The Resolved Church Must Die
This is the second of a three part sermon series addressing the story of The Resolved Church, what it means to be a church plant, how a church plant happens and what the vision and goal of The Resolved Church is. This sermon was originally preached on July 15th, 2007 at The Resolved Church.
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:: The Resolved Church :: July 15th, 2007 :: Pastor Duane M. Smets
“The Resolved Church Must Die”
A Theology of our Hearts
Mark 8:34-38
Mark 8:34-38
34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
Introduction
Read text and pray. Father God this is your book, Jesus this are your words, we are here today as your people and have come to worship you and ask that by your Spirit you might learn from this passage of Scripture, be affected deep in our hearts by it, and be caught up into action for the sake of Jesus and his gospel as we await his coming. Amen.
Here’s what going on to try and catch all of you up. It’s summer so that means vacations, and travel, and school is out, and that often means missing Sundays. And that is okay, I’m not complaining (too much). God rested on the seventh day to teach us about rest, Jesus modeled that principle as well by frequently going away into the mountains to get away, and so I believe God likes and loves vacations. It is just hard if you are a new church plant because you start to feel like some kind of freakish cult when there’s like 15 people here. So I promise you we are not, I’m not going to start drinking blood and playing with snakes or anything. J
So, here is the deal. Three weeks ago I finished our fifth and final sermon of the “No Condemnation in Christ” series looking at Romans 8:1-4. Then the next week, I did something I really don’t like doing anymore but I shared my personal life story and some of the experieniential aspects of why I believe God has called us to start The Resolved Church here in San Diego. Then last week my good friend Bobby Key, came and preached for me because I was out of town doing a wedding. I listened to his sermon online on Monday and was pleased to hear that God used him to minister to many of you in a deep way. That brings us to today and here is what is up with the next few weeks.
I’m going to take two more weeks off of Romans before we return and start the next series called “Walking According to The Spirit.” Today, I want to preach a sermon about death and us dying and Jesus from the gospel of Mark. So it should be a really exciting and happy day today. J Then next week we might do something really crazy and preach from a passage in the Old Testament, maybe. There are a few reasons I want to take two more weeks before we go back to Romans. One is, God has been doing some deep work in my heart that I just cannot ignore because it not only has to do with me but all of us and who we are as a church. The other reason is because we are approaching a critical stage in the life of our church.
Two weeks ago I wrote this for our weekly church email (we sent it out again this week just because I wanted to make sure all of you got a chance to read it). Here is part of what I said,
“The Resolved Church is really in a do or die spot. We must grow or we will perish and I don’t mean that lightly. The reality is at this point in time The Resolved Church will not continue if I am not its pastor and for me to continue being our pastor we must grow numerically for a few reasons. One, I will die inside if souls are not saved. My heart is to see souls be saved and God has not called me to just start a cool church, he has called me to create a strong refuge in the city of San Diego where sinners may run into its safety and be saved by Jesus our Lord. Two, I believe we are in danger of becoming like those people in Isaiah 6:9-11 who God said would get fat hearts by hearing and knowing the word of God but never putting it into practice to the point where God destroys the city. The city that has begun in The Resolved Church and the city I dream will become a strong city within the city of San Diego, will be removed by God if we are not living lives that are pleasing to God and lives that are winning souls into God’s kingdom. The simple truth is you get good teaching at The Resolved Church, I make sure of that. But we are in danger of getting fat on it. Three, our money will run out. Gary Warkentin, my father in law, who is The Resolved Church’s financial administrator, told me that for the past few months we have been between $400 and $500 dollars below budget. At the end of June, our church bank account had about $13,000 dollars left in it but if we consistently have to dip into those funds then money will eventually run out and we will have to close our doors. I say that not to scare you but to hopefully spark the fire that is in me in you. It is a fire that will do anything short of selling out on the gospel to make this church plant happen.”
So today I decided to title my sermon “The Resolved Church Must Die.” What do I mean? Here is how I want to answer that. First, we need to do some work with this text in Mark so that we make sure that it is God and his Word and Jesus teaching that is driving us and not our own clever ideas. Second, there is a connection with what Jesus says here and an overall theme in the Bible concerning our hearts even though Jesus doesn’t use the word “heart” here. And then third, I want to talk openly and honestly and practically about what that means for each of individually and together for this church.
Exegeting Mark 8:24-38
Okay, so let’s look at some stuff in Mark 8. Here is what is going on in the book of Mark. Mark was the first gospel, the first compilement of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. It is also the shortest and is action packed. Mark’s favorite word other than Jesus is “immediately.” First this happens then that, then Jesus says this and then he does that. It is one of those page turning books if you sit down and read it from start to finish.
Here’s where we’re at in the book in Mark 8. It’s a little more than half-way through the book chapter wise but it is toward the end of Jesus life story wise. Jesus has just performed this crazy miracle where there are like 4,000 men plus their women and children, so probably easily over 10,000 people, that’s almost the size of the Sports Arena. And Jesus takes seven loaves of bread and three fish and somehow gets all these people to bring these empty baskets to him and he prays a prayer and when he is done praying all the baskets are full of bread and fish. And so everybody eats and when he is done there are 7 baskets full still filled with food.
After that, the crowd is pretty hyped up about Jesus and are following him around. Jesus performs another miracle healing this blind dude and then I suppose Jesus figures he needs to thin the crowd out or something because he calls them together and he gets real serious and begins to tell everyone that he is going to suffer and die and then three days later rise again and he tells them what that means for people if they want to follow him. And that is where we pick up the story.
Read verse 34. Let’s look at that phrase “deny himself.” It doesn’t mean only men here. The possessive “self” here is not meant to be gender specific but to probe at one’s individual identity. So the question is what is Jesus getting at?
Back then they did not have this highly developed and generally accepted psychological system like we do today of “self” like we do today. Today we have: self-actualization, self-awareness, self-concept, self-disclosure, self-efficacy, self-esteem, self-harm, self-help, self-image, self-monitoring, self-realization, self-talk and a whole host of other jargon constructed to aid our humanist attempts to try and understand the human person apart from God.
For the first century person, the “self” was highly connected to who one’s family is. What their heritage was, who their parents parents, what country they were from, what their family’s religious background was. So Jesus was doing something quite radical in challenging the individual person.
This word “deny” is an interesting word translated from haparneiomai in Greek. It means reject or disown. After Jesus died and rose again and the church got started many people started becoming Christians and that was such a radical deparature from their family’s beliefs and heritages that many Jewish families would try and manipulate and control their children and they would hold funerals for their family members if they became Christian as if to say, if you follow Jesus then you are dead to me.
Speaking to such situations Jesus says, in a passage in the gospel of Luke that if anyone wants to follow him they must be willing to leave their father and mother and brothers and sisters behind. If anyone wants to follow him, wants to be a Christian, they must “deny themselves.” Would you be willing to leave your family for Jesus?
And we are a whole step removed from that because most of us don’t even value our families too much in our culture. Rebellion against your family’s wishes and values is almost cherished as virtue. Romeo and Juliet are our heroes and parents are just seen as old and ignorant. When we think of who we are and our identity we most often do not think of our families do we? We think about our jobs or our musical tastes or our clothing style or our bank accounts.
Jesus knew that. Jesus knows and understands our rebellious hearts and so he takes it a step further and clarifies what he means by “deny.” “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Take up his cross. There is a picture for you. A cross. Death. We don’t have a universal picture for death like they did in the first century with a cross. Maybe an electric chair or a gun but that just doesn’t quite cut it. A cross is such a vivid illustration of suffering and death. Essentially Jesus is saying here if you want to follow me you are going to have to die.
Did he just mean physical death, like how a lot of the early Christians were tortured and killed for being Christians? Well, maybe, I think that is certainly included and we’re going to talk a ton about suffering when we get into the latter half of Romans 8. But I think Jesus means more than just physical suffering here. I think he means the heart behind it. Let’s read verse 35-37, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?”
You see, Jesus is talking about life and one’s view of it and what one pursues in it. What is your life about? What do you pursue? We could spend a whole ton of time here. What it means to try and save your life but lose it…what it means to lose your life but save it. We’ll come back to that because I want to talk about the “soul” for a minute.
A Theology of our Hearts
“Soul” in Greek is Psyuche. It is where we get the word psychology from. Modern psychology only showed up about 60 years ago after Freud and Carl Rogers began to captilize on this word which now dominates the scene. Before that it was pastors who people went to for the care of their soul. Today everyone goes to a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Jesus, here is the chief psychologist, the chief counselor. Isaiah 9:6 calls him the “wonderful counselor.” And here we see him at his best. Jesus asks us, “What can one give in exchange for his soul?”
My second point and subtitle for my sermon is “A Theology of our Hearts.” There’s a few reasons for that. One, I already said is that I think Jesus is trying to get at the issue of our hearts here. Two, is the word itself. Often times the Hebrew word for heart, Leb (Leh-v), gets translated as soul, because the soul has to do with one’s very being, the inner drive and identity of a man from which the whole of his moral life springs from. That’s why Jesus said the greatest commandment, the commandment behind all the commandments, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength (Mk 12:30).
The third reason, I want talk about a theology of the heart is because Bobby hit on it last week, and there is a connection between what he said and what I am saying today. Listen to Ephesians 4:17-18, the text he preached on, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.” I think here in Ephesians, Paul is saying the exact same thing as Jesus, that trying to save your own life, is living life apart from God, in which you forfeit your soul because it is hard.” That is the danger.
Here is the deal, all through the Bible there is a theme that everything is about our hearts not loving God before and above everything else. Jeremiah 17:9 says “the heart is decietful and wicked above all things.” Think about it with me. We lie because our hearts thinks that if we do so we will get ahead somehow or to cover something up. We get anxious or angry because our hearts want to be in control and want things to go a certain way because we know what is best. This is a deceptive one. We may be harsh and rude and it is because we are resentful and not loving because our heart things have not gone right and we have somehow been wronged.
Or it can be much sneakier. I might be able to use some big words and be very passionate in moments but then secretly get in my car and in my head be muttering and gritting my teeth and cussing up a storm. Did I win by not saying anything. No. I’ve got a jacked heart.
Or how about the opposite. Some people are just tempermentally sweathearts and seem very non-judgmental, very tolerant and accepting, but that has nothing to do with loving God, it is because they have no self-control in their own life, are always breaking promises, and have not real peace or joy that does not sprong from their own misgivings. Worry is a big one. Why do we worry? It is because we don’t love God. Humility, a heart that loves God really believes He knows what we nedd. Anxiety and worry is arrogance because we think we are sure of what must happen for our joy.
I’ve been listening to a preacher lately named Tim Keller, he is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian church in New York City and some of these things I’ve been saying are things I’ve just stolen from him because I can’t say it much better. He said something in one of his sermons that hit me hard and I can’t stop thinking about it. So let me quote him directly, he said, “The main problems in our lives are the things we want too much, that we want more than Jesus (repeat).” Proverbs 4:23 says, “Guard your heart for out of it flow the issues of life.” Let me just stop and ask you, how is your heart?
Dying to Live
This is the deal. Let’s talk about “Dying to Live.” It sounds like an old Aerosmith or Bon Jovi song. J Dying to live, the Bible’s perspective is that the only hope for our hearts is Jesus, for him to save us, everthing else is us just trying to save ourselves by letting our wicked hearts lead us all over the place. The Bible’s perspective is that our old, bad, hard, heart has to die and Jesus has to take it out and change it and transform it by killing it and giving us his heart.
Listen to Ezekiel chapter 36. In it God prophesies about how he will act in the future and show himself as God and save the people, he referring to Jesus, and he says, ” I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes…and I will be your God (Ez 36:26-28).” This is the key issue. Whether we are going to let Jesus be Lord of lives, be our God or not. Martin Luther said as we have before that all sins are a breaking of the first of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shall have no other gods before me” because every sin is a sin of our hearts valuing something or someone else as god in our lives, it is all connected.
Paul, in Romans said the same thing, he said our hearts have to be circumcised, cut open, and that one can truly know God is inwardly by the heart that embraces Jesus (Rom 2:28-29). Let me explain this to you. The default mode of the human heart, is religion, self-salvation. Religion, self-salvation, says I obey therefore I am accepted, so you and your wicked heart keeps control. No one can ask you to do anything. You do what you want when you want to. And if it doesn’t work you have the right to feel hurt and mad. The gospel of Jesus says you are accepted and therefore you obey and your heart belongs to God and you do anything he asks because it is the only for for true hope and joy. Your life become his and his to direct and you get the joy of having him work in you and you trust him for everything.
Let’s go back to Jesus and our text in Mark 8. I said we come back to it. So let’s listen to Jesus again. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?” We have got to die. We have got to give away our life. We have to lay down and surrender and give everything to Jesus for his and his gospel’s sake.
The gospel of Jesus Christ says he died for us so that we might truly die to self and receive new and perfect life from him. The gospel says the punishment for our wicked hearts was dealt with by Jesus on the cross and because he did it now there is hope for us. We do not have to suffer the eternal consequences of hell nor the present experiences of failure. The gospel freely admits that I can’t do it. But Jesus can and did and because of him there is hope because he promises to impart that to us if we turn to him.
Dying to live. I’ve been asking myself this question. How do I die to self so that I might live. I’ve really been taking this to heart. I began to ask myself, if it is true that “the main problems in our lives are the things we want too much, that we want more than Jesus” and if it is true that’s a heart issue, then what is are the things that bother me most and why. And here is what I came up with. See how deceptively and wickedly the heart works…
You know the think that frustrates me most, the thing that gets me more worried, more angry when it does go right, more sad when when it fails? This church. The Resolved Church. Here is the thing, this church is my life, my identity is so caught up with it. I have put my heart and soul into this thing. I wrote the doctrinal statement, I designed the look and the feel of this place, those who are here and who are with us are those I have reached out to and discipled and preached to. I, I, I. My problem isn’t that I don’t like church, it that I love it. I love it too much. The Resolved Church in many ways has become my God.
When I realized that I was horrified. What do I do? Does that mean we quit? I think it means this, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” I think it means The Resolved Church has to die in my heart, where it’s success is the basis of my love and approval with God. It means I have to die to anything that I want more than I want Jesus himself.
What do you need to die to in your personal life? How about in regards to this church? I think what God has been teaching me means something for all of you as well. Church is people. That’s you. The Resolved Church, every one of us must die to this thing. We have to let this church go as our home, our solution, or our preference. The only hope for our lives and for this city is the gospel of Jesus Christ, not the perfect church. I think that means that each of us have to die everything this church is to us that is not a love for Jesus. He must be front and center. And Jesus asks for everything. “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
Here is the picture. Heaven is real. Hell is real. Eternity is at stake. And Jesus is coming back. He is all about his gospel and it is our only hope for soon one day he will return, not dressed in peasants clothes but in the full array of his divine kingship. The book of Revelation says that when Jesus comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels he will be dressed in a bright shining white robe with edges dipped in blood. He will come on the clouds riding a white horse and there will be peals of thunder and he will have a shining sword and he will call for his church and all those who have truly loved him will be caught up with him, and we will watch him as he creates a whole new heavens and earth.
That is what is coming. And it may not be far off. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is at hand. When you’re God two-thousand years must not seem like a long time. The time is drawing near and Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever…he is still all about the sake of the gospel and how we treasure it and spread it through his church. Jesus is all about his church and he is all about this one if we will have him as first in our lives, otherwise he will kill it with the quickness of his hand.
Application
I began this sermon reading you part of my letter to us as a church and telling you about what kind of season I believe we are in. I believe Jesus wants The Resolved Church, what I see happening is what has needed to happen, him come and take his rightful place in the throne of our hearts. He is doing that in my heart and I have heard some great stories lately of what he has been doing in yours.
For The Resolved Church to continue and to grow healthy and strong we will have to die to self. The Resolved Church must die. Whether that means dying to your job, your kids, your husband or your wife, your boyfriend or girlfriend or your desire for one, or all your plans or your future…it means everything. We are going to have to sacrifice everything for Jesus and the sake of his gospel.
Here is what I am calling for. I concluded my journal entry by saying this, “Here is what I am calling us to do. One, each person of The Resolved Church needs to take it a little more seriously. I need for each of you to pray and to try and think of one thing, that you personally can do, to improve the strength and stability of our church. Two, I want each person to try and think of one person or one family you would call or meet with and tell them about our church and ask them to come over and try and help us build this thing and get it off the ground. If they are already involved in another church or are kind of sketched, ask them to commit until December and if after then they are not into it then cool, no worries and they will have hopefully got some good experience in being a part of a church plant and maybe even helped it to really reach a point of stability. Three, I want you to really pray. Pray for souls and partners and money. Be telling people about Jesus and inviting them over to dinner to do so. Please call each person you know who is a Christian, whether it is a family member or a friend and share with them about our church and ask them to regularly pray for us and maybe even partner with us financially. And if you are not giving yourself, start. Four, follow me. I say that with all the true humility that I can muster. I am attempting to lead an example of gospel heart repentance. I am calling you to follow me in that. My heart is more consumed with love and passion for Christ than it ever has been before and I do not hesitate to say as Paul, follow me as I follow Christ.
I love you all and believe if we as a group truly lay down ourselves before the foot of Jesus’ cross and desire him and his church more than anything else then we will see him work in a way we never truly dreamed possible.
For the sake of the gospel,
- Pastor Duane
Let’s pray.
