A Thousand Points of Light

Transcript

I want to take a moment and refer you to the ‘Tenth Press’ article that's in your bulletin; don’t read that now, but if you haven't read it, read it later. It tells more of the story of the ‘Christian Street Outreach.’

I want to begin this morning by asking you to think about two things that, on the surface, will seem completely unrelated and that our passage will draw together for us. Here is the first thing, when you hear the word ‘ministry,’ what are the pictures, what are the concepts, what are the things that come to your mind? Do you think of programs, church organized schedules, certain locations, maybe a certain outline that you learn, and you learn to use? What are the things that come to mind whenever you hear the word ‘ministry’? Maybe this will surprise you, but I am deeply persuaded that the influence of the Church of Jesus Christ is powerfully weakened by an unbiblical perspective on ministry.

There is a second thing. When was the last time you complained? (Nervous laughter in the room.) Two months ago, you can barely remember it? Do you think it was on a Tuesday, but you're not sure? Last week? Yesterday? This morning? Maybe even in this room as you had to squeeze more tightly than you actually wanted to? It is an amazing thing, this thing ‘complaining.’

Who here would say, “I'm free of it?” Yes, we do have the ability to stand in front of a closet filled with clothes, and say, “I haven't a thing to wear.” We can stand in front of refrigerator full of food, and say, “There's nothing to eat.” When we're busy, we complain about being busy; when we have nothing to do, we complain about being bored. When it's warm, we complain that it’s warm, wish that it was cold. When it’s cold, we complain that it’s cold and wish that it was warm. We complain about being around people who complain.

I would like you to turn to Philippians 2, because in a way, that's a bit shocking and powerful and convicting, these two things that seem completely separate are made as one by the apostle Paul. If you're using the church Bible, that's page 981. I want to read for you, beginning with verse 12 of Philippians 2:

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good purpose. Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life.

And I’ll stop there. Notice, if you would, that first sentence, that powerful command that is there. “Do all things without grumbling or questioning.” Wherever you are, whomever you're with, no matter what time of the day it is, no matter what circumstances are going on outside of you, no matter what is rumbling inside of you, do everything that you do without one word of complaint, one word of questioning. Oh, my!

Imagine just one day that isn't marked and marred in some way by complaint. Imagine waking up in the morning and not being filled with the pressure of all the things that you really don't want to do and a bit of grumbling inside that you don't want to do them. Imagine lying down at night, and your heart is not filled with complaint about what your day was like. Imagine being in the marketplace of life around other people and not complaining because people are in your way somehow, some way.

Imagine being a parent and not complaining about your children; imagine being a child and not complaining about your parent. Imagine being a worker and not complaining about your boss; imagine being a boss and not complaining about your workers. Imagine a life that is absolutely absent of complaint. Could it be that there are few things that more powerfully picture our need of grace than this thing that is in all of our lives? And could it be, brothers and sisters, that this thing that we've named as a little sin, is not a little sin at all?

Now, here is what we have to do to be faithful to this passage. We have to understand the heart behind this kind of communication. Why do we have to do that? Because Jesus arose in the Gospels, and said, “It’s out of the heart that the mouth speaks.” You cannot, you must not, we should not back away from the words of our mouth. The words of our mouth always reveal the condition of our heart. And so, grumbling and complaining is a powerful revelation of what is actually going on in your heart.

Now, the two words here are very interesting. The word ‘grumbling’ has more to do with the emotional side of complaint. In fact, the English word is ‘onomatopoetic.’ It actually sounds like what it does…’grumbling.’ It has that feel of the background drone of dissatisfied humanity, ‘grummmmbblling, umb, umb, umb, umb.’ And you walk through life wherever you are, you are the ‘umb, umb, umb, umb, umb, umb,’ of complaint. It is the drone of a fallen world. Have you joined the drone? Are you a pretty skilled droner?

The second word that's translated here, ‘questioning’, could be translated ‘dispute.’ It's actually the content of complaint. It's arguing against what is in your life. It's an argument, if you would, with life. Now that word really leads us to the heart behind complaint, and that heart says two things. Here's the first thing, these are very important and very convicting. Here is the first thing, grumbling says, “I deserve better.” Grumbling sticks you in the center of your universe; grumbling actually makes it all about you. Grumbling says, “This is not what a person like me deserves.”

You see, when you stand in front of that closet full of clothes, a lavish wardrobe that billions of people alive today would never have a fantasy that they would ever possess, and you are dissatisfied, and you say, “I have nothing to wear,” it's not that you have nothing to wear; it’s the particular thing that you want to wear, doesn't happen to be hanging in that closet. How self-focused! How self-absorbed, that I could look at lavished blessing and not see blessing. I stand before my refrigerator; there are all kinds of food there; a vast amount of the world starves. And I look at that refrigerator, and I say, “There's nothing to eat,” because what I think I deserve to eat, given who I am, doesn't exist in that refrigerator.

Shocking! It’s shocking! I shouldn’t have people in front of me in a line. I shouldn’t have people disagree with me. I shouldn’t have delay or difficulty to suffering of any kind. My every want should be indulged; my every need should be fulfilled; my every feeling should be taken seriously because I am me. I deserve better.

Grumbling says a second thing; this is equally shocking and convicting, “I know better. If I were ruling my world, I wouldn't bring this thing into my life.” You cannot, you cannot profess belief in a world that's under rule by a sovereign God and understand that grumbling is anything other than bringing God into the court of your judgment and judging him as being unwise, unfaithful, unloving. Grumbling says, “If I were sovereign, my life would be different.” Wow!

It was a bit of grief for me to study this passage over the last few months. I want to think that I'm a man at peace with God. I want to think that my heart rests in His sovereignty. I want to think that the zeal of my life is a zeal of His kingdom, but I’ve been confronted with the drone in my own life…not a little sin, is it? Grumbling puts you in the place of the Divine, and says, “You know better.”

Now, I want you to go back to the passage; I want to read it to you again:

Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life.

I want to look at that last phrase there, “… among whom you shine as lights in the world,” and talk about ministry and then let the middle of the passage put these two things together for us. A biblical perspective of ministry is not like, “ministry is one big spotlight that the church is.” You know…like one of those big, huge spotlights that they put out front when there's a festival or a gallery opening or something important happening, and you can see it's beam tracking back in the light, and you think, “Well there must be something going on,” where that beam shows at a certain location at a certain time.

That's not a proper ministry metaphor. If that's your metaphor of ministry, then ministry looks like this: You step out of your life which is your life, and you step into ministry for a moment, and then you step back out of ministry back into your life.

There is a different metaphor in this passage. Look at it, “…among whom you shine as lights in the world.” This is what the picture is: It's like the stars in the sky; Christ collects His people; He lights them with His grace, and then He casts them out into human culture so everywhere you look, the light of the Gospel is seen.

I remember the first time I was in Montana, big sky country. The person who was hosting me knew that I lived in Philadelphia. And we walked out of a restaurant at night, and he said to me, “Look up,” because he knew I'd never experienced what I was going to experience, and I was blown away at the lights in the sky. As far as you could look, in every direction, you couldn’t look in the sky without seeing light. That's ministry!

God, in His grace and in His sovereign, redemptive plan, scatters His people everywhere so that in, the halls of a hospital, light is seen; in the lawyer's office, light is seen; in the university library, light is seen; in the grocery store, light is seen; on the street of the city, light is seen; at the mall, in the suburbs, light is seen; in the morning, light is seen; in the afternoon, light is seen; in the evening, light is seen, so that you could not be in the wider community without being exposed to the light of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s ministry! That’s ministry! That is a God of magnificent love who would spread His light like stars in the universe so they could be seen by those who so desperately need the light of that grace.

Now, listen! That's not a description of something that the church schedules and programs. Oh, yes, it's not wrong for the church to schedule and program ministry. Sometimes we can do things collectively that we cannot do individually, but that's not enough of a definition of ministry. This says your life is ministry and ministry is your life. There's no separation. You are called to be one of those lights where ever you are.

Now, let’s look at the middle of the passage:

Do all things without grumbling the questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation.

You see, if you are ever going to understand the connection between this call to forsake complaining and the ‘thousand points of light’ definition of ministry, you have to understand who you are. He says it this way, “You’re the children of God;” you have been invited into the family of God, and for ministry purposes, that means that you have been called as a representative of that family. I can remember my dad saying that to me.

I was 11 or 12 years old. He said, “Your last name is Tripp; your father's name is Robert Tripp; everywhere you go, every decision you make, somehow, some way, you represent the Tripp family.”

We must understand our identity. We carry the name of the family, and we are representatives of that family wherever we are; we define what that family is about; we are actually meant to incarnate a visible God, to incarnate His visible kingdom, to make the grace and love of that God visible, to make that invisible kingdom visible by the way that we live. That's not something you do once in a while. That's your identity wherever you have been placed by the One who is your Father. You’ve been scattered as a representative; you are a child of God.

Notice the words, “…that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish.” He’s not talking about personal perfection; you ought to quest to live a perfect life, to be holy as God is holy, but you'll wrestle with sin until you cross the other side. What he's talking about here, very clearly, is reputation, that you would represent the Gospel well, that there would not be somehow, some way, a Gospel contradiction in the way that you live. You proclaim this message of a God of glorious grace and lavish love, but you are bitter and dissatisfied and complaining. That holds you to charge. Versus the picture here is: By the beauty of your joy, by the sweetness of your contentment, by the depth of your gratitude, that the people around you would be intrigued by what in the world makes you tick.

I Peter captures it when it says, “That the person, (the people around you), would wonder about the hope that's within you.” It's a picture of reverse evangelism, diversity needing to be evangelized actually comes to be evangelized, and says, “I don't get you. What makes you tick? You work with the same boss, but you're so gracious, and you’re so thankful, and you're so content, and you’re so joyous. What is going on? I've never lived by a neighbor who was so kind and so content and so joyful. You are like you're celebrating all the time. I don't understand. It’s at your university where there is something about you, there's a depth of gratitude that bleeds its way out in the way that you talk about life.”

Hear this. Where does this drive us? Here it is: The key to effective ministry is holiness; effective ministry flows out of the manner of your living; the key to holiness is worship. When my heart is filled with deep gratitude for the love that has been lavished on me, I want to obey the One who has lavished that love on me. Stay with me. The key to effective ministry is holiness; the key to holiness is worship; the DNA of worship is joy.

When I wake up the morning, I know my neighbors aren’t perfect; I know my family is not everything that I would wish it would be; I know not all of my bills are paid; I know I face things at work that are hard, and sometimes I find days more difficult than others, but I wake up with a deep gratitude, a deep joy, a thankful heart. I wake up, and I say, “I’ve been loved. I’ve been loved. I’ve been loved. How could it be that I would be loved this way? How magnificent it is. I have reason to celebrate and to smile and to rejoice today even though the world is disordered; I have been loved.” And that joy, and that worship, and that holiness will make you shine like a star in the sky of Montana in a crooked and twisted generation.

The word there for ‘crooked’ is a familiar word to you; I don't talk about these things much, but it's the word that we get that term ‘scoliosis’ from, that bending of the spine. It really means you live in a world, you live a generation that’s bent. It’s bent so it's not operating the way it's supposed to operate.

Listen! You cannot, as Phil Ryken has done such a powerful job of depicting for us from Ecclesiastes, you cannot remove God from the world, from your consciousness and not have life horribly bent. This world is bent; it's twisted; it's distorted. You know, it's like that shopping cart in the grocery store that's been hit by a car, and it's got that wheel that rattles and vibrates your whole body, and you can't make it go straight. You keep hitting things in the grocery store that you don't want to hit. That’s it; it’s to be a cart; it can’t work anymore. That's our world.

I get up at quarter of six every morning, put on my warm-ups, walk out of my building at 11th and Arch, walk a few blocks to Loews Hotel where, on the fifth floor, there is a gym where I exercise. It's a bit of a sad walk in the morning because I'm the guy that wakes up the homeless people, and I’ve struggled with that in mornings because I'm a counselor sort of person, and they represent stories to me, and I wonder what's the story of this person, what's gotten bent here?

The other day, I was walking sort of ‘hardly’ because I'm trying to get there quickly, and I guess my footsteps were loud, and a rather young homeless man jumped up. He grabbed his filthy blanket, stuck it on his arm, and started moving in front of me, like he was in trouble or something. I looked at him and thought, “Why? How? What has happened? What led to this? What brokenness? What wrong choices? What sin against him? What is the story there?”

And, I thought that that man represented the general brokenness of the world around him. That brokenness may be just as prevalent in the heart of the rich lawyer, in the three-piece Brooks Brothers suit, who is just as broken. And, how does God respond to that twisted generation? With magnificent love, He grabs His people, and He throws them at that darkness so that everywhere bent people are, the light of the glory of the grace of Christ could be seen. How magnificent is that love? How magnificent is that love!

Well, where does this passage lead us? Well, it leads us, first, to own the fact that we do treat our lives as if they belong to us. We do somehow slide away from gratitude into entitlement and complaint, and in so doing, we become part of the background drone of this twisted world. Hear this. Grumbling is the default language of a shrunken kingdom.

But, it should drive us to another place. This passage should drive us to Jesus. Maybe you've listened this morning, and you say, “Too high, too high, Paul, how could I ever, ever even think about living this complaint-free life?” Jesus lived that life on your behalf. If anyone had the right to stand up and say, “I deserve better,” it was the Lord; it was Jesus, but He never did that because His joy, the joy of His heart was to do His Father's will.

He did that for you. That was substitutionary. He was accomplishing righteousness on your behalf, righteousness you could never accomplish, so that you could stand in your brokenness, stand in your selfishness, stand in your self-focus, and say, “Oh, Lord, please help me to be unafraid and to be filled with hope because of His life, death, and resurrection, He will never turn His back on you. He will turn towards you with forgiving enabling and delivering grace. And He will not stop; He will not quit; He will not relent until one day your mouth is filled with nothing but praise because your heart is filled with nothing but worship.

And so, we hold fast the Word of Life; we hold fast unto this Gospel; it is our hope. The thing that is in the way of ministry, we recognize is us, and so we hold on to the hope of the Gospel of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ because that Gospel is a Gospel of fresh starts and new beginnings. Oh, we don't just hold it for us; we would offer it to others because we know that that homeless man on the street needs the Gospel of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. He needs that Word of Life. That self-possessed businessman needs that Word of Life. That hopeless person in the hospital needs that Word of Life. That university student needs that Word of Life. That mom, overwhelmed with parenting, needs that Word of Life. That man who doesn’t know how to pay his bills and thinks that life has not treated him right, needs that Word of Life. We hold it fast in faith in Jesus, knowing that as He rescues us, He’ll use us as an instrument of rescue in others.

Listen! I don't know if you know this, but you have been picked up and you’ve been thrown. It's not one, big spotlight; it's a thousand points of lights so the message of the grace of the glory of Christ would sprinkle itself everywhere the twisted brokenness of sin is. Yes, you are meant to twinkle like a star for the sake of this broken world and for the glory of the One who is Light, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s pray: Lord, we would confess to you that so often we join the drone of the discontent of a fallen world, and so we would pray for Your forgiveness, and we would pray for Your empowering grace. We would confess that often we separate our lives from ministry, and we’re confronted by the model that is very different in this passage. Oh, may we say, “Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to Thee,” take my moments, take my days, and may they be a chorus of endless praise. Lord, may we shine like stars in the universe, representing, well, the family to which we have been connected by Your grace. In Jesus name, Amen.