Dangers of Do-it-Yourself Christianity [A]

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Transcript:

Are any of you do-it-yourself kind of people? You like to do it yourself? Sandy, I see a few hands.

Okay, I’ll admit I’m that way too. I kind of have a philosophy that drives my wife nuts. I don’t do this in everything because some things it’s just easier to go buy or pay somebody to do it.

But I like to do it myself, and my philosophy is don’t buy it if you can make it. Don’t pay somebody if you can do it yourself. Don’t throw it away if you can use it.

And I try to, so we have more stuff than we need, old tools and things in the garage. Some of y’all got to see that last week, didn’t you? Anyway, it drives my wife kind of crazy.

I’m not as bad as some other people, but I like to try to do things myself. And I think it’s a good thing that we’re seeing in our society, a little more of a trend towards people wanting to do things themselves instead of, oh, I’ve got to hire somebody to come in and change a light bulb. Well, I’ll do it myself.

I’ll hire somebody to mow the yard, I’ll do it myself. Not that there’s anything wrong with hiring those people, but it’s good sometimes to be able to do things on our own just in case we ever need to know how. One of my little projects, I’ve told some of you already, one of my projects was about a year ago now, my sister broke down in her car one time too many.

She didn’t want to get it fixed again. She’d already put some money in it. Anyway, it hadn’t been fixed right, and I think if it had, she wouldn’t have had to put the money in it.

But she didn’t want to put any more money in it, and so she said, I’m just going to go buy another vehicle. I’m sitting there scratching my head. Christian and I had two cars at the time.

She said, I’m going to go buy a vehicle right now. And I said, we had the two cars at the time. I said, you can drive this one.

I got it running again, and you can drive it and take a little time to shop around. But she said, no, I’m going to go buy this. So she went and bought a nice new SUV, new to her anyway, and it is nice.

I’m scared to drive it because it’s so nice. But she went and bought this, and I said, well, what are you going to do with your other vehicle? She said, I don’t know.

I said, can I have it? She kind of looked at me like I was crazy. Why would you want it?

It’s broken. But I thought, hey, if I can fix it, I’d always loved her vehicle that she’d had before. And I said, hey, if I can fix it, I can have your car.

There’s a line in a movie where a guy’s about to be in a fight, and a little kid asks him, can I have your watch when you’re dead? That doesn’t bode well for his chances in the fight, and I’d always tease her, can I have your car when you are dead? Anyway, you’re not dead, but can I have your car anyway?

And she, I guess, I don’t know why you’d want it, but you can take it. And I thought, okay, if I can fix this up, how hard could it be? If I could fix this up, I could have it running, and I could have her car because I’ve always wanted it.

And some of you all have seen that blue SUV that I drive now. Christian said, we should have gotten a four-door. I said, if I could have found a four-door for the cost of parts, we would have.

But I got this vehicle from her, and it was a blown head gasket, and it probably would have cost over $1,000 to go have it fixed. And I said, that’s for the birds. We’re not paying $1,000 to have some mechanic fix it when I can fix it myself.

Well, it turned out to be a bad thing to start with. I got the books together, the manuals on how to fix it, and I got diagrams and pictures on the Internet, and I dove headfirst into that thing and realized that particular engine didn’t look like any of the pictures, didn’t look like any of the three kinds of engine that they had in the book for that vehicle. Couldn’t find pictures of anything like it.

So I started taking things apart until I got down to things that I didn’t know what they were. That was for about six months and really didn’t get very deep into it in about six months. I hit a stopping point.

I said, I can’t go any further. So do it myself wasn’t working out, but I was bound and determined. I wanted this thing to run.

And so finally I enlisted my wife, who’s not a mechanic either. And we kind of learned as we go along. I didn’t know she liked to do mechanical things, even though she’s not a mechanic.

We kind of learned as we went in two sets of hands and two sets of eyes. And we did it ourselves. And we dug into it.

And we finally, with her, you know, I’m kind of a chicken about it. If I don’t know what that is, I don’t want to break it. But with her kind of cheering me on, encouraging me to do things that may or may not turn out well, I’d start taking off parts that I didn’t know what they were.

Now, everything that we took off, before we’d move on to the next part, I’d look it up, see if I could figure out what it was by looking at it. And I made a list of what we took off in what order. And at one point, the SUV looked like we were building a Volkswagen because the whole engine was in the back.

But another six months later, and a bunch of skinned up hands and $300 in parts total, the thing runs now. We did it ourselves. And now if the head gasket ever blows again, I’m going to pay somebody.

Because now that I wanted to prove I could do it, and now that I have, I don’t want to do it again. But, you know, there’s a stubbornness that I’ve gotten into this thing, and now it’s taken a year, but it runs, and we did it ourselves. And so sometimes doing it yourself works out well.

I’ve seen beautiful things that people have done in their houses and done it themselves and things that people have built and done it themselves, and it’s just incredible what people can do. It’s incredible what we can do when we take the time. Yeah, we may not know how to do it, but we can read up on it and study up on it, and sometimes it works out well.

It’s incredible the things that we can accomplish. It’s incredible the things that this country and the people in this country have accomplished in just 200 years. But I love trying to do things myself and build things and make things and reclaim things.

I get that from my grandfather. You all have heard me talk about him some. Some of you got to meet him when we were moving.

He’s been a big influence on me, and he’s influenced a lot of that do-it-yourself stuff. He’s one that has all the lawnmowers and refrigerators and these kinds of things. My whole family is nodding their head yes.

He’s been a big influence on me with the do-it-yourself stuff. Some of the stories he’s told me of him growing up as a child, though, he was born in 1924. Go ahead and turn to Hebrews chapter 10, if you would, please.

We’re getting to that. He was born in 1924, and he was born in Hugo, Oklahoma, down in the southeast part of the state where there’s never been a lot of money anyway. And then when he was about five years old, the Great Depression hit.

So there was even less money for luxuries or even some things that you needed. And he’s told me one story in particular that they used to ride their bikes everywhere. They didn’t have school buses or any kind of fancy innovations like that, and so they’d ride their bikes to school uphill both ways.

They’d ride their bikes, and sometimes they’d get a flat as it happens. If they had things like fix a flat and if they had things like the slime, the green slime that goes in it, if they had those things, they certainly didn’t have the money for it. And they didn’t have the money to go buy brand new bike tires to put on their inner tubes or whatever they used back then.

So he told me just recently, my dad thought he’d heard all of my papa’s stories until I told him this one. I said, if you heard this one, it’s great. He said they would, when they didn’t have anything else, they’d fix it themselves.

and they’d go get a can of that sweetened condensed milk and a siphon hose, and they’d pump the sweetened condensed milk into the tire, and they’d roll it around and let it get more condensed, I guess, until it hardened, and they said it would patch up the tire, and you could put some more air in it, and you could go right on. And I said, that’s incredible. I said, did you think of that?

And he said, well, I think so. I might have. I said, that’s incredible.

I said, did it work? He said it would work for a while. I said, what happened then?

He said, you just had to hope you didn’t hit a big bump and explode the tire after a year or so. He said, you talk about an awful mess. I thought, I can’t even imagine.

So sometimes do-it-yourself doesn’t work out real well, does it? If you’ve got a tire full of year-old condensed milk that’s just exploded all over you on the way to school, do-it-yourself doesn’t always work out well. It can be a good thing if we learn to stand on our own two feet, but there are instances when do-it-yourself just doesn’t work.

Folks, our spiritual life is one of those instances where do-it-yourself just isn’t good enough. And we’ve got a generation of Christians, and when I say generation, I mean the people that are living now. I don’t mean my generation, your generation, my parents’ generation.

I mean the group of people alive now. We’ve got a group of people that think that we can do it ourselves spiritually. And we think we’re going to have the experience of the victory of a year later we’ve got the car finished and running when what we’re really going to do is explode a tire from trying to fix it ourselves.

There are so many people, and I’ve talked to them and you’ve talked to them, that think I can be a Christian and I can serve the Lord and I can read His Word and I can do it all on my own. And you know what? They can.

They can read the Bible on their own. They can pray on their own. They can serve Christ on their own, but not to the extent, not to the fullness that He expects of us.

They say, I don’t need a church. I don’t need this. I don’t need that.

I’ll just do it myself. And to an extent, hear me on this, to an extent, we can study God’s Word on our own. We should study God’s Word on our own when we go home.

If all of God’s Word that you’re getting is here on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night, it’s not enough. We should study God’s Word when we go home. We should pray on our own.

If we’re only praying here at church or when we bless the food, it’s not enough. We should do those things on our own. We should walk with God on a daily basis on our own, not just when we’re here with the people from church, but when we’re out in the real world, when we’re out around the people from work or in our neighborhood.

We should serve the Lord as we do those things. But trying to do it ourselves is not enough. We will never have the Christian life that we are supposed to have.

We will never experience it in its fullness and its abundance, in its joy, in its sadness, in all of these things if we try to go it alone. We need the church. We need one another.

And I’m not just saying this to pack the pews and try to get everybody in here. If I was doing that, I would be telling this to the people out there. But I’m telling you who are already here not to make you feel bad about what you’re not doing because you’re already doing it, but to encourage us to continue the race, continue doing well what we’re doing, and to encourage those that we know that are not part of a local body, whether it’s here or someplace else that’s a solid Bible-believing, Christ-honoring, Bible-teaching church, to get into one, to be part of one, because we need each other.

We were never meant to do it ourselves spiritually. We were never meant to go it alone. The idea of the lone ranger Christian is not found in the Bible.

And I want to look at Hebrews chapter 10, just a few verses here. Something the writer of Hebrews, some things that the writer of Hebrews says in really a familiar verse here, verse 25, about assembling, not forsaking the assembling together. But he says some things before that, I believe talking about the local church and talking about our need for one another.

He says in Hebrews chapter 10, verse 23, let us keep the profession of our hope without wavering, for He is faithful that promised. And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works, not forsaking the fellowship that we have among ourselves, as the manner of some is, but let us exhort one another, and that so much the more, because ye see the day that draweth near. Okay, that sounds similar to what most of you have.

I have to tell you, I ran off and left my regular Bible in the car this morning. I had this one up here. It’s not King James, but it’s one of the ones that King James is based off of, a little older, so it words it a little differently, but it’s the same meaning, basically.

He tells us, let us keep the profession of our hope. As the King James says, let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering.

Let us stand strong in not only the faith that we have, but in the profession, the making public of that faith, without wavering, without backing down, without stepping aside, without doing any of these things. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering. Why?

Because he says, for he is faithful that promised. He is faithful that promised. The profession of our faith is worthless without the one we put the faith in.

I’ve told you this several times. Over the years, I will repeat myself, and I’m okay with that because the world that bombards ungodly messages at us day in and day out, repeats itself. So why not the preacher repeat himself?

Our faith is only as valuable as its object. Hear me on that. Our faith is only as valuable as its object.

We can have the strongest faith in the world. We can have faith that we don’t doubt at all that something can happen and we can put it in the wrong thing and it’s worthless. And there are billions of people who do that.

There are billions of people doing that this morning. They are placing their hope for life and they’re placing their hope for eternity in something worthless. And yet we put our faith in the one who is faithful that promised.

And suddenly we have a profession of faith that we can hold fast to without wavering. But he says, let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering. Let us keep the profession without wavering, for he is faithful that promised.

And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works. not forsaking the fellowship or the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is, but let us exhort one another, and that so much the more as we see the day approaching. We see the day that draws near.

What he’s giving us here is a picture of the local church. He’s not just talking, whoever the writer of Hebrews is, and there’s debate about it, some people think it’s Paul, some people think Apollos, some think Barnabas. It doesn’t really matter because we know from reading clues in the book that it’s probably a sermon given by one of the apostles.

And from the earliest days, they held it as not just a letter, but a book of Scripture. And so whoever the writer is, whether it’s Paul or Apollos or Barnabas or somebody else, the writer is not just saying, hey, you and me, when he says us. He’s talking at this point to a group of Hebrew Christians, a group of Jews who had converted to Christianity.

And he’s telling this group, and as they go through and they preach their message, this book is obviously written to believers. As we read through it and read some of the things he talked about, it’s written to believers. And we see in the book of Acts things that they would do.

They would either go into a public place and they would preach to the non-believers, or they would go to visit and encourage the churches and speak to the believers. And so the fact that this seems to be written to the believers tells us that he’s speaking to the local church because that’s how they were organized in that day. You didn’t hear a lot about these Lone Ranger Christians running around that, you know, I’m just going to have church in my living room.

I’m just going to serve God where I am and I don’t need the church. They realized that they needed the church. The world was hostile toward the things of Christ. The world is hostile toward the things of Christ today, but they realized it so much more because they were under such persecution.

But as he writes these things, he writes it to a church of Hebrew Christians, a local body of Jewish people who had converted to Christ, and he says, let us do these things. Not you individually and you individually and me individually. He says, let us do these things.

Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering, for he is faithful that promised. And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is, but exhorting one another and so much the more as you see the day approaching. So many times throughout this passage, he talks about the us and the we and ourselves and one another and together.

There’s no mention here of us doing these things individually, although if we’re doing these things as a body, as a church, it means that we’re doing these things individually. But the focus here is not on each one of us. It’s on each one of us doing these things together.

As a church, we need each other. And there are dangers that are involved in trying to go it alone spiritually. There are dangers.

It’s not just a warning here because God says, I want you to do these things, although that would be enough. It’s not just a warning here because Paul says, I want you to do these things, although that would be good advice too. It’s a warning here because there are real dangers.

The things that he warns you to do are because there are dangers if we don’t do them. And I want to look at some of those things this morning. Some of the things that we run the risk of if we don’t hang together.

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin when they had just signed the Declaration of Independence, I believe. If anybody knows the story better than I do, please correct me. But I believe it was Benjamin Franklin when they had just signed the Declaration of Independence told the other men that were assembled there in the Continental Congress because what they had done was rebellion against the king.

And they were in it by signing this document. There was no turning back. And they were going to be wanted men.

He said, let us all now hang together or we will surely hang separately. In other words, let us stick together because on our own we’re toast. We’re done. The same thing is true for the church.

Once we have said we trust Christ, and once we’ve been baptized as a profession of that faith that we trust Christ, and that baptism is a public statement, making it known to the world that we’ve trusted Christ for our salvation, we’re now His followers, it’s like there’s a target marked on our backs. Because the world hated Him and He said, don’t be amazed if the world hated me and they hate you for my sake. Not His exact words, but that’s what He said.

And so he put us together as the church because we have to hang together or we’ll hang separately. Now in this day and age in the United States right now, we’re fortunate that that’s not a literal we will hang. But in some parts of the world, that’s very literal. And here we face persecution in small ways.

We face being ostracized from our family, from our friends. We may not get that job promotion because we don’t go out and drink with the guys after work. We may miss out on this business deal. Our families may not understand our commitment to Christ. The world is hostile to varying degrees toward Christianity, and that’s why we’ve been put together, because we need somebody to lean on.

If we try to do it by ourselves, it will more than likely lead to our ruin. At the very least, we won’t experience the fullness of the Christian life that we’re supposed to have. So he gives us five warnings that I see in this passage about what happens if we neglect the local church and try to live the Christian life without the help of the local church.

There are five dangers I see in this passage. We’re going to get through as many of them as we can this morning. But I want to start in verse 24 where he says, Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works or good deeds.

The first thing we’re in danger of if we neglect the local church as Christians, if we’re not part of this body, not just members, not just name on the rolls, but we’re involved, invested in this church, the first thing we run the risk of is disregarding our service. Disregarding our service as Christians. He reminds them, let us consider one another.

Let us be mindful of one another to provoke unto love and good works. I love that word provoke. It means you stir something up.

You stir something up. I remember my sister and I, my sister and me, when we were little. And we used to provoke each other.

Sibling rivalry is one of the places you hear the word provoke in real life. We used to provoke each other. And I’m trying to think now of any specific instance.

My mom could probably help me out in that regard. But I know there were times she would do things just to irritate me, and it would work. And there would be times I would do things just to irritate her, and it would work.

And sometimes that still happens. I can admit that. Most of y’all have brothers and sisters.

I think we could all admit that. Sometimes, as much as my sister and I love each other, sometimes we still get on each other’s nerves just for the fun of it because that’s what brothers and sisters do. They love each other and irritate each other.

But I used to provoke her. My sister used to watch these. I wish I could think of an example from my own life, but you can talk to my mom later.

My sister used to babysit these kids, and they were our pastor’s kids at the time, and I’d go over there occasionally and help her watch them. They had three kids, and they had taught their kids the word provoke. That might have been a mistake, I don’t know.

But the older brother and the sister would pick at each other, and they’d dig at each other and just get on each other’s nerves until something happened, as usually happens when you provoke somebody and something gets stirred up. she’d poke at him, he’d poke back at her, and they’d, you know how it is. And then eventually he’d haul off and he’d slug her with a toy or something.

And the mom or my sister, depending on who was there at the time, the mom would get on to the son and say, why did you do that? And he’d learn to say, she was provoking me. Did you provoke him?

Yes. I always wanted to say, well, he provoked her too, but he’d learn the word provoke. she’d picked at him just long enough that he’d lashed out and hit her.

She probably shouldn’t have lashed out and hit him right back. No, that’s not biblical. That’s just my thought. Supposed to turn the other cheek.

He would hit her, right or wrong, because she had provoked him, because she had stirred him up. A good picture of provoking is when you, I never did this, but there were kids that did. My school playground, part of it looked like desert land.

dirt and there were these red ant piles. Do y’all have the red fire ants here? No?

Okay. We’ve got them in Oklahoma. And they would have these hills of red fire ants, big ones.

For ants, they were big. And they bite you and it feels like fire. And there would be kids that would go out on the playground at recess and no matter how much the teacher would tell them, stay away from those fire ants, they’d get a stick and they’d poke it down in the hole and dig around.

And eventually those ants would just swarm up out of there. And if the kid was dumb or wasn’t fast or something like that, he wouldn’t pull that stick out of the hole in time, and those ants would come up the stick and bite him. There were always kids getting bitten by the fire ants because they’d provoked them.

They’d taken that stick and they’d stirred up their nest, and they’d provoke them. Folks, we’re supposed to provoke one another in the local church, not in the same sense. We’re not supposed to take a stick and poke at each other.

We’re not supposed to annoy each other until we come out swinging, although I’ve seen that sometimes in churches. That’s not what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to provoke each other unto love and good works.

We are supposed to encourage one another and challenge one another that we’re to be serving God and to be serving other people, and we encourage one another in that. And it’s not just accidental that we see somebody that’s done something good, and we say, hey, good job. You did well on that.

And we think that’s encouraging him. He says to consider one another, to be mindful of one another. Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and good works.

Consider means we’re mindful of them. We think about it. There’s thought ahead of this, that we’re intentional, that that’s part of our purpose in being here, is to encourage one another in our service toward God and toward other people.

We are to consider one another, we’re supposed to think about it, plan it out ahead of time, that we are always encouraging one another for love and good works, stirring up love and good works. Now, do I know exactly what that looks like, exactly how that has to be done in this church? I don’t.

But I believe if we’re considering one another, if we’re mindful about it, we’re thinking about it, I believe God will show us ways to provoke one another to love and good works. As we serve God and as we serve others and other people in the church see it, because if we’re together in the local church, folks, we ought to be up in each other’s business. Not a lot of amens on that one.

I’m not saying, you know, we have to call everybody at the church and tell them what we had for dinner tonight. But we ought to be involved in each other’s lives. Amen?

It should not be just a once a week Sunday morning, I sit down the pew from you, hi, how are you, go our separate ways kind of relationship. We ought to be involved in one another’s lives. And one way I think we provoke each other to love and good works is that if I see Christians serving, if I see Christians serving God and serving other people, I see Marcia serving God, doing something incredible for God, serving other people for God, and I see that, it ought to drive me to want that same thing.

And I ought to know about it because we ought to be involved in each other’s lives. When we go and do ministry, one of the things I’ve heard in the last year or two that I kind of like is that you never do anything alone in ministry. And I think there are times that, you know, there’s ministry to be done and it needs to be done whether anybody’s there with you or not.

But we ought to be intentional about if we go to do some kind of ministry, if I make hospital visits or we go to pass out tracts or we go to visit somebody, that we’re taking somebody with us. Either somebody that’s going to do it with us or somebody that is a newer believer that’s never done this before, doesn’t know what it means to serve yet, we take them along with us and show them the ropes and let them see ministry firsthand, up close and personal. Whatever it is, whether it’s being part of one another’s lives, whether it’s taking somebody with us, whether it’s, folks, whatever it is, we need to be intentional. We need to be considering one another to provoke unto love and do good works. We need to encourage one another to love and to serve.

And if we’re not part of the local church, that’s not happening anywhere else. There are plenty of Christians who don’t go to church, that love people, and they serve God, but they’re not being provoked. They’re not being spurred on by the local church, cheered on to go and do these things, encouraged to do more, to grow in their love, to grow in their service, because you go out in the world and you look for people, you look for organizations, You look for influences that are trying to push people to love others and to serve others in Jesus’ name.

You’re going to be few and far between. There aren’t even that many good influences out there, really. Most of what we hear coming at us all the time is encouraging us to sin, to disobey God, to dishonor God.

The influences pushing us to love other people and to serve God and do it all in Jesus’ name are few and far between. If we don’t get it here, odds are we’re not going to get it. We need to encourage one another.

We need to stir each other up for our service. And if we’re not involved in the local church, we run the risk of disregarding that service, throwing it aside completely. How many believers, how many people do you know that say, yes, I’m a believer, I’ve trusted Christ, and they never do a thing about it.

They never go out of their way to demonstrate love to anybody. They never do any kind of ministry. I’m not saying everybody that doesn’t go to church is that way, but how many people do you know?

Because it’s so easy to disregard our service, to set it aside when we don’t have a local church cheering us on. The second thing this morning, going back to verse 23. Excuse me, these first two verses were kind of going backwards.

I mentioned it says, He is faithful that promised in verse 23. Why do we have faith? It’s because He’s faithful that promised.

And part of this, let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering. Part of this is based on who we’re putting our faith in, as I mentioned earlier. The local church ought to be here to teach the truth about God and who He is and what He does.

There is so much misinformation in this world about who God is, what He’s like, what He does, what He’s said, that it’s almost like it’s a, well, with some people it may be intentional, but it’s almost like there’s a propaganda war out there against God. So much misinformation, so many untruths and half-truths. And I’ve said before, you can’t even turn on the TV without somebody giving some picture of God that’s not accurate.

God’s the grandfather in the sky granting all of our wishes. God’s a magic genie. God’s an ogre.<