God's People Gather: A Celebration of Christian Fellowship

God’s People Gather: A Celebration of Christian Fellowship

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a Sunday in January 2020. I was talking with Sandra, who, as you all know, is wise beyond her years. She was asking me what I thought about this whole coronavirus business that was coming out of China. Silly little me, I said to Sandra, “There’s only been one confirmed case in Canada so far. I feel for those Chinese people, but I’m not ready to be worried about an outbreak of conjunctivitis, or whatever it’s called, in Canada. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

Famous last words… If I could go back in time, I think I might just slap myself for being so naïve. It was less than 2 months later that we closed our doors and didn’t open them again until the end of June. What we thought was going to be this temporary, 2-week hiatus – this blip in our congregation’s history – is still dragging on, however many months later.

But here we are! Many things have happened since January 2020 – some good, some not so good – but for better or worse, here we are, back in God’s house with God’s people to hear God’s Word. Never before have I appreciated more the opening words of Psalm 122:

I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.”[1]

Rejoice, dear brothers and sisters in Christ! Celebrate this blessed privilege to participate in worship together, to be part of a Christian community together, and to serve God and our neighbours together.

Are you sensing a theme? Good! I hope you are, because there’s nothing subtle about the blessings we celebrate today, i.e. the joy of being together in worship, community and service.

We’re enjoying the first part right now. We’re worshiping God together! It seems like such a simple thing, but how don’t we take this for granted? For years – probably for your entire earthly life – you have always been able to come to church. There was a service every week. If your softball team had a tournament one weekend, you knew that you could always go to church the next weekend. If work took you out of town 2 Sundays a month, you knew there were always 2 more Sundays that you could come. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

But a year and a half later, not knowing from one month to the next whether another wave of the pandemic was about to strike, here we are. May we never take this for granted again.

Here we are gathered together to hear a pastor share the good news of God’s love, i.e. to announce the forgiveness of all of your sins for the sake of Jesus, your Saviour. You get to stand shoulder to shoulder with fellow sinners just like you who carry burdens of guilt just like you, but who, just like you, find relief in the cross of Christ, in the forgiveness of your sins.

Here we are gathered together to pray to our God, to cast all our anxieties on him, just as he invites us to, and to be reminded together of God’s abiding love for us and his promises to protect and provide for us.

Here we are gathered together to praise the name of the God who loves us, to lift up our voices in word and song to lift up our God in celebration for all the good that he given to us.

Here we are gathered together to do the one thing needful that Mary did our Gospel lesson for today. There are crockpots in the kitchen. There are school schedules to sort out, car problems to get fixed, moving plans to finalize, but here you are, just like Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet to hear the good news of God’s love for you, the glorious gospel that we have a God who sent his Son to save us, to set us free from sin and to give us hope both in this life and the next.

And that’s something that unites us – people from all over St. Albert and Edmonton, families whose family trees are rooted in different continents, people from every socio-economic bracket you can imagine, who have different political opinions and favourite sports teams. We’re all here together because God has united us together in the one faith we express together in worship.

It is a blessing to worship with you today.

But the amazing thing about our God is that the unity he gives us is not limited to this hour we spend in worship every week. If it were, then you might get to know people’s faces, maybe even their names, but as you’re confessing your sins together and receiving the promise of God’s forgiveness together, as you’re praising God’s name in song together, you’d just be two people walking parallel paths.

Thankfully, that’s not the limit of the unity and the fellowship that God gives us. We are blessed to be able bookend worship – before and after – with time to talk to each other, to get to know each other, to support and encourage each other.

Maybe this is your first time worshiping with us today. Maybe you don’t know another soul sitting in these seats today. I’d love for you to stick around and get to know them. Because these fellow Christians can be your lifeline in a tumultuous world.

For those of you who have worshiped with us before, who know the other people here, how many times have you gone home from church and said something like, “Wow, Emily is really going through a rough time. I’m going to need to keep her in my prayers this week. I’ll give her a call tomorrow to see how she’s doing.”

Or, “I’m so glad I was able to talk to Bill this morning. He’s such a good listener. It just felt so good to get everything out there and share what I’m going through with someone who cares.”

That’s the blessing that we have to be a Christian community – to be together, not just side by side as we worship the same God, but truly together, to encourage each other just as we heard in our Second Lesson today:

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another.[2]

It’s no wonder God wants us to gather together as his people. When we do, he blesses us with the joy of worshipping together, united in faith and purpose. He blesses us with the opportunity to experience true Christian community together.

But – at the risk of sounding like a late-night infomercial host – that’s not all! There’s more! When we gather together as God’s people, united in faith and love for each other, we also have the privilege of serving not only each other but alongside each other as we serve our neighbourhood and our world.

That’s what God’s people are supposed to do. We gather together here every week to fill ourselves with the good news of salvation in Jesus. We unload our guilt at the foot of the cross and receive the relief God promises us in Jesus. He breathes new life into us every time we hear his Word.

Then, we get emotional and practical support from our fellow Christians, who talk to us and encourage us, whom we can listen to and build up.

But then, together, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to use what God has given us to make a difference in the world he’s made for us. When God unites us in faith and bonds us together in community, then we have the blessed privilege of pooling our resources – our time, our talents, our treasures – to serve the people around us.

I think of those of you who are on a service team, opening up church and making everyone who walks through the door feel welcome; I think of those of you who are on the altar guild, beautifying our church in every season and preparing the Lord’s Supper every other week; I think of you choir members and offering counters, every one of you who brought a dish to pass or who helped set up chairs today, the lawn mowers, the Sunday School teachers. The list goes on!

We weren’t able to do any of those things for a while. But now we can, and now we must. Because there are children who need to be taught the precious truths of God’s Word. Can you spare one Sunday a month to help out our Sunday School?

There are members of our church and our community who still aren’t ready to be here. Can you press a few buttons to make the livestream work reliably week in and week out? You can be the reason God’s Word reaches those who need it most.

There are neighbours not so far away who need our help. St. Albert’s Food Bank is desperately looking for help for their food drive that’s going on right now. Can you drive to pick up a few bags of food for those in need?

And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure you can think of people in need and ways that together we can do more than just serve ourselves with God’s Word, but we can use the gifts that God has given us to serve the people he’s put in our lives.

That’s what the first Christians did. That’s what we read in our First Lesson:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had… God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them.[3]

A lot of things have happened since last January – some good, some not so good. But here we are, blessed to be united by faith in our one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, bound together into one Christian community, privileged to serve not only each other but alongside each other as we use the gifts God has given us for the betterment of our community and to the glory of the God who claims us as his own. Cherish this gift that God gives you. Don’t take it for granted. But take every opportunity to celebrate the true blessing it is to be united in worship, community and service. Amen.

[1] Psalm 122:1

[2] Hebrews 10:23-25

[3] Acts 4:32-34

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A God-Lived Life Is One that Craves God's Word

A God-Lived Life Is One that Craves God’s Word

The Pharisee never missed his time in the temple. Like clockwork, he was there for prayer. He brought his offerings. He wore the right clothes, said the right prayers, did the right things. Every box was checked on his religious resumé. He was doing it. He was living the God-lived life!

Or so it seemed. There was something missing, wasn’t there? He was living the God-looking life. When, counterintuitively, it was the tax collector, who had cheated people out of their money but who was forgiven, who had a relationship with God. It was the children, the ones who didn’t seem to be worth the time, who receive the kingdom of God. The God-lived life is the one whose relationship with God is based on his mercy, not on our merit.

So, where do you fit in? Do you seem to live a God-lived life, or, by the grace of God, do you live a God-lived life? The God-lived life is not just doing the right things. It’s being who God has made you—not someone who lives to gain God’s favor, but one who lives because of God’s favor. It’s doing things not because you are supposed to, but because it’s who you are. It’s the difference between going through the motions and experiencing the fulfillment of living your purpose. The God-lived life is a life lived in relationship with God, in reaction to God’s love and his life for you.

And so we could say that the God-lived life starts with being a disciple, a life that wants to learn more about God, that wants to grow closer to God. The God-lived life is a life that craves God’s Word. Our text is 1 Peter 1:22-2:3. In it, Peter encourages our good behaviour by reminding us that we have been born again, through the living and enduring word of God.

23 For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.

Peter’s going to talk about what it means to be born again in a second, but first let’s spend a second thinking about the agent of our rebirth. Peter calls it the living word of God. It’s alive and active. It does something. God’s Word is not dead or powerless. It makes a visible, tangible difference in our lives. It gives you a new life. Again, more on that new life in a second.

Peter also calls it the enduring word of God. Long after you are gone from this world that Word will still endure. Peter quotes Isaiah who had prophesied eight centuries earlier to make the same point. Isaiah was long dead and gone, but the Word he wrote endures:

24 For, “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, 25 but the word of the Lord endures forever.”

We are here and then gone, but God’s Word endures. It lasts forever. It’s the same word that for you as it was for your grandparents and great-grandparents, just as it will be for your children and grandchildren. God’s Word endures.

And then Peter says:

And this is the word that was preached to you.

Imagine that! The living Word that gives life – the word that God used to create the world – he gives to you. He puts that power in your hands. The enduring Word of God that offered the same comfort to Adam and Eve as it does for you and me he gives to you. He puts that legacy and heritage in your hands.

If you had access to something that powerful, that lasting, that important, what should you do with it? You should cherish it! You should use it! You should take every opportunity to be connected to that power and purpose.

But let’s be real. There’s probably a part of you today that came to church or tuned in out of duty or habit instead of eager excitement. You’ve had more than one day when a daily devotion wasn’t what you were looking forward to, but what you had to get done…or didn’t want at all. That Bible on your shelf or the app on your phone doesn’t always register in your mind when you think of your most prized possessions.

If you sacrificed and went above and beyond to give someone you love a precious gift and they acted like it didn’t matter that much to them, you’d be offended, right? If you saw a guy get down on his knee and give his girlfriend a diamond ring—and then you saw her toss it to the side like it was nothing—you’d be appalled. What does God feel when he sees our attitude toward his Word, that precious gift he has given us? What does he feel when he sees our attendance at Bible study, our faithfulness in daily devotion? Some days I don’t want to know the answer to those questions.

But in the living and enduring Word that God has given us, he shows us Jesus – “the Word made flesh,” as John called him – doing what we often fail to do. Even as a 12 year old in the temple, Jesus cherished the Word. He studied it and discussed it every chance he got. He used it to fend off the devil’s temptations, to perform miraculous signs and wonders, but above all to give you salvation.

The living and enduring Word of God tells you of God’s love for you; tells you of the sacrifice God made for you, the forgiveness Christ won for you through his perfect life and innocent death on a cross. It is precisely and only through this living and enduring Word of God that God makes you alive through faith in Jesus.

And now you are reborn! Peter goes on:

Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.

Since you’ve been given new life through the death of Jesus, you have a chance to put your old ways behind you. And to learn new ways too…

2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3 now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

Could the picture be more vivid? Maybe it’s just me because I have a newborn, but when he is hungry, there is nothing in this world he wants more than milk. No silly faces, no hugs from dad. All he wants is milk. And if I interrupt him, do you know what he does? He screams! His face gets red. He starts throwing his fists around. Why do babies do that? Well, first, they like milk. It tastes good to them. But, more than that, they need it. They need it to grow. Without it, they die. It’s a matter of life and death.

Now translate that picture to your reborn, newborn life in Christ. God’s Word is just as necessary for our faith as milk is for newborn babies. Without regular feedings in God’s Word, our faith gets weaker and would eventually die. But God’s Word tastes just as sweet as milk to a baby. What could be better than to hear that you are loved by God every day? So of course, Satan wants to spoil that for you.

Have you ever heard of post-Bible Basics syndrome? Bible Basics is usually the first Bible study people get involved in when they’re new to Christianity. I don’t know how many people have told me that their 12 weeks in Bible Basics were the best thing that ever happened to their faith. As a new Christian or someone coming back to it after a while, that regular commitment to Bible study, digging into God’s Word, strengthened their faith more than anything they had ever done. And that’s good! That’s proof that you’ve tasted that the LORD is good.

But then what happens? Satan tries to convince you that you don’t need it anymore. He wants you to celebrate your “graduation” and put Bible study behind you. And if you think that sounds silly then I invite you to look at our Bible study statistics. We haven’t had Sunday morning Bible class in a while, but the last time we did – pre-COVID – we were averaging just about half of worshipers in Bible study afterward. You look at Sunday School for our children – you know, the ones about whom Jesus said, “The kingdom belongs to such as these; let the little children come to me.” – you look at Sunday School and there were only kids to teach 2/3 of the time. 1/3 of the Sundays there weren’t any children to bring to Jesus.

That’s not exactly what you’d hope for from people who have tasted that the Lord is good, who have promised at youth or adult confirmations to be faithful in worship and Bible study. But that’s why Peter reminds us who we are and encourages us: “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk,” and notice why— “so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”

It's the living and enduring Word of God that God uses to rescue you from the punishment deserved for every time your life wasn’t the God-lived life he looks for. It’s the living and enduring Word of God that strengthens you to fight against every temptation. It’s the living and enduring Word of God that tells you of God’s love for you in Christ. So, crave it. Realize its value and don’t let anyone take that away from you.

By God’s grace, commit to living a God-lived life in this aspect. On your challenge cards for this month, there are challenges for several aspects of craving the Word. Commit to coming to worship and Bible study—and let your brothers and sisters in Christ hold you accountable. Challenge yourself to a daily schedule of Bible reading, to devotions with your family, to finding ways to be in the Word and protecting your time for it. Crave that pure spiritual milk and grow up in your salvation. Amen.

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