I'm going to tell you a story I've told before from this platform.
So some of you have heard it. Some of you will not have heard it.
Some of you who were here when I told it before have forgotten it.
And for those of you who do remember it, you'll benefit from hearing
it again. But it's a story that challenged me tremendously.
I was invited some years ago now to speak at a conference of pastors
in the city of Boston in the United States. It was organized by the
New England Association of Evangelicals. New England, of course, is
the six states in the north eastern part of the United States. And they
came together for this conference and there were several speakers, and
one of them was a man called Juan Carlos Ortiz. He was a pastor of a
church in Buenos Aires in Argentina. And he... gave us a message...
one day that challenged me thoroughly.
He told us that he had gone to Buenos Aires to pastor a church of 300
people, and it had begun to grow very quickly, and it soon became 1000
people, and he said, he became known as the pastor of the fastest growing
church in Buenos Aires. And he was delighted with the reputation that
gave him, he said.
He said one Sunday morning he had planned to preach a message on love.
During the week, he prepared his message, and he came to the church that
morning, very confident of what he wanted to say. And he sat on the platform
during the time of worship and music, and during that time he felt a very
strong impulse that he should not preach his message. But he had nothing
else to say.
When the time came for his sermon, the worship leader said, "And now brother
Juan Carlos will bring us his message," and he said, "I came to the platform,
I opened my Bible, and I said, 'Brothers and sisters, my text this morning
is, "Love one another."'" Then he stopped, closed his Bible, and he went
back to his seat.
And there was silence.
And with the silence, there was confusion. The worship leader leaned across
and said, "Are we supposed to sing another song?" But he sat their quietly,
and after about two minutes, which is a long time when you don't know what
is happening, he told us that he got up, came back to the pulpit and he
said, "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is 'Love one another.'"
And he went back to his seat.
He said his wife was sitting in the balcony and she thought, "He's flipped!
I knew it would come one day." After a couple of minutes of silence again,
he got up a third time, came to the pulpit, said, "Brothers and sisters,
my text this morning is 'Love one another!'"
And I think it was after the third time, and he went back to his seat, that
somebody sitting somewhere in the congregation turned to the person next to
them and said, "Excuse me. I don't know you. Is there any way I can love
you?"
Somebody else turned to somebody else somewhere else in the congregation
and said, "Excuse me. Is there something I could do for you?"
And within a few minutes, the whole church was alive with people talking
to each other. He said, "We had 28 people in the church that morning who
were unemployed. Every single one went home with a job." And he began
to give other statistics, and I was writing fast, and I haven't got the
figures exactly, but he said there were single mothers with children
in the congregation that morning who were struggling alone, and every
one of them went home with a family committed to help them and share
with them, [and] help take some of the burden with them.
He listed other things. He said, "That Sunday morning changed our church."
He said, "If I had preached my message on love, people would have come to
me, shaken my hand and said, 'Brother, Pastor Ortiz, that was a good
message. I really enjoyed that. Especially liked the differences you
explained between the different kinds of love.'" They would have said
all that, but he said, 28 people would have gone home unemployed, and to
be utterly honest, he said, most of the church couldn't have cared less.
But something happened that day. He said, "The next Sunday, I got up for
the message, and I said, 'Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is
the same as last week: "Love one another!"'" Went and sat down, and
people said, "Well, who can I help this week?"
He said, "I didn't have any liberty to preach for three months. I just
said, 'Here's my text, "Love one another." Go to it.'" He said, 300
people left the church. They said, "We don't employ you to stand up and
say, 'Love one another.' We want you to teach us the Word!" But he said,
for those who stayed, who really didn't want just to know the Word, they
wanted to obey the Word, and they were discovering that it was obeyable,
(If there is such a word as that) their lives, their relationships,
began to change.
He said, "After three months, I got up and I said, 'Brothers and sisters,
the Lord has given me a new text this morning.'" And they broke out in
applause. He said, "My text this morning is, 'Love your neighbour as
yourself.'" And he stopped, and their was a silence. He went back to his
seat again.
Somebody got up here and began to go to the door. Somebody else got up,
began to go to the door. Somebody else went to the other door. And before
long, in 10 minutes, the whole church was empty, the parking lot was
empty, there was a line of people at the bus stop. And they went home,
went next door, knocked on the door, and said, "Excuse me, I'm a Christian.
Is there anything I can do for you?" He said, it was the worst time to
do it, because it was just before Christmas. He said, "My wife and I,
and I have two daughters, had presents that we'd bought for each other,
to give them at Christmas. And we discovered need in our street that
we had no idea about, and we took our unopened Christmas presents and
we gave them away to other people."
He said, "If that first Sunday, and the three months after that, changed
our church, this changed our community, because, I tell you what began
to happen," he said. "We had tried to reach our community in all kinds
of ways. We had all kinds of methods. We adopted all kinds of programs.
And some of them worked okay, many of them didn't work at all." But he
said, what began to happen was the telephone began to ring at the church,
and people would say, "Is that the church that helps people? My son
is on drugs. My daughter is pregnant and unmarried. My wife has been
diagnosed with cancer this week. Could you come and help?"
And he said, instead of saying, "How in the world are we going to reach
our community?" the community began to come to us and say, "Would you
help us?"
Now let me say this. I'm not going to do that, because that was a divine
moment in that particular time. But I do want to ask you the question.
Did you come here this morning expecting to bless somebody? To minister
to somebody? Did you come here this morning, and when this service is
over in a few minutes, are you going to look for people to talk to?
Are you going to be bold enough, if they tell you something's wrong,
to say, "Can I help you?" Because they might say yes. Were you going
to talk to the person next to you, who you don't know? Or just get up
and go? Have you thought you might invite some stranger home for lunch?
Or out to a restaurant with you for lunch?
I'm only asking you the question. Because when a church begins to live,
not just in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, but in 1 Corinthians chapter 13,
the life and character of God begins to flow into the community. Because
God is love.
And I want to ask you this morning, is this the kind of church we want to
be, or do we want to be a safe, easy, be-as-comfortable-as-you-want-to-be,
kind of church? [With the attitude of] "But please don't expect me to
take these things seriously."
How is the Christ Life in you? For as we have seen, Christ is the Head
of the body, His Spirit is its life. And the life of Jesus, endwelling
us by the Holy Spirit, is totally committed to loving, through you and
through me.
If this isn't the kind of Christian we want to be, if this isn't the kind
of church we want to be, and recognize we need to be, and recognize we
are instructed to be, and recognize we have the resources to be, we're
better shutting up shop. Because if you have the tongues of men and of
angels, if you engage in all kinds of activities that other people applaud
from a distance, but you do not have love, and you're not kind, and
patient, and long-suffering, and trusting, and all the other qualities
that are there, then you're just a noise, and all the neighbours ever
think of us is, "We're glad when the service is over on Sunday, because
then they can park their cars outside their houses." There is no
sense, "Here are people that actually care."
And I'm preaching to myself. And I've preached to myself all week, and
not just that, but I have brought my own heart once again to the cross
of Jesus Christ where all this is made possible.
But it's not lots of individuals Paul is talking about, he's talking about
the church in this chapter. This is how the church, made up of individuals,
is going to function if we're going to please God.
