Community (Resolutions)

resolutions: community

Jason Procopio

We’ve arrived at our last sermon in this series on the spiritual disciplines. In this series, as you know, we’ve been looking at the means God gives us to grow in him. Someone came to me last Sunday and asked me a question about our role in all of this—we say that God is sovereign over our salvation and over our growth…so is it him who does this in us, or is it we who do this in us? The answer is both. Saying that God is sovereign over our salvation and growth is not a reason to sit around and do nothing (because God’s going to do this work in us); the promise of God’s sovereignty is a promise meant to encourage us in our work—to assure us that our efforts will be effective, because God is doing this work in us.

The spiritual disciplines are part of the “work” that he gives us to do—the ways we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, trusting that he is working in us.

The thing is, on our own, these things can still be really hard to pursue with any regularity. Take the subject we talked about last week, which was giving. God commands us to participate in the financial life of the church, so the church can do what she is called to do, and so that we can know the joy of seeing that God provides for our needs. But we tend to keep our finances a secret—it’s not something we openly talk about with others, for the most part—so it’s really easy to not actively pursue this spiritual discipline, because no one will know if we don’t. 

We need other people to encourage us and to push us in these areas…and that won’t happen if we’re not actively involved in each other’s lives, in a way that goes far beyond what we would experience with just a friend. We’re feeling this now, more than many of us have in our lives, because of COVID. We spent months and months separated from one another, speaking only at a distance. And while it’s wonderful that we have the technology to keep in touch, we’ve noticed just in conversations that on the whole, even if we’re out of confinement now, people are exhausted, they’re discouraged, and they’re having a hard time living for God. The last two years have been brutal.

So we need each other now more than ever.

That’s why we’re ending on this spiritual discipline, which is simply the discipline of living in community. 

To look at this, we’re going to be in Romans 12.

The beginning of Romans 12 is a text many of us know well, but that we almost never apply to community. We don’t ever want to force an application, to try to force a text into a situation it doesn’t speak about. The thing is, if we keep reading, we see that the context of Romans 12 is very much the context of community in the body of Christ.

So we’re going to look at v. 1-13 today, in three parts: we’ll start at the beginning, to see our great call: the goal and product of our service. Then we’ll see what that looks like in practice, according to our various gifts. And lastly, we’ll see what that looks like, no matter what gifts we have.

Call to Service (v. 1-2)

The apostle Paul, in the first eleven chapters of Romans, has just laid out the most breathtaking explanation of the gospel in the Bible. He has given us the through-line for the entire Bible, showing how the promises made to Abraham apply to both the people of Israel and to the Gentiles who have faith in Christ: how the promises God made to Abraham apply to us today. He shows how the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ have established a new covenant with God’s people—the church—and how Christ’s perfect life, lived for us, and his death, suffered in our place, for our sin, give us perfect access to God’s perfect presence and his perfect blessing, forever.

And finally, in chapter 12, he tells us how we are to respond to this glorious good news. Let’s begin at v. 1:  

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 

(Quick note: the word “worship” in v. 1, in Greek, is a word which is almost always used in the sense of service: it is the ways we serve God as a result of our worship.)

To put this very simply: Paul says that if we have received God’s great mercy, then we must stop living as if we haven’t. If God had saved us from our sin, we must stop living as if we are still in it. If he has saved us from our rebellion, we must stop living like rebels.

How do we do this? We present our bodies as a living sacrifice, totally committed to his service. The implications of this are huge. First of all, he doesn’t tell us to present our hearts or our souls or our spirits as living sacrifices, but our bodies. This means that our “spiritual worship” of God encompasses areas of our lives we wouldn’t normally think of as spiritual. Our time. Our money. Our relationships. Our leisure. Our food. Our physical activity. God gets all of it—if your body is involved in an activity, that activity is now lived for God and not for yourself.

Secondly, he tells us that we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice. Sacrifices for the Jews were offerings they would make to God for various reasons: in this context, sacrifices of worship. They would bring an animal, or the fruit of their labor (say, grains if they’re a farmer), and they would give that thing to God as a sign of their devotion to him. That sacrifice would be used according to the rules established for your sacrifice: either put to use for his glory, or consumed by fire; it was a sign of their dependence on God and their allegiance to him.

But the obvious truth of sacrifice is something we often forget: once a sacrifice is made, it no longer belongs to the person who made it. Say a man offers a goat as a sacrifice—that goat no longer belongs to him. It belongs to God. 

The same goes for our bodies: we offer our bodies as living sacrifices, which means we no longer belong to ourselves. We don’t get to decide how we live anymore: God decides how we live, and we do what he says. (And incidentally, what he tells us to do is always better than what we would naturally decide to do—it’s a sacrifice, yes, but really we’re trading up.)

Third, he tells us that this sacrifice of worship is to be holy and acceptable. When we give ourselves to God, we give ourselves to holiness—that is, our goal is no longer to fulfill our own dreams, but to be like Christ. (Which, again, is far better than having all our dreams fulfilled: we have pretty terrible dreams compared to being like Christ.)

Next, Paul tells us (v. 2): 

2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. 

As usual, we have a tendency to over-spiritualize this; it’s way simpler than we think. This has happened to nearly all of us: you see a movie, and you think of someone you know really well, and you think, Oh, he would LOVE this, or She would HATE this. How do you know? Because you know that person. I have a list of movies to watch with Jack when Loanne’s not around, because I know that Jack will love these movies, and Loanne will hate them. And I know that because I know them.

The world has a way of thinking that is naturally—this way of thinking, we know instinctively, because it’s how we think. There are things we want, and things we don’t. There are dreams we have. There are things that seem right to us, things that seem desirable.

God has a way of thinking that is quite different from that of the world: many things the world loves, God hates. The world wants to pursue certain things; God calls us to pursue different things. The world attributes value to some things; God attributes value to others.

There are lots of situations that the Bible doesn’t explicitly mention, a lot of choices we make that, at least on the surface, the Bible doesn’t seem to help with.

But if we know God—not just about him, but who he is and what he is like—then we’ll be able to discern what to do, even in these situations about which the Bible says nothing explicit. We read his Word, and we respond to his Word in prayer, and over time, the Holy Spirit brings us into closer relationship with God. We learn to know what he’s like, because we know him.

And the better we know him, the better we are able to discern his will: the better we know him, the better we’re able to look at something and say, Yeah, God would hate this. God would approve of this. This is what God’s calling me to do in this particular situation.

That is the reason behind the spiritual disciplines: that we might grow in our knowledge of God and in our relationship with him, and come to know him so well that we are able to discern what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Service with Our Gifts (v. 3-8)

Now, all of that was merely introduction; this was Paul, giving us his giant, overarching application of everything he said in the first eleven chapters of Romans. 

Starting in v. 3, he gets into the details of what this looks like in practice. And it’s interesting that he doesn’t tell us to focus on ourselves, or try to improve ourselves. He tells us rather to see ourselves rightly, which in turn shapes the way we see and serve others.

3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 

Again, he starts broad before focusing in. And the broad, overarching attitude behind our spiritual worship is an attitude of humility and intelligence.

He calls us to see ourselves rightly, and to see others rightly. Seeing ourselves and others rightly means recognizing that a) we are all different, and God has given us different gifts; and that b) every gift is necessary and beneficial. No one in the body is more useful than any other; we’re just different. 

He’s trying to help us avoid comparison with one another. We are constantly comparing ourselves with one another, in a positive or negative way. This kind of judgment in the church is both highly prevalent and completely ridiculous. And that is, I think, why he says that we should see ourselves rightly, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. This, too, is simpler than we think. 

Let me use myself as an example. I love Charles Spurgeon—the English pastor who preached in London in the late 19th century. He’s called “the Prince of Preachers”. If you’re a preacher, reading his sermons can be both incredibly uplifting and very discouraging. Because no one has ever been this good. I read his sermons, then I look at mine, and I think, I may as well give up now: I’ll never be that good.

Maybe not. But I don’t need to be, because I’m not preaching at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London in the late 19th century. I don’t need to be as good as Charles Spurgeon, because I’m not Charles Spurgeon. That’s not what God has called me to do, or who he has called me to be. He has given me a measure of faith that is specific to me, today, and he has given me gifts that are specific to me, today. And all he expects of me is to see myself according to my measure of faith, and to use my gifts, today.

God doesn’t expect more of us than what he has given us. He has made us different parts of the body, with different gifts and different measures of faith, so that we might obey him where we are, with what he has given us. God doesn’t expect you to be me, or to be anyone else you might see here: he expects you to be you, offering your body as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to him.

And that’s where Paul brings us next (v. 6):  

6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. 

I’m not going to go through and dissect all of these gifts; but there are two common threads in what we see here. Firstly: the “gifts” he mentions are, for the most part, things we would see as completely ordinary. Service. Exhortation (that is, helping others to see what God calls us to do and encouraging them to do it). Giving. Leading. Helping (“acts of mercy”). Occasionally people will have gifts that manifest themselves in very specific ways and in specific contexts (like prophecy and teaching). But far more often, our gifts won’t play out here, in the service. They’ll play out on the métro, or at home, or at lunch, or at the park. 

They’re ordinary things that, actually, aren’t ordinary at all. How freeing would it be to see these ordinary things many of us do all the time, not as ordinary, but as spiritual gifts? Well, that’s exactly what Paul is saying. If you are able to encourage someone in their faith, that is a gift God has given you. If you have a desire and the disposition to help others in simple ways, that is a gift God has given you. If you enjoy thinking hard about the Bible and helping others to think too, that is a gift God has given you.

All of us have gifts, and all of us are called to use them.

Now I know that I’m going to get a question about this after the service, so let me just answer it now, because it is related. And that question is, How do I know what my spiritual gift is? There are sometimes entire conferences based around this question—“Come discover your spiritual gift”—and those conferences always make me very nervous.

For two reasons…

The first reason is that we need to beware of making distinctions that the Bible doesn’t make. Paul seems to make a distinction between the two in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, when he talks about gifts of prophecy, healing, tongues, etc. But we need to remember that in that letter he’s addressing a particular problem in that church, and even there, when Paul lists the spiritual gifts, he includes gifts that we would consider “ordinary”, like helping and administration (1 Corinthians 12.28). That’s the first reason: we jump on 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 and end up creating a sharp distinction between “spiritual gifts” and “ordinary gifts”—a distinction that’s not nearly so sharp in the Bible.

The second reason this question—“How do I discover my spiritual gift?”—makes me nervous is that the Bible never gives us an answer. So anyone who claims to have a method for discovering your spiritual gift is necessarily coming up with it on his own. 

A much more important question, I think, is why does the Bible not tell you how to discover your spiritual gift? If you look at everything the Bible says about the subject, I think the answer’s simple: the Bible never tells you how to discover your spiritual gift because it expects you to know already. The main directive we have concerning our spiritual gifts comes in v. 6 of Romans 12, which we’ve already read: Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them… 

Paul expects his readers to know what their gifts are. How can he expect such a thing? Because he expects all Christians to be serving. It is in serving that we discover the gifts God has given us. We’ll see a need, and we’ll step up to fill it, and we’ll keep doing that until one day we discover that we’re actually gifted in this particular area.

That’s how I discovered that I’m a half-decent preacher. I had been in the same church for years, serving in perfectly ordinary ways, wherever I could, and one day the pastor was looking for help preaching in the Wednesday night prayer meetings, and he asked me if I’d like to try. He asked me, because I’d been present everywhere else. In other words, it was nothing more than God’s providence that put me in the right place at the right time to fill the right need…and I found I was okay at it. And that only happened because I was already serving in all these other areas I wasn’t gifted in.

So how do you discover your spiritual gift? You serve in any way you can, and you trust that God will give you the opportunity to serve according to the gifts he’s given you. And if you serve for years and you still don’t see it? You keep serving regardless: a lack of knowledge of your spiritual gift is never given as an excuse for the Christian to do nothing.

So that’s the first thread we see: most of the gifts God gives us to serve with are things we would consider ordinary, but that actually aren’t ordinary at all.

The second thread we see here is that whatever our gifts happen to be, God calls us to use them completely. Fully. To give everything to them. God doesn’t call us to serve while wishing we were doing something else. If we’re serving, that’s where our minds and hearts are; if we’re giving, we’re giving generously, because that’s what our minds and hearts are; if we’re helping, we’re helping happily, because that’s where our minds and hearts are.

This is how God calls us to serve: by using what God has given us for the sake of the body, and by giving it everything we have.

Service for the Sake of All (v. 9-13)

After this, Paul is going to turn to a more general exhortation; he’s just told us what service within the body of Christ looks like according to our specific gifts. Now, he’s going to tell us what service in the body looks like in practice, no matter what gifts we have. (And this is another reason why the distinction between “spiritual gifts” and “ordinary gifts” is misleading—because whatever our gifts happen to be, the way we go about serving is the same.)

9 Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. 10 Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. 

These are things we are all called to do; this is how we are called to live together. Paul goes on to show what it looks like in other contexts in the following verses, but it’s important to see that for now, the context is still life in the community: this is how we serve when we’re not together on Sunday mornings; this is how we see that God is transforming us by the renewal of our minds.

I know some of you may still be wondering why I chose this text to talk about the spiritual discipline of community; but in fact, this text is perfect for our subject. We say that living in community is a spiritual discipline because living in community, as God intended, will bring us closer to God, and glorify him in our lives. And living in community is more than just getting to know each other really well. It’s not enough to have a community checklist in mind: “We asked how everyone is doing (check), we asked for prayer requests (check), we prayed for those prayer requests (check)—so we’re good.” 

We are called to a specific type of service that will both draw us into community and push us upward, into relationship with our Father: the type of service that is characterized by genuine love, real holiness, familial affection, honor, passion for God, joy, patience and hope, prayer, material help and hospitality.

This type of service—this type of life in community—is a spiritual discipline for two reasons: firstly, because it will require discipline to live like this. Like we saw last week: it’s not enough just to want it; we’ll have to do it. We’ll have to remember what our attitude together should be, and we’ll have to put that attitude into practice.

And secondly, this type of community life is a spiritual discipline worth pursuing because if we do this, everyone will be cared for. 

Everyone will be loved.

Everyone will be holy. 

Everyone will know they’re part of a family.

Everyone will be honored.

Everyone will contribute.

Everyone will be happy.

Everyone will be patient.

Everyone will be prayerful (and prayed for).

Everyone will be protected (materially).

Everyone will be welcomed.

There is no better environment than this to grow in our pursuit of all the other spiritual disciplines. And there is no other environment where growing as God calls us to grow will actually be possible.

Application

If there’s one thing we need to remember from this text, it’s that the worship God calls us to—the service he calls us to—is the responsibility of every Christian, not of a certain hyper-gifted subset.

When we arrive in a church (especially a big church), we can sometimes have a hard time knowing how to begin serving. Or maybe we’ve been in the church for a while, but we’ve stayed a bit isolated; and now we want to serve, but we don’t see how.

There is a multitude of ways to do it, but I’ll just give you the two simplest. (Well, not simplest, but best.)

First of all: come to church ready to serve like this—according to your various gifts, and in the attitude God calls us to have—by searching for opportunities to welcome others.

When we speak about welcoming in this church, we have a tendency to look to our deacons—toward Steve, our deacon for integration, and Aurélie, our deacon for welcome. This process of helping people integrate the community is often pushed off onto them, or onto the welcome team.

So let me be as clear as I can: Steve is not responsible for getting everyone connected. It’s not Aurélie’s responsibility, or that of the welcome team, to welcome newcomers. They are responsible for helping facilitate that—if you have a question and don’t know how to help someone get involved, you can go see them—but they is not responsible for doing it. If you’re not on the welcome team, and you’re not Steve or Aurélie, you are still responsible for helping newcomers get into community here. This is our responsibility, not theirs. The best possible outcome for me would be to see a day when we don’t need a welcome team anymore, and we don’t need an integration deacon anymore, because the church fills those roles.

So come to church ready to serve the way Paul describes here, and when you come, put it into practice by welcoming everyone, and not just your friends.

And secondly: care for everyone you can. Use your gifts to serve them.

Now I want to be really clear about what I mean by this. Often when people hear us talk about investing in one another’s lives, their instinct is to think that they’re doing that already. They’re always spending time with friends from church, doing things together, even talking about Jesus together.

That’s good, but it’s not enough. Because what we’ve seen is that far too often, people are very social, but not necessarily supportive. They’re present when things are going well, but when someone is going through a difficult time they find themselves very much alone.

It’s easy to guess why, and there could be several reasons. It can be embarrassing—people who aren’t doing well are often reluctant to say they’re doing well; or when we ask if we can do anything to help, they say no, because they don’t want to impose. If we’re going to be there for them, sometimes we need to press: sometimes we need to say, not: “Would you like me to come over?” but rather: “I’m coming over.” Sometimes we need to ask, not: “Can I do anything to help?” but rather: “What do you need?” And if they say nothing, we say, “No—what do you need? I know you need something, and I’m coming no matter what. So what do you need?”

Or it may be even simpler. Often we’re not present when people need us, just because it’s a bummer. We’re doing fine—we’re happy—and spending time with someone who’s not doing well can make us sad, and we don’t want to feel sad.

Guys, this is bigger than just moral support. It’s not just about helping someone feel better. It’s about helping them to grow in their intimacy and maturity in God, and it’s about us growing as well, in the process. Because the stakes are so high, caring for one another means we’ll be even more present when things are difficult—even more present when our brother or sister is in pain—even more present when it costs us.

Now we’ve had a lot of questions about how we can possibly do that in such a big church. And the answer is, you can’t do it with everyone in the church. No one can serve two hundred people the way Paul describes here; we just don’t have time.

But you can serve a few people like this. You can serve ten, or fifteen people like this.

This is why we have community groups spread all over the city. It is in those groups that we serve each other well; it is in those groups that we live the life of the church. In a small group, we can get to know a handful of people really well, and serve them really well with the gifts God has given each of us.

This is also why we encourage people in community groups to form discipleship groups together: to find two or three people in your group, and regularly meet to read the Bible together, to pray together, to confess your sins to one another, to serve each other well. It is in these groups that we find the most intense form of growth in the spiritual disciplines, because we’re pursuing them together.

This is, by the way, what should happen in a family. Unless you have ten or twelve children, every family serves as a discipleship group: living our lives together as brothers and sisters in Christ, knowing each other intimately and helping one another grow. But we don’t need a family to live like this; we have a family already. They’re sitting next to us right now.

When we live like this, everyone is cared for. Everyone is provided for. And everyone is growing in their relationship with the Father. It really doesn’t require a lot. We don’t need huge programs or great structures. We need men and women, boys and girls, brothers and sisters, serving one another with the gifts God has given them and in the love God calls us to have for each other. 

So let’s grow together.