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The Necessity of First
Hand Experience
A sermon
by Dr. Bob Moore, Pastor, Bonsack Baptist Church, Roanoke, VA
Guest preacher at First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, August 26, 2007
I am going to ask you to
take your Bibles and turn to the gospel of John chapter 20. A very recognizable
passage that occurs after the resurrection of our Lord. Beginning, if you would,
with verse 24. “Now Thomas, called Didymus--one of the twelve—was not with the
disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the
Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my
finger where the nails were, put my hand into his side I’ll not believe it.”
Well, a week later, his
disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them. Though the
doors were locked, Jesus came, stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, see my hands, reach out your hand
and put it in my thigh, stop doubting and believe.” And Thomas said, “My Lord
and my God.”
I want to encourage you
to keep your Bibles open because we will come to that passage in just a few
moments. The expectation, the understanding, the intention of the Christian life
is that what begins in faith will grow into maturity. The understanding of the
New Testament is that once a person comes to know Christ, then that person
begins a journey and they will grow into increasing levels of spiritual
maturity. And the key to growing spiritually is the nurture of that first-hand
personal experience love relationship, if you will, that we have with Jesus
Christ.
Do you remember how
frustrated Paul got with the Christians at the church in Corinth? He loved those
people, but, boy, they had a pack of problems. There was immorality in the
church. There were Christians suing other Christians. There were Christians
joining up into various kinds of groups—splintering the church, giving it a bad
name and a lot of different problems. But he comes back to one central issue and
he just goes after it in chapter 3. The issue is, in his judgment, that they
hadn’t grown spiritually. He says, “I gave you milk, not solid food, because you
are not ready for it.” He’s frustrated at the Christians in Corinth because they
had not grown in their faith--that is in their capacity to know God, their
capacity to trust God, their capacity follow God. They had not grown in their
knowledge of God—that is, in who he was or what he wanted for their lives. In
his judgment, they were still asleep in the playpen. They were still babies.
It’s OK to be a baby—everyone of us is a baby sometime. We gotta start
somewhere, but his concern was that while they had started there, they hadn’t
grown. Their immaturity was affecting themselves, it was affecting the church
and it was affecting the witness to the world they were supposed to have. And we
should be concerned today.
George Barna, some of
you will know that name. He, for at least 30 years, has been on the forefront of
studying American churches. He said, “I am convinced that the typical church as
we know it today has a rapidly expiring shelf life.” Do you know what a shelf
life is? Do you know those little messages now they put on boxes or on products
on drinks and stuff when it says you gotta use it by such and such a day.
Expiration date.
You don’t know this, but
I’ve got two lovely daughters. Bless their hearts, they’re married, they both
live in Roanoke. They both have given me grandchildren—and by the way, one on
the way. How about that! I love them a lot. They come over to our house and they
won’t drink milk out of our refrigerator until they look at the expiration
label, because they are not sure their mother will keep it beyond the right
time.
Barna says, “The typical
church, as we know it today, has a rapidly expiring shelf life.” There are about
340,000 American Christian churches and most are small and most are so focused
on themselves that they haven’t grown in years. Their impact in the world is
minimal. Why? Barna says part of the reason is because new believers are not
being incorporated into the church. He said the majority of the people who make
first-time decisions for Christ are no longer connected to a church within eight
weeks of the time they make their decision. That is to say, new believers aren’t
finding their place into a congregation of healthy believers. In most cases they
don’t move from decision to conversion, or from conversion to growth. There are
Christians who know everything there is about how to catch a fish or how to hunt
deer or how to assemble a motor or what the DOW Jones industrial average is
doing or, if they’re in Roanoke, what the strength and weaknesses are with
Virginia Tech’s offense and defense; but they don’t have clue how to walk in the
spirit or how to witness to someone about Christ, because they haven’t grown
spiritually. And when we don’t grow spiritually we hurt ourselves. There’re so
many Christians who, remaining baby spiritually, miss out on some of the most
rewarding experiences of what it means to follow Christ.
Some of us are still
two-year olds when it comes to talking with God. And the best we can do is to
say some rote prayers because we have never grown much further than that. Some
of us are still six-year olds when it comes to our ability to sort out things in
our culture that are going to undermine our walk with Christ. And so, we don’t
really know how to evaluate the TV programs that we’re watching or the lyrics of
the songs that we listen to or any of the other stuff that culture keeps pumping
into our lives. Some of us are eight-year olds when it comes to any of the most
basic biblical knowledge. So when temptation comes or when sadness strikes or
tragedy, we don’t know either how to find what we need from God’s word or how to
apply it to our lives. Some of us are toddlers when it comes sharing our faith
with others. So there are people in church who’ve never known the joy of leading
even one person to Jesus Christ.
We also need to grow up
for the world’s sake. It’s so ironic to me that probably we are living in a time
when there is a greater interest in spiritual enlightenment in American—at least
as much as there has been in the last 50 years—but our churches are having less
and less impact on the perspectives and behaviors of people than ever before.
And why is that? Partly the reason is that more and more people are dismissing
the church as irrelevant, as outdated, as weak; and the stumbling block is not
our theology, but it rather is the failure of Christians to apply what they
believe in compelling ways. We’ve been our own worst enemy in showing the world
what authentic biblical Christianity looks like and we are living in a time when
somebody needs to see it. There is no way of calculating the powerful influence
of the contagiously happy and genuinely holy Christian. We need to grow up and
then go out in the world and be the salt and the light that Jesus told us to be.
Folks, there’s been a
lot written about what kind of churches are able to reach people in the secular
world. I can tell you part of the answer. Churches that reach people are going
to have a measure of mature Christians and a bunch of folks who are growing
spiritually. That is to say, people who can accept you just the way you are. A
people who are open and positive, and who are infectiously joyful. People whose
lives have been made kinder and wiser because of the power of God working inside
of them. At the core of the understanding the Bible has of Christianity is that
we will grow and the key to growing is that first-hand personal experience we
have with a living Lord because there is no substitute for first-hand
experience.
I guess it was two weeks
ago I had a lady come up to me in our church and we were doing missionary path
from one of our mission teams who had gone to Belize. This was here first trip
and she came to me. With some emotion, she took me aside before that evening
service and she said, “Pastor I have heard about poverty all of my life, but
going to Belize and living with, working with, praying with, worshipping with,
being with those people, I saw things unlike anything I had ever experienced
before.” And I understood what she was saying because there is nothing like
first-hand experience. See, listen you may have been to 50 funerals, but you
don’t know what a funeral is until you’re sitting opposite a casket at a
graveside and it’s your loved one who is being laid to rest. That’s when you
know what a funeral is. That’s the power of personal experience.
And the same thing is
true when it comes to our faith. Jesus said to his disciples, “I am the vine and
you are the branches.” Now, sometimes we make Christianity more difficult than
it is. But Jesus made it very simple, very understandable, “I am the vine, you
are the branches;” and, implied in that illustration is a living relationship
with the living Lord. Because, unless there is a living relationship between the
branch and the vine, the branch doesn’t survive. You can’t produce the fruits of
the spirit—love, peace, joy, kindness, patience, gentleness, self control—unless
the life of the vine is inside of you. The key to growing spiritually is the
living, first-hand experience you have with God.
That brings me to
Thomas. The disciple Thomas is known for one moment in his life, which is sad to
me, because if I were to ask the average person in any church who was it who
said to the disciples, “Let us also go with Jesus to Jerusalem that we might die
with him there” most people wouldn’t have a clue. But if I were to ask them,
“Which of the disciples doubted that Jesus had been raised from the dead?”
everybody knows that would be Doubting Thomas.
When Jesus having
learned that his friend Lazarus was sick, said to his disciples, “We need to go
to Bethany,” which is just right next to Jerusalem, the disciples were saying
“You can’t go there! There are people there who want to kill you.” And it was
Thomas who spoke up and said, “No, no, no. Let us also go with him to Jerusalem
that we might die with him there.” But nobody remembers that [about Thomas.]
What Thomas is remembered for is—well, look at verse 25. You have that text
before you. One statement! “Unless I see the nail prints in his hands and
unless I put my hands into his side, I won’t believe.” You see,
Jesus had appeared to the other disciples on that evening of the Sunday that he
rose from the dead. They were huddled together somewhere afraid of the Jewish
authorities and there he [Jesus] was. And I can’t begin to imagine what that was
like, to have been so low and then to seeing Jesus there. But Thomas wasn’t
present. So when the other disciples said, “We’ve seen him. We’ve seen the Lord.
He’s alive. We’ve seen him for ourselves.” Thomas didn’t join their bandwagon.
Maybe it sounded too good to be true. Maybe he was trying to protect himself
from being let down having been stung by all the awful events that had occurred
over the span of just a few days. And so, in response to their enthusiasm, he
said, “No.”
There it is in verse 25,
unless I see with my own eyes, unless I can touch with my own
hands I won’t believe.
Now, I’m not saying that
we should extol the virtues of doubt. But if you look at it a different way,
Thomas was saying I need first-hand experience with Jesus being alive. And so do
we. That really came home to me some time ago when I received a letter from a
long lost friend. My closest friend when I was in high school was a guy named
Brad. We grew up in the same church. We went to the same high school and as a
young teenager I actually witnessed to him, shared my faith with him and later
he came down the aisle and accepted Christ and was baptized. After that he
actually became closer to me than my own brothers. He was probably in my house
more than he was in his house. We did virtually everything together. After high
school I went to Tech and he went to Old Dominion.
On a Sunday when I came
down the aisle in my church to surrender to full time Christian service, he was
sitting in the same pew. When I stepped out just about 10 or 15 seconds later he
stepped out and said that God had also called him into the ministry. He made it
through one year of seminary after college and then he dropped out. This was in
the early 70s. He left Christianity behind and ultimately became a hippy—he
actually did. I lost track of him for 30 years. Then through a set of
circumstances, I discovered he was living in Alaska and I got his address from
his mother and wrote him a letter. Boy, was he surprised to hear from me!
Surprise of surprises, he wrote me back. Our journeys had been so different that
we started writing each other and probably, I guess we wrote over 100 letters
each in the span of less than two years. This is what he wrote to me in one of
his early letters.
Dear Brother
Bob,
My story I probably don’t need to tell you is
quite different from yours.
And I think it would be valuable to share it
with you after all these years.
My junior year in BSU at Old Dominion was the
peak of my involvement with church and the heyday of my revival preaching. In
the summer of my junior year, I was assigned to Fort Yukon, Alaska as a student
missionary. That summer was a mixture of tremendous joy at finding the wild
beauty of Alaska and also a lot suffering over the first real doubts entering
into my faith and a lot of doubts about my self worth.
In retrospect, I realize now how much my
faith and self-respect had depended upon my relationship with you. You came into
my life at the lowest all-time recorded low in my personal history, and your
leaving for college had a profound affect on me. As you must know your house was
a place where I felt so accepted and loved. You taught me how to play pool. You
taught me how to wrestle. You taught me how to think. You taught me how to
believe. It really never was my path, but it was a direction and a safe refuge
for a while and I will never forget what it meant for me. The fact is, my
religious world was not really something I had ever made my own. It revolved
around trying to be like you. I wasn’t so much a Baptist as I was a Bob-tist.
This, which of course, was not your fault, but has to do with the emptiness and
the fear that I felt as a high school student, and the fact that you really
rescued me from those feelings, at least temporarily. All during my BSU career,
I was trying to be the kinda guy I thought you had been and make the kind of
impression on others that you had made on me.
With you had gone to college I became more
removed from our relationship and started to explore new ideas about what it
meant to be a real Christian in the real world. And these ideas were much more
political and much more social in nature. And I realize now why I went in that
direction. The fact was that even though I prayed desperately for a real rebirth
in Christ, I never really felt anything happen to me. I can’t recall one
single time when I ever had a feeling of being a different person than I was
before. I was going around doing a bang-up job of convincing others that Jesus
would do something wonderful, but it wasn’t happening to me. It made me feel
like a fraud—which was true—and a failure.
My faith fell apart fairly fast after you
left, but my desire to hold on lasted for several more years. This feeling
reached a peak when I graduated from college and seminary was starting to sound
like a really scary place, where I might actually have to face the uncomfortable
truth that I had no personal relationship to God.
The idea occurred to me that I could
volunteer with the Home Mission Board and go back to Alaska as a kind of hiding
place where I might able to sort things out. My new wife and I joined the US2
program and became circuit missionaries to small villages around Fort Yukon. As
it turned out, I wasn’t able to hide from anything. Of course, I was able to
charm them with my style and fakery at first, but my mask fell off, first to my
supervisor in Fort Yukon and then later to the people at Fairbanks when I tried
to share my missionary experience with local churches.
The house-of-cards really fell apart when we
discovered my wife Barbara was pregnant and they moved us to Seward where there
was a hospital to have the baby. And here I became an associate pastor to a guy
from Texas and his three children. We all lived in the church basement together
and things really got ugly. Basically, we all hated each other and every Sunday
we would waltz out in front of the congregation and lie our butts off for an
hour or so and then wipe the smiles off and go back to hating each other. This
guy reported me to the Home Mission Board and they sent us back to Fort Yukon
where Angie was born. I hit the all time low of my life as we drifted into
despair and eventually quit and left Alaska for many years to come.
It was in this setting that occurred the
death of my ever becoming a preacher and the birth of the finest thing that I
will ever bring into this world—my beloved daughter Angie.
You see, folks, there’s
no substitute for first-hand experience. Remember what Jesus said, “I am the
vine. You are the branches.” We have a living relationship with Christ. We know
the grace of God, the love of God, the power of God from personal experience.
That’s how we know him. And that’s what my friend was lacking and that’s what
needs to be nurtured if we’re ever to grow spiritually. That’s why Jesus said,
“Abide in me.” That is, make sure that that love relationship, that personal
experience you have with a living Lord is constant, is growing. Unless we
cultivate that we will never bear any of the fruit of the spirit because the
life of the fruit of the spirit is a result of the God inside of us. It’s not
enough to see God working in somebody else. It’s not enough to hang around on
the sidelines and see God blessing somebody else’s sacrifice and surrender. He
needs to be using you, needs to be blessing you.
Thomas’s doubt led to
faith. Jesus shows him his wounds. Jesus lets him feel the nail prints in his
hand and Thomas says, “My Lord, and my God.” I just think that’s where we need
to be. I just think that’s the direction that we need to go.
Let me ask you a
question as we need to close this message. If I were to ask you where you would
place yourself on a continuum of spiritual growth and over here is the nursery,
and over here is adulthood, just for a minute, I mean, if you were to place
yourself wherever it is you are, where would you place yourself? Where in your
own estimation would you . . . and as a follow-up question, and probably more
important, where is that in relation to where you were last year, or two or
three years ago? I don’t know where that most important thing is, whether you
are over here in the nursery as it is where it is you’re moving—because we all
have to start someplace. You’ve got to crawl before you can walk. Everybody’s
got to be a baby sometime. The sad thing is when we never change. When year
after year—and it’s rampant in the church, it’s everywhere in the church.
Spiritual babies are often tearing churches apart, undermining their capacity to
give a legitimate witness to the world or to be a place where the love and power
and grace of God can come alive. Where would you place yourself in relation to
where you were last year? Have you moved up to another level? I mean, when it
comes to Bible knowledge, when it comes to spiritual discernment, when it comes
to holding your tongue, when it come to standing up and being counted, when it
comes to managing your temper, when it comes to counteracting our innate
selfishness, when it comes to individual acts of servanthood. . . are you any
further along now than you were last year?
We’re going to have an
invitation in just a moment. But I am going to ask you to just think about this
prayer. Could you pray this morning, “Lord, I want to grow and I don’t want to
be in the same place next year that I am now. When it comes to loving you and
knowing you, serving you, hearing, you trusting, you, when it comes to bearing a
witness or laying down my life, when it comes to my personal temptations, when
it comes to the stresses I try to manage and how I go about them, I want to
grow. I need that personal, fresh, first-hand experience of the love of God.”
Would you pray this morning, could you pray this morning, “God, help me to
grow.”
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