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Seek Welfare of the City:

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Tolerance and the Gospel

[Audio Link at bottom]
Today, were going to focus on a topic that might just be the most central issue of our day as we seek the welfare of the city in the Canadian context: the issue of tolerance. My contention this morning is this: The Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches us True Tolerance
This is a very disputed contention. It is in fact routinely denied in our culture, which views the Christian faith with, at best, suspicion, and more commonly, derision. 
  • On March 9, CNN talk-show host Piers Morgan interviewed Pastor Mark Driscoll, a well-known Christian pastor.  “Interview” is a charitable word, as Morgan drilled Driscoll on the issue of tolerance, rarely allowing the pastor time to get a full answer out. “Do you think you're a tolerant type of guy?” Morgan asked, “Do you teach tolerance?” When Driscoll said that he preaches that we should love our neighbor, Morgan cut him off “But tolerance – tolerance in particular.” “Because, you know,” Morgan went on to say, “my — my view about this is — is not that I don’t respect Christians or Catholics or whoever who — who absolutely swear by every word in [the Bible]. It’s just that it’s — I just don’t believe anyone who is genuinely Christian should be spouting bigoted opinions about sections of the community for their sexuality … But I also think what is harming America right now, like many countries around the world, is just a fundamental lack of tolerance and respect for people who may not share your personal values.”
  • Morgan went on to suggest that the Bible must be dragged “kicking and screaming” into this age of tolerance. Google: religious, tolerance.  The first hit is the website for the Canadian grown religioustolerance.org, the Ontario Consultants of Religious Tolerance.  About the Bible and by extension Biblical Christianity they write that: ”an overall theme of the Bible is religious exclusivity and intolerance.” 
  • Maybe you’ve felt the pressure of trying to discern how to hold your Christian beliefs in environments increasingly hostile to the “intolerance” of our faith.  What did you do on the “Day of Pink”? What will you do this year? Has your campus group faced pressure to alter its charter? Has your work adopted policies and causes that leave you outside of the mainstream.  These things are happening more and more in Canada.
  • As Canada becomes more multicultural, tolerance becomes the only virtue left and therefore is championed more and more zealously. Tolerance has come to define what it means to be Canadian. For example, University of Ottawa Professor Leslie Armour writes, “Our idea is that to be a virtuous citizen is to be one who tolerates everything accept intolerance.”

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Charity and Bearing Burdens

We've spoken in general about good works and about being benefactor households.  Today, we’ll get a bit more specific and speak of charity. Charity: generosity and helpfulness especially toward the needy or suffering; also : aid given to those in need. (Merriam-Webster).
My primary text this morning if Galatians 6:7-10:
Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

Charity is the duty of every Christian and, by extension, every Christian Church.
Charity is extended first to the household of God.
Charity extends beyond the household of God through relationships.
Charity bears others burdens without taking responsibility off of the recipient.

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Strategic Singleness

Benefactor households: 
What is the place of single adults in the household of God? (last week)
o The physically or mentally deformed.
o Those with indefinable gender, or gender issues. In about 1 in 4500 births the baby is born with amibuous genitalia which make it unclear as to whether the baby is a girl or a boy.
o Those with no attraction to the opposite gender (homosexuals and asexuals)
o The divorced that find themselves disqualified for remarriage according to Biblical guidelines.
o Single, though married.
o Those who have advanced passed the age in which they consider themselves to be “on the market” – widows who will not remarry
o Those who choose to forsake marriage for spiritual reasons relating to their calling.
How might single adults have a particular part to play in seeking the welfare of the city? (this week)

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"Eunuchs" in God's Household

Some of you will not marry. Statistically, this is becoming more and more the case. The age at which people are entering into their first marriage is steadily rising (now near 30) along with the high divorce rate and lowering marriage rate mean that in 2007 for the first time since millions of men left widows during WWII, single adults have become the majority, 51.5 percent of the adult population.  Particularly, many of you women will not marry.  It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. As I said last week, throughout university and graduate school (the time people are most likely to select a mate), roughly 57% of the people you will meet will be women. Even if you were to go to a large church with many singles, close to 60% of North American churchgoers are women - a gap that widens among twenty-somethings. What that means in your generation is that many of your female friends will settle for a man who either falls below your standard of education and ambition, or they will fall in love with ambitious unbelievers because they couldn’t find a good man in the church. Interestingly, in Mainland China, the situation is reversed, for the one-child policy along with selective birth control has created “bachelor bomb” in which unmarried men between 20 and 44 already outnumber their single female counterparts 2 to 1.  So ladies – there are good men in the world, they are just all in China.  So, some of you will not marry.  Dads and moms, some of your kids will not marry.  Christians, some of your friends will not marry. Church, some of our own and some of our visitors will not marry. 

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We Need Good Men

Today we’re going to shift our focus to men. There’s a shortage of good men in the world.  You don’t believe me? Ask the experts.
  • TED TALK: The Demise of Guys: http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html
  • “Boys Adrift”
  • If you don’t believe the experts, ask the single women.  Last November the Atlantic Magazine ran an Article “All the Single Ladies”, in which author Kate Bolick argued that “recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing).”
  • I went to the park yesterday, met a 23-year old single mom who recently moved to Ottawa. The dad’s nowhere to be found, she’s putting herself through school with a one-year old, taking out loans to house herself and her kids.  Tough story.  Then she tells me that her 25 year-old brother’s been crashing on her couch for 4 months, eating her food that she’s going to have to pay back with her school loans, playing video games all day, continually telling her that he’ll go get a job, but making no tangible moves toward it.  And he’s staying with her because her older brother moved back into her mom’s basement, so he had to go.

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We Need Good Women

Over the next month or so we’re going to drill down deeper into this idea of what it means for us as a church to foster this orientation: to be a benefactor community that engages the city through our good works. So where do we start? It’s a big question isn’t it? You want to change the world and transform society – where do you begin?
Moms.  We need to start with moms.

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Make, Save, Give

If you were to visit the study of American President Thomas Jefferson in the newly constructed White House during the early years of his presidency at the beginning of the 19th century, you might be pleased to see a well-worn, and obviously poured over Bible prominently displayed on his desk. However, if you were to be so bold as to open Jefferson’s Bible, you might be shocked at what you found between the covers.  During those years, Jefferson had engaged himself in a project to re-craft the Bible in his own image. He took a razor to its pages, rearranging the Gospel narratives, removing entire sections, and even re-writing some passages to give the “correct” reading.  Jefferson did this because he believed that the ethical and philosophical teachings of Jesus had been obscured by the supernatural and, he thought, superstitious stories about Jesus.  He sought to remove any reference to miracles, to the deity of Christ, to resurrection power, to the Holy Spirit – and be left with the pure ethical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Obviously, followers of Jesus have always taken issue with Jefferson’s approach, for once we set ourselves up as the final authority as to what or what isn’t proper to God, we come out with a God that looks very much like ourselves and a Bible that no longer challenges us beyond ourselves.

 

My point in telling this story is not to deride those who edit out the power and deity of our Lord Jesus Christ. My point in telling this story is to ask whether we in the modern church unwittingly do the same thing.  Jefferson edited out the supernatural to leave the ethics – do we do the opposite? Have we taken our razors out and left behind a virtue-less faith? We glory in our correct doctrines, but do our hearts and our hands lag behind?

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Hermits, Tax Collectors, Zealots and Jesus

Because Jesus didn’t stop there. Let me ask you something: now understanding the diversity of people and backgrounds of those who followed Jesus, wouldn’t it be something spectacular if from out of this rag-tag bunch of hermits, tax collectors and zealots a consistent approach to seeking the welfare of the city emerged?  If you threw Jesus into a group of people who couldn’t agree about anything, and they came out of their experience with Jesus with such a one-minded approach to seeking the welfare of the city that within a few hundred years they had infiltrated every city of the Empire.  Historian Rodney Stark has directly connected the growth of Christianity with the care and concerned they showed one another and to the city.  Stark cites the non-Christian Emperor Julian who attributed the growth of the Christian movement to their approach to seeking the welfare of the city:  “I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans [Christians] observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence … The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”

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Between Two Worlds

When I was in university a group of us would go down to High Street in downtown Columbus, Ohio and talk about Jesus with the people down there. To get a little context, High Street is a little like the Byward Market are here, close to the university, center of town, lots of bars, lots of people on the street.  So we’d talk about Jesus and sometimes people would be interested about learning more, and sometimes they’d want to check out a Christian Church – the only problem was that we couldn’t find a good church in the area to send them to. We looked and looked, then found one, just over the bridge – walking distance to the place where we shared with people.  I checked out there doctrinal statement online – looked good, so Jean and I and a couple of friends went to visit them.  We sat through their service that Sunday morning.  It was easy to notice that they were very traditional and everyone had very grey hair, but that’s fine – would they be welcoming of the students and street people we’d send them?  We talked to the pastor after the service, and I am not sure if I have ever been as disappointed with a Christian in my life as I was when he told me that it would probably be better if we didn’t send those type of people to his church.  Keep in mind that theirs was the only gospel preaching church for miles around the inner city core.  This was his answer: “We don’t think we’d be a good fit for them. Even though we’re located right downtown, we think of ourselves as more of a country church that just happens to be located in the middle of the city.”  I was a bit upset.  Ok, very upset.  How can a church be so disconnected of the community around it to the point that they would say, please don’t send people to us?

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Caution and Confidence

In this passage we are introduced to some guys who oppose Nehemiah’s vision for the city. I wish I could say that they made a stink here at the beginning and let things go, but they continue to be thorns in his side throughout the entire project. To do God’s work, even if everything looks like its going great, we need thick skin. Our enemy the devil knows what we are planning and will work to thwart God’s work.  
In Chinese church, we tend to value harmony and peace, and so we've heard that if we want to accomplish anything for God that there will be spiritual opposition, and so we’d rather be “normal” Christians and think we’re safe than actually set out to do anything for God.  I say “think” your safe because if that is you, you’ve already lost.  You’re already defeated.  The enemy already has victory in your life. I don’t want to become a board member of serve in leadership, because it might be hard and I might become a target for Satan.  I don’t want to share m y faith at school because then I’ll be marked.
We need to understand that, yes, while we may need to at times move forward with caution, there is still a confidence that we can have from the Lord. We are going to see in this passage how the vision and burden for the city is transferred from Nehemiah to the people with caution and confidence.  

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