- with Pastors Gregg DeMey & Jeff Klein
Gregg DeMey 00:00
Alright, friends, I invite you to fasten your seat belts for today's message; it is going to be in four parts and include four different passages. And it will be a little ping pong in between Pastor Jeff and me; you may be thinking, oh no, am I going to have to endure four sermons as a result of this? They are going to be short and very direct. I wouldn't. I would invite you to think of this as a four-part meal from Portillo's.
Gregg DeMey 00:30
Perhaps a hamburger or Italian beef and order fries, a delicious shake, and dessert. What could be better than that? Alright, the keyword for today is belonging. And at the turn of a new year, I think it is a great significant question to ask, Where do I belong these days? And maybe even more significantly, to ask, To whom do I belong these days? Here is one of the amazing things about God, not only did He create us to be free people, God being infinitely greater to us is the ultimate free being. And if God uses this freedom to say things they literally come to be, and if God says over a group, or over a person, you belong to me, who is going to contradict that? Who is going to reverse that? Who is going to notice that if God says, You belong to me? Wouldn't it be amazing to walk around through life with confidence knowing that God has said over your little life? You belong to me? A quick show of hands—anybody in the room want to belong to God? Like, I mean, you're here on Sunday morning, like why would you be here, through ice and snow and viruses, if you did, if you did not already have this desire in your heart, here is how God feels about the matter. From Isaiah chapter 43. "Listen to God's voice. But now this is what the Lord says He who created you, Jacob, he who formed you Israel, God's people, do not fear for I have redeemed you. I have summoned you by name and you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. When you pass through rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire. You will not be burned, the flames will not set you ablaze. Do not be afraid my people. for I am with you." Interestingly, in this passage, it describes the trials that we inevitably go through in terms of waters and rivers, and fire. I would recognize it in the history of Elmhurst Christian Reformed Church, we have been through both literal and figurative waters and fires and more. There was a huge flood in Elmhurst in 1987. This building flooded in 2009 and 2011. Is that right, Doug Bardolph? The steeple of our old church building. Not that the church is a building, was struck by lightning in 1991. Bert, yes? 1991 it burned the roof and wrecked the church. And our church was kind of a church on the move for about a year, after that. We have literally been through waters; we have literally been through fires. Now we're passing through a global pandemic right outside the Worship Center. If you take a quick right, can we go back one slide, there is this little stand including a metal Cross, which is the cross that was struck by lightning. And on top of that little stand, there is a Bible opened. And here are the pertinent words that echo the passage in Isaiah that we just read together. In this Bible, it says "For this, we went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance." I would add you brought us through the water. You brought us through fire. You're bringing us through COVID. You are bringing us to a place of abundance. This is only possible because we belong to God. Here's the promise of God when you're in when you belong to God, God brings you through.
Gregg DeMey 04:36
That's what gives me confidence, hope to go through whatever water-flood-fire challenge nonsense. I either concoct, or that comes upon me from the outside. If I belong to God, God will bring me through if we belong to God, if the church, and if this particular congregation belongs to God, God will bring us through. That is his promise. Does God promise that it will be easy? Oh, maybe not. I'm going to give it to Pastor Jeff.
Jeffrey Klein 05:11
Yeah, my knees are not quite as good. I remember when my son Benjamin was in fifth grade. And we found out at November teacher conferences, his fifth-grade teacher tells us that Ben has been telling his teacher for like three months, he can't do his homework , because it's we're so busy at home every night, we're always going somewhere. So we always have him out going places he can never sit down to do his homework. So I came home and said, "Ben, we got to go see your teacher." And Ben had forgotten that to be part of the Klein family, and you want to be in? It didn't include lying. It didn't include not taking responsibility for your stuff. It didn't include, you know, kind of living your own way, getting whatever you want, and then doing it your own way. Now there were a certain set of parameters he had to live within right, to be part of the Klein family. So all the way down to the school that day, as we walked to school, the three blocks, Ben gave me all the rationalizations, he gave me all the minimizing, and gave me all the denials about what he had done and why he had done it and how he wasn't gonna flunk out of fifth grade. I mean, come on. And we got there, of course, we talked to his teacher, now we could have ignored the whole thing. We're going to just say, hey, you know, we'll just let Ben lie and shirk his responsibility, fine, but if you're going to be in, right, if your parents really care about you, they're gonna hold your feet to the fire. So we had to hold Ben's feet to the fire, we couldn't let them keep acting like this. Now, the reason I tell you this story is I think a lot of people in the world, treat our sin, our missteps, our slip-ups, in the same way, Ben did. We minimize it. We rationalize it, we deny it, we kind of pretend like it didn't really happen. It's no big deal. Right? We've kind of learned this, this passage and Ezekiel chapter five is kind of a wake-up call on this. We when we get to the end of chapter five, Babylon has already visited Israel once and carried off its best and brightest, and Ezekiel is going to be sent to warn them that Babylon is coming back to destroy the city, we find that the people of Israel who have minimized their sin, who pretend like there's no big deal, but the things they're doing, who have ignored God's commandments and rules have forgotten what it means to be in a covenant relationship with their God, that there are parameters, there's a way you're supposed to live to keep you on the path that God has you on. So Ezekiel is interesting, as a prophet, he's almost like a theatre actor like he's like a street actor who goes out in the streets to put on display in some form the message from God. So in this particular passage, in Ezekiel five, he's sent out and he's told to take a sword, shave his beard, shave his head, and keep all the hair that he's supposed to take the hair on a scale and weighed into three equal parts. One party is supposed to put on a map over the city of Jerusalem, light it on fire, and burn it. The next party is supposed to take his sword and chop it into little pieces. And the third party is supposed to throw it to the wind and let it blow all over the wind. What does this mean? Well, it's a sad message, 1/3 of the people of Jerusalem will die from fire in the city. 1/3 of the people of Jerusalem will die from the sword outside the city. And 1/3 of the people of Israel will be carried into exile into Babylon and slavery. Look what God says in Ezekiel five, verses four or five. This is an illustration of what will happen in Jerusalem, "I placed her at the center of the nations. But she has rebelled against my regulations and decrees and has been even more wicked than the surrounding nations. She has refused to obey the regulations, the decrees I gave him to follow." So Israel is placed at the center of the nations to be a light to the nations. But instead, her behavior has made the nation even darker. She's forgotten what it means to be in this covenant relationship with God. Now, there's one little bit of hope in the passage is he was told to take a small bit of the hair that he cuts off and put it in the fold of his garment, and protect it there. Because even though God's going to judge his people and discipline them, he's not going to wipe them out. He's going to continue in this relationship with them, which is a bit of hope. When it comes to God's dealing with us, if God didn't really care, he would just turn us loose. But when you said yes to follow Jesus, when you said yes, to be part of a community like this, you said yes, to God's discipline, God's judgment, God keeping you on the pathway of relationship with him. So just like Pastor Gregg, I have a slide. When you're in, God disciplines you. It's not the way we like to think of God. But it's true.
Jeffrey Klein 10:06
It's interesting. I think in our culture today, we've lost a fear of the Lord. Now the fear of the Lord doesn't mean you're sitting around shaking your boots, it means that you have a reverence for God and His ways. I think most of us, again, we just sort of write our little missteps up is like, no big deal. But maybe when you get back to this idea that God is -whoa. And we need to have a little more fear and understand that he wants to shape us and transform us into people that reflect His glory and shine a light to the nations.
Gregg DeMey 10:47
I'm glad you got that passage, man. So this is true. To live in the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. To live in the fear of the Lord is equated in the Bible with living a holy or set apart, or countercultural, or against the grain kind of life. If we're going to live that way, where's the energy going to come from? Where's the vision going to come from? If I have to summon that up for myself, if I have to just like buckle down and try hard to be like a good spiritual person, like, I'm not going to get very far. For us to do that we need a leader. We need a vision that's higher than our own. If God wants us to live in the fear of the Lord, and to be holy, and to be set apart, the way he's going to accomplish that, the way it's gonna be accomplished in our lives, is by us, following Jesus and keeping our feet on his path. God desires to set us apart with Jesus. Here's what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. This is the first scene that we see of him in the gospels, when he's an adult. When all the people were being baptized, so as by John the Baptist, in the Jordan River in Israel, Jesus was baptized to this was a way of being set apart, saying that I want to live all in for God. As Jesus was praying, heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove. Now this is an amazing scene, right? You have Jesus, the Son of God, you have the Holy Spirit, in bodily form. It's almost an appearance of the entire Holy Trinity. We're only missing God the Father at this point. By the way, the word trinity doesn't appear anywhere in the Bible, explicitly, but implicitly the fact that God is Father and Son, and the Holy Spirit is all over the whole story of the Bible. But here's what happens next. And then there was a voice that came from heaven. And will you read these words with me these two lines and quotations? You are my son, whom I love with you, I am well pleased. Now, whose voice do you think that was? It was God, our father's voice. So again, there's Jesus of Nazareth, a human being. There's the Holy Spirit present in validating Jesus and what he's about to start his sacrificial ministry, and the voice of God the Father is literally speaking like thunder out of heaven. Now Jesus himself was about 30 years old when he began his ministry, he was the Son. So it was thought of Joseph. God, the Father gives his Son, this incredible validation and confidence boost, that it is in fact, his mission to be the Messiah, the bridge builder, the rescuer? Did Jesus need this as a 30-year-old Jewish man who was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth? Did Jesus need his confidence boosted? Did Jesus need affirmation? I think on one level totally, he was a human being like we're human beings. Jesus had a need for food, and shelter, and friendship, and love, and affirmation, like all of us. And God, the Father at this moment, is being an incredibly faithful provider of what matters most like we all need someone to believe in us. And God in an amazing way provides that for Jesus just as he is launching into his adult ministry. I remember being a four-year-old kid this is ancient times, but kids if you have older siblings, I have several siblings who are quite a bit older, when I was four, my oldest sister went to nursing school at the University of Michigan. As the oldest in my family, she was kind of like the first one to leave town and go off on her own. And I remember it being a little bit of a sad day because it was the first time that our family was kind of splitting off. At the same time, I have a vivid, vivid memory of how proud my parents were of my sister, not just for her hard work, wanting to become a nurse, but also proud that she was brave enough to leave the safety of home and do what she was supposed to do. And as a pretty small kid, at that point,
Gregg DeMey 15:44
I think what I was left with was this thought not that just, my parents are proud of my sister, Julie being the oldest. But it dawned on me that my parents were proud of all of us as kids. So that makes sense. Like, I felt like a little bit of the sunshine that was shining on her that some of the light like spread on me, even though I was going to preschool and didn't have much to offer. At that point in my life. I will have lived most of my life with what I would call the blessing or the good fortune, and I have not been able to shake the blessing of my parents. That is a fortunate thing, as now nearly a 50-year-old to be able to say I have never escaped the blessing of my parents. They were not perfect people. They had their own problems. But they loved, loved, loved their kids and their grandkids. And I carry that with me to this day. Both of my parents have passed, they've been dead for a while. For a bit after they had gone, I would occasionally in my imagination, still hear my parents' voices-like giving me a word of affirmation or a little bit of confidence. But the older I have gotten, it's not that I have forgotten my parents. But that need has slowly evaporated in my life. And it has been replaced by the affirmation that by faith I receive from God Himself. Amen. As good as my parents were, the affirmation of God, by faith is something infinitely more durable and eternal, and, and stronger. Now, I didn't get my parents' blessing because I deserved it. Or because I was a particularly great kid, I was up to all sorts of nonsense. I don't get God's blessing, because I'm a particularly good adult, or deserve it. I'm still up to all kinds of nonsense, Amen. All right. Here's the thing. I received God's blessing because Jesus received God's blessing. And I'm with Jesus. Like that's where it's at, not through hard work, not through achievement, not through being a professional Christian, not through running my mouth on Sunday morning, not through trying to do things that are kind or being a good neighbor. I am confident of the blessing of the Lord through faith because I am with Jesus. When you're in when you belong to God. You're with Jesus, as simply as I can put it when you're in you are with Jesus and vice versa. Now, is this just for kids with nice parents? Is this just for people who grow up and work for churches? Could this possibly be for a wider audience? When that'd be amazing? Pastor Jeff bring us home.
Jeffrey Klein 19:02
You've almost made it yet. You've one more second segment here you ready? Book of Acts. The book of Acts tells us about the beginnings of the earliest church. Right? You know that Pentecost, the Holy Spirit falls, and there are tongues of fire. And there is rushing wind. And the disciples are given the ability to speak in the language of all the people that are gathered at the temple. They all hear them in their own languages, which is a Holy Spirit miraculous kind of happening. Peter gives this sermon, 3000 people are converted on that first day and are baptized not only in water but in the Holy Spirit. When Jesus leaves left the earth 10 days before that he told these disciples you will be my witnesses, not just in Jerusalem, but in Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. The disciples probably had in their own minds what this meant being his witnesses and who were this was reserved for the Jewish people that were already on the inside the people that already understood God was and who kind of got this? Those were the ones who would be the witness they would be witnesses to. Those were the good Jews with the right theology and the right lineage and all that. In fact, the disciples might have stained Jerusalem and an app and for the persecution that broke out, when the Apostle Paul started taking stone the church and drag people off, they were comfortable in Jerusalem. It was nice there. They were used to it there, through there. So they hung out and so they're the homeless, but then the persecution breaks out and they've scattered all different places. I wonder why some of them ended up in Samaria. I think it's probably because they figured nobody will look for them there. Seriously, they notice Americans think well, no good Jew will think we're ever in Samaria. We'll go hang out there. But Acts tells us wherever they went, they preached the gospel, and people the Samaritans came to believe in Jesus. Now, I don't know if you know the Samaritans are. They're considered by the Jews to be half breeds. Because they come from a marriage between Israelites and Assyrians. It happens way back in the Old Testament. So the Israelites that got carried off into Assyria, intermarry with the Assyrians. And they created this half-breed group of people that the Jews couldn't stand because it was a sell-out of Deuteronomy, chapter seven, which was the only marry your own kind. So they hated the Samaritans, Every good Jew would always go round Samaria. Imagine like, it's like, if you're going to Colorado and you can't send the people from Iowa, you drive around Iowa. That's where they did. Right there. We drive around some area there we go around somewhere, even there were many more miles to get around because they didn't want to go through it. Because they might rent to a Samaritan. They couldn't stand them. So look, what happens in Acts eight, Philip is preaching, they get converted. And then the news reaches Jerusalem, but what's going on in some area, when the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the Word of God, they sent Peter and John to them, probably to investigate this, to see what's going on there. And look what happens next. When they arrive, they prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit had not yet come upon any of them. They had simply been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, that Peter and John placed their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. It didn't matter. They were Samaritans didn't matter they were half breeds, didn't matter what they had done, didn't matter what the Jews thought about them. Because God thought differently. Because when you're in, it doesn't matter where you're from, or what you've done. Now, it's interesting, because we as a church would all say we believe this. It's totally true. Really? Do we really act like it's true? Like when people come through the door that are a little different? Do we welcome them with open arms? Like Jesus? Did. Are we ready to receive anyone that walks through the door of the church and help them belong to Jesus, get the Holy Spirit, and belonging this community? I know when I was a youth pastor and started to reach out to the community, my first experience in pastoring, in this church and how in Michigan, I found out pretty quickly that people really didn't want to welcome people that were different than them. I found out pretty quickly that these kids that were coming off the streets and coming to church now, were not really welcome there. They were considered to be contaminating the rest of the kids and they were considered to be these tough people that we didn't know he wanted to have around. I mean, the example of Acts eight is pretty amazing. We're ready to welcome people to help them find this Jesus. Anne Lamott says a great thing. You can safely assume you've created God in your own image. When it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Jeffrey Klein 24:06
So, are we prepared to welcome the Samaritans in our midst? We've got a SHE ministry here with single moms. We've got a prison ministry here with guys who are incarcerated. We've got Alpha groups going on. We're witnessing and serving the community. If these people show up at our door, are we ready? To help them belong?
Jeffrey Klein 24:33
Would you pray with me? Let's pray. Again, Lord Jesus, Father, God, Holy Spirit, thank you for your word. It is life-shaping. It is powerful and it is effective. We trust this morning, Holy Spirit that you have spoken to your people that you have translated for them. These week and fumbling words of to preachers something powerful has happened in the lives of your people and your name Jesus we pray, Amen