Sermon for Sunday October 8th, 2006

PRIORITIES FOR TODAY’S CHURCH by Bruce Ball

Matthew 7:7-7:8


A policeman in Los Angeles responded to a call of a burglary in process. It was around midnight when he got there. He saw a young man standing near the front door of the business and when he yelled for him to get down on the ground, the young man raised a gun and pointed at the policeman. The policeman fired, killing the man.

It later turned out that the robbery suspect had just left, and the young man who pointed the gun was a 15 year-old boy who was pointing a BB gun. Now I think all of us would agree that it was a bad situation, and all of us would grieve over the loss of that boy, but it should also be obvious to us that the policeman did not do anything wrong. Yet, the boy’s parents sued the Los Angeles Police Department and won a very large sum of money.

By the way, these were the same parents who didn’t bother to keep their kids home after midnight or teach them anything about common sense. Common sense doesn’t seem to be that common anymore, does it? Our society is so concerned with not trampling on anyone’s rights that we often trample over the victim and throw their rights out the window.

I think it is plain to see that this nation has her priorities all messed up. But that problem is not just with society in general. It is wide spread in the church, too! The church of today needs to take a very careful look at her priorities. What do you think the church is here for? We need to start asking ourselves some very hard questions, all to see where our real priorities in life are. We need to decide whether our priorities are based upon the world or based upon Heaven. It is either one or the other. It cannot be a little of one today and a little of the other tomorrow.

1 JOHN 2:15 tells us to not love the world or anything in it. And it cautions us about that because everything in our lives is spiritually based, whether we acknowledge it or not. And for us to have Godly lives, we must have Godly priorities.

The “world” has invaded our lives and has kept us from having Godly focus. It has also invaded our churches and kept them from having Godly focus, too. There are churches today that concentrate more on their day care centers than on how they preach and teach the Word of God. There are churches out there today that have their many programs as their priority and not their reaching out to the unsaved.

There are churches today that have turned their church into a compound. And those compounds offer everything from Starbucks coffee to movie theaters. And the priority in these churches is giving its members a nice and safe place to do things … but the priority is not on reaching new people for Jesus.

So, if today’s churches need a change of focus, where does it start? It starts the same place a revival starts: With one person getting on their knees and going before the Lord to ask for it. It takes one person convincing another of the need for it. And, it takes one church that is willing to be the example for the others in their area.

Almost every one of us have had a very strong church background, but have wandered off and ended up staying out of church for a long time. This is a common fact in America among Christians. Why do you think this occurs? It happens because the priority of the church changed away from Jesus.

A man called a pastor one day and asked about church membership. The man said he didn’t really want to attend all the time and surely didn’t want to get involved, but thought it was important to have a religious affiliation of some kind.

The pastor said he didn’t think the man would fit in with his church, but gave him the address of a church he thought the man might like. So, come Sunday, the man followed the address and went to the church the pastor had suggested. When he got there, he saw a building that was empty and falling down. He could tell that it had not been used for anything but a home for rodents for a long time.

The next day, he called the pastor back and asked if he had given him the wrong address. The pastor said that he had indeed given the right address. Then he told the man that when a church loses its focus, that’s all it becomes in God’s eyes – a place that needs repair and that houses no Godly thing.

When a church loses its excitement to reach new people for Jesus, it becomes stale, even lukewarm. The passion is gone and the vision has disappeared. And in that kind of church, you will find people who lose their desire to keep going to church. In that kind of church you will find that many people have drifted away.

But when these same people who left, decide to come back to church somewhere down the road, they always seem to look for a church that is excited about doing things for the Lord. And people can only do the right things when they have a priority of doing the right things.

In JAMES 1:22 it tells us to be “doers” of the word and not just “hearers.” In other words, when we go to church, we need to listen and we need to learn, but we also need to get involved in the church. That is the only way we can help the church set and keep its true priority of introducing people to, and teaching people about, Jesus. By becoming involved in the church, we keep the church from going stale.

Jesus warned us about the stale church in REVELATION 3:16 when He said He would spit them out of His mouth. As far as people losing their vision, the Bible says in PROVERBS 29:18, that where the people have no vision they perish.

The churches that focus on “how” they do church, or on “what is comfortable to them” are causing many to walk out of the kingdom and back into the world. But I don’t want to talk about them today. I want to talk about CrossRoads Church and what we can do to not have the same problems some churches are having today.

Now think about this:

· Some churches have parking problems, while some churches don’t.

· Some churches have kids running around making a lot of noise and some don’t. I have told you about the last church we planted; it had no children for several months and seemed like a tomb. This church has many children and the “noise” they make is a blessing from Heaven.

· Some churches are growing so fast you don’t always know everybody’s name. While in other churches, all they have known for years is each other.

· Some churches are filled with tithers; some other churches are filled with tippers. At the board meeting Wednesday night, someone had a question as to when I would start receiving a salary from the church. I said that this church is the priority, and when it can financially afford to pay me I will take a salary. Until then, we need to concentrate on the church so it will have a future.

· Speaking of the future, some churches plan for the future, while some are content to live in the past. Those churches that live in the past are the same churches that have no excitement for the Lord to offer anyone. They are the same churches you used to go to, but left.

· Some churches evangelize, while other churches just fossilize

For us to be strong for the Lord, I believe there are three areas where we must have correct priorities. The first is having –


1. A PRIORITY OF PRAYER

Now, we all say that we pray and that we believe in the power of prayer, don’t we? We even quote scriptures such as MATTHEW 7:7-8

‘Ask and it will be given you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.’

In JOHN 14:13-14, it says,

’And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask Me for anything in My name, and I will do it.’

Now, we could go on and on picking and choosing verse after verse that substantiates the need for, and the power of, prayer. The point I want to make is that prayer MUST be a very real priority with a Christian or that Christian will not have a good relationship with God. Likewise, prayer MUST be a very real priority for a church or that church will not be doing the work of God.

Sometimes, we make the mistake of thinking the quality of our prayers must be of a certain caliber or God just won’t listen. Or we are in a hurry to do something we want to do, so we offer up God what I call a ‘prayer to go’. God isn’t interested in our having quality prayers because He is our quality. And as far as our quick little prayers, we must remember that God generally will not give us that $1,000 answer we want for the $2.00 prayer we offer.

Another problem we all seem to have is taking those every day small miracles God gives us and we either don’t take the time to see them, or we take the credit for them ourselves. A man was up on the roof of his barn once and slipped. As he was quickly sliding down the steep roof, he yelled out to God to save him. At that very moment, his pants got caught on a nail that was sticking up. After he had come to a complete stop, he said, “Forget it God, I took care of it myself.”

We should not have a ‘profession’ of prayer. That is when we talk a lot about how much we pray, etc. That just goes to glorify ourselves.

We should have a ‘practice’ of prayer. That is when we let our actions speak for themselves, and they will speak volumes if we really do have a Godly prayer life.

Are we so jealous of our prayer time that we won’t let anything interrupt it, or are we so jealous of everything else that we won’t let our prayer time interrupt them? How often do you get so wrapped up taking care of business that you forget to go to the Lord and let Him take care of you?

There is the story of a young man who applied at a logging company and asked for a job. The foreman asked him if he could fell a tree with an ax. The young man walked over to a tree and felled it like an old pro. The foreman hired him.

On Monday, the young man outdid everyone else on the crew. But, each day after that, he got slower and slower until Friday, he could barely cut one tree down. He went through all the motions; swinging his ax, hitting the tree and repeating it, but it just didn’t work very well.

Finally, the young man laid down his ax, sat on the ground in exhaustion and wondered what was causing this. The foreman came over and told the young man he knew what caused it. He said he had been so busy all week doing the things that a logger does, he had forgotten to get back to basics and sharpen his ax. And because he hadn’t kept his ax in good shape, it had become dull and worthless.

Sometimes we get so busy doing things for God, we forget to get back to the basics and have conversations with Him. Don’t you agree that to keep our faith in good condition, we need to make prayer a real priority in our lives?

The second thing I would like to talk about today is about ...


2. HAVING A PRIORITY OF PRAISE

There was a man who owned a grand old mansion on many acres of land. He wasn’t particularly satisfied with it and wanted something better, so he hired a real estate agent and asked him to write up an ad about the house.

The next day, the real estate agent came by and read the ad to the owner. The ad went on to say that the house was a beautiful old piece of artisan craftsmanship sitting on 30 acres of beautiful woods with plenty of scenic views of the valley below. It said that there were 20 rooms, all of which had floor to ceiling windows that overlooked the estate, and there was a large stone fireplace in each room.

The owner thought about that for a while and then read the ad again to himself. He laid it down and told the agent to cancel the sale. He said that he had never realized just how wonderful of an estate he had until he heard someone else praising it, so he decided to keep it.

In 2 SAMUEL 22:4, it says,

‘I call to the Lord who is worthy of praise, and I am saved from my enemies.’

We need to slow down and start recognizing the many blessings God gives us each day as what they are; blessings from God. And then we need to stop for a few minutes and simply offer God praise for loving us enough to give those blessings to us. But you will not be able to praise God unless you have a personal relationship with Him. You will not be able to have a relationship with Him unless you take the time to pray to Him regularly, and you can’t do that unless you make Him your first priority. And all that just so you can properly praise the Lord with all your heart. Not much, yet worth so much.

In the jungles of Africa, there is a fruit called the ‘taste berry’. It has that name because when you eat it, it changes your ability to taste things. Everything you eat, even several hours later, will taste very sweet. Even the most bitter and sour of things will taste pleasant and sweet after eating the taste berry fruit.

I think that Christianity has its own taste berry fruit. I think that praise is the fruit that leaves us with the sweet lingering taste of God, long after we have even lifted our praise to Him. When we are filled with the sweet taste of God, nothing this world can throw at us will seem as unpleasant as it would have without God filling up our hearts and souls.

In EPHESIANS 5:18-19, it reads,

‘….. be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord….’

Would you say that you have a priority of praise? Is that your daily habit; to praise God for everything that happens to you? It should be.

The third thing I want to bring up is having a –


3. PRIORITY OF PEOPLE

In EXODUS 32, Moses tells God that the people of Israel had sinned, and he asked God to forgive them. Then he said if God would not forgive them, then God should just take Moses and leave the others alive. Moses’ priority was not on his own life, but on the lives of the people of Israel.

In ROMANS 9, Paul says that all truth is in Christ, and the Holy Spirit bears witness to that. Then he says that he has sorrow in his heart for others and would wish that he could be accursed rather than them. Paul showed his priority was for others, not himself.

How many people today, even in our churches, have a priority for other people’s salvation? Do we worry about their souls? We should. Do we try to talk to them about Jesus? We should. Do we invite them to church, or to a Bible study? We should. Do we have them as one of our priorities? Again, we should.

I would like to ask a question this morning. Are you a Godly person? Do you have your priorities where they should be, or do you always seem to start focusing on the world around us instead of keeping our focus on Jesus Christ? What do you think you should be doing about that? Do you think maybe you should come back to Christ?

Let me ask for the Praise Team to come back up, and then let me tell you what real priority is, and then I will close.

During service one morning, the pastor told the congregation that there would be a guest speaker that morning. The guest was a retired pastor who he had known for most of his life. He then introduced the old pastor.

The old pastor talked a while, and then started talking about salvation and accepting Jesus, telling the congregation just how important that was to them. He told a story of how a pastor had taken his 12-year-old son and his son’s 12-year-old friend out on a boat to do some fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.

He said a sudden storm came up and the boat overturned, throwing all three of them in the water. He heard his son calling for help about 20 feet to his left and saw the other boy struggling to stay afloat to his right. He said the father only had one line, and could only save one boy. He yelled to his son that he loved him and threw the line to the other boy, saving him. Then, he told the congregation that it was a true story, that he was the father.

After church services, someone came up and asked him why he saved the other boy instead of his son. He said that he knew his son was saved and would go to Heaven, but he knew the other boy wasn’t saved and he didn’t want him to go to hell.

That person then asked the pastor how the other boy finally turned out, and the old man looked at him and said, “That little boy is now your pastor.”

Having your priorities straight is sometimes a very difficult thing to do. That old man had his priorities on the urgency of being sure you go to Heaven. I urge you to take this opportunity this morning to get your priorities straight with the Lord, too. I urge you to commit yourself to the Lord fully and completely today.