Christ. It is this: “Love one another as I have loved you.” In fact Jesus said this is how people are going to be able to know that you are a follower of his, a disciple. They will see that we in the church genuinely care about each other. Phyllis was a leader in this kind of love.

I had an aunt who liked to cook. I would eat dinner at her house about every Friday night during my childhood. She would cook something she really liked and say to you, “Taste this. This is really good.” That is the way I see Phyllis. She found what made a real difference in her life and she would say to her family and friends, “Try this. This has brought me some joy and peace and I want you to have the same.”

She cared for people and loved the church. That was getting her ready for glory.

2. She loved life as it came to her.

I noticed that when I talked with Phyllis. There was no super spirituality. She didn’t try to impress me or anyone else with her knowledge of the Bible or her prayer life or her regular church attendance. She lived her life in this world and loved it. That was evidence of her getting ready for glory.

I heard someone ask this question recently: “If you don’t enjoy living this life, what makes you think you will enjoy the next one?” I would expand that a little: If you aren’t experiencing what the Bible calls the fruit of the Spirit in this life, what makes you think you will get it in the next life?

The fruit of the Spirit is what God is making us now in this life. Here it is in Galatians 5:22-23, “God's Spirit makes us loving, happy, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.” Does that describe Phyllis?

Henri Nouwen said,

“For a long time I have thought about eternal life as a life after all my birthdays have run out. . . . But the older I become, the less interest my “afterlife” holds for me. . . . Wondering how things will be for me after I die seems, for the most part, a distraction. When my clear goal is the eternal life, that life must be reachable right now, where I am, because eternal life is life in and with God, and God is where I am here and now.

The great mystery of the spiritual life – the life in God – is that we don’t have to wait for it as something that will happen later. Jesus says: ‘Dwell in me as I dwell in you.’ It is this divine in-dwelling that is eternal life. It is the active presence of God at the center of my living – the movement of God’s Spirit within us – that gives us the eternal life.” (-Henri J.M. Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit, 1994)

3. She endured hardships with faith.

This is at the heart of the promise in 2 Corinthians about getting ready for glory. “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure.”

An affliction is anything that causes pain or suffering. We saw Phyllis go through a relatively short battle with cancer. I am sure that there were some other things in her life that caused her some pain and suffering. Many of you would know those pretty intimately. My guess is that she had learned along the way in her life to go through pain and suffering with trust in God.

Trust means that you let God be in control. Trust means that you accept what happens to you as somehow not outside God’s care. You submit to the pain and go through the suffering with an awareness that God didn’t cause you to suffer in order to punish you. You know that you are not different from the rest of humanity. You are just as likely as the next person to be in an accident, to be struck by lightning, to get cancer. But in all these things, we are more than conquerors, more than champions. We know that they are not evidence that God doesn’t care. In all the events of life, we trust God.

Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”

Joseph, after his brothers had sold him into slavery in Egypt and he had gone through false accusations that resulted in a long time in prison, he came to see that God used his suffering to bring about good for a lot of people. And Joseph, when he got the chance to get back at his brothers for what they had done to him, hugged them and cried and said, “You intended to do me evil, but God used it for good.”

Paul said, “God is at work in all things for those who love God and are called to find out God’s purpose in their lives.” And he said, “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor suffering nor hardship, nor war, not even angels or demons – nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from God’s love that we have in Jesus.”

So Phyllis let herself be renewed on the inside. That is why we know that she has entered into a new life that we can only call, with the Bible, Glory. Did you know. as you saw her live her live and deal with her hardships, that she was bound for glory?

We can’t really picture in our minds what it is like for her now, but the Book of Revelation helps us.

John wrote that he “saw a vast crowd, . . . from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb. (The Lamb of course is Jesus after he has been the sacrificial lamb for our freedom from sin and death.) They were clothed in white robes and held palm branches in their hands. And they were shouting with a mighty shout, “Salvation comes from our God who sits on the throne and from the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living beings. And they fell before the throne with their faces to the ground and worshiped God. They sang, . . .Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and strength belong to our God. . . .”Then one of the . . . elders asked me, “Who are these who are clothed in white? Where did they come from?”

And I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.”

Then he said to me, “These are the ones who died. They went through the great affliction . They have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb and made them white.

“That is why they stand in front of God’s throne. . . .

And he who sits on the throne

will give them shelter.

They will never again be hungry or thirsty;

. . . . For the Lamb on the throne

will be their Shepherd.

He will lead them to springs of life-giving water.

And God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”

Can you see Phyllis in Glory? Can you see her in that vast crowd, in her clean, white robe, standing in front of God’s throne with Jesus, the Lamb, by her side? She is filled with all the fullness of God’s love for her. She has life that flows forever from the Springs of the Water of Life.

Stewardship: Faith, Love, Hope

The theme for our stewardship program beginning on November 7 is titled “Grow as Stewards through Faith, Love and Hope!” In his letter to the church in Thessalonica, Paul wrote, “We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 1:3).

God gives us faith, love, and hope – virtues essential for our lives as Christian stewards. Each week during this three-week program, we will look carefully at what the Bible teaches about faith, love, and hope.

In week one (November 7), we will look at how it is through faith that we have access to God’s grace and a new relationship with God. Faith gives us peace with God (Romans 5:1), and Paul says in our theme verse that faith produces work. Faith leads to action. Through faith, we are given power to work for God’s purposes. With the eyes of faith, we can see that God is gathering people into Gods family through our work at New Hope. We are seeing some lives changed in the direction of real growth in the Spirit of Christ.

During the second week (November 14) we will focus on love. Love is working to help others become what God created them to be. The source of love is God. “Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us” (1 John 4:11-12). God’s love has brought together a strong fellowship here in New Hope. In response to God’s love for us, we give freely of our time, talents, and money to help others, to bring them into a relationship with Jesus that puts their feet on the right path and brings them into God’s family.

The third and final week (November 21) we will focus on hope. Because Jesus was raised from the dead we celebrate our hope that life can be filled with joy and peace now and on into eternity with Jesus. We give ourselves to joining God and working with hope for what he is doing in Port Orange and beyond.

I want all of you to be in worship and in Bible study as we focus on the theme “Grow as Stewards through Faith, Love and Hope!”

To Change the World

There is a story of an old man who said, "When I was young, I wanted to change the world. I found I could not do that, so I tried to change my community. I found I could not do that, so I tried to change my family. I found I could not do that, so I decided to let God change me."

The strange thing is God changed that man, and as a result, the world was changed. It became a better place.

Jesus is changing hearts today, at the price of his cross. He wants you and me to look at our own lives and tell the truth about our need to have him change us.

Like the old man in the story, our greatest temptation is to think so much about changing other people that we never think about our own need to change. I want to encourage you to look not at what you can criticize in others but at what you need to give over to God in your own life. Jesus used the image of trying to take a speck of dust out of someone’s eye while you have a huge chunk of wood over your eye. First remove the obstruction from your own eye, he said, and then you may be able to help a brother or sister who needs to change.

Tell God the truth about what needs to change in you. Jesus is changing lives today. Tell him that you are ready to let him change you. Watch Jesus make the world a better place.