Of Penicillin and Fruit

 

Thursday, January 27, 2022

God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts.  Use them well to serve one another.  Do you have the gift of speaking?  Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you.  Do you have the gift of helping others?  Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies.  Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ.  All glory and power to him forever and ever!  Amen.  1 Peter 4:10-11

Everything God created is a gift in some distinct way.  “Special” is a word that is usually reserved for something that is a cut-above the expected.  And anything God gives falls in that cut-above category.  That includes you, me, and everyone else in creation.  It is my belief that each of us is born with spiritual possibilities which God has given, and we are to develop, in accord with whatever God places in our pathway. 

The first of these gifts is love.  As we begin cooperating with God’s plans and promises, we first accept His offer of salvation, or, as John Wesley often reminded the troops, rescue from the wrath to come.  Past that, we are to put our spiritual gifts to work serving the One who loved and saved us.  As we do this there is a progression of working in God’s vineyard with differing gifts of prophesying (preaching), faith, healing, discernment, and the fruit which the Holy Spirit brings to the body of Christ:  love, joy, peace, gentleness, patience, and more.[1]

But what happens if we fail to cooperate with the gifts, and the spiritual fruit God expects?  Just like with the analogy Peter and Paul use of spiritual gifts producing spiritual fruit, unengaged gifts make for spiritual fruit mold.  Mold is like spiritual gifts unused…the fruit possibilities dry-up on the vine and become mold.

I met a man early in ministry when I served as pastor in North Central Florida.  He was serving on the grounds committee of the church.  The first time I met Henry[2] was at the back door of the parsonage in which our family would live the following years.  In the conversation I found he’d been a pastor…for a few months.  He was now earning a living with his carpenter skills.  I inquired why he was not pastoring any more.  His reply was just three words:  Couldn’t live it!  To his credit, I will say that Henry didn’t just walk away from the church, he found ways to serve God, even though the gifts and calling of pastoral ministry were there.  I never learned the details of “couldn’t live it” but over the years I knew him, it was sadly-clear something had happened to interrupt the development of fruit-production, as his spiritual gifts were left like unused tools on a workbench.

Apostle Peter’s admonishment to us in today’s Scripture lesson is to use them well to serve one another.  We are to use our spiritual gifts to produce fruit in the life of the body of Christ…and be a blessing to the entire world. 

For You Today

You are breathing!  And that is all the sign you need that God gave you spiritual gifts to be used in cultivating spiritual fruit, that which God uses to bless His creation.  If your fruit is a little moldy because you’ve been neglecting time in the vineyard, it isn’t too late to get busy.  You do know that God can take mold and make healing penicillin.  So, what will you do with the time you have left? 

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and Other Images:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

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[1] Study these passages for a deeper understanding:  Romans 12, Galatians 5:16-25, 1 Corinthians 12

[2] OK…so he wasn’t really named Henry…but he’s a real person, and so was the conversation.

Emptying the Church

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Monday, August 13, 2018

Carefully determine what pleases the Lord.  Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness; instead, expose them.  It is shameful even to talk about the things that ungodly people do in secret.  But their evil intentions will be exposed when the light shines on them, for the light makes everything visible. This is why it is said, “Awake, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”  Ephesians 5:10-14^(NLT)

The trend towards everything personal in today’s culture is emptying the church.  It’s not that people have no spirituality about them; in fact, according to most religion studies, more people are interested in the spiritual side of life these days than previously.  But this overwhelming emphasis on personal freedom, personal growth, and personal choices make the church an impractical anachronism, a useless institution that misses the mark of what individuals want today.  And that word want is the key that opens Pandora’s Box.

God designed the church to be exactly what humans need, and not necessarily what we want.  And in the scheme of things, as we push through this life under the influence of our fallen nature, we crave what we want much more than what we need. 

The apostle Paul tells us we should carefully determine what pleases the LORD.  That is so different than our human bent, which is to move towards the darkness of selfishness, pleasing self.  However, in our human proclivity towards the darkness of selfishness, too often we fail to see that moving towards what pleases the LORD (moving towards the light) is that one needful thing our souls really crave.

As I read the statistics and opinions about how the institutional church is slowly sinking into oblivion I am impressed with two thoughts:

1.      An institution that fails in its mission ought to go out of business.

Everything about the church’s mission is geared towards bringing praise, glory and honor to God through Jesus Christ.  If we cannot center on doing that, we miss the purpose for which we exist; we become self-serving, and we live in darkness.  That version of church doesn’t deserve to be called “Christian”.

2.      God’s Word is true.

Jesus gave us the ultimate reality check in his conversation with Peter. 

…upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it.  Matthew 16:18b(NLT)

If we believe-in Christ, trust, and rely on His word being true, how can we simply opt-out of Christ’s church…particularly in favor of some personal pseudo-spirituality that creates aloofness and separation?  Rather, God has specifically called us into fellowship with believers.

Emptying the church (as I’ve entitled this post) is an oxymoron for true believers; you don’t leave the church – that is like leaving Christ.  How can the foot depart from the leg and still be a foot?  How can the hand say it needs nothing but absence from the body which needs the hand to feed it?  How can the stomach despise the hand that feeds it?[2]

The denominations (groups of churches) that claim to follow Christ are not infallible; neither are they holy when they call sin holy and refuse to move from that stand.  It is right that believers do everything possible to help correct the heresy.  But if the refusal to repent stands, the only choice left is to stand-apart from that group.   

For You Today

Let’s let the apostle have the final word today:

Don’t team up with those who are unbelievers.  How can righteousness be a partner with wickedness?  How can light live with darkness?  What harmony can there be between Christ and the devil?  How can a believer be a partner with an unbeliever?  And what union can there be between God’s temple and idols?  For we are the temple of the living God.  As God said:  “I will live in them and walk among them.  I will be their God, and they will be my people.  Therefore, come out from among unbelievers, and separate yourselves from them, says the Lord.  Don’t touch their filthy things, and I will welcome you.  And I will be your Father, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”  2 Corinthians 6:14-18^(NLT)

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day. 

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[1] Title Image:  Courtesy of Pixabay.com

[2] See Paul’s discourse on this concept in 1 Corinthians 12