Sermon by Lyn Peden - Assistant Minister
Matt 7: 7-12
Have any of you run a marathon?
Would any of you like to run a marathon?
How many of you made New Year’s resolutions?
How many of you are still keeping them?
We’re really good at wanting to do things - learning a new sport, joining a weight watchers class or a gym, signing up for a night class. But the reality for many of us, is that we are better at wanting to do the new thing than actually doing it!
We all want to be better people, better Christians.
We all want to develop and produce the fruit of the spirit – love, joy, peace, patience etc.But wanting to do something and being intentional about doing it are 2 different things. This is the second of our five practices that we began exploring last week. We introduced these practices with radical hospitality. We talked about being invited and welcomed into church and the importance of all of us being responsible for that welcome and hospitality. This week we’re going to explore how we go about intentionally developing our faith once we are here.
Once we start going to church we join those who are already here on a journey of faith development. Perhaps a better way to describe it is that we are all on a journey of discovering more about God and letting those discoveries transform us.
Each of us comes to seek God; we come with questions about who God is and what God wants of us.
Just like the disciples who spent 3 years with Jesus, they too wanted to learn and discover more and more about God. Much of that learning involved them asking Jesus questions. Our faith development begins by us asking questions. As we become aware of God and seek to learn more about who God is and what God means to and for us.
But who do we ask?
This is where the church comes in.
The church is a community of people who gather and ask questions about God and who together seek to discover more about God.
The church has a responsibility today to offer a place where we can come and bring our questions.
We may not always get the answers we expected, we many not even get an answer, and often we will leave with more questions but that’s ok. The church has a responsibility to offer each of us ways of moving along the different stages of our journey. Each church chooses a variety of ways to do this.
The range of resources is pretty endless from Sunday School for children and sometimes adults, Alpha or other courses introducing people to what Christians believe, Bible studies, prayer meetings, house groups, book groups, new members classes, marriage or baptism classes. Each church chooses it’s resources based on the needs perceived by the ministry team or by the demands of the people in the church.
You’ve heard the phrase you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Well the church can offer all sorts of classes or resources but it is up to the individual to actually attend them.
Think of it this way, the minister is the parent and the members the children. When children are young they need to be guided and taught to the best of the parent’s ability. Each parent has their own ideas of how best to bring up their children.
Once a child grows and reaches maturity then they take on the responsibility of learning themselves.
So it is in church, the minister is responsible for ensuring that the church offers programs, classes to help those who are young in the faith to get a handle on what the church, God, prayer etc is all about and how they can be developed. But once these areas have been covered and the person has reached a level of maturity it’s up to each person to take responsibility for how they want to continue to improve their faith life. This does not make the minister or parent redundant, it just moves the responsibility onto the child/church member.
Here in Langside we offer a range of services from Sunday School for younger members and Youth Connextion for the growing teenagers to house groups twice a year and the recently started book group. We even had a prayer labyrinth during Lent.
For some people that is plenty and for others too much, but there may be some of you who want something completely different.
If you do please let us know.
One of the joys of the church for me is that we are a community, we are able to help each other, whatever stage we are at. Together we share worship and life together. Each of us brings a different perspective and the more varied the number of views the better.
One thing though that I think we are very bad at in church is talking about the basics of our faith – for me that means prayer and reading the Bible.
If you’ve ever been to weight watchers you’ll know that each week you get weighed and you are meant to have kept a diary of what you have eaten to help you spot where you are getting it right and what you need to do to get more weight off.
But in church no one stops you at the door and says what bit of the Bible were you reading this week or how many times did you pray – no one assesses our spiritual weight each week.
In fact I wonder if anyone has ever been asked a question about their spiritual well being either on a Sunday or any other day?
As a church we are very poor at looking out for each others spiritual health. And so it is left up to each individual to be intentional in our relationship with God in prayer and reading scripture and also in taking steps to develop our faith in other ways.
Faith development takes time and energy and it involves us taking responsibility for it and choosing to make it a priority in our lives.
Like other parts of life the priority we give it will change as other things happen, like a change in relationships or family life or a change in our daily routine - studying, working or retirement. But so long as we are aware of our needs and responsible for meeting them then we are doing ok.
I think we can all identify with this. We all want to have a closer relationship with God but it’s how we go about doing it, wanting it isn’t enough.
I want to play the piano but if I don’t have lessons and practice it will never happen, this is true for our faith development we all want to do something about it but unless we actually do something our faith will not grow and develop at all, in fact we may even give up on it all together.
Each of us has a responsibility to look after our faith development and to be intentional about it.
Let’s take time out this week to analyse where we are on our journey and take stock of how our spiritual health is and how good or otherwise we are about being intentional about our faith development. And let’s ask ourselves what would we like to see happening in church to help us develop our faith.
The church is here to help each of us to grow and journey together, but it can only do that if we all get involved and share our questions and ideas with each other.