Live the Little Way

For my preaching class I have to give a 20 minute sermon on Monday on a passage that I was assigned.  In order to help me prepare, I manuscripted out what I plan to say.  I’ve included it here.  I hope it makes sense. Please let me know if it’s unclear or if you have ideas for stories, verse references, etc.  Enjoy!

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What do you think is the biggest hindrance to the church’s successful witness to the world?  What is the number one reason that missionaries come back from the mission field?  What it the single most common thing that destroys ministries and drags pastors out of the pulpits? It isn’t a lack of doctrinal purity.  It’s fighting. Conflict. Backbiting. In a word–Disunity. 

[Share briefly about family member who had cancer]

What I’m here to tell you today is that the church has cancer.  I have a personal passion for the local church.  She is God’s idea.  She’s sick, yes, but we can’t give up on her.  But if the church cannot get along, how can we possibly reach a lost world?  What I’m asking you today is to close your laptops, forget, just for a moment, about how much you need a coffee, or that you’re ready for a nap.  Come with me for a moment and consider this cancer and the remedy in the Little Way.

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Turn with me to Philippians 2:1-4, and we’ll read it together.  1If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. 3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

Sometimes this passage gets overlooked because it comes right before the famous kenosis passage.  But it’s packed with power, and contains a message for us today, a remedy for this cancer that’s draining the life from our churches.  In it we find four Ps, if you will, which will help us understand the remedy, which is found in the Little Way. 

First, in verse one, we see the Premise for unity.  A Premise is something on which a line of argument or way of thinking is established.  In order to understand how we can have strong, unified relationships in our churches, we must first understand our relationship with God.  All our horizontal relationships flow from our vertical relationship.  They are inexplicably linked.  We must first understand that we belong to God and are secure in our relationship with Him.  The conditional clause if here expresses certainty and can be understood as since.   Since God is, we can be.  Since God has given us encouragment from being united with Christ, since we have comfort from His love, since we have fellowship with the Spirit, since we have tenderness and compassion from Him.  We have all these things!  We must take a spiritual inventory of our riches in Christ, if we have any hope of having healthy relationships with others.  We cannot invest deeply in our relationships with others until we have a firm understanding of who we are in Christ.  We see this play out in relationships all the time.  Confident, secure people make good friends because they are able to freely give of themselves.  Needy, insecure, and emotionally incompetent people cannot give of themselves.  We must understand who we are in Christ first.  The Premise for our ability to give ourselves humbly to each other is an understanding of the depth of love God has for us and the riches we have received from Him. 

When we understand how we belong to God, we can then belong to others.

Secondly, in verse two, we have a Picture of Unity.  Since we have these riches in Christ and acceptance in Him, we are commanded to three things.  To be 1) like-minded, 2) having the same love, 3) being one in spirit and purpose.  What do all these have in common?  Like, Same, One.  There is a togetherness, a solidarity, a unity of mind, love, spirit, and purpose.  So what does really mean?  There have been so many well-intentioned pleas for unity that are nothing more than an abandonment of God-created differences.  What does this really mean? 

There are several things that unity is not. Unity is not being color-blind. I apologize if any of you have this t-shirt, but 15 years ago or so everyone was wearing these “God is colorblind” t-shirts.  I understand the idea, but I’m sorry, God is not colorblind! That is an insult to God, as if He had a handicap!  He created color. He loves the nations of the world, the races, the differences.  He loves that you have black hair and I have blond and that some of us have none.J  Look at the glory of creation.  The beauty of nature. Look at the tremendous joy we get from eating—I love bright fruits and vegetables, sweet chocolate, cool water.  God created diversity, truly.  Unity is not uniformity.

Unity is also not something we can manufacture. Hopefully all of you have now read The Search to Belong.  In it we read of the circles of belonging, and how healthy it is for people to function and move within all four of those spheres.  Unity does not mean that we must all crowd ourselves into the intimate circle of our lives.  It does not mean we are best friends with everyone.  Unity cannot be forced.  Unity and belonging develop and grow as we cultivate the right environment. 

But what environment is that?  Let’s look at verse 3.

Verse 3 provides us with a Path to unity.  3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.  The path to unity has a steep downgrade.  The road goes down, and down and down and down.  At times it’s windy, at times narrow, but always always down.  The amazing thing is that this downward path takes you to the mountaintop.  The summit of the Christian life is experienced on the mountaintop of humility. 

In my life, the answer is always humility.  We joke here in seminary that the answer is always Jesus. Well in my in my life, the answer is always humility.  Christine shared in her sermon that she found it humorous that God would give her the topic of being free from anxiety.  Well I found it equally humorous that God would give me the topic of humility.  I’m sharing as a fellow sojourner on this journey because I certainly haven’t arrived.  My two favorite books of all time, which I have read probably more than a dozen times, are AW Tozer’s The Pursuit of God and Andrew Murray’s Humility.  I cannot read them enough.  Their pages always draw me downward, back to Jesus’ feet, back to a position where I can consider others better than myself.  I borrow much of what I share with you here from them. 

Just as we did with unity, let’s look at what humility is not.  Humility is not simply self-deprecating.  It is not pretending that you lack talent or skills.  It isn’t acting sad all the time. It doesn’t mean you have to be an introvert.  It doesn’t mean you lack dreams and ambitions.  False humility takes on these forms, but is only just another form of pride. 

Andrew Murray says humility is the sense of entire nothingness which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all.  Humility is losing oneself in God. It is a total lack of concern for self, which sets us free. 

While there are many facets to humility, this verse is focused on one in particular: humility before others.  Andrew Murray says that humility toward men will be the only sufficient proof that our humility before God is real.  We cannot be humble before God unless we are humble before eachother.  So we are told to do nothing out of selfish ambition—Lord, what are my motives for doing this act of service?  Do I want to be seen? Appreciated? Applauded?  Do I consider others better than myself?  This doesn’t mean that we pretend that we don’t have gifts or talents, but we willfully choose to place ourselves as the bottom priority.  Jesus never pretended to be less than what He was, and yet He placed His own needs below those He came to serve. 

So how does this path of humility produce unity in our churches? Let’s look at verse 4.

Verse 4 sends us on a Pursuit of unity.   4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.  Our humbling of ourselves before others is not a passive thing. As we follow the downward path, we pursue each other’s good.  We turn our eyes off of our precious selves, and look to see how we can lift up, bless, edify, help, encourage, and selflessly love our neighbor.  Tozer explains how this path of humility frees us from three things which hinder our pursuit of unity.

First, we are freed from Pride.  Tozer says, The burden of self-love is a heavy load indeed.  CS Lewis said, “The pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching.  If there is an itch one does want to scratch; but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch.  As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither but have everything else (God, our fellow humans, animals, the garden and sky) instead.”  Humility, then is forgetting our precious selves.  When we do this, we are freed to gain true fellowship and unity with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Second, we are freed from Pretense.  This is the idea of “putting your best foot forward.”  We constantly strive to look our best for others.  We fear that our clothes or car or house are too cheap.  We tell stories in a certain light to make ourselves look faultless.  We respond to “how are you doing” in a certain way, highlighting hardships or exaggerating how fatigued we are by our service for Christ.   This is no small thing. These burdens are real and they are killing the life of the church.

Finally, we are freed from Artificiality.  That is living in the secret fear that people will find out who we truly are. We fear that some moment we will be careless and someone will peep into our empty souls. It will be found out that we are not as deep and spiritual as we portray ourselves to be.  Humility enables us to be loved for our true, ugly, raw selves.  This is why humility truly is the most freeing quality of life.  When we can forget ourselves, we cease to worry about messing up, looking dumb, being rejected, failing.  We cease fearing what others will think.  We quit backbiting, snubbing, and gossiping.  We lay down the burden of self and freely give ourselves to the betterment of others. 

So you may be wondering, how can I cultivate this?  Understand the Premise—we are accepted and loved by God.  Gaze at the Picture—Love, Unity, Like-mindedness.  Follow the Path down to humility.  And lay down your burden of self for the Pursuit of one another.  Do you want the secret to this?  It’s found in the Little Way.  Therese of Lisiex devised a prayer-filled approach to life that is deceptively simple.  Seek out the menial job, welcome unjust criticisms, befriend those who annoy us, and help those who are ungrateful.  Lay down your burden of self and Live the Little Way.