Can We Defeat God

Have you ever gotten frustrated with the church?

Perhaps you heard that WCC or NCC took some action that you disagreed with.

Or maybe the denomination or the local Presbytery made a decision that infuriated you.

Or perhaps your local church or a neighboring church acted in a way that seemed to you to contradict the Christian faith.

Have you come close to deciding that the church is just a waste of your time?

You have given it a lot of your time and energy and for what?

The church is not growing,

When the news media reports another scandal – often sexual or financial, or about churches at war with each other– you get embarrassed admitting to other people that you are a member of a church.

Who wants to be part of such a bunch of hypocrites, anyway?

And if you have not felt that way, I’ll bet that you know others who say such things.

What do you suppose that God had in mind when he sent Christ who called the disciples and formed the church?

If you were cynical enough, you might conclude that from the beginning God seemed to either be a poor planner or hopelessly naïve.

According to Scripture, God created the world and almost immediately humans began to rebel and mess up the creation.

At one point things got so bad that God considered destroying the whole mess but couldn’t quite do it.

There was a flood but God saved Noah and his family and then when the flood ended, the first thing Noah did was to go out and get drunk.

Then God chose Abram and Sarai to at least form one group of people, eventually called Israel, that could show the rest of the world how to live.

And what did they end up showing the world –

An ungrateful bunch of complainers who never seemed to get it right.

So then God sent his son to save the world.

And Jesus formed the church from his believers.

The problem is that the story of the church is almost a mirror image of the story of Israel.

A constant pattern of self-centered pity and fighting among themselves.

Don’t you hear a modern echo of Paul’s words, “What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or I belong to Christ.” or I’m a Presbyterian, or I’m an evangelical, or I’ve been born again.

As a cynical friend of mine likes to say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

But when you think from a faith perspective, you have to ask what God had in mind.

Since God is all knowing, surely God knew the nature of humanity from the beginning.

The sinful nature of humanity could hardly have been a surprise to God.

Some have said that since God couldn’t save the world by defeating sin, God sent his only son to rescue the faithful out of this sinful world.

The early Gnostics believed that and we see it in the currently popular “Left Behind” series of novels.

The problem is that it makes the whole creation a failed experiment and reduces God’s saving power to rescuing the few while admitting failure in the larger plan of creation.

It paints a picture of God as a rather inept architect of a failed creation who desperately rescues a few as the building blows itself up.

When Paul was praying to God to remove the thorn from his side, he heard God saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Not only that, but Paul recognized that the thorn that was so troublesome for him was actually a gift from God for his own benefit.

Can the sinful nature of the church actually be a gift from God for our benefit?

Before we get too discouraged about the state of the church, perhaps we need to consider that God did know what God was doing.

The negatives that we are able to identify in the life of the church may well be used by God to bring about the redemption of the world.

A central and repeated theme of the Bible is that God does not work through perfect communities and perfect people to accomplish God’s purposes.

As God worked through the imperfect Abraham and the immoral David, along with countless others in the Bible,

As God worked through the early disciples that often misunderstood Jesus and frequently fought among themselves

So God can work through us to effect God’s intentions.

The issue is do we have faith to trust that God can do that?

Or to use a popular phrase, “Whether we cut and run.”

I’ve certainly had my share of frustrations with the church and church members over 40 years of ministry.

As a body of believers we can be as self-righteous, judgmental, petty, and self-centered as any other group of people in this world.

In fact, let’s be honest, as individuals each of us can be that way as well.

But what I have seen over those years are repeated examples of God’s power to act redemptively in the midst of this very human organization made up of imperfect people.

What I have learned is that that is the central truth of the cross.

Don’t forget that the cross was not intended to be a good thing.

The cross was the Roman form of capital punishment to execute the worst of their criminals.

When God chose to give the highest expression of God’s love for humanity by sending his son,

Humanity chose to give the most extreme expression of their rejection of God’s love by killing Jesus in a cruel and painful manner.

The cross really represents humanity at its worst.

So here we have the two extremes—God’s love at its best and humanities’ defiance at its worst.

Was God defeated by human sin?

On the contrary, God transformed the very symbol of that sinfulness, the cross, into a sign of God’s redemption.

And so God repeatedly does in the continuing Body of Christ.

So how should we choose to respond to that redemptive love of God?

I want to suggest to you that the behavior of your body is a major factor affecting the health of your spirit.

If, for example, when you woke up this morning, you said a cross word to another member of your family, your spirit shrivels a little.

If, on the other hand, some one at the office makes a mistake and instead of jumping all over them, you are graceful in helping them correct the mistake, you will find your own spirit lifted up and likely the whole body of workers will be strengthened..

The same is true for the body of the church.

There is a reason why Paul in almost all of his letters emphasizes the signs of faithfulness as being behaviors that exhibit the fruits of the spirit.

Imagine the impact on others when members of a church exhibit love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

It strengthens the spirit of the whole body.

And that is even more strongly demonstrated when those behaviors are in response to someone who has not acted very faithfully.

We can choose to live by what Paul refers to as the fruits of the flesh—enmity, strife, quarrels, dissensions, factions, etc.

OR we can choose to exhibit fruits of the spirit.

As the redemption of the world began in an out of the way village in the corner of an almost forgotten colony of the Roman Empire, so the redemption of our church may well begin here.

God has a way of surprising us with the impact of our faithfulness.

It tends to be contagious.