January
18, 2015
Acts 6:1-4
1 Now at this time while the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint arose on the part of the Hellenistic Jews against the native Hebrews, because their widows were being overlooked in the daily serving of food.
2 So the twelve summoned the congregation of the disciples and said, “It is not desirable for us to neglect the word of God in order to serve tables.
3 Therefore, brethren, select from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may put in charge of this task.
4 But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”
One of the dilemmas that face ministers is the
amount to which they should be confessional about their lives. I’ll tell you about some of the goofy
things I’ve done and some of my life experiences, but I generally have a limit
on matters that are deeply personal.
But I will tell you this morning about
a moment of epiphany for me. Earlier
in my life I was going through a period of great anxiety. It continued through a period of
several months and came to the point where I felt as though I had locked myself
in a prison of anxiety. There were
many nights of sleeplessness and much soul-searching, and I wondered what was
wrong with me and asked God what was wrong with me. I tried several ways of dealing with the anxiety.
First, I decided I needed to work harder. I don’t know why that’s a solution that
often comes to mind for so many of us.
As if we don’t already work hard enough – and while there is nothing
wrong with hard work, it can lead to an obsession that can damage our lives –
we usually find that working more does not help us to work our way out of
anxiety. Second, I thought it
would help if I became better organized.
If you know me well at all, you know I am not very organized, although I
do try very hard to keep organized.
I have alerts and reminders programmed into the calendar on my
phone. But I also keep a paper
calendar with me as well, and it is full of notes and reminders. Each week I print a long to-do list,
and you can see from this copy – about six pages long – that I add a good bit
to it during the week. I also have
a couple of pages of notes with me at any given time, notes about matters I
need to keep in mind and notes about upcoming sermons, programs, etc. But I’ve found it is impossible to
organize yourself out of anxiety.
Third, I found myself attempting to be a fixer. Some of you are
also fixers, working to fix everybody
and everything. But what I
realized – and you may have realized as well – is that I can’t fix anybody, and
I certainly can’t fix the world. I
can barely fix myself. The danger
of becoming a fixer is exhaustion and
frustration at trying to fix everyone and everything, and how the desire to fix
can lead us to become controllers. When we become fixers we place ourselves in the role of God,
who can fix things. I can’t fix
anybody else and you can’t either.
We can, though, point the way to God who can do the fixing. But we need to stop trying to take the
place of God, because when we can’t fix people we want to start controlling
them to make them the way we want them to be, and that isn’t what we’re called
to do. Fourth, I turned to the reading of Scripture in a way that had a
profound effect upon me. Each day,
I would read a few of the psalms.
I would read the same psalms each day, and after a period of time I
would turn to other psalms. Each
day I would read a portion of the prophets, such as the passage from Isaiah
that I read for the Call to Worship.
I would also read a portion of the Sermon On the Mount and various
sections of New Testament. One
day, while reading from the book of Acts, I came to the passage that is our
text for today. It’s a text that I
have used many times before, but as I read that day an important truth became
clearer to me – there are many levels to Scripture, and we can turn to the same
passage time and time again and find deeper and more varied meanings. As I read this story about the
selection of the first deacons it occurred to me that what I had been trying to
do was to live a well-organized life,
while God is calling us to live a well-ordered
life.
This is a passage about the events leading to
the selection of the first deacons, but it is also a passage about leading a
well-ordered life. A well-ordered
life is a life that has a healthy arrangement of priorities, it is a life that
is well-balanced, it is a life that recognizes there are matters more important
than just keeping up with what is on our daily to-do list. It is a passage about doing what God
has called us to do and centering our lives in God. It is about stepping away from the idolatry that makes up
much of life in our modern world.
This is a passage about living a well-ordered
life, not a well-organized life. I used
to have the illusion of being well-organized, but I have come to realize that
was only an illusion. We spend a
lot of time trying to be well-organized, but what about being
well-ordered? A well-organized life
is not the same as a well-ordered life.
You can live a tremendously well-organized life, but it may not be a
well-ordered life. A lot of people
think that if they just live a more organized life then life will be better,
but a well-ordered life is what is really needed, not a more organized life.
A well-organized life is a life where one organizes
their schedule and responsibilities, but a well-ordered life goes beyond these
things. A well-ordered life asks
questions of us, such as, is my schedule
reflective of who I am in Jesus?
Am I giving my time to the right things? Am I giving too much of my time to peripheral matters? Are there important matters of life
that I am missing? Where is God in
my life? How am I serving God in
my life? Is God the love of my
life? Do I love God with my all my
heart, mind, and soul? (Deuteronomy
6:5; Matthew 22:37) Well-organized
and well-ordered are not the same thing.
Here is the heart of what I want to say this
morning – I don’t think we are always living well-ordered lives. If you disagree with me then you can
just tune me out and think about something else, but that is what I
believe. And I believe that living
lives that are not well-ordered is at the root of much of our anxieties and struggles. The question becomes – do we really
believe the words of the Scriptures in relation to how we are asked to live our
lives?
This is not a message meant to make you feel
guilty. Just mentioning the word priority sets off guilt in a lot of
people. Guilt is an emotion that
is generally destructive; I prefer the word conviction to guilt. Conviction is much healthier and is
more likely to bring about long-term change in our lives. Conviction leads us to ask hard
questions about our lives and to look closely and carefully at the fundamentals
and the foundation of our lives.
As we turn to our Scripture passage this
morning we find it is a time when the church is bursting at the seams with
growth. The growth was putting
tremendous pressures upon the people within the church. It would have been easy to just ride
along with the growth trying to keep their heads above water and to allow the
activity to set the agenda, but the apostles make sure they are well-ordered in
their approach. Very quickly the
apostles recognize the need to keep the church in a healthy order.
The first matter was to make sure they did not
get swept away from their responsibilities as the leaders of the church. Listen to verse 2 says so the Twelve gathered all the disciples
together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the
word of God in order to wait on tables. The matter at hand was how to keep up with the ministry of
feeding people, and the apostles – the twelve – understood that their priority
was in teaching the church from the Scriptures. It’s not that they believed they were above the task of serving
food, but that was a task to give to others so they could concentrate on their
primary calling.
Here is an important truth to remember – if we
do not set the agenda for our lives, life will set the agenda for us. This is why it is so important to be well-ordered,
because living a well-ordered life will prevent us from setting our life
agenda.
I like to find metaphors about life, so I will
present two of them to you this morning.
One is the metaphor of a treadmill. How many of you have been on a treadmill? How many of you like a treadmill? I’ve told you before that I have a
philosophical problem with treadmills.
I know they can keep us healthy, but I have a problem with a machine
that is so much like life – no matter how hard you go, you never really get
anywhere and if you slow down for just a moment you are in real trouble. That’s no way to live, is it?
I prefer the metaphor of white-water rafting
for life. How many of you have
been white-water rafting? It is so
much fun, although you have to wonder about some things about such an
adventure. First, it’s always a
bad sign when you are given a helmet before engaging in an activity –
especially one you have paid to participate in. But I put the helmet on and get in the boat and start down
the river. Each boat has a guide,
thankfully, but there are some things they don’t tell you until you are already
in the boat. They tell you that
when you fall out of the boat – not if
you fall out of the boat, but when –
that the current may pull you under. I thought I was already in danger of being pulled under the
water by the heavy helmet on my head, but the guide gives me another reason to
worry. The guide says one of the things that can hold you under
the water is getting pinned under a rock. What do they mean by one
of the things? What else is
under that water that can hold me under?
The instructions are to curl up in a ball – not so easy to do underwater
with a swift current – and a heavy helmet on your head – and you will
eventually pop out from under the rock and float to the top, where one of the
other boats will pick you up. How
long is eventually? I can only hold my breath for about
thirty seconds. And what if, after
following all the instructions and floating back to the surface, you suddenly
remember you were in the last boat?
Who picks you up in that case?
But the craziest part of this entire adventure is that we pay money to
do this! But it does beat a
treadmill, and even though you hang on with all your strength to make sure your
head stays above water, and you scream, and sometimes you fall out, but you get
back in and then things calm down and you laugh about the wild ride. I prefer that
white-water way of living – you have a guide to steer you through the times when
things are rough and they will see you safely through to the destination and you
have a sense of fun and adventure while you’re at it. I don’t want to live the treadmill kind of existence that’s
all pain and no progress and never gets you anywhere. The difference between those two approaches to life is that
one is a life where the agenda is set for you and the other is a life where you
set the agenda.
Do you ever feel as if life is taking you on a
treadmill ride over which you have no control? Does it feel as though all you can do is try your best to
deal with the immediate problems and needs that jump up at you every day? The
apostles saw danger on the horizon; they recognized that if they did not allow
God to pull the church into a well-ordered existence they would be driven by
everything that came their way.
The apostles were skilled at setting their
priorities. There are so many
opportunities available to us today.
Many of those opportunities are great opportunities – they are great for
individuals and the church. But the sheer number of opportunities can overwhelm
us as well. We have to have a good
filter at sorting through what is available to us – a filter that comes from
worship, prayer, and study of the Scriptures.
The apostles realized they could not be swept
along by everything that came their way; it became very obvious they need to
have a well-ordered approach to life and ministry. It wasn’t just well-organized, but well-ordered. As you read this passage you will note
that there is not one hint of the details of how, for instance, the ministry of
feeding the poor was carried out.
It doesn’t tell us how many were served, what they were served, and what
time they were served; it just says they were served food. Well-organized tells us the details of
how it is done; well-ordered tells us that it needs to be done. Well-ordered reminds us that we are not
to live life with thought given only to our own interests but to the interests
of others, as Paul says in Philippians 2:4 – Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the
interests of others.
Is your life well-ordered, or are you trying to
work, organize, and fix your way through life. I can tell you that will not work, but being well-ordered
will!
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