Bishop Jerry is on travel this week and until his sermon is up, he suggests you may wish to consider this from Rev Jack:
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Sermon – Reverend Jack Arnold - Time and Action
Church of the Faithful Centurion
- Descanso, California
Today’s
sermon tied the Collect, Epistle and Gospel together.
Consider the words from the Collect, wherein we ask God to give us … be
open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and, that they may obtain their petitions,
make them to ask such things as shall please thee …
Once again, this Collect is kind of a follow-on to last week’s
Collect. First, we ask God to hear our
prayers, this is funny in that He always listens intently to us when we pray
and we very seldom listen to Him when He answers. It is an odd paradox, He listens but we never
seem to listen. It seems as if at times
we should pray that we should listen not Him, as He always listens! Nonetheless,
we ask His help to ask for those things we need, not those things we want and
are bad for us. We need to be humble
when we ask. What does that word mean? According to the dictionary, to be HUMBLE
means to be:
·
Modest
·
Respectful
·
Lowly
Modest - unassuming in
attitude and behavior
Respectful - feeling or
showing respect and deference toward other people
Lowly - relatively low in
rank and without pretensions
These are three characteristics that we do not possess in our natural,
sinful state. We however can obtain these through asking the Holy Ghost to
bring these attitudes into our hearts, souls and minds. And not just asking, but we have to be
willing to listen to what He says we should change within our lives. We cannot
change what is our station in life, but we can change our attitude towards
God. He is God, we are not. We are His creatures, imperfect with free
will. We must recognize that when we ask
for His Help. We badly need the guidance
from the Holy Ghost so we can ask for what we need, instead of what we
want. NEED and WANT are two four letter
words that are used too oft interchangeably that do
not mean the same thing. People often use these four letter
words erroneously, thinking they mean the same thing. They do not and cannot. Needs
are vital for our spiritual health as well as physical health. Wants are nice
things to have, but they are not vital for us to survive. When we think we
“NEED” something, we have to ask if it fits the above definition “Is this vital
for our ministry/life here on earth, or is it something just nice to have, but
not a critical item?” We have to see if what we need is something we truly
need, or just a want. Too many people do not perform this need analysis and as
a result suffer for it physically and spiritually.
While our needs must be fulfilled, there is nothing wrong with wanting,
just so long as you want things that are good for you. And as long as your want
does not turn into coveting or wanting people’s stuff without being willing to
work for it. We have to carefully monitor our wants and make sure that they are
good for us and that we are wanting to work for whatever it is that we
want. Once again, we are asking God to
help us to want the right things that will be good for us and help us develop in
our Christian lives. Paul reminds us though each believer is different,
throughout all the believing peoples of the Church the same God, the same
Spirit, the same Christ works all in all and through all His work is done and
accomplished. When we are setting off to do work for the church, we have to
keep in mind that those believers we serve and help believe in the same God we
do, and they are filled with the same spirit.
Paul reminds us we each have differing talents, but if we use them to
the Glory of God, without concern for who gets the credit, all will be well. I
can think of no finer example of this than the Marines serving on Peleliu with
Eugene Sledge, in the 3rd Batallion/5th Marines. I was reading his memoir, With the Old
Breed, when I realized in my reading, none of the Marines he served with
cared a bit who got a credit, all they cared about was helping their fellow
Marines accomplish the objective. They didn’t do what they felt like, at least
not the good ones. They did what was right without thought as to who would get
the credit. Their main thoughts were to work as a team to defeat the Japanese.
We must work in the same manner with our fellow Christians, using each of our
talents to further His work and to defeat the forces of Satan. God has given us
all each unique talents to be used to further His Mission. Together, our
talents can help us as the Body of Christ serve and glorify Him on Earth.
Do what you can, not what you feel like. Ignore what you feel like
doing and do what God wants you to do. We will profit from doing what God wants
more than if we did what we just felt like doing. This is hard for us to grasp,
but it will help us in the long term if we do what He asks, instead of doing
what we want. What we feel like doing often does not align with what God wants
for us, which can result in negative consequences for us. However, if we do
what He wants for us, there will be positive consequences. It is a simple
message, yet one that can be hard to swallow sometimes, but it is a message
that must be swallowed all the same.
If you will but read the Bible, what God wants you to do will be
clear. If you do your best to do His
Will all will be well with you. Death is
a pretty hollow threat if you do your duty. If you have done your best, that is
at the end of the day, you have done your best to follow Him, then truly you
have nothing to fear. The people of Jerusalem would not have been in the pickle
they got in when 70AD came along, had they only done what God wanted. But, it was too hard
for them. These were of course the
descendants of the people who defied God in the wilderness for 40 years, they
were a stubborn and stiff-necked people. They were blinded by their
stubbornness to change. They could not see what God wanted for them or now for us. In 70AD, what had been so hard seemed pretty
easy compared to the fix they were in, but by then it was too late. By that time they were left with only “There
are none so poor as cannot purchase a noble death.” But, for most of them by that time they had
no will. It left when they failed to
follow God’s Will.
It is an object lesson for us, to do what we can in the here and now
and not worry about tomorrow. And also we shouldn’t complain if it is too hard for us, because being on God’s side, nothing is too
hard for us. We should ignore these thoughts and turn our attentions to what
God wants for us. We must learn from the past mistakes of our spiritual
forebears and resolve not to repeat those same mistakes. If we are ignorant of
our spiritual past, we are doomed to make those very same mistakes.
When Luke wrote of the sales in the temple, he had a
point. The point was not to preclude
jumble sales at church. He was not
abhorring the sales, but the cheating in the name of God. This
Gospel does literally preclude cheating people at those jumble sales! You must understand the temple hawkers were
selling perfect defective “sacrificial lambs” which would be recycled over and
over[1]. In their very successful effort to make money
they were defrauding the people and insulting God in His own House. It should also be pointed out that a church
should be a place of worship. It may be
a Prophet Center, but not a Profit Center[2]. Similar sounding words, but a totally
different meaning for the church. If the
building needs constant commercial enterprise, then perhaps the emphasis is on
the wrong center. All of these churches that emphasize quantity over quality
should be suspect. It does not matter the quantity, as long as you have a base
of quality believers that serve the One Triune God. We need to be concerned
more about the spreading of His Word, the constant truth, then focusing on how
many people we can attract, and how the message can be changed to suit them.
These are both problems with the modern churches today. A church should be
funded for its needs by its members and its wants should come much later, if
not in fact unheeded. A church is about
Him, not about IT. It should not be a self-licking ice cream cone, but a center
to help the believers walk in Christ, not focusing on physical and material
plant on earth, but on helping us on our own “Pilgrim’s Progress” towards
heaven. If it focuses on anything but that, it is a stumbling block to
believers. We are not called to be a
stumbling block, but to be guides, to be lanterns shining in the darkness, to
be as a light cloud amidst the darkness of this world.
Do what you are supposed to do when you are supposed to do it. That is duty.
It does not matter how you “feel” about black or white. Black is black; White is white. Do your duty. Work as hard as you can, do the
best you can, trust in the Lord. By the
way, cheat no one. If you follow that,
you won’t need to be told, “Particularly in God’s House.”
Action counts. For by their
actions ye shall know them.
Heaven is at the end of an uphill trail. The easy downhill trail does not lead to the
summit.
The time is now, not tomorrow.
The time has come, indeed. How
will you ACT?
It is by our actions we are known.
Be of God - Live of God - Act of God
[1]
The
concept of being truthful in the efforts we make to spread The Word is not a
separate subject by any means, but would take more time to talk about than we
have time for here. Suffice it to say
that we must take every care to spread The Truth and not what our audience,
whoever that may be, would like to hear.
When we bring our “sacrifice” to the “temple” we need make certain it is
in fact as perfect as we can make it.
This is so hard that one of the recurring themes of the Collects is
asking for guidance to ask for the right things.
[2]
A term I
first heard from Bishop Dennis Campbell in 2011. It was a great thought then and a great
thought now!
