Purpose Driven Life: Purpose #2: Formed for God’s Family - Unity
Opening Humor: Mark Twain used to say he put a dog and a cat in a cage together as an experiment, to see if they could get along. They did, so he put in a bird, pig and goat. They, too, got along fine after a few adjustments. Then he put in a Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic; soon there was not a living thing left.
Phillip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace, Zondervan, 1997, p. 33
i. This means we were made by God, for God.
ii. Anything less than that will bring us frustration.
iii. If we live for ourselves, we are never going to be truly happy.
i. This dealt with belonging to a family.
ii. Church isn’t an institution.
iii. It isn’t an organization, but a living organism.
iv. It is a family, and we all have a vital place in it.
1. If one of us is missing or giving less than 100% to God, then the ability of the church to achieve its God Given Destiny is shortcircuited.
2. I used the image of the team from the Movie Miracle, the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, that against all odds, defeated the USSR (never beaten in 16 years) with a bunch of amateur players. They won because they became a team. Every member did their part. Every person had an equal commitment to the success of one another.
3. We too, must develop that kind of commitment to Christ and His purposes in our lives so that collectively we can achieve God’s purposes. God’s purposes in our world will not be accomplished with anything less than that.
i. The passage starts off with the Apostle Paul “begging” his readers to live in a way that is worthy of the people God has chosen to be his own.
1. The “people God has chosen to be His own” is another way of saying, “The people God has called to be His family.”
ii. That is exactly what we have been talking about. Belonging to God’s family.
1. Perhaps you have a standard of conduct for your family.
a. Let us know where you are going, what time we can expect you, call us if you are going to be late?
b. Don’t dishonor your family by conduct that would bring embarrassment or shame to the family.
c. No name calling. No physical violence. Honor each other in your words and actions. Chew your food with your mouth closed.
d. Every family has their standards, many are unspoken, but are well known to all in the family.
2. In the same way, God has standards of conduct for His family.
a. But His are written down. They are clear.
i. But God puts His emphasis upon what we are TO DO and not just on the Don’ts.
ii. In verse one of this passage we find Paul “begging” the church family to live in such a way that reflects the standards of conduct God has for His family.
i. This is our key verse today.
i. The opposite of humility is conceit, self-centeredness, and arrogance
ii. It means that we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought (Romans 12:3)
iii. Practically speaking, if we are humble, we will respect people, even though we may disagree.
1. We will try to serve them in helpful ways, even if they do not appreciate our efforts.
iv. When I get frustrated at home, or when I develop an attitude of self-centeredness, God has shown me a method of dealing with it.
1. Serve someone. Do something for someone else.
2. It disarms my uppity, self-righteous, self-serving attitude.
3. “Humble yourself and God will lift you up” is a statement that says when you realize you are getting prideful
a. (demonstrated by an attitude of me first, or is filled with “I want” statements, or exhibits control and anger)
b. you can make a choice to humble yourself and allow God to take control of your life, or you can refuse and suffer the consequences.
i. Don't think of gentleness as a strait jacket to action
1. Don't speak up. You're supposed to be gentle.
2. Don't protest what happens - be gentle.
3. That isn’t gentleness! Gentleness is not impotence.
ii. Gentleness (grk: Prautes) is used of domestic animals whose great strength has been reined in and brought under control.
iii. What a wonderful description of Jesus.
1. Capable of calling down 10,000 angels to destroy the earth and those who were crucifying Him, yet He humbled himself, and chose to lay his life down on behalf of us.
2. That is the perfect picture of power under control.
3. You have the ability to crush someone, but you choose to let them vent.
a. You can win an argument, but you don’t because winning would destroy the other person.
b. Gentleness can only occur when we get our eyes off of our own desires
c. One the antonyms for "gentleness" is the Greek word "tapeino" which means, "to press for the last drop of one's rights."
4. Isn’t that our natural tendency?
a. One writer I found said that “Gentleness is defined as the willingness to accept the imperfections of others”
b. Gee, that doesn’t come naturally, does it?
iv. Gentleness can be evidenced through a principle called deference.
1. Acts 16:3 so Paul wanted him to join them on their journey. In deference to the Jews of the area, he arranged for Timothy to be circumcised before they left, for everyone knew that his father was a Greek.
2. Greek Word: Dia = because or “on account of” or “in consideration of”.
3. Philippians 2:3 Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves;
a. Do nothing from selfishness
b. But with humility of mind (same as our other verse)
c. Regard one another as more important than yourselves.
i. That is Deference
i. You want something to happen.
1. You want a vote on something.
2. You feel really strongly about it.
3. You don’t just believe you are right…You know you are right.
ii. But there are a few folks at your meeting who don’t see things the way you see them. What do you do?
1. You can force your hand. Argue passionately about your side.
2. Go and try to get people to take your side.
3. Work the sidelines. Work the crowd. Go behind the scenes.
4. You know you can get enough votes if you talk up your side of the story and talk down their view.
5. If you manipulate, politic and work the situation, you can win the battle, (although you will probably alienate your opponents).
iii. Or, you can turn to God.
1. In the Old Testament, the meek are those wholly relying on God rather than their own strength to defend them against injustice.
2. In other words, they trust that God will sort it out without their interference.
3. Time and time again in the book of Psalms we find David crying out for God to be his defender. Over and over in His life, we find him refusing to attack Saul, but instead relying upon God to sort it out. Time and time again, he has Saul’s life in his hands…literally the power to kill him and doesn’t do it.
4. When you defer, you choose to let go of your power and watch God do it instead.
iv. Imagine splitting a church over the color of a carpet. It has happened. Why?
1. Because people did not practice deference. They insisted on their own way.
2. They were puffed up with their own importance.
v. When you turn to God, what happens.
1. You ask Him to plead your case. To change the hearts of those who see things differently.
2. You stop pushing so hard and others will stop defending themselves so hard.
3. If you work to see things from their perspective, you might soften your and their stance at the same time.
vi. Deference doesn’t mean compromise. Deference seeks understanding the other person and sees their point of view as just as important (or more important) than your own point of view..
1. Winning an argument should never be the goal in the church.
2. Unity and cohesiveness is more important than getting your way.
3. You and I must learn to aim for God’s way and plan.
4. We sometimes want God’s plan but we want it our way.
5. God’s way is the way of the cross.
6. It is the way of self-denial.
7. All the “results” are secondary to the cross.
8. The color of the carpet is secondary to us taking the cross and making it a reality in our lives.
vii. Deference is a principle to live by.
1. Imagine your family are planning vacation. But one of you wants to do something else.
2. Do you roll over them? Most of us do. “I said so!”
3. But that leads to some hurt feelings.
4. We are talking about physical and spiritual families.
5. There is a reason why we are told that church leaders must be good leaders of their families, because so much of the leadership of a church is similar.
viii. We must learn to get all of them on the same page.
1. When one is hurt, we are all hurt.
2. We must not forget the one.
3. Just as Jesus leaves the 99 behind to find the one, so must we! Everyone is important.
i. If you destroy it, it is like ripping the heart out of Christ’s body.
ii. Think about God’s Unity in the Trinity: He is perfectly unified as One (Jn 17) – united in sacrificial love and humble other-centeredness.
iii. Imagine as a parent what you feel like when you see your own children arguing or not getting along.
1. I recall watching our kids do the typical sibling stuff, and know how much it hurts, and how much it hurts my wife.
2. I also know what great satisfaction we both get when we see our daughters, even now as teenagers, working together, talking together, and acting like they care about each other.
3. Don’t you think that God Himself has a similar attitude?
i. He paid the ultimate price for it.
ii. And we are to make this priority to be of equal importance to ourselves as well. In fact, Jesus said that the “world will know you are my disciples by the love you have for one another.”
1. The verse Try your best to let God’s Spirit keep your hearts united. Do this BY living at peace.
1. Peace. How do we live at peace?
2. Peace starts with me.
3. Obviously. If I am at war with myself, I will be at war with others.
4. If I am at odds with God, it is likely I will be at odds with others as well.
ii. Other believers will let you down.
1. The church is a collection of broken people.
2. We will hurt one another. Probably more so than the world will hurt us.
3. Just like family has the capacity to inflict pain upon us, so also in the church, our spiritual family has the capacity to hurt us. Why is this so?
a. Because we open ourselves up to one another.
b. Because we make an effort to get close to one another.
c. Because we make ourselves vulnerable in our attempts to care and love one another.
d. And we are all quite broken, quite flawed and very much incomplete in our journey.
e. It is sad that in God’s flock the greatest wounds come not from wolves but from fellow sheep.
f. We must try to reconcile with those with whom we have conflict.
g. The temptation is to run away. The fight or flight attitude doesn’t work here
i. Learn to encourage rather than criticize. If you are feeling critical toward another person, you might realize that at the root of the conflict may be the fact that the other person has some similar traits as you have. (Charles Flemming)
1. Make a point to act positively toward others.
2. Actions follow faith, and faith follows action.
a. This means if you don’t feeling loving toward someone, try acting loving. Try to care, and you will learn to care.
b. Feelings follow faith.
ii. Refuse to Gossip. When someone gets your goat, let them have your goat, don’t tell everyone about it! If someone complains about someone, ask, “have you spoken to them about this?” It will cut off the gossip. “Fire goes out for lack of fuel, and tensions disappear when gossip stops.” (Prov. 26:20)
iii. Be the first to apologize: Go to the person who has offended you and let them know that you have been hurt. Open with an apology for your anger toward them, and they will be more open to working with you.
1. I am not perfect, contrary to popular opinion. I overlook people’s needs and I fail people…I fail even my own family sometimes. Let me know if I do so. Just simply say, “I felt _____ when you did/didn’t do this” I will appreciate it.
iv. Take the loss (write it off). – If you have ever been in business and had a bad debt you could not forgive, you probably had to write it off. Once it was written off (forgiven) you stopped trying to collect.
1. The apostle Paul has a similar piece of advice for Christians in conflict: Paul exhorts Christians to “take the loss” rather than sue. (1 Corinthians 6:7 To have such lawsuits at all is a real defeat for you. Why not just accept the injustice and leave it at that? Why not let yourselves be cheated?
a. This means, it is better to choose not to win than to irreversibly divide relationships.
b. Talked with someone recently who had an employment issue…his boss was in a position of “I gotta win this argument no matter what.” But this person did something remarkable. He said, “It doesn’t matter, I will do whatever it takes to keep the peace, just know what my heart is on this matter.” AS a consequence, the boss relented.
c. Choosing not to win doesn’t mean losing, it means ultimately winning, because you are surrendering your will, your view of what is right to God’s view.
d. People dig their heels in when confronted. It is better to not fight at all in those situations, as the refusal to fight disarms your opponent.
e. After all, a man convinced against his will has the same opinion still.
f. It is sometimes better to simply help drop your opponent’s defenses by not going on the “offense.”
ii. For Christians, the standard for family conduct is more often about how you are dealing with conflict than about its outcome.
1. Jennifer had an exercise at her work. The goal was teambuilding, but it was quickly apparent that everyone on the team had an agenda and THEIR way of doing it. On the first exercise, she was able to persuade the team to do it her way, even though she had to overcome a lot of resistance. Their team won the challenge. On the second exercise, she deferred, knowing she was right about two of the answers. But in deferring, the team was built up, even though they had wrong answers.
2. Deference allows people to make mistakes together and learn about one another.
a. It says that winning or being right is not as important as building the team or the family.
b. If you have conflict with someone, keep in mind that being right is not as important as being right with someone.