Today I want us to focus on what we can do to not just endure our voyage but make it a good one. What is it that makes our faith strong enough to not only survive the storms but vital enough to bring power and joy and peace and purpose to every part of our lives. As we think about this I want us to think about the 3 core values we have a church. As God’s people gathered together as Faith Church we are committed to 3 things, connecting people to God and one another, serving Christ and our community and growing deeper in our faith and wider through the sharing of our faith. These are not just three things we pulled out of the air, in many ways these are the core values or principles of faith itself and so if we want to have a good voyage we need to commit ourselves to these 3 principles.
You have probably seen this analogy before, but it is a good one. Let’s compare our faith to the strength and stability of a 3-legged stool. When all 3 legs of a stool are strong and stable – the stool is usable. You can stand it to reach things you couldn’t otherwise, you can rest on it, you can place things on it – it is practical and helpful, but if you take one of those legs away, or if one is weak or shorter than the others, the stool isn’t good at all. The same is true with our faith – a strong faith requires three things: a connection with God and others, serving Christ and the community and growth. If any one of those is missing or weak, our faith won’t be able to support us. If we aren’t connected to God, our faith will fall apart. If we aren’t serving God and giving to those around us we aren’t experiencing the full power of our faith and if we aren’t growing then we are dying. If any living organism isn’t growing – it is dying, so we need all three legs for a strong faith.
While we call these three legs, connect, serve and grow, others have given them different names. Some people use the image of the body and talk about head, heart and hands and when they do they talk about the principles of knowing God, loving God and serving God. In many ways they are all the same 3 things.
Head – Knowing God - Grow
Heart – Loving God - Connect
Hands – Serving God – Serve
So if want to have a good voyage or a vital faith we need to focus on these 3 legs, so let’s start with connect or the heart and learning to love God. The first and most important command we have been given is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. It was the foundation of the law given to us by God in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 6:5) and Jesus said it was the greatest command which forms the foundation of his teaching in the New Testament (Matthew 22:37). We are to love God and what we need to remember is that developing this connection takes time.
We all know that strong and loving relationships take time. It takes time to get to know one another, it takes time to get comfortable with one another and feel vulnerable with one another and learn how to trust one another, but it’s not just idle time sitting together, it’s time sharing and giving and caring and serving one another that helps relationships grow. When people come to me and talk about how they have grown apart in their marriage I often find that it’s because they have stopped spending time together. If you want to keep your marriage strong here is something very simple you can do, go out on a date with your husband or wife. Set aside time to be alone together and while this might be hard because of children and schedules, the investment of time and energy will pay off in the end.
Relationships are hard work; they not only require an investment of time but they also need good communication. Now sometimes the communication that is needed is the quick communication that takes place during the day. We call or text one another about what we are doing and where we are going throughout the day and we do this to just stay connected, but relationships also need longer times of intentional conversation where we can share our goals, dreams, hopes and concerns. It’s often this kind of communication that suffers most in our relationships. We might find time to go out and eat and have a good time, we might do well at staying connected during the day, but many times it’s the deeper conversations that we struggle with.
For example, the number 1 stress in marriage is not children or jobs, its money. Whether it is our attitude toward money or how we save it or spend it, issues around money are the leading cause of divorce and yet one of the things we never want to talk about with anyone is our money, but we need to have these kinds of conversations. We need to talk about money and our goals for the future and our fears about growing old or having children, or not having children. Strong relationships take time and an investment of energy and good communications, and the same is true with our relationship with God. If we want to connect with God and deepen and develop our relationship of love with God then we need to give God time and make sure there is strong communication and the way we do this with God is through regular worship attendance, daily prayer and daily Bible reading.
Let’s call worship attendance a kind of date night. It is time we set aside to be in the presence of God. We meet with God. We share with God. We open ourselves up to God. At times we even eat (communion) with God. Regular times of worship are essential to our connection with God, but worship one hour a week can’t sustain this relationship just as a date with your spouse once a week can’t sustain a marriage. Think about how weak and fragile your marriage would be if you only spoke to your spouse one hour a week? I know, some of you are thinking that might be good – but trust me it would not be good, it would be dangerous. So while we need regular weekly worship, we also need daily prayer, daily conversations and communication with God.
Daily prayer might be intentional and focused or it might just be a quick simple prayer in the middle of a day, while we are driving the car or washing the dishes or sitting in a meeting. When a concern or joy or question comes to us we need to learn how to direct these thoughts toward God. We need ongoing conversation with God or daily prayer, but we also need more intentional times of conversation with God where we share our hopes and dreams and listen for God’s direction and love – this comes through daily reading and reflection on God’s word.
There is no better place to go to deepen our connection with God than to God’s word. Part of staying connected to God is hearing his voice and it’s the Bible that gives us words of inspiration and encouragement, words of challenge and conviction, words of hope and grace and love right here. We need to take the time to read and reflect on God’s word if we are going to stay connected to God. A few years ago a nationwide study was done on what helps improve people’s faith and the one thing that helped people develop their faith at any level more than anything else was the reading and reflection on God’s word. If we want to keep strong this one leg of our stool, the leg of connection to God or loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, then we need to commit ourselves to at least these three things, regular worship attendance, daily prayer and daily reading and reflection on God’s word. These three simple things can do so much for us, the question is will we commit ourselves to this way of life? Check out the next steps? Where do you want to be in these practices by the end of the year? Make the commitment today and begin to set goals to get yourself there.
The next leg of the stool we are going to look at is grow because it’s not enough for us to be connected to God, we need to grow in our understanding of God and how God works in our lives and in our world.
When I was in high school wind surfing was popular and my cousin had a windsurfer he brought down to my grandmother’s beach house one weekend. I could stand up on the board and pull the sail up pretty easily, but my problem was that I didn’t know anything about sailing. So I would stand there and move the sail all around not knowing how to catch the wind and move the board and so all I did was drift along the shore.
When I got to the end of the beach my cousin was there and he hopped on the board and in two minutes had sailed I back to our house. I walked the beach home.
The problem I had was that I didn’t understand how to sail and catch the wind and turn the sail and move my feet to get the board to do what it needed to do. I didn’t know enough about sailing to move forward and enjoy the experience. Sometimes this is how we are in our relationship with God. We know God somewhat, but we don’t know enough about God to really have our faith move us through life.
One of the biggest blessings we have at Faith Church is a really good church library that can help us learn more about God and God’s will and I would encourage you to take some time to dig deeper and use your mind to learn more about God and really move from just loving God to knowing God and growing your faith.
Growing in our understanding of God will also help us grow the church because the more we know about how God moves in the world the more we will be able to share our faith effectively with others. People are searching for God today. People are hungry for something powerful and something that will make sense to them and God is powerful and God can make sense when we take the time to understand the fullness of God’s will and ways and then be confident enough to share it with them. So growing in knowledge will help grow the church and a growing faith is the only kind of faith there is because if our faith is not growing – it is dying.
And the last leg is service – serving Christ, the church and the community. Service requires one thing at the very beginning, we have to stop focusing on ourselves and begin to focus on others. You see our faith isn’t just about our relationship with God it also is about how our relationship with God effects others. Jesus put these two things together when he was asked what the greatest commandment was. His response was (Matthew 22:37-40). Of course Jesus was simply reflecting the truth of the God from the very beginning. God has always called his people to care for the widows and orphans and the strangers in need. God has always called us to reach out and serve others – the difficulty we have is taking our eyes off ourselves long enough to see and then meet the needs of others.
Serving others requires us to make a decision to follow God into mission and ministry. God is calling each and every one of us to some kind of service and we need to be willing to allow God to show us this work and lead us into it, which is something we see in all three of our nautical examples. If you remember we are looking at the examples of Noah, Jonah and Peter and each one of them was called by God to a mission and ministry in the world, each one of them was called to serve God, let’s take a quick look.
Genesis 6:9, 14, 22
Noah walked with God; he had a relationship with God so we know he was connected. Noah listened to God, he learned about God’s plan for him in the world (to build an ark) and then finally Noah followed and served.
If you remember Jonah, at first didn’t want to serve the people of Ninevah, he wanted them all to die, but after sitting for three days in the belly of a fish he began to agree to God’s call to serve and finally went and his words helped save the people of Ninevah.
Jonah 3:1-3
Peter also heard a call of God, it was a call to become fishers of men and women and to work with Jesus to help bring people into God’s kingdom and help them experience the fullness of God’s life and although he was afraid, he said yes. He followed Jesus. Luke 5:10b-11
What we see in each of these three men is that God had a purpose for their lives – God had a voyage he wanted them to take and for them to set sail they needed to be connected to God and able to listen and they needed to grow – but those two legs weren’t enough, for their voyage to be complete, they needed to serve. God called them to serve and God calls us to serve. God is calling each and every one of us to serve in some way. We can’t just stay as a passenger – we need to become part of the crew and serve God and the first step in serving is just making ourselves available to God. It’s saying, OK God, here I am. Send me. Use me. Can you say that today?
After we make ourselves available to God we can then ask God, where do you want me to serve? Is it right here, or is it on the other side of the globe? Am I to meet the needs I see in my own community or am I called to tackle the global problems of poverty, hunger, slavery and war? How is God calling us to serve? If you asking yourself that question today I would invite you to reflect on this questions, What area of need do we see that stirs your heart? Is it seeing people hungry? Is it seeing children need shoes or clothing or medical attention? Is it knowing that people need the grace of God to bring their hearts and lives healing and wholeness? Whatever stirs your heart might be the beginning of God’s mission for your life?
Now don’t think that saying yes to God will suddenly mean moving next week to Africa or South America or China to be a missionary. It might, but it’s not my experience that God works that way. God usually leads one small step at a time. For example, if seeing people who are hungry stirs your heart maybe God is asking you to take some canned goods to the food bank. Maybe after a few trips to the FaithCentre you feel the desire to volunteer there one day a week. After a while you might want to start talking to the clients at the food bank and help find the cause of their situation and do something about it. Maybe this leads you to a ministry that helps feed the hungry in poverty stricken areas of our state and region and maybe then it leads you to feed the poor in Africa. The big question is are we willing to take the first step?
Noah took the first step and began to build the ark, Jonah finally took the first step and began a journey to Ninevah, Peter took the first step and let go of his nets. What is the first step God is asking you to take? Service is one of the legs of our faith that we can’t ignore. It has to be just as strong as the other 2 which means we need to find ways to serve those in our church and community and world. Again, on the next steps we invite you to think about how God is calling you to serve. You may not know where it is yet, that’s ok, will you make yourself available to God. Tell God you are willing to serve 1 hour a week or 4 hours in a month and then just trust God will lead you to his mission for you. Just take that step of faith today.
For us to have a good voyage, we need to commit ourselves to three vital principles, three core values – connection with God, growing in our faith and serving Christ and the world. Can we commit to this voyage today? And can we commit to taking this voyage together?
Next Steps ~ Our Journey
My Commitment to developing my own Spiritual Journey.
By the end of this year (2012) I will:
• make it my goal to attend worship times per month.
• make it my goal to have conversations with God each day.
• make it my goal to read my Bible minutes each day/week.
• invite friends and/or family to worship.
• give hours of my time each month to serving others by: .
