Broadway Christian Church
Columbia , Missouri

Morning Worship
October 17, 2004

Prayer of the Day

Gracious God, Loving God; we, who know something of you because of Jesus, worship you this day.  Prepare our minds for action.  Help us become the disciples you want us to be.  May we set all our hope on the grace Jesus Christ brings.  Amen.

Scripture 
Luke 18:1-8

Jesus told his disciples a story, a parable.  He told them a story about how they should keep on praying and never give up:

In a town there was once a judge who didn’t fear, who didn’t believe in God, or care about people.  In that same town was a widow who kept going to the judge and saying, “Make sure that I get fair treatment in court.”

For a while the judge refused to do anything.  Finally, he said to himself, “Even though I don’t fear God, I don’t believe in God, or care about people, I will help this widow because she keeps pestering and bothering me.  If I don’t help her, she will wear me out.”

The Lord said:
Think about what that crooked judge said.  Won’t God protect God’s chosen ones who pray to God day and night?  Won’t God be concerned for them?  God will surely hurry and help them.  But when the Son of Man comes, will he find on this earth anyone with faith?

Message
Pray Daily
Rick Frost

Here we go again.  If you have been with us for a while, you know about these pithy parables – these Trojan horses of Jesus.  They are stories that always turn out to be so critical, so central to the teachings of our faith and about the way we, as Christian people, decide to do life.

In today’s reading, Jesus tells about a persistent woman who pesters a crooked judge until he finally gives in.  She pesters him until he finally is willing to hear her case, until he finally gives her what justice requires.  The implied message is, of course, if this sleazy judge will pay attention to and respond to the needs of this very poor, vulnerable, nobody of a woman, how much more will the Creator, Sustainer, Judge, and Redeemer of all that is do for those who know God, for those who love God, for those who care for God, for those whom God knows, cares for, and loves?  So it is, said Jesus, we should pray constantly, be persistent, do not lose heart, and never give up.  Only sometimes we do.  Don’t we?

We go through peaks and valleys.  We do.  Sometimes we go through peaks and valleys of our own lives.  Sometimes we go through peaks and valleys with others with whom we share life – people we care about and love.  Sometimes we go through peaks and valleys with our community or with our nation.  The valleys knock us down, or at least try to.  They discourage us, or try to.  They even try to defeat us. 

Add to that our cultural propensity to have instant everything.  I was looking the other day: instant oatmeal, one-hour cleaning, 60-minute photos, 20-minute pizza delivery, Jiffy Lube, excellent health and sculpted body in 20-minutes-a-day-three-days-a-week.  Right!  Marriage enrichment in a weekend.  And of course you can have a relationship with God through Christ with only a couple hours a month.  Whoa!

A 19-year-old writes, “I tried Christianity.  I went to church for several months.  The people were nice, but you know what?  I just didn’t get it.  So I moved on to transcendental meditation, and that didn’t work.  So I took a couple of courses in world religions, and I visited a synagogue, and a mosque.  That was interesting.  But then I lost interest in that, too.  Then I bought a prayer pillow, and I’m doing yoga…”

You get the picture.  Don’t you?

That’s when it hit me.  This parable of Jesus, I think is not just about prayer.  I think it’s about how we put ourselves in those places where the grace and the love of God can actually reach us – where we can be open to it.  It’s an amazing life.  It’s about a joyful, a purposeful, and a meaningful life.  It’s called the Christian life.  That life takes practice.  It takes persistence in doing certain things.

Let me tell you about something that’s going on in North America today.  It may not seem new to some of you, but it is, in fact, amazingly new.  Growing numbers of people are actually seeking the keys to the very kind of life we are talking about here.  What they are going is asking us church folks – people like you and me – to actually show them how to begin, or how to grow, or if they’ve been at it a while, how to mature as a spiritual person.  They are asking that of us.  In today’s world they are asking us, and they are looking to us to be very explicit, to be very up front, and to lay out very concisely and clearly, up to this point for most of us, has been implicit or silently assumed.  We, however, cannot make that assumption any longer in today’s world.  Put very simply, people want to know how do you become a follower, how do you become a student, how do you become a real disciple of Jesus?

Let me give you an illustration.  A man comes to our community.  He worships with us.  Let’s say he is in his late thirties or early forties.  He is married, has a couple of children, owns his own business.  He’s very athletic and in excellent health.  Life is good for this man.  But he seems to be awakening to some kind of void, some hollow place, a spiritual void, if you will.  It is a part of him that he has just been too busy doing what he has been doing to really explore or pay any attention to.  He asks me, “What would be expected of me if I joined this church?”

What would you say?  Well, I answered with what I always do, because what I heard was, “How do I join this church?”  I said, “What you do is, during worship, at the appropriate time, you come forward, and you stand next to me or whoever is preaching, and one of us will ask you, in front of God and everybody, ‘Do you believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and that he is Lord and Savior?’  If you do, guess what?  You are a member of Broadway Christian Church by definition, and you are pretty much free to explore what that means as you see fit in your own time frame.  That’s just the way it has been.”

And he said, “Yes, I understand that.  But what I really want to know is how?  How do I get from where I am today spiritually to where I want and need and can be?

Folks, that is a whole different question.  Isn’t it?

All of us in this church, whether you are here as a long-time charter member, or perhaps thinking about seeking this place as your church home, could ask that very same question.  How do I get from where I am today to where I want, need, could be spiritually? 

We come from all different kinds of backgrounds, all different kinds of socio-economic groupings, all levels of faith development.  They are all here in this room.  We have persons right here today who have been in church since they were born.  We have adults in this room who were baptized as adults.  We have some folks here today which marks an absolute beginning for them.  Some people come into our doors, who have found themselves in desperate situations, and they come seeking a better way.  “There has to be a better way.  Show us that way.”

Others come to us who have almost everything, seemingly, going for them.  It’s all working for them, and yet, something big, something huge, something critical is missing.  Almost all of them come intending to become active, committed participants in the community of faith.  “What we want to know is how?”  What would you tell them?

The answer, I think, in a word, is a word you have heard me throw around recently.  You are going to hear a lot more of it.  That word is “discipling.”  It’s not a program.  It’s not a department.  It’s not a person.  It’s who we are.  It’s the air we breathe.  The ministry and mission of Broadway Christian Church is nothing more, nothing less, than all of us helping each other to begin, to grow, and to mature as disciples – as followers of Jesus.  This is a place, folks, where every person can encounter the Spirit of the Living God and where every life can literally be transformed, resulting in faithful, compassionate, joyful, moral, ethical, purposeful, Christian living.  That’s huge!  That’s amazing!  That’s an incredible claim!  So what is it that we can do to put ourselves in the place where God’s transforming love and grace can get to us, where we can be open to it?

Kim and I have identified eight keys.  They are listed in your bulletin – eight keys to being a disciple.  I am going to walk through those with you.  I am going to ask you to stick with me.  Eight channels of grace…  Eight steps that enhance your experience…   Eight ways we believe Broadway should name and claim, upfront, make explicit, make clear, and indeed should become the driving spiritual vision of the ministry and mission of this church.  They are for you, for me, for anybody who walks into this place trying to move from where we are to where we want and can be spiritually.  Those eight keys, we have found, are proven to empower real people with real faith for real life.

Let’s take a look at them.  By the way, these are not in any particular order.  They just happened to turn out this way.  You could put number eight in the first slot.  It wouldn’t matter – mix and mingle.  But we are going to start with…

1

Pray daily.  Christians – people who want to follow Jesus – pray daily.  That sounds pretty simple.  That sounds pretty obvious to most of us.  Yet what we know is that most of us, as adults, do not know how to pray.  Now what I want you to hear is that puts us in very good company, because Jesus’ disciples didn’t know how to pray either.  In fact, that is what they asked him, “Lord, teach us how to pray.” 

The good news is we can learn how to pray.  Prayer can and should be taught.  We don’t need more stories.  We don’t need more books.  We don’t need more lectures about it.  What we need is user-friendly instruction about how to actually pray. 

So we see Broadway organizing itself to offer ongoing lessons, classes, workshops training anyone who is willing, in this very critical, basic, fundamental tool of communicating with the Creator of all that is.  It is a very, very powerful work of living prayer, and we need to be intentional about that as a church.

2

Worship weekly.  Do you know we have over 900 active, participating members in this congregation.  There are scores of people who visit our three worship services regularly.  Yet the average worship attendance at this church is 430 per Sunday.  My point?  My point is this.  Many of us have a lot of room to grow in our weekly worship.  We need to be more intentional about worshipping weekly in the body of Christ.  Whether you are on vacation, whether you are traveling, whether you are out working somewhere, or whether you are here at home, being at the Lord’s Table on the day the people of God assemble means that you belong.  You need to be there at least once a week.  We need to work on our worshipping weekly. 

The worship experience we create, that we offer here at Broadway, obviously has room to grow.  People in our culture want to actually experience, want to encounter the power and the presence of the Living Spirit of Christ, not only with their minds and their ears, but also with their ears and with their eyes.  They want to hear God’s call to their lives.  They want to be spiritually taught, fed, nurtured, restored, strengthened, inspired, and sent out to love the world, just like God loves the world.  What an incredible thing!  The implications for that, folks, for our music, and the implications of that for our technology in this sanctuary, and the implications of that for our preaching, for the visual imagery we have in our community, are absolutely huge.  The content and the quality of the worship experience and the number of people who worship with us weekly are inextricably linked.

3

Read the Bible regularly.  People who want to follow Jesus learn to read the Scripture.  The Bible is the key tool for everybody who wants to follow the Christ.  It is part of every Christian’s tool kit.  Now the catch is that we have to help each other learn how to use it.  As you know, the Bible is the story of God’s mighty acts, and because of that, it is our story as well.  It is a story that tells us every time we open it up who we are and whose we are. 

Our goal should be to cultivate an environment where turning to the Bible is as natural for our people as turning to the newspaper, or a magazine, or the television.  But it is not easy.  It is not an easy book to understand.  It’s a hard book to understand.  It’s a hard book to use.  That means we are going to have to find ways to teach each other how to do that.  We are going to have to do that for people who are absolute beginners – who never even saw a Bible until they walked into that door.  And then, of course, we have people who have been connected with the community of faith for a long time.  They have had bits and pieces of the story, but they’ve never seen the whole thing.  So we have people in that intermediate range.  Then we have folks who have been in the Word since they can remember.  They need a more advanced, deeper experience of Scripture.  The power, the guidance, and the wisdom of the Bible for real living is a resource that is literally waiting to be discovered by our people and the people thinking about being a part of this community of faith.

4

Participate in a relational group.  What we found is that group life in a church our size is where real spiritual growth takes place.  It’s the one place where caring about each other’s spiritual life is on the agenda.  When we participate in a small, relational group we know several things are going to happen.  You are going to get to know 10, 15, or 18 other Christian folks who are walking somewhat like you are.  What we are going to find out also is not only are they wonderful people, they are going to become friends.  Not only are they going to become good friends, but also they are going to literally look out for, and care for each other, and enjoy each other’s company.  They are also going to read, and they are going to think, and they are going to discuss, and they are going to study things of faith together.  But more importantly than all of those, what they are going to learn is, without embarrassment, how to ask for and how to pray for each other and for the world in which we live.  What an incredible thing that is. 

We could start ten new adult Sunday School classes at 9:30 a.m. if we had the space.  I meet with members of this church on a regular basis.  I am absolutely amazed.  They are here, but we have no place at 9:30 for them to meet.  I hope and I believe this church will address that issue in the not-too-distant future.

5

Give generously and gratefully.  People who follow Jesus give generously and gratefully.  We live in a culture that has a lot to learn about ownership and about stewardship.  We have a lot to learn about giving and receiving.  We have a lot to learn about being less, and about learning how to manage, about sharing, and about celebrating.  What we know is that the generosity of a disciple is rooted deeply in the generosity of God.  What we know is that as we actually encounter the Spirit of the Living God, things within us start to change, and we actually want to grow in our generosity.  It’s not anything that has to be pushed or forced. 

We want to do it, first by making a pledge, making some kind of financial commitment that we can joyfully and delightfully and pleasurably offer to God for God’s purposes.  Then, as we grow, as we mature, we find ourselves moving toward the tithe.  Tithing is giving ten per cent of everything we are and everything we have.  But it doesn’t stop there.  What’s really amazing is that eventually we find people actually trying to figure out ways to pour themselves out in service to the Lord.  It’s not pushed.  It’s not forced.  It’s something that just comes from within the spirit.  Disciples of Jesus give generously, and they absolutely love doing it.  The implication of that for our stewardship at Broadway is absolutely immense.

6

Engage in the life of service.  The life of a follower of Jesus is, by definition, a life of service.  We follow one who “came to serve, not to be served.”  Disciples know that “God so loved the world that God gave God’s only son…” and that God intends to keep on loving that world through you and through me and through people like us.  (John 13)  The Bible teaches that all persons of faith have gifts for servant ministry.  Ministry needs to happen here in this place, to build up this place.  But there is also a ministry and a mission that is out there in the world beyond the church. 

Those gifts – all of us have them – need to be identified.  They need to be named.  They need to be developed.  Most of all they need to be used.  So we see the day coming when every adult and every teen, who enters this place, goes through our life-focus seminar, or something like it.  The goal of that is to develop a personal mission statement that enable people to actually engage in the ministry the Spirit of Christ is calling them to.  That energy, that joy in that person who is doing something with their gifts and with such amazing passion is a joyous thing to behold.

7

Share your faith.  People who want to become, and want to grow, and want to mature as disciples of Jesus share their faith.  For us, what we think that means is that at least once a year, every disciple connected with this church needs to invite and bring a person, not presently participating in another community of faith, to this church.  The goal is not only to welcome them, but also to nurture them to be another person who knows, who believes, who follows Jesus.  That means we are going to have to learn how to teach each other how to invite.  You know… I think the reason we don’t invite is we just don’t feel comfortable.  We don’t know how to invite another person to go to church with us. 

The other thing we have trouble with is our story.  Around this room there are tremendous faith stories, but we are not comfortable sharing our faith story with another.  We just don’t have that comfort, that knowledge yet.  Here is the good news.  It is being done.  It can be done.  We can learn it, and we can be comfortable in doing it.  The other thing I think is so important is that we need to know the most effective thing we can do to help change this world for the better and to make a real difference in this life is to help make another disciple of Jesus.  I can’t think of anything that has more long-range potential for good for this world than that.  Think about that.

8

Honor a Sabbath time.  Look around you.  Look in yourself.  Most of us live pretty hectic, harried, heavily-scheduled lives.  We very much need to be very intentional in regularly setting aside time for rest and renewal.  The practice of honoring the Sabbath goes all the way back to Genesis.  You know that.  I mean… even God rested as part of the creative process.  Now what are you doing in your in your life and for your family’s life for that very thing?  We need balance, folks.  We need balance and rhythm in our lives. 

What we know is that when we let that go, the lack of it afflicts, not just us personally, but everybody around us.  It afflicts our relationships.  It afflicts our families.  It afflicts our community.  I think it even afflicts the world.  Practicing Sabbath is an invitation to eat together, to bless each other and family, to read, think, enjoy, nurture intimate relationships.  Whatever.  It is an incredible blessing, and we need to be very intentional about doing it in our kind of culture.

So, hang in there.  You’ve done great.  Bless you!  What I hope you see is there is nothing new in anything I have presented to you today.  Is this a surprise?  Have we unveiled anything that has never been done before here?  Absolutely not.  What we have talked about today is incredibly simple, but don’t be put off by that.  Don’t be fooled by its simplicity.  This is incredibly profound as well. 

For the persons who really wants to become followers of Jesus, over time they will literally unleash the Spirit of God if we actually, persistently practice these eight things.  Tradition and experience teaches and confirms this.  The Spirit is waiting not only to touch us, but to transform our lives, and change us which results in faithful, compassionate, moral, ethical joyful, purposeful Christian living.

These eight things are foundational, and we are going to be taking them to the church board tomorrow night and asking the board to put this on the church’s agenda.  Because we believe these are the kinds of things – the spiritual things – that need to be at the very heart of everything we do at Broadway Christian Church.  Again, there’s nothing new.  We have sort of known this.  It has been implicit.  What we are asking is, “Let’s make it explicit.  Let’s put it out there.  Let’s put it up front.  Let’s name it, and let’s make it clear.  Let’s fully implement these eight keys to being a follower of Jesus Christ.”

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

Listening Lord; Make our lips be in ceaseless motion forming prayers of thanksgiving and praise.  May our spirits be heard and affirmed by the council we find in your ways.  At the drop of a knee we find you there.  Hasten our hearts to open in prayer. Amen.