Be a Blessing

Notes
Transcript

The Church is Essential

We haven’t done this in 12 weeks.
The entire month of April and May
Easter, Mother’s Day, memorial day, graduation
This is an important day.
Things are not back to normal and won’t be for who knows how long, but this is a good day.
The concepts of essential and nonessential have been talked about a lot over the past 12 weeks.
What businesses, organizations, activities, or events fall into those 2 classifications have been argued about and debated a lot.
And the church has been at the center of many of those debates.
Is Church essential?
Absolutely, but not in the way we might think.
The church building is not essential, we could gather anywhere. There are churches in after meeting under a tree and that doesn’t make them any less of a church than us today.
The church meeting for music, preaching, and kid’s ministry is not essential. It is not a bad thing, but it is not essential.
What make the Church essential is our community, our ministry, and our mission.
Church is essential because we need each other.
For encouragement and correction, for confession and for prayer, for rejoicing and for mourning, for serving and for teaching.
Church is essential because we have a mission.
To proclaim and to live out the glorious Good News of Jesus to the lost around us so that they may hear of, believe on, and trust in Him and be saved.
We are essential because we are heralds of the the Gospel in our words and our ways to all those who are far from God.
And though we haven’t met physically in the last 12 weeks, and even today our regathering is far from where we would want it to be, at no point did we stop being the Church and at no point did we stop being the most essential organization of people that has ever lived.
Our significance in this world is at the center of Peter’s message in this passage today.
How ought we live if we are to be the kind of community that proclaims the excellencies of God not only by our words, but also by the witness of our lives?
Living in a way that displays the unmatched goodness of our great God.
It all centers on our calling to be A BLESSING.

The Shared Calling of Christian Exiles

1 Peter 3:9 ESV
9 Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing.
These word remind us of Jesus’s words in Luke 6:
Luke 6:28–29 ESV
28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29 To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either.

Be a BLESSING.

What does it mean to bless?
It means to speak goodness and welfare over someone’s life
To ask for God’s favor to be on them.
That is what Jesus meant and what Jesus modeled.
Peter is saying to these Christians who are being treated unjustly, harshly, and are being mocked for their faith.
Don’t get angry and bitter and mean. Don’t repay the evil you are getting with evil, or the reviling (harsh, abusive treatment) with more reviling.
Instead be a blessing to all, those who are good to you and those who are not.
How must we live as believers if we are to be a blessing?
We must consider the context of these verses:
1 Peter 2:9 NIV
9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
We are not defined by what others say about us or think about us, but we are defined by God and who we are in Christ.
To be a blessing is to fully embrace our identity as the chosen, precious, holy people of God who have been brought out of darkness into marvelous light in order that we might proclaim the excellency of that light and broadcast the goodness of God by the way we live according to that light.
1 Peter 2:10–11 NIV
10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 11 Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.
We bless others and one another when we give people a glimpse at the goodness of Jesus with our words or with our ways.
The more we make the goodness of Jesus more clear and draw people's gaze more and more to Him, the more we are blessing them.
But if we are to BE A BLESSING it requires us to be altogether different people.
We must embrace a new set of virtues.
Virtues are the guiding attitudes and dispositions of our lives.
In Christ we are new creations, born again into a Living Hope which changes not only our afterlife, but the way we live our lives in the present.
These are the shared virtues of Christians that allow us to be the Blessing that God calls us to be.

The Shared Virtues of Christian Exiles

1) Fight for UNITY not YOURSELF. (Unity of Mind)

James says that the cause of conflict is that we want something that we do not have, so we kill.
Maybe that is harsh, but it is also very true.
Our desires and our comfort have the tendency to drive our decisions and direct what we give our attention to.
What makes us feel most comfortable or secure is often the most important factor in making decisions.
How do we bless others if we are so overly concerned about our own desires, comfort, security, and happiness?
Having unity of mind is not uniformity of mind, meaning we have to agree on everything.
It means that I don’t just look after my own interests in every decision or direction.
It means we find the things that do unite us (namely the Gospel) and we commit together not putting our personal preference before the unity of our faith family.

2) Commit to really LISTEN. (Sympathy)

Have you ever been in a conversation or argument and thought “they aren’t listening to what I am saying, they are only thinking about what they are going to say in response”?
The reason that is frustrating is that it is selfish, and yet it is the the default posture many of us live with.
We are too busy with our own wants, needs, struggles, and trials to stop and truly listen to the hearts and hurts of others.
What makes a good listener is someone who can not think about themselves long enough to hear what someone else is saying (or not saying).
How can we bless if we are unable or unwilling to listen and seek to understand the plight and struggles of others?
Not condoning but listening.
You might not agree with what you are hearing, seeing, or experiencing, but sympathy requires us to listen and work to understand so that we might speak truth, hope, or correcting in a loving way (That is Blessing BTW)
How can we bless if we are too concerned with winning.

3) LOVE like FAMILY, because we are. (Brotherly Love)

I’ll remind you of the words of Jesus here:
John 13:34–35 ESV
34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
The world around us sees our bickering.
They see our lack of commitment and faithfulness to one another.
And they, rightfully, don’t see much difference than what they experience in the world.
One of the hardest parts of ministry for me is seeing or hearing about people leaving our church family.
I realize there are often good reasons to leave a church, but there are often not very good reason to leave or to leave in the way they do.
Family is messy and sometimes we have to work through differences and even work through the pain of sin, but it is what we must do if we are to “have brotherly love”.
How are we to be a blessing if we can’t get along with one another?

4) Let your heart be TENDER toward OTHERS. (Tenderhearted)

Also translated compassionate and similar to sympathy.
To be tenderhearted means to see AND serve the needs of others.
Book about North Korea.
During a long and devastating famine, a teacher talked about how she became desensitized to the starving children in her school or the dead on the streets.
In order to survive, she had to look to her own needs and realize she couldn’t help them.
We have a very different problem, we have become so caught up in consumerism and commercialism that we have struggle to see and struggle to feel the burden of those in need.
Compassion is at the heart of Jesus.
So, how can we bless others if we don't see there needs? And how are we to be a blessing if we are not willing to serve those needs?

5) Count others more IMPORTANT than yourself. (Humble)

Perhaps the heart of it all is right here.
Humility requires that we count others more important than ourselves.
To be humble is to follow in the footprints of Jesus.
Philippians 2:3–8 NIV
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. 5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
Humility is powerful because it is so foreign in our world.
But humility is at the heart of being a blessing.
Listen to the Words of Paul about the outcome of Christ’s humility
Philippians 2:9–11 ESV
9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Jesus is lifted up and God’s goodness and glory are on display through the humility of Jesus.
Likewise, our humility shines light on the goodness and glory of Jesus to the world around us.
How are we to bless unless we embrace the humility of Christ?

Take Up Your Cross and Follow

Peter quotes David’s words from Psalm 34:12-16
The gist of David’s message is those who desire to “love life and see good days” must put their energy and attention not to trying to get that good life the world promises us.
The way to joy and satisfaction in life is
not through gathering enough stuff or experiencing worldly success.
It is through turning from evil and doing good.
It is not about making God happy, but being happy in God.
We must stop trying to acquire, accomplish, manufacture, or maintain blessings in our lives.
We must RATHER humbly give up trying to save our life in order that we might save it through Jesus.
Luke 9:23–25 ESV
23 And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. 25 For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?
If we desire blessing then we must sacrificially, sympathetically, lovingly, compassionately, and humbly submit ourselves to the Lord in order that we might BE A BLESSING and that is where the true blessing will be found.
As we come together again and rebuild our lives and our church, let us seek to be a blessing and not just seek to be blessed.
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