This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series. God has been doing a pretty incredible work at my church. We are experiencing explosive growth thanks to the movement of His Spirit in our midst. We are also on the cusp of breaking ground on an expansion and renovation of our current facilities. It’s a pretty exciting time, and we are most definitely going somewhere. But in order to make sure we are truly heading in the right direction, we need to remember who God made us to be. For the next three weeks, we are going to be explore afresh the basic elements of our identity as a church. Thanks for coming along for this journey with us.

The Gospel Is for Everybody

Social media can be a great tool for the advancement of the Gospel. But social media can also be a place where people vent their spleen without really thinking through what the full consequences of their words might be. I won’t ask you to raise your hand if you’ve ever posted something you later wish you hadn’t and even perhaps had to take down because of the negative impact it was having. And the thing is, because none of us are particularly disciplined with our words on a good day—whether they are coming from our mouths or our fingers—all of us are susceptible to this kind of thing. Even pastors. 

A few years ago, I remember coming across a comment by a pastor who was pretty well-known at the time. I didn’t see the comment when he first posted it. Instead, I came across it when another friend of mine shared it approvingly. The comment was made after Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to the bench by the Senate. Someone connected with the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee—that’s the part of the SBC that is compensated and which handles the day-to-day operations of the Convention—posted a tweet congratulating the new Justice on her historic nomination to the highest bench in the land. 

Now, whatever you happen to think about Justice Jackson, her political positions, or her decisions record, it was unavoidably true that she was the first black woman appointed to the Court. Whether or not you think that should be celebrated doesn’t change the fact that it was an historical first. Coming as it did from an organization that tends to stake out cultural and political positions that do not align with Justice Jackson’s, the tweet was likely intended to be a bit of cultural olive branch; a bit of graciousness expressed toward someone who typically stood on the opposite side of the ideological divide from where the SBC usually stands. 

Well, this particular pastor took umbrage with the Executive Committee’s congratulatory tweet and called them out for it publicly. He expressed on Facebook that if a member of his staff had been the one to post such a message, he would have fired them on the spot for the personal offense of their expressed opinion. Now, I don’t know this particular pastor’s political persuasion (although from his post, I think my assumptions about him are probably fairly accurate), but think for a minute about what he was likely unintentionally communicating. 

One of the demographic facts about our nation is that people who identify themselves as falling in the same basic region of the political continuum as Justice Jackson by and large do not also identify themselves as followers of Jesus. From the standpoint of people who are followers of Jesus, this means that these are folks who need to hear the Gospel and to experience the love of Christ so they can embrace it and find the salvation and life they need. For this pastor to publicly and vigorously condemn simply a note of congratulations suggested a kind of partisanship on his part that communicated loudly and clearly that folks who don’t share his political preferences would not have been welcome at his church. 

Friends, whether you happen to agree with his expressed political positions or not, I hope you can see that this was not the message any church should be sending—let alone the pastor of a church. To proclaim so loudly on social media that the very people in your community who are statistically the most likely to need to hear and experience the Gospel are the very same people who are least welcome in your church rather severely undercuts your ability to effectively share the Gospel with that group of people. If the church really is for everybody, then we need to make sure it is for everybody. 

This morning, we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series called “Going Somewhere.” Every Sunday morning, when I first walk up to this lectern, I welcome you to First Baptist Oakboro, and I pretty quickly then thereafter say something else as part of my initial greeting. I tell you who we are as a church. I remind you that we are “a people with whom anyone can connect to grow in Christ and reach out for His kingdom.” There’s a reason I say that same thing to you every single Sunday morning. I want you to remember it. I want that phrase and the ideas it conveys to be so drilled into your minds that you can’t think about this church without hearing it echo around your head. Anytime you talk about the church with someone who isn’t already connected here, I want you to say, “I’m a member at First Baptist Oakboro. That’s this great church in the community where anyone can connect to grow in Christ and reach out for His kingdom.” And the reason for all of this is that this is who God made us to be as a church. Whether you are intimately connected here or still connecting here, I want for you to be constantly conscious of this so that you can both live into it and live out of it when you go other places around the community and beyond. 

But as much as I want that one idea to be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the church, simply hearing the phrase over and over again isn’t enough if you don’t really understand what it means. Because of that, at least once a year, we take a few weeks to explore afresh the elements of who God made us to be as a church so that we can all be operating from the same page in the same playbook. This year, with a rather large project looming ahead of us, it struck me as all the more important that we not lose sight of who we are in the anticipation of what is yet to come. As a church, we are going somewhere. God is taking us on a journey, and it is, frankly, pretty exciting. If we don’t properly understand who we are as a church, though, we’ll be far more likely to wind up going in the wrong direction entirely by accident. So then, what are these elements of who we are? 

Several years ago, I took a few months with the deacons to clarify together who we are as a church. After a long stretch of prayer and thinking through the church’s past, present, and desired future, along with a careful study of the Scriptures, and guided by some evaluation questions, we settled on three ideas that really define who we are: connect, grow, and reach. Each of the next three weeks, we are going to focus in on one of these together to see how it is a part of who we are, and how God is shaping us to be more fully the church He has created and called us to be. We’re going to start today with that first one: connecting.

Jesus was a master at connecting with people. Everywhere He went, He engaged with people right where they were in order to draw them toward His kingdom. It really didn’t matter who the person was. He crossed all sorts of cultural boundaries that no one expected Him to cross. Actually, it was not simply that they didn’t expect Him to cross them, they actively expected Him not to cross them. But He crossed them anyway because His message was just too important for anyone to not have the chance to hear it. 

This attitude on Jesus’ part was not at all common in His day. His disciples in particular struggled with it. More than once they were blown away by the kind of people He engaged with and the ways He engaged with them. It was scandalous. He talked to people He wasn’t supposed to talk to. He touched people He wasn’t supposed to touch. He ministered to people He should have ignored. He got His rhetorical and actual hands dirty in ways that made the group deeply uncomfortable. Even after they received the Holy Spirit, they still struggled with just how welcome and open God’s kingdom really was. 

But God was building something new. He was building His kingdom. In order to do that, He was going to have to transform His people from ones who operated pretty much like everybody else when it came to how receptive they were beyond their natural tribal boundaries into ones who better reflected His own passion for connecting with everyone. And as if to show just how total of a transformation the Gospel can bring about in someone’s heart, while Jesus’ earliest and closest followers still struggled with connecting with people who fell outside of their normal circle of impact, a later addition to the party did not. In fact, a good argument could be made that no one embraced Jesus’ demonstration of a radical willingness to connect with others better than Paul did. The irony of this is that before the Gospel, Paul would have been one of the loudest voices condemning Jesus and His disciples for crossing all the boundaries they did. Once the Gospel got into his heart, he led the way into more. 

And although Paul demonstrated his commitment to Jesus’ radical spirit of inclusivity and connecting with others many times throughout Luke’s narrative of the growth of the early church in Acts, in one of his letters, he gives word to his approach in a way that hits right in the bullseye of what God is doing with and in and through this church. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, let’s take a look at these powerful words together. You’ll find them in 1 Corinthians 9. 

Now, kind of like chapter 13 that we looked at last week, 1 Corinthians 9 falls right in the middle of a three-part section of the larger letter in which Paul focuses on one particular issue. In this section, Paul is doing the thing he occasionally does where he talks about one thing as a vehicle for talking about another. In chapters 8 and 10, he’s talking about whether or not it was morally appropriate for believers to eat meat that had been obtained from a pagan sacrifice. We’re not going to spend any time on that right now. It’s enough to know for the time being that it was a really big issue then. In chapter 9 he is talking directly about his right to be fairly compensated for the Gospel-advancing work he has been faithfully doing. Through both of these topics, though, what he’s really talking about is the importance of followers of Jesus being willing to lay aside their rights and expectations and even comfort levels in order to connect other people with the Gospel who wouldn’t otherwise hear it. 

In the first part of the chapter, his argument amounts to this: I would be well within my rights to expect to be compensated for the preaching and church planting that I’m doing. Other speakers who are doing the same thing that I’m doing demand fees for their work. I could easily do the same and expect to make a comfortable living from it. Scripture itself allows for me to do this. But if I did that, then there’s a chance people would accuse me of being a kind of Gospel-mercenary, undermining the message I proclaim by suggesting that I’m only saying what the people paying my salary want me to say. That would be nonsense, of course, but if someone was on the fence about the Gospel, that kind of an insinuation could be enough to push them off in the direction of unbelief. Because I absolutely don’t want that to happen, I make my own life more difficult by refusing to take any money from anyone for preaching the Gospel. I’m not going to let anything get in the way of the Gospel if I can help it. “For my part I have used none of these rights, nor have I written these things that they may be applied in my case. For it would be better for me to die than for anyone to deprive me of my boast!” (His “boast” there is in the grace of God and not anything he was doing.) 

So, with all of that in the background, when we get to v. 19, Paul dives into this willingness to not simply give up his rights for the sake of others’ hearing the Gospel, but to bend himself in almost any direction in order that someone else might hear and receive the Gospel message leading to salvation in Jesus Christ. Listen to how he puts this. “Although I am free from all and not anyone’s slave, I have made myself a slave to everyone, in order to win more people.” 

Pause there a second. Slavery was a big feature of the culture of first century Rome. Not a single Roman that we are aware of had any moral issues with it at all. It wasn’t racially based like our version of it was in the 19th century. Paul’s making reference to it here was not some form of an endorsement of it. His work lay the groundwork for the abolition movement which was almost always a feature of the church wherever it took root somewhere. Paul was simply using an illustration his audience was going to be able to understand in order to make a spiritual point. His point was that he was willing to submit himself to the beliefs and expectations of the people around him without regard for his own life and safety—just like a slave had to do—if it meant their getting to hear the Gospel from him. 

So, “although I am free from all and not anyone’s slave, I have made myself a slave to everyone, in order to win more people. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win Jews; to those under the law, like one under the law—though I myself am not under the law—to win those under the law.” He’s just saying the same thing in two different ways here. When Paul was around Jewish people, he behaved like a Jewish person. He lived within Jewish moral and social expectations just like he was still bound by the law. He wasn’t, of course, because in Christ he was free from the law, but he did this for the sake of being able to connect with them. If he went into Jewish contexts and wantonly violated all of their cultural and religious norms and customs, they weren’t going to be willing to listen to a single word he said. They would be focused only on the offense of his behavior. No Gospel work was going to happen in that instance. As far as the Jews went, the Gospel itself was offensive enough. He didn’t need to put anything else in the way by behaving in ways offensive to them.

None of this should be hard for us to understand. Think about your home for a second. In your home there are certain norms and expectations—rules, if you will—that you expect people to abide by. You abide by them yourself. If I come into your home with the intention of sharing the Gospel with you, and as soon as I walk in the door I start violating all of these rules you live by, how likely are you going to be to listen to what I’ve got to say? Let’s say you always take your shoes off when you come in the door, you don’t sit in a certain chair, you never take a sip of a drink until the person who served it has sat down and had their sip first, and so on and so forth. If I walk in, leave my shoes on, plop right down in the forbidden chair, and drain my glass as soon as it’s filled, you’re not going to be looking to hear what I’ve got to say, you’re going to be looking to get me back out the door as soon as possible. You might just pick me up and carry me out. It doesn’t matter if I like the rules or agree with them at all. As long as they aren’t violating a command of God, there’s no reason beyond personal pride I can’t keep them while I’m in your home for the sake of gaining that Gospel hearing. 

Paul goes on to give some more examples of how this can be the case. “To those who are without the law [that would be Gentiles, or pagans—people who don’t believe in God more generally], like one without the law—though I am not without God’s law but under the law of Christ—to win those without the law.” As long as connecting with another person doesn’t require you to do something God has explicitly said not to do, you are free in Christ to mold yourself to their circumstances and situation. You can adapt to their expectations without worrying about making God mad. If your goal is to proclaim the Gospel, He’s going to be right there supporting your efforts. “To the weak I became weak, in order to win the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that I may by every possible means save some.” 

Our goal as a church is for people to connect with Jesus through hearing and experiencing the Gospel. Anything less than that, and we are not being faithful to God’s design for us as a group of Jesus followers. The simple truth that Paul understood so very well here is that the Gospel is for everybody, and it is our job to help them receive it. In order to accomplish this, especially in our culture as it currently exists, we are going to have to earn that hearing. It will not be automatic. We dare not assume on it. The people around us who have not yet received the Gospel message and had their lives utterly transformed by it are almost certainly suspicious of Christians. They’ve heard enough bad things about us to keep them well convinced that they don’t want anything to do with our particular brand of crazy. And, it may be that they haven’t had to hear anything about us at all because they’ve experienced plenty firsthand. They’ve experienced the church and believers at our worst and been left with a taste in their mouth so bad that the very word “Christian” still brings a bit of bile up in their throats. Still others just don’t care, and can’t see any possible relevance the Gospel might have for their lives. And the few things they have seen or heard have convinced them we’re just weird. 

In the face of all of this is again this simple truth: The Gospel is for everybody, and it’s our job to help them receive it. This means that our being a people with whom anyone can connect can’t just be something we say. It can’t be just a line I repeat to you each Sunday morning. It has to be who we are at the most fundamental of levels. 

Here’s the thing: The culture around us expects certain things from the church. It expects the church to be a certain way. It expects the church to attract a certain kind of people. Indeed, there are plenty of churches that have a “type.” Everybody who goes there fits a certain mold, and if you don’t fit that mold, you’re really not going to connect there. In fact, you won’t really even be welcome there—kind of like what that pastor from a little while ago communicated about his church. At First Baptist Oakboro, I’m sure we have a type too, but we need to be sure to the extent of our abilities as a body that our “type” is as broad and inclusive as it can possibly be. This is because the Gospel is for everybody, and it’s our job to help them receive it. 

If we are going to be a people with whom anyone can connect, then we need to be ready to engage with people who are not like us, who don’t like us, and who we might not even like very much given our cultural upbringing and personal tribal preferences. We all have people we naturally resonate with more than others. But we absolutely cannot expect people to harmonize with our preferred rhythms just because they’re our rhythms. We need to be ready and willing to learn all kinds of new harmonies so that we can sing along with whatever song someone comes in humming. 

Now, there’s still only one song. That’s the Gospel. But it can be harmonized endlessly. Christ alone is Lord, and there is no way to the Father that doesn’t go through Him. That is core, unchangeable doctrine. But how someone gets to Him from out of the background they are coming with all of their assumptions, experiences, passions, preferences, cultural norms, and the like is wide and varied. If we limit ourselves to only one kind of people in terms of who we will reach, we are cutting ourselves off from being able to minister the Gospel effectively to all the rest. The Gospel is for everybody, and it’s our job to help them receive it. 

The goal is to make the Scriptures our one and only guide here. Of course, even in saying that, we have to be careful. There are plenty of folks who have spent their lives hearing, “the Bible says this,” or “the Bible says that,” and who therefore think the Bible says this or that when it either doesn’t really, or doesn’t say it nearly as forcefully as they’ve been led to believe that it does. There are folks who have been raised to think that only a certain translation is acceptable to use; that only certain people can fill certain roles; that in order to be a Christian you have to have a certain political party affiliation; that you can only go to certain kinds of places or do certain kinds of things. The truth, though, as Paul makes clear here, is that the freedom available to us in Christ is vast—far broader than we often imagine it to be. Far broader, even, than we are perhaps comfortable with its being. We can pursue a whole variety of different things to His glory and do so from entirely different angles than the person next to us, and still be pursuing the same Lord together. The Gospel is for everybody, and it’s our job to help them receive it. 

The bottom line here is this: Being a people with whom anyone can connect isn’t about us. We’re not to be connecting people to ourselves. We are to be connecting them to Jesus. When our first concern is connecting people to ourselves, we will gradually become more and more tribal. Only people who are like us will connect with us because that’s all the people we are interested in having connect with us. But if connecting people with Jesus is our only goal, we’ll truly be open to anybody from anywhere with all distinctions beyond being a unique image bearer of God becoming irrelevant. The Gospel is for everybody, and God has designed us as church to be a people with whom anybody can connect to experience it. The Gospel is for everybody, and it’s our job to help them receive it. 

So, how do we do this? Well, the biggest part of it is for you to keep being the incredible community you are. Keep welcoming guests warmly and genuinely. Keep inviting friends and neighbors and family and strangers you meet around town to experience the community we have here. Keep inviting people to experience the incredible atmosphere at The Gathering Place on Wednesday nights. When you see someone who doesn’t seem to fit for some reason, go out of your way to meet them and make doubly sure they know they are welcome here. And do all of this not simply because you are who you are. Do it because this is what Jesus did. It’s who Jesus was. Do it because these folks need to hear the Gospel and our going the extra mile to connect with them just may be the starting point of their walking down that road. I can’t think of many things in the world that matter more than that. The Gospel is for everybody, and God made us to be a people with whom anybody can connect to make sure they can hear it. The Gospel is for everybody, and it’s our job to help them receive it.