2020 Vision: Community
Transcript
Good to see each of you here today. It's so wonderful to look out and see this congregation, so many people here. I was talking to one of the ladies from Casey First before this started. Fall a year ago, fall of 18, our church spent 100 days in prayer and we had different prayer groups. She was telling me that her prayer group came over here and prayer walked this building and came in the sanctuary and prayed that God would fill it. And she came in this morning and looked around and said, my prayer's been answered.
Isn't that fantastic? Fantastic. Thank you. Greenville, when I was only about the eighth grade, felt like that God was calling me to be a pastor. And I worked toward that, went to North Greenville, to Furman and the Southern Seminary. And I got married.
My wife's Joy, see here at the front. We've been married for 49 years. We have two grown children. We have a son and a daughter. Our daughter has three sons. I mean, our son has three sons and our daughter has two girls.
And so we've got five grandchildren. And I had my first church. I started my first church when I was in seminary, and that was in 1971. So I've been a pastor for a little while. And keep learning. And it's just been exciting to serve God all these years.
Of course, there's been ups and downs and lean times and blessed times. Let me share with you how I ended up here at Casey First. After I retired full-time, I'd been at First Baptist Church at Newberry for 30 years. I retired full-time from there and wasn't ready to quit completely preaching. So I'd taken transitional pastor training.
And I'd done a couple of transitional pastor churches. One of them was Holland Avenue over here. And then after two, I was out for several months, and I began to like being out. You know, not having to get up and work and do all the things you've got to do. And we were attending church one Sunday morning. It was in August of 2018.
And the preacher that morning preached on what do you need to sacrifice to God? What do you just need to turn over to him and let him be in control of it? And you surrender that to him. And I thought to myself, or really the Spirit said to me, You're a retirement. You let God decide about that. And I said, Okay, Lord, I'll turn that over to you.
And committed to that in prayer during that service. The next morning, I got a call from Johnny Rumbaugh, our director of missions here in this association. He said that Dr. Pete Cassidy, who had been at this church for six years, had died suddenly. And would I come and fill in for him? And so I came the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and the Sunday after that, and after three or four Sundays, they called me to be their interim pastor.
And so I was here, you know, during that time, or since that time. And we began working on, Okay, what does God want us to do now? Considering what our resources are, and we've got tons of building resources. Considering our people resources, and we didn't have many, we began praying, Lord, what do you want us to do? And then we began looking at the options. And to make a long story short, in the process, we got connected with Mill City Church.
And Mill City Church had been praying, Lord, show us where you want us to, you know, buy land, pay for a building, whatever. Guess what? God has answered both of our prayers. He brought you to us, and we opened our arms to you. And one of the most exciting things in my ministry since 1971 has been the opportunity to see two churches come together and begin to get to know one another and work together and plan together and serve God together in this building and in this community. And I've just seen in so many ways something amazing happen.
This doesn't happen often for two churches to come together like this. And it's just so evident to me that God is in the midst of this. And I am just real excited to get to work with your pastors and with you and with our people who have been here at what we call Casey First. And it's just been a really exciting thing for me. And I'm glad that God gave me the chance to be a part of this. It's been a real blessing for me personally.
We are seeking to work together now. And Chet preached last Sunday on the gospel. And what that means is we begin to work together here in this community. Next week, Spencer will come and tell us some of the hows that we can work to carry out the mission he's given us. This morning, I want to speak about how we can better come together as one church family. And the purpose of all of these sermons is to give us some idea.
OK, what does it mean for us to be a gospel centered community on mission? And that's what we're all working toward. So we're going to think about that a little bit this morning. Now, have you ever noticed how humanity easily divides itself into different groups? We do that with nations. We do that with races.
We do that along economic lines. We do that with religions. We can even do that with trying to worship God. When I was in Newberry, Lewis Rich, the big turkey processing plant there, began hiring a lot of Hispanic people. And so the population grew very much in Newberry. And we thought they need a gospel witness.
And so our church started a Hispanic church. And they began to grow. And they started meeting in our church. And then just completely by the grace of God, they were given a church building. The congregation had completely died out. And they were just given this nice church building.
And they continued to grow. They had their own pastor. It was going really well. And then they split. They split over the different worship styles between the Mexican Christians and the Guatemalan Christians that were in that church. It's easy for us to divide ourselves into different groups.
That was true in New Testament times. In New Testament times, the Jewish people knew that they were the chosen people of God, that God had a special mission for them. They just kind of didn't grasp all of the ramifications of that. And so they looked at themselves as God's special people, the Jews. And everybody else, everybody else in the whole world was a Gentile. And they thought that they were pretty special.
And the Gentiles looked at the Jews and thought, these people are a bunch of prideful nobodies. And so there was a lot of contention between the two. Let me give you an illustration of that contention. The temple that was there in Jerusalem. By this time, it had been built into an elaborate structure. And there was the place, the building proper, where only the priests could go in.
Outside of that was the court of the Jewish men. And outside of that was the court of the Jewish women. And outside of that was the court for the Gentiles. They could come and worship God, just not real close. They had to keep their distance. Now, there were walls dividing these open areas.
And on the walls between the court of the Gentiles and the court of the women, there were signs on the gates in those walls. And they're mainly more like fences. And the sign said, if you're a Gentile and come any further, you'll be responsible for your own death, which will result. In other words, they couldn't come close to God. They had to keep their distance. Now, think about that and that scripture that we read a little earlier from Ephesians 2.
And you might want to look in your Bibles. Some of you can look at Ephesians 2 and find that all right. In the Pew Bibles, that's page 568. And this passage begins to tell some of the things that how the Gentiles were in reality before they became Christians. And the reason this is being addressed is because as the gospel began to spread after Jesus' death and resurrection, then the gospel went to the Jews and then it spread beyond the Jews and Gentiles began to be Christians. And so you had a whole lot of Gentiles coming into the church.
And Jews were in the church. And, oh, how were they going to get together? There had been such a divide there. So this letter of Ephesians was written primarily to Gentile Christians to help them understand, you know, what could be done to help them accept the Jews and as a corollary of what Jews could do to accept the Gentiles. So we're going to look at some of these verses that were read a little bit earlier first before we get down to the actual verses that I'm going to read a little bit later.
But if you would look at verse 12 of Ephesians chapter 2, it says this, Remember, and he's primarily addressing Gentiles here, Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Now, look at this, separated from Christ. It's hard to be separated from Christ. If you don't have Jesus, you don't have a Savior. If you don't have Jesus, you don't have a Lord who can rule your life and give you the assurance that he's the one that's going to be in charge for all of eternity.
And if you belong to him, then you're going to be taken care of. If you don't have Jesus, you don't have the one that called himself the good shepherd who watches over his people and keeps them in his care and laid down his life for them. And no one can snatch them out of his hand. They were without Christ. And then it says they were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. In other words, Israel was the people of God.
And they weren't part of the people of God. They were alienated from them. When this was written, if you could have Roman citizenship, then it meant something. Some people were born into Roman citizenship. Some people bought it. But if you had it for whatever reason, and most people didn't, you had certain privileges and response.
You had certain privileges and things that came to you that the normal person didn't have. And when we're a part of God's people, there are certain things that are a blessing to us. And we have those things, but the Gentiles didn't have those things. They were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. And then strangers from the covenants of promise. God gave his people in the Old Testament several different covenants.
One of the ones was with Moses. Remember when Moses led the children of Israel out of slavery in the land of Egypt? And on the way to the promised land, they went to Sinai. And God gave them the Ten Commandments and his laws. And he said, you let me be your God and follow my laws. And I will be your God and let you be my people.
That was the covenant that he made with them. There was the covenant with David. God went to David and said, I am going to make of your offspring one who will have an eternal kingdom. And of course, that was fulfilled in Jesus. Remember when the angel went to Mary and was announcing that she was going to bear the Messiah? And the angel said to her, of his kingdom there will be no end.
That's God's promise. God's covenant. In the book of Hebrews, the writer picks up on something that Jeremiah said from the Old Testament. And listen to this. Man, that's a neat sounding covenant, isn't it? Our sins to be remembered by God himself no more.
So many blessings for being part of the people of God. And yet the Gentiles were away from that. But it goes on. And it says, having no hope. No hope. They probably hoped in some things.
A lot of people hope in things today. A lot of our hope is, in essence, just wishful thinking. We hope something will come true. But we have no guarantee that that will happen. But biblical hope is different.
It's based on the promises of God. And we know they're going to happen. When he made those promises, they happened. When he makes the promise that he'll forgive us our sin. When he'll give us eternal life. When he'll take us to heaven when we die.
We know. Because it's based on the promise of our faithful God. But the Gentiles didn't have that kind of hope. Their hope was just wishful thinking. And then, without God in the world. Man, that's hard.
Now, they didn't design the existence of God. In fact, the Gentiles worshipped a whole lot of different gods. If you ever read Greek or Roman mythology. You read about all of those gods that they worshipped. Nothing like the true and living God. The eternal God.
The creator God. If you're without that God. Then you are without hope. They had no knowledge of the one true God. They had religion. But they didn't have a relationship with the living God.
Isn't this one of the saddest verses in the Bible? You were at that time. Separated from Christ. Alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. Strangers to the covenants of promise. Having no hope.
And without God in the world. Guess what? That wasn't just the Gentiles then. That's us today. Before we had Jesus. That's the way we were.
So. Praise the Lord. In that kind of state. God came to us. He said Jesus. And we're going to see what Jesus did.
He did some amazing things for us. Look at verse 13. It says, but now. I like it when the Bible says, but now. It usually means that, you know. There's something in bed.
But God's doing something. This is going to be better. So he says, but now in Christ Jesus. You who were once far off. Have been brought near by the blood of Christ. We were far off from God.
We were separated from God because of our sins. And we have been brought near. Because Jesus died on the cross. Because he was willing to hang there. And shed his blood. So that our sins might be forgiven.
So that we might be given eternal life. Jesus did that. He opened the way for us to have forgiveness. He brought us near. You know, Jesus was always bringing people near. When you think about Jesus' ministry.
You realize that he was always bringing people near. You think in John chapter 4. About the woman at the well. She was a pretty immoral woman. She was a woman who was confused about religion. She was a woman who was evidently shunned.
By most of the people in her little town. And yet Jesus came to her. Talked to her. Told her the truth. He changed the whole trajectory of her life. He brought her near to God.
And she was living for a new purpose from then on. Jesus is bringing people near. Jesus brought Zacchaeus near. Zacchaeus in Luke chapter 19. Zacchaeus was a short man. And he was a tax collector.
Don't you hate April the 15th coming? Oh no. Oh goodness. We still don't much like tax collectors. Did you hear about the man that walked into a restaurant. With an alligator on a leash.
And he went over and sat out at a table. And the waitress came. And he said. Will you serve tax collectors here? And she said. Oh yes sir.
We'll do that. He said. Good. I'll have a steak. And bring my gator a tax collector. Well.
Back in New Testament times. Where Zacchaeus lived. In Palestine. They hated tax collectors more than we did. Because see. That tax collector.
Was. Collecting taxes. For the Roman government. Not the Jewish people. They were paying taxes. To a foreign nation.
And for him. As a Jewish man. To collect taxes. For the invaders. He was considered to be a traitor. And the way that system was set up.
It was easy to be a tax collector. Who cheated people. And got rich yourself. And so. Zacchaeus. Was away from his people.
And probably because of that. He was away from God too. And when he heard that Jesus. Was coming to town. Because he was such a short guy. And couldn't see what was going on.
Because of the press. He climbed up in a tree. So we could see Jesus. And Jesus saw him up in the tree. Told him to come down. And somewhere.
Beside the time. That he was up in those branches. By the time he hit the ground. Jesus had changed him. And he said. Lord.
That's a pretty good title. To call it for Jesus. If I have cheated anybody. I will pay it back. And Jesus said. This one too.
Has become a son of Abraham. A son of the people of God. He was one. That Jesus brought near. The man who read this scripture. We were reading this morning.
Was the. Apostle Paul. And Paul. Was once. A very religious man. A Jewish man.
Who kept the law. And was zealous for God. To the point of persecuting Christians. Because he thought they were completely wrong. And yet Jesus appeared to him. On the road to Damascus.
When he was going to have Christians. Arrested and persecuted. And changed him. And brought him near. Jesus is in the business. Of bringing people near.
We were separated. But Jesus. Brings us. Near. We've been brought near. By his.
Cross. By his shedding. His blood. Blood. Jesus. Also.
Is the one. Who brings us peace. Jesus comes. And preaches. Peace. I believe it's here.
In. Verse 17. It says. And he came. And preached. Peace.
To you who are far off. And peace. To those who were near. Jesus brings peace. Scripture says. That we who have been justified.
That we who have been justified. By faith. Have peace with God. Through the Lord Jesus Christ. Before we accept Jesus. It's like we're at war with God.
You know. We don't want to submit to him. We don't want to. Don't want to. Obey his commands. We want.
We don't want to. Accept the fact. That we are sinners. And don't deserve. Really anything good. And yet.
When we accept Jesus. Then Jesus. Makes us at peace. With God. And. We don't look at God.
As an enemy anymore. As a tyrant. As somebody. Who's out to get us. We see God. As a heavenly father.
As one who loves us. Who cares for us. Who's going to help us. Who's going to guide us. In the right way. And this is not something.
We earn by ourselves. Or. Or make up by ourselves. Or search for peace. Or finding it another way. It comes through Jesus.
If you. Look at the. Part in verse 14. He says. For he himself. Is our peace.
And. In the. Last part of verse 15. He said. That he might create it himself. One new man.
In place of the two. So making peace. In other words. He gives us peace with God. And he gives us peace. With all.
Other believers. If you've accepted Jesus. And accepted the peace. That he's given. Then. Not only do you have peace.
With God. But you're going to do your best. To stay at peace. With other believers. He brings us together. That way.
Reconciling us. To those. And then. He does one other thing. He gives us. Access.
To God. In verse. 18. He says. For through him. We both have access.
In one spirit. To the father. In. Verse 12. Of chapter 3. He says.
In whom. We have boldness. And access. With confidence. Through our faith. In him.
Because Jesus. Has become our high priest. Then. We are able. To go into the presence of God. That's what Chet preached on.
Last Sunday. That. That we have access. To God. Because. Of Jesus.
And we can go to God. In prayer. We can go to God. For help. We can go to God. For direction.
We can go for God. For power. To live the Christian life. We have access. To him. And he blesses us.
In these ways. Makes tremendous difference. In our lives. One of the churches. Where my wife and I. Were attending.
When I was. In between. Some of these transitional. Churches. There was a young woman there. Who was a vibrant Christian.
Outgoing. Fully accepted. By the congregation. Just. Just a. A.
B. A. A. A. A. A.
A. A. A. herself and then was in a bad car wreck. And she was in the hospital for several days. And while she was in the hospital, her house was burglarized. And it was just like her whole world was falling apart.
And she remembered a little bit of what she'd learned when she was a little girl about Jesus. And she called out to him and invited him into her life. And she became that Christian who was, I described her as so vibrant and excited about the faith and was fully accepted by that church. You know, she had been brought near, given peace and had access to God and other believers as well. Jesus does these things for us. He brings us near.
He gives us peace. He gives us access to God. Now, on the basis of that, what are we supposed to be as his people? What are we supposed to be as a church? Let's look and see what the scripture says that we are so that we can begin to leave it out.
Ephesians chapter two, beginning with verse 19. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by his spirit. So what are we now? First part of verse 19, no longer strangers, but you are fellow citizens with the saints. Saints means Christians.
You're a fellow citizen. You have citizenship in the kingdom of God. And remember, that's an everlasting kingdom. Now, I imagine that most of you are probably citizens of the United States. And because you're a citizen of the United States, then you have certain privileges. You have freedom of speech.
You have freedom of religion. You have freedom of assembly and a whole bunch of other freedoms as well. You also have some responsibilities. You have the responsibility to pay those taxes we were talking about earlier. You have the responsibility to obey the law. You should vote and be involved in the political process.
Those should be, you know, responsibilities we gladly accept because we are so blessed to be citizens of our country. Kingdom of God works the same way because we who are believers are part of the kingdom of God. Then we have certain privileges. We have the privilege to go to God. We have the privilege to have our sins forgiven. We have the privilege of God's direction.
We have the privilege in the church of having people, people who care for us and who work with us and help us in ways when we need help. And we have responsibilities. You know, we care for one another. We were concerned for one another. We help one another. We, we build each other up.
We keep each other going in the right direction in the faith. We, we bring the encouragement that people need. Amen. Now, let me speak to those of you who were members of Casey first before. Yeah. We have got a lot of young people in here.
They are so enthusiastic. They do so much work around this place. Isn't it amazing how it's been transformed in such a short time? Just the building itself. It just, I can't get over it. It's just fantastic.
But let me tell you something, just because they're here doing this kind of work doesn't mean you can kick your feet up and do nothing from now on. Okay. You still need to give your encouragement. You've got wisdom. You've got skill. You've got experience.
That's going to be a blessing for them. You can still volunteer to do things. You, you can volunteer to help. You could, you could volunteer to help maybe with childcare sometime, give some parents. I guess I got a lot amens on that, huh? We're glad to do that.
But remember, most of us are old. Not too many at once, please. But you get the idea, you know, we're together. Yeah, we, we, we could share one another with these responsibilities because you see verse 19, he says, you're members of the household of God. In other words, we are part of the same family. We all belong to the same God.
We all have the same Jesus as our savior. God is our father. If you're a Christian, God is your father. You know, he said that in verse 18, he said, for we have our access in one spirit to the father. When Jesus gave us the model prayer, he taught us to pray our father. So if we've got one father, what are we?
We're brothers and sisters of the Lord. God's our father. We're related to one another. We're brothers and sisters of the Lord in a good family, in a good family, there's acceptance. There's affirmation. There's the, the imparting of values.
There's correction. There's encouragement and guidance and all of those things. And you know, we value one another. We support one another. We encourage one another. That's part of being a family.
And as the church, we're a family and we ought to be doing those things for each other. Give me a personal illustration of how valuable a family can, a church family can be. 1997, my wife had breast cancer, did the surgery, found out that it had spread. It was in the lymph nodes. She was going to need regular treatment. She was also going to need a stem cell transplant.
They were doing those over at Richland at the time. So through the summer, she had the regular treatments, you know, that knocks your immune system down. So she was in the hospital a couple of times from that. Then she went in from the stem cell transplant. Basically what they do is they harvest your stem cells out of your blood, put them aside, and then zap you with so much chemotherapy, you know, kills all the cancer supposedly, but you know, it wipes out your whole immune system. So you have no resistance to anything.
So she was in the hospital in isolation for five and a half weeks. So, you know, then they, you know, they re-infuse your stem cells and you get your immune system back, but it takes a while. So even after she got home, she couldn't be around people and she certainly couldn't get out and go to church. And so on Sunday morning when I would go to preach, she would sit down in front of the TV, get on her hymnal, turn on First Baptist Church of Columbia and worship with them. And when they would sing, she would sing the hymns with them with tears, gorsing down her cheeks. Because she missed her church family and couldn't worship with them.
You get that close in a family. And then she had to have 30 radiation treatments. And the church had let me be out while she was in the hospital. And so I needed to be at work every day. Somebody from the church would come by, pick her up, bring her to Columbia for a radiation treatment. You can get them Newberry now, but you couldn't then.
And so every day there was somebody helping, supporting. And in the meantime, so many people praying. And such a blessing our church family was to us that it's hard to put it into words. That's our dream. That's our dream. That's our dream that all of us together, all ages, all backgrounds, all of us together will become that kind of family.
And as we become that kind of family, what are we? That's what Jesus is seeking to do. Let's look at verse 20. Built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him, you also are being built together as a dwelling place, Christ Jesus, the spirit. We're the temple of God.
And Jesus is the cornerstone. Now today, when we have a cornerstone, you know, in a building, it's kind of a decorative stone. It may have a cavity in it and you place, you know, mementos in it or something historical in it or something like that. New Testament times, that wasn't the cornerstone. Cornerstone was the main foundational stone is the building. It carried a lot of its weight, supported the way the building was going to be built and grow and shaped.
You know, the cornerstone was the very foundation. Jesus is the very foundation of our lives together as a congregation. He's the cornerstone. We are being built on him. And we become God's temple. You know, you ask the average person today and you say to them, what's the meaning of the word church?
And most people are going to say to you a building. That's not the way it is. You who were members of the former Mill City were a church before you had a building. When I was a boy, he used to have this little thing that get us to do as children. You know, they'd say, here is the church and here is the steeple. Open the door and there's all the people.
Well, guess what? That's not right. This is not the church. This is the church. The people are the church. You are the church.
And God is building us into a holy temple. He puts us together. Each one of us of stone. And God's purpose is not to have a lot of individual stones laying around on the ground, not associating with one another. He builds us together in the church to make a building for his purposes, a building for his glory. It's God's work.
I guess most of you probably, you know, it's all about Notre Dame burning this past summer, that great cathedral in Paris, you know, hundreds of years old, took decades and decades to build, you know, and then saw a report the other day that there's probably only a 50-50 chance that thing can be restored. Well, it's kind of sad to lose a building with that historical importance and to lose a cathedral in that sense. But, you know, the greatest cathedral doesn't compare with a group of people who have turned from their sins, accepted Jesus as their Savior, have come together in faith and worship and serve Him together. That's the church.
That's what makes a difference. Man can build pyramids. Man can build the Parthenon. Man can build skyscrapers. But God builds the church and He builds it out of people just like you and I.
He's the one that builds the church. He makes a difference. And, you know, we are being built together to a dwelling place for God by His Spirit. We're being joined together in a holy temple. Now, one of the reasons that they made those old cathedrals so great, and one of the reasons people for hundreds of years have built church buildings with steeples and things all the time, was to give God glory so that people would recognize there is a God and glorify Him. Well, guess what?
That thought was right. But the idea, biblically, is that we, the people who make up the church, have a purpose, and our purpose is to glorify God. We glorify Him through working with one another, through accepting one another, through serving together, through ministering together, through impacting our community together, through loving one another. That's what we're supposed to be about. That's what we're supposed to be doing. When we do that, we will set an example for this community so that people will look and say, hey, what's going on over there?
Maybe we need to check that out. And they'll have the opportunity to come to find out about Jesus. You know, something else. If we make this work, and I think God's already shown us that this is going to work, this bringing of ourselves together, that provides an example for a lot of other churches in our state who are dying, or a lot of other new starts who need some method to move forward. Now, I'm not saying that's what every one of those needs. Everybody doesn't need to do the same thing.
But there's some that can look at what's been done here and think, hey, it's possible. God did it there. Maybe He can do it with us. We have a chance to bring glory to God as we come together. Let God bring us near. Give us His peace.
Give us access to God and we use it. And then turn us into a family, a temple of people who bring glory and honor to God. Isn't it great to be part of a church family? Our dream this coming year for 2020 is that all of us together will use this opportunity to become one family who glorifies the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.
Amen.
