One Family, In the Home, In the Church, In the World

A message presented at the 1^st Word International Ministries Global Gathering 30^th of December 2007 in Manila, Philippines.

Introduction

An Elusive Hope

The book of Joshua and the book of Judges are two contrasting Old Testament narratives canonically placed adjacent to each other; both depict the failure of human will to carry on the work and purpose of God. They both present a disheartening story that moved from victory to frustrations, euphoria to despair, from religious zeal to faithlessness.

The book of Joshua, which is named after Moses’ protégé, illustrates how the nomadic nation of Israel led successful invasion campaigns against more superior and sophisticated nations and armies inhabiting the Promise Land using crude war implements and sheer faith in their God. Of course the victory was won not because of their military efficiency but because of the divine intervention of YAHWEH. The last chapters of the book show the victorious people of Israel converging in a place called Shechem to listen to the victory speech of their charismatic leader Joshua[1]. There was a resounding Amen when Joshua made an altar call for commitment to the covenant of YAHWEH, “We will serve the LORD our God and we will obey His voice!” was the confident assurance given by the people of God[2].

Astonishingly, as we move on through the book of Judges, all the triumphant ‘amens’ of the people were turned into cries of despair and faltering dedication towards YAHWEH. The author of the book, emphatically gave the reason for such turn- around, “…there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel.”[3]

We may be quick to judge this generation of Israel as ingrate, unfaithful or having a misguided ministry paradigm. But wisdom warns us that this daunting episode in the life of God’s people can happen to our church community!

Still an Elusive Hope

This failure of Israel in the era of Judges is not one of a kind. Rather it is a recurring theme throughout history. Not because God is unable to fulfil His promise, but because God’s people as a corporate body time after time fail to swallow the bitter taste of sacrifice that is blended with the sweet tasting promise of God.

From Cain and Abel, to the sons of Noah, sons of Jacob, to the Hebrews in the desert, to the Judges, to the rule of the Kings, to the post exilic era, in the time of our Lord Jesus Christ, to the early church (Greek and Jewish Christians), to the Catholic church, to the Reformations, to the many revivals and many denominations that sprung out of the grace and mercy of God, the opportunity to relish the fruits of the mighty deeds of God has always been short-lived and wanting. Many denominations – in order to secure their survival – built the church into institutions of personalities, rules, hierarchies and thrones. As a result of crystallizing the church as an institution, the vibrant communal life of God’s people has often been replaced by individualistic spirituality, sometimes unmindful of others and often characterized by personal loyalties to a particular church institution.

A Sacrifice Beyond What We Can Bear!

I do not wish to dampen our rejoicing for the wonderful deeds that God has done to our community in the last ten years, nor do I desire to douse the flame of jubilation and confidence towards the attainment of our hopes and dreams. But, we all need to understand that the hope laid down before us, “One Family, In our Home, In our Church, In the World” will not be achieved by sheer fearless declaration or claims of God’s promises as the Israelites did, but it will require sacrifices beyond what we can bear. Sacrifices that are required from all: the church leaders, the fathers, the mothers, the young adults, the young people and from everyone who loves this family.

Marrying the woman I love is one of the most exciting and joyful moments in my life; but marriage is not about the wedding day. It is a life – often a long one – shared with someone you are determined to love. The joy of being a husband, a wife and a parent is priceless and enduring. But for that delight to endure one has to give up other forms of pleasures that sometimes numb our heart from savouring the sweetness and joy of marriage.

Winston Churchill quoted, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Indeed, milestone events are exhilarating but they are not finish lines, they are mile markers that tell us to shift to a new pace, to keep on going and harness all our strengths. Churchill is suggesting that achievements should not be an end of aspirations but must become the beginning of a new courage to pursue greater accomplishments. Thus, today we are facing a new beginning; we are just starting to live in the promise of God.

Therefore, I propose that as we hope to relish the promise of God to be One Family, In the Home, In the Church and In the World, let each one of us be ready to sacrifice beyond what we can bear by:

Counting the cost
Carrying our cross
Empowering one another
Remaining faithful to our God

We need to Count the Cost

Luke chronicled that multitudes of people were eager to follow the Lord Jesus Christ during the peak of His ministry. Surprisingly, unlike many famous preachers of today who would flatter their followers with many promises to gain support for their ministries, the Lord Jesus pulled the rug under the feet of his followers and pulled them down from the clouds to reality. He laid down the qualification for one to be His disciple; first, “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father, mother…..he cannot be my disciple.”[4] – To be disowned by one’s family is an expected reality for a true follower of Jesus Christ. Second, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and comes after Me cannot be my disciple.”[5] – Giving up one’s right, disregarding reputation and sense of self honour for the sake of Christ is a price one has to pay for following the Lord.

Third, His postscript to these disturbing prerequisites was an advice to make a feasibility study, whether one has the capacity and capability to make it.

“For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it.”

“Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle will not first sits down and take counsel, whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming with against him with twenty thousand.”

Luke 14: 28, 31

One Family, In our Home, In our Church, In the World, is a mandate of God for His people from the time of Adam to the present. It is the tower that we need to build, not the towers we normally tend to build, like our own ziggurats of Babel (pride), our own tiny kingdoms, denominations and personal credentials.

It is also a battle that we have to engage, a conflict of moral principles, of faith, of right and wrong, of preserving the unity, of exercising justice and grace. We have to count the cost whether we have the capacity and the capability to build and to defend the family.

What are the costs we have to incur in order to have the capacity to build One Family, in the Home, in the Church and in the World?

I can name some, which include:

The capacity to love, to accept and honour one another though we are different in many respects;
The capacity to forgive and be merciful to those who commit mistakes, and to those who offend us;
The capacity to humble ourselves and accept that others are better than us;
The capacity to be honest, to be sincere in the things we do, in our words, in our commitment, in the treasures entrusted to us and in our relationships;
The capacity to change our views and sometime antiquated traditions, which are irrelevant and detrimental to the purpose and will of God;
The capacity to persevere in striving for excellence in our home, in our churches and in the workplaces that God provided us.

What are some of the costs that we need to incur in order to have the capability to defend and preserve the family?

We need to have:

The capability to read, interpret and make the word of God alive and relevant in our home, in our church and in relating to the world (i.e. the capability to read beyond our doctrines);
The capability to lead, to teach and instruct one another about righteousness because we practice righteousness ourselves;
The capability to settle our differences in a matured and sensible manner;
The capability to bless this world that is deprived of love, care, justice and peace;
The capability to confront the hostile world with wisdom, with good deeds and with love;
The capability to fight a long and sustained battle, not giving up until the Master comes to finish the job.

To the pastors, the leaders, the parents, the kuyas and ates, we must realistically take into account what we will need to have to lead this community to a greener pasture, beside quiet waters, through the valley of the shadow death and to feed them in front of their enemies?[6] Indeed do we have enough of the Great Shepherd to shepherd this great family?

We need to Carry our Cross

The traditional interpretation of our Roman Catholic heritage of this saying is to struggle with one’s fate or destined problem, which is supposedly dumped by God on a person’s shoulder. Apparently, such cross is God’s way of testing one’s perseverance, allowing each person to participate in the suffering of Christ. This is a fatalistic view and a great error that needs to be corrected. Such view restores back the temple veil that has been miraculously and symbolically torn[7] at the death of Christ thus, disregarding the liberating power of the cross.

The saying, “Whoever does not carry his own cross…” implies a voluntary choice. The verb carry (Basta’lei) is in the present active indicative form where the carrying is initiated by the subject, whoever. The cross that the Lord is talking about is not a sticky problem that is given by God by ‘force majeure’. It suggests a deliberate denying of one’s ambition, reputation and identity in favour of pursuing the cause of Christ. It echoes the meaning of dying to oneself. We can choose to carry, dump, and let others carry it for us (meaning let others suffer for us, for our own glory) or take the cross upon ourselves.

Why do we have to carry our cross? Though we are one denomination we must remind ourselves that we are building a Family, a community whose corner stone is Christ and whose surname is that of God, our Father. This implies that we must build this church on the principles of Christ derived from the heart of God. And this, my friends, is where some, if not many of our problems originate.

The living principles of Christ are greatly misunderstood today. We consider His teachings as this lofty ideal and hence, dismiss them as spiritual principles of godliness that will be perfected in the time of our glorification. This begets a slew of excuses when we fail to emulate or observe such principles. We call Christ’s teachings as ‘hard sayings’, and often readily ignore them and focus on the exceptions and outward piety that the religious leaders in the time of Christ love so much. Why? Because these exceptions and outward habits easily provide us with a cheap spiritual make-up.

If we have to build a family, we have to build it on the principles of Christ. This requires from all of us nothing less than carrying our cross and denying and dying to ourselves. Let us look at some of the crosses, the denying and the dying we have to do.

The denying of:

Our comfort (so that, ironically, our spouses, our children, our employees, our employers, our friends, our enemies, our brethren may find comfort);
Our desire for honour and power (in lieu we need to empower and honour others);
Our own privileges (by recognizing the privilege due to others);
Our own opinions and philosophies in order to listen to others and value them for their merit;
Our hunger for love and attention, (so that we may love and pay attention to others).

The dying we have to make constitute:

Dying to our self (which means to quit being self serving);
Dying to our sin or unrighteous practices that hinder our ability to honour God;
Dying to emotions of hatred, vengeance and envy;
Dying to our ignorance and ungodly perception of life and others;
Dying to our misplaced pride that breeds discrimination and mistrust.

We will be building, maintaining, extending this family but this can only be done if everyone will live in the principles of Christ that require carrying our cross.

We need to Empower One another

The book of Judges is silent about the failure of the Joshua generations to reproduce another Joshua generation. I believe we can safely assume that the leaders, the fathers and the elders of the Joshua generations did not empower their young people to carry on into the future.

Empowering is God’s way of magnifying His goodness and creativity. He empowered Adam, Moses, David, Solomon and the prophets. He empowered the apostles and until today empowers His church.

We need to be a family that empowers one another. To empower means to allow people to develop their full giftedness, ability and personhood in order to bring about goodness and blessings of God through His people. This requires providing people avenues to explore and express their hearts and minds in order to sharpen and train their giftedness for God’s purpose. This also requires self restraint from those in position of authority to ensure that we do not dampen positive developments and enthusiasm among ourselves.

The western world experienced great developments because when these countries began to relive Christian principles following the Protestant reformation, people were empowered to develop, to study, to participate in leadership, to think and to help. Thus we must recognise the essential role of pastors in all our churches, and willingly share the burden of carrying out the chores to build our church community, so they could accomplish their core tasks that include praying, studying and mentoring the church members.

As a family, kuyas and ates must participate and help tatay and nanay in improving the home. The ‘bunsos’ must share with the household chores. Titos and titas must offer a helping hand. This is the way we must build our family.

Parents, married couples, the young adults, and our youth must be empowered to think and discover answers or solutions about issues that threaten their faith, their morals and their future. We must empower them to search and adopt solutions that they see fit to preserve their dedication to our God. This is the fundamental reason why the apostles were taught by the Holy Spirit to appoint deacons among the Hellenistic Jewish Christians, so that the apostles may devout themselves to pastoral work of praying, studying, teaching and mentoring the people.

We Need to Remain Faithful to our God

The underlying reason for the failure of the people of Israel after the Joshua generation was that they did not solely trust in the faithfulness of YAHWEH. It is not that they did not know Him, but they began entertaining other ‘gods’ relegating the LORD as optional god, the god of last resort!

God our Father demands exclusive allegiance from us, trusting Him completely, serving and worshipping Him. “You shall have no strange ‘gods’ before Me,” was His command to His people. We may say, ‘Jesus is my Lord,’ yet our faith is not closely focused on Him but on the ‘gods’ that we have made. I like to mention some of the ‘gods’ that we mistakenly have made.

- Our ‘petty dogmas;’ sometimes our beliefs become a replacement for God when they become a reason for us to sever a relationship with our brethren simply because they eat the things we do not want to eat or they don’t sing the way we sing.

- Our ‘idols’ represented by famous healing prophets (somehow this is how these people want to be called). I was so surprised to hear a church leader who desperately came to one of such healing rallies believing that the so-called ‘prophet’ was his only chance to be healed.

- Our ‘self’, when we begin claiming and prophesying things to happen, because we believe we possess the same ‘word’ (logos) that God uttered when He created everything out of nothing. In this sense, we are dangerously acting as ‘god’ and making God a ‘genie.’

- Our ‘success’ when we become proud and arrogant that we lose the need to call upon the Name of the LORD!

These are some of the things God’s people have come to trust, to worship and to serve as ‘gods’. As the Lord grants us more success let us never forget our first love[8].

Indeed how do we guard ourselves from such errors? Again, it requires a sacrifice beyond what we normally are willing to give, to study the scriptures diligently, know history and walk in the Spirit that He may teach us in His ways.

To avoid such pitfalls, our pastors and leaders must strive to study and raise their level of understanding that they may rely fully on God’s wisdom and less on handbooks and the Internet. Churches must contribute to send their pastors and key leaders to pursue further studies so that they may serve and guide the church properly in this chaotic era.

Conclusion

One Family, in our home, in our church, in our world is paradise beheld. It defines what life would have been if only Adam and Eve did not desire to become like God. It would have been the state of the world civilization if only the people of God, Jews and Christians alike, fulfilled their task of bringing and showing the love of God to the world; if only God’s people have learned to love one another as Christ commanded – setting aside their differences and idiosyncrasies.

Can we make it? I believe we can in our own small way, in our sphere of influence and in the places where God allows us to take root and blossom. But it will need sacrifices beyond what we can bear.

Winston Churchill in his speech to the House of Common of the United Kingdom[1] concerning the Parliament building that was destroyed by German bombings quoted,

“We shape our buildings; afterwards our building shapes us…”

In the same manner;

“We shape our family; afterwards our family shapes us…”

In all these things we need to force ourselves to trust God as our Father, the Lord Jesus Christ as our Redeemer and the Holy Spirit as our teacher. This is what it takes to remain faithful, to serve Him and to worship Him.