One Shared Mission

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You know, I assume that most of you know who Michael Jordan is. And the reason I assume that, the reason I can safely assume that, is because I know almost nothing about sports. Not nothing, but almost nothing.

I know almost nothing about sports, and even I know who Michael Jordan is. If you don’t, if you know less about sports than I do, he was the star player for the Chicago Bulls basketball team back in the 90s. and he was widely recognized as one of the greatest NBA players of all time.

He had, when he was with the team, I’ve written some of these things down because I knew I wouldn’t remember them. I told you I know next to nothing about sports. When he was playing for the NBA, there were ten seasons when he scored more points per game on average than anybody else in the whole league.

And during his time with the Chicago Bulls, there were six championship games that they won, and five times he was the season MVP. Now, I do know what those things mean. I just wouldn’t remember them.

He was an incredible basketball player. And he was a superstar because of his prowess in playing with the Chicago Bulls. But if you think back, that’s what we remember him for, but if you think back to the early 90s when I was just a kid, There was a period of time there where he sort of lost sight of that.

And as I understand the story, as I’ve read it, it kind of got started when he, in 1992, went to participate in the Olympics. And then from that, he just kind of got burned out and decided, I’m going to go play baseball. Didn’t work out too well, did it?

He had a really lackluster one season of playing minor league baseball. And now, I’m not putting the man down. His lackluster season was better than anything I could have accomplished.

But still, compared to what he was doing in the NBA, it was nothing. And then on top of that, he got into acting, and then there was the Space Jam movie, but even as a child, I thought, this is terrible. And thank goodness, thank goodness, he realized, hey, I don’t have to dabble in all these things and spread my focus around on all these things that really I’m not as great at as I could be is one thing, and he went back to the NBA.

And he had three of his championship seasons and I think two of his MVP seasons after he went back to the NBA, after he went back to the Chicago Bulls. See, he went back to focusing on one thing that he did really well instead of trying to spread his focus over all these things that he just was okay at. And there’s a lesson in his career for us because we do that as individuals and we do that as churches.

Churches tend to want to do everything. Oh, here’s an idea over here. Let’s do this.

Here’s an idea. Here’s a ministry over here. Let’s do this.

Here’s something we could focus on. Let’s do this. And we lose sight a lot of times.

Churches do, especially as they get bigger. They lose sight over what it is that they’re supposed to do. Churches will try to take care of focusing on so many issues of people’s lives, whether it’s entertaining people.

and we know there are churches that focus real heavily on entertainment. There are churches that focus on socializing. We’re just going to be a big country club.

And by the way, as I list these things off, the problem is a lot of times churches will focus on several things, not just, oh, they’ve gone off in this wrong direction. Socializing, education. Some churches do really well at educating their people, but they’re focused on too many other things to really double down on that.

Comfort. The church is going to take care of us. We’re going to take care of every need that we have.

There’s going to be somebody there to marry us and bury us and everything in between. Everything before that. Social services, taking care of the poor.

Some of these are not bad things, okay, by the way. Some of these are really good things that a church should do. But this gets to be where we’re focused off in 50 different directions.

Political change. And it’s not just the conservative churches either. We’re going to change the world.

I want to change the world through the gospel. The list of religious goods and services that churches can focus on, it could go on and on and on. And the problem with a church, the problem with any organization really, which there’s that word again I told you last week, we think too often of the church as an organization when it’s an organism.

God has put us all together to be part of the same body. The problem with any group or with any individual for that matter is when we lose sight of the one thing that we’re working on, the one thing that we’re supposed to be working on, and we go off in 15 different directions and scatter our focus and scatter our effectiveness, and we’re never quite as good at 14 things as we are at one. And from my perspective, a church should not settle for being mediocre at many things.

Hear me on this. First blank in your bulletin, by the way, if you’re following along. A church should not settle for being mediocre at many things when we can be excellent at one thing.

And that’s true. That’s not just true for a church. That’s true for us as individuals.

Even the Apostle Paul said, this one thing I do, not these 14 things I dabble at. And there are some things that I, as an individual, am really good at. And as I say that, I’m drawing a blank right now in my mind as to what those would be.

But I know they’re out there. There are some things that I’m really good at. There are some other things that I could work at and maybe be okay.

But it’d be a shame to take my focus off of the one thing that I do really well and put it on 56 things that I can just be okay at. And we look here at Romans chapter 15 and what Paul was writing to the church at Rome. And we need a little background on the church at Rome to understand what he’s really saying to them.

If you know anything about the Roman Empire, it’s called the Roman Empire because it started at Rome, and Rome was the center of it. Rome was the seat of power. Rome was the most cosmopolitan city in the whole world at that time.

I mean, you take New York and London and Paris and San Francisco and all these centers of culture and technology and innovation, you roll them all into one, that was Rome. And you had people from all over the world at Rome, and you had people from diverse backgrounds at Rome and different ways of looking at things ideas and different, just different. And they were all there at Rome.

And so when the gospel reached Rome, the gospel reached people from all over the world. The gospel reached people from all sorts of different backgrounds, all sorts of different incomes, all sorts of different ethnicities and nationalities. They were all there at Rome, and they all heard the gospel, and parts of each population, parts of each group, responded to the gospel and became Christians, and then they were fit together there at Rome as the church at Rome.

They were all members of this one body that I talked about last week. They were all members that God had plucked out of various places and stuck together as one body. That creates problems sometimes, doesn’t it?

As much as I said last week, based on what Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, I don’t warn everybody in the church to be just like me and think just like me, it does create some friction, doesn’t it? I told you I don’t want to be married to somebody who’s just like me. And some days probably neither does Charla.

It’s a joke. Some days she may not want to be married to somebody exactly like me, but she is. She’s stuck with me.

I don’t want to be married to somebody just exactly like me because one of us would be unnecessary. We’d be lacking a certain balance and perspective in the relationship. And yet there are times the fact that we are different causes friction.

I know you’d never know that to look at us, but sometimes there can be friction. She’s very detail-oriented and very planning, and I’m not as much. I’m more of a big-picture person.

What time do you think you might sneeze tomorrow? I don’t know. Can we just see how the day plays out?

And sometimes we just, sometimes there’s just friction. Okay, it’s the same thing in a church. We come with different perspectives and different ideas and different backgrounds, and sometimes it can cause friction.

Or sometimes we may not fight about it. We may just, as a church, go off in 50 different directions and dabble at this and dabble at that and dabble at whatever strikes our fancy when somebody from a different background or different idea has a different thought about what we should do. And instead of taking, as a church, taking our efforts and energy and working in one direction, we work in 43.

And we get, instead of being great at one thing, we get okay at 43 things. And so Paul, talking to this church that was from a lot of people gathered from a lot of places, he talked to them about the idea of focusing themselves in one direction. And he starts in verse 4, starting from the idea of the scriptures being the basis of everything for them.

He says, for whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. He’s talking about learning from the Scriptures and being pointed in the right direction by the Scriptures. And he says in verse 5, now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be like-minded one toward another according to Christ Jesus.

He’s saying from this starting point of the Scriptures, he says, the God of patience and consolation may he grant you. to be like-minded one toward another. And this whole thing starts with God and His character, and God being a God of patience and consolation.

And because of this, God calls the whole church to be focused together because God is single-minded and focused, and because God is all about working together for His purposes, God calls the whole church to be focused together on a single mission that is the center of all that we do. And it starts with God being this God of patience and consolation. Those are words that are a little different from how we use them today.

It’s talking about endurance, patience meaning endurance. I can get through this. I can deal with this.

It’s not comfortable. It’s not my first choice, but I can do this. I can do this.

And consolation meaning encouragement. Now, God is a God who gives both of those things. and he gives it abundantly.

And a lot of times he gives us the conditions for why we need it, which is why I hear all the time people say, don’t pray for patience, because he’ll give you opportunities to exercise that patience. Now, the God of patience and consolation, he gives us the ability to live in community with each other. And in this sense, I think of God and his spirit being sort of like the motor oil and the engine of this church.

If we didn’t have the oil, gentlemen, what’s going to happen to the engine when it runs? What happens to the internal combustion engine if you don’t put any oil in it? But again, it freezes up.

Because the friction overheats everything. It’s just a mess. Boom.

Good. Good way to say it. Boom.

There’s too much friction. We are fallen, sinful people. We are imperfect people.

And we rub up against each other and we rub each other the wrong way. And I’m not talking about in the church. I’m just talking about anywhere where you get people together.

We love each other the wrong way, and God is sort of, his patience and his consolation that he sheds on us abundantly is sort of like the motor oil that keeps everything running smoothly and keeps everything from overheating. God gives us the ability to live in community with each other. God, God sends off the rough edges, and God makes us able to love each other in a way that we couldn’t otherwise do.

And he does this so that we can find peace and harmony with each other. It’s not just so that we don’t kill each other as human beings. It’s so that we actually find peace and harmony.

We find a way to work together and fit together. Because he says, Paul is praying that God would grant them to be like-minded one toward another. That we would think the same way.

Be careful here. I’m not talking about brainwashing. We need to all agree on every little detail.

That’s never going to happen. I don’t agree with myself 100% of the time, okay? That’s not what I’m talking about.

Oh, we have to think just like the preacher or we can’t be part of this. No. But being like-minded means that we have the same focus and the same goals and the same idea about where we’re headed and what it is that we want to accomplish.

And we’ll get around to what that is in just a moment. But he’s praying that God would grant them to be like-minded toward one another, that they would be able to find this sense of harmony and peace with each other. And he says, according to Christ Jesus, this harmony and this peace and this like-mindedness, this idea of all thinking the same way, doesn’t mean about everything, but it means about Jesus Christ. It means that this harmony and this like-mindedness is found in uniting around Jesus Christ at the center and bowing in obedience to Him.

We’re not going to agree about everything. I can guarantee you, Not everybody in this room voted for the same person on Tuesday. It’s a big deal. It is a big deal. People are about ready to rip the country apart over who voted for whom.

And I can guarantee you not everybody voted for the same person. It doesn’t matter. Not everybody in this room thinks the same way on the issues that affect our community or our nation.

And that’s okay. I mean, as long as we’re not killing each other, it’s okay that we think a little bit differently. We don’t all come from the same background, and that’s okay.

We have the same income. We don’t talk the same. We don’t look the same.

We don’t dress the same. We don’t eat the same thing. You know what?

It doesn’t matter. If Jesus Christ is at the center, that’s what matters. If our focus is on being obedient to him and his word and the things that he teaches us to do, that is what matters.

And we can look at each other and say, you know what? You’re quite a bit different from me. But we can love each other in the name of Jesus Christ. And an example that I’ve given many times is that a missionary friend who was doing training in the Middle East talks about being at this conference where there was a believer, and I believe probably a pastor of a small church, who was from a Jewish background there in Israel, and he had come to be trained at this conference, and there was a man there who was pastoring a church who used to be a member of Hezbollah.

And these two should have hated each other. From their backgrounds, they should have been ready to kill each other when they walked through the door. And yet they were able to embrace one another as brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Did they agree on everything about life?

Probably not. Did they agree on everything about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that was tearing? Probably not.

But when Jesus Christ is at the center, when he’s first and foremost, everything else is secondary. When it’s about obedience to him and everything he commanded, then everything else is secondary. and at that point I don’t care where you came from or what you talked like or who you voted for you’re my brother, you’re my sister in Christ and we’re supposed to be like minded toward one another we’re supposed to love one another and be focused on obedience to Jesus Christ he says our job is to follow the Lord and bring him glory because after he’s talked about being like minded toward one another in accordance with Christ Jesus according to Jesus Christ after he says that, that that’s the basis of our being like-minded toward one another.

He goes on in verse 6 and says that you may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our job as believers. Our job as believers is to bring glory to God. That’s it.

That’s it. Now, we can accomplish that in a lot of different ways. We can be involved in a lot of different things to accomplish that, But our job is to glorify Him.

The one we’re focused on is to glorify Him. And we’re supposed to do this together. We’re supposed to do this together because He says that we are supposed to, with one mind and one mouth, glorify God.

But we don’t all share a mouth. He’s not talking literally. He’s again going back to what Paul said so many times about the church being a body and the parts working together.

A body that has multiple mouths can say different things at the same time. Kind of like a politician. It works best if the body has one mouth.

It says what? Y’all find that way too funny. It’s just sad to me.

The body, God created the body to have one mouth. And to say one thing at a time. And to say it clearly.

And he created one mind in the body to think. And to drive the body in the same direction. the body works best when the mind is telling me to do one thing at a time that’s why I hear people talk about they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time when the mind focuses in one direction and gets the mouth to speak with with consistency and with one voice that’s what he’s talking about the church doing and again we don’t go back to the idea that oh we have to all think the same thing about everything and we all have to be brainwashed that is not what it’s talking about but when it comes to Jesus Christ and obedience to His Word and giving Him glory, we’ve got to think with one mind and speak with one voice.

Part of the reason I think that our world is in so much trouble, part of the reason that I think that the world has, in our society especially, that we have abandoned God as a society is not the fault of the non-believers outside these four walls, it’s that the church has gotten confused and started to speak outside of both sides of its mouth. And we can’t make up our minds about whether we stand for this or whether we stand for that. And it’s time for us to come back to, with one mind and one voice, glorifying God.

And I’m not just talking about calling out sin. And oh, you’re wrong, and you’re wrong, and this is wrong. I’m saying we’ve gotten so focused, as believers, we’ve gotten so focused on everything else, that we’re not even talking about the glory of God, by comparison.

We may talk about it here and there, but it’s being drowned out by 50,000 other messages. And it’s time for us, with one mind and one voice, to glorify God. We’re called to reflect Christ’s mercy.

As we do this, as we work together to focus on one thing that we need to do, which is to glorify God, we demonstrate this because he says in verse 7, wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God. Christ received us to the glory of God. God gets glory when sinners repent and trust Christ. When sinners are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, God gets glory from that.

And one of the ways that we glorify God is to make that message known, but also to live that message out. If our message is one about being reconciled to God and being reconciled to each other through Jesus Christ, and yet we don’t receive each other with mercy, if we don’t show grace and mercy to each other, we’ve got nothing to back up the message with as far as the world is concerned. Look at that.

These Christians, they preach mercy and grace and love and they hate each other. Take a swing at each other at business meetings. It’s not supposed to be that way.

He says to receive each other. Receive one another as Christ also received us to the glory of God. How did Christ receive us?

Christ looked at us in our sin, in our wickedness, in our worthlessness, and loved us anyway. And welcomed us with open arms when we repented. God commended his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Paul also wrote that to the church at Rome. and reminded them that while we were in the process of sinning, Christ died for us. He didn’t look at us after we’d had some time to pass and we thought different about it and we decided to live a little better for a few days.

While we were in the act, as far as God was concerned, God looked at us and loved us in spite of our wickedness and was willing to offer us grace through Jesus Christ. Now what Paul’s saying is you need to receive each other with the same grace. You need to show each other the same grace and the same mercy and love and receive one another. If God can overlook, not really overlook our sin, but if God for Christ’s sake can forgive our sin and let it be in the past and receive us into His family, why are we so hard-headed and hard-hearted sometimes about receiving people into God’s family and letting their past be their past?

And all of this comes back around to the idea that it doesn’t matter where we’ve come from. It doesn’t matter who we used to be. It doesn’t matter how we see things, how we voted, what’s in our bank account.

None of these things matter. It matters that we’ve been received into the family of God because Jesus Christ died to pay for our sins. It matters that He loved us enough.

And it matters that we go and tell other people that He loved them enough to do that for them. And that we glorify God in every way we can. Our mission, as this church, as any other church, as believers, Our mission is to glorify Jesus Christ and make his story known.

That’s our mission. That should be our focus. Not all the things that I listed that some of them are good things to focus on.

Some of them are not so good things for a church to focus on. But we could focus on 15 different things and do them okay. I mean, let’s be honest. We’re probably never going to be the most entertaining church in town.

At least not while I’m the pastor here. I’m just not that exciting. Probably never going to be the most entertaining church in town.

Probably never going to be the country club church in town, if there is one. There are a lot of things that we could try to do and be okay at. Or we could focus on the one thing that matters and do it really, really well.

Do it with one mind, one voice. Do it as one body. Do it together.

And you might be thinking here this morning, if you were here last week, wait a minute, you said last week we all had something to contribute. I did. But looking at what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 12 and talking about the church being the body, I tried to make it abundantly clear that it’s God’s perspective and that it’s my perspective that you matter here.

That you have a place here. You have something to contribute. And when you’re not a part of this church, something’s missing.

And I told you last week, I don’t say that because I get a commission on the number of people who walk in the door. And I don’t say that because I have anything to gain by being able to say, look at me. I have the big church.

That does nothing for me. I’m saying that because it’s true. You matter here.

And God has put you, if you’re a part of this church, God’s put you here for a reason. And you may look at it and say, but I don’t do that much, or I’m not that important, or I can’t do what he does. Go back and look at what he said about the foot complaining that it’s not a hand.

Well, sure, the foot can’t do this and grasp things with the opposable thumb. It can’t do any of that, but you’re going to tell me the foot’s not important? I’d be sitting down to preach and couldn’t wander around back and forth and distract y’all if I didn’t have feet.

I couldn’t run to my car to try to make it to the restaurant before First Baptist if I didn’t have feet. The foot’s important, folks. Every part has a role to play.

And your ministry, your calling, your part in the church, your part of the ministry of this church inside these walls and outside these walls may not be the same as mine. And it may not be the same as the person sitting on the pew next to you. but you still have an important role to play.

You have a vitally important role to play. You matter here. And so it won’t take anything that I’ve said this morning to think, oh, we’re just supposed to be working on one thing and what I do doesn’t matter.

No, no, no. I didn’t say we couldn’t do multiple things. And everything has to go out of one focus. We can’t let our focus be on 97 different things and, well, let’s entertain the people.

Let’s be a place for people to socialize. Let’s educate them and help them get really smart about life. Let’s do this, let’s do that.

Let’s try to just make sure everybody has a great life. We can focus on all sorts of things. But we need to be focused on one area, which is to glorify Jesus and make his story known.

But you know what? There are a lot of ways to do that. And the way you do that may not be the same way I do that.

Who is actually in charge of what we’re doing with the shoeboxes? Who put that together? I should know that.

Kathy. Okay. That’s a way of glorifying Jesus and making his story known.

Because what they’re doing, as I understand it, is sending these shoeboxes to children in foreign countries who may not otherwise have a Christmas, and they’re telling them, as they have the opportunity, some of these are going to closed countries, that they’re giving these to children and telling them that these boxes were given to them by followers of Jesus Christ who they have never met and probably never will meet, but who love them anyway. And if they’re able, many of these children, if it’s legal, if they can get away with it, many of these children are going to receive Bibles and discipleship materials as well. So we could say, well, don’t misinterpret what I’m saying is, okay, we just need to have an evangelism program and that’s it.

He doesn’t care about anything else we’re doing here. Not so. Not so.

I stand up here and preach the gospel. Many of you put together shoeboxes to send to children to open doors for people in other countries to share the gospel. That’s part of this mission.

What they’re doing back there with the children, and I can hear the children, and I’m pretty sure it’s mine that I can hear. They come out of children’s church, they come out of Sunday school, and they’re able to tell me Bible stories that they’ve learned, that they know now, that I know I haven’t told them because we haven’t gotten around to those yet, and they’re learning them here. And I can ask my kids questions.

I can ask my kids questions about Jesus. What did he do? He died on the cross.

Why? For our sins. Why did he do that?

Because he loved us. And yeah, I’ve told my kids that. But that didn’t come just from me.

And what they’re doing in the back hallway here. What they’re doing in the back hallway here is bringing glory to Jesus and making his story known. There are many ways for us to accomplish that goal. so don’t take anything I said this morning and think he doesn’t care about my ministry or what I’m doing as long as it works toward that goal I love your ministry whatever it is and it may be something we’re not even doing yet it may not even be something we do here at this church here in this building but God’s called you to do something and it contributes to this church being able to accomplish that goal of glorifying Jesus and making his story known that I love it a church can have many ministries and we can work in many areas.

But anything that does not support that goal, anything that doesn’t support that mission, it’s not worth our focus. It’s not worth the time. We have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of resources here on this earth.

As a church, we’ve got to throw everything in and work in that same direction. We can do it through many ministries and many areas, but we’ve got to work in that same direction and ask ourselves, why am I doing this? if it’s for some other goal, it’s not worth our time and focus.

We as a church with one voice, with one mind, we have one job together. It’s to glorify Jesus and to make His story known.

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