Thursday, November 21, 2013

Gathering to God

For twenty-eight years Woody Hayes coached at Ohio State University, winning three National Collegiate Championships.  He was known for winning games and losing his temper.  His outstanding career disintegrated after the 1978 Gator Bowl.  With the game on the line, Charlie Bauman, a player for Clemson, intercepted a pass and was running down the Ohio State sideline and out of bounds.  After the play was over Coach Hayes stepped out onto the field and punched Bauman in the throat.  The next day he was fired.  He retired in humiliation.

A few weeks later, a prestigious gathering of coaches and athletes from across the country was held.  Tom Landry, the acclaimed Coach of the Dallas Cowboys, had an extra ticket.  He invited the humiliated and discredited former coach, Woody Hayes, as his guest. 

When they walked together into the banquet hall and the heads all started to turn, in that moment Coach Landry became Professor Landry – a teacher of grace and mercy.

Someone has said, “All of God’s blessings are accompanied with a teaching certificate.  When God forgives you, He equips you to become a teacher of forgiveness.  When God pours generosity and kindness into your life, He qualifies you to become a professor of kindness and generosity.”  And that’s what we see the Apostle Paul being time and time again.

What is best known about his letter to the Philippian Church is that it’s one of the letters he writes from prison.  Unlike most of his other letters, Philippians is a letter of unbridled joy, with few disciplinary exhortations.  He begins with the familiar words, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” and he continues both themes throughout.

What is not so well known is the presence of false teachers in the midst of the church of Philippi.  Indeed, it is the presence of these false teachers that prompts Paul, inspired of the Holy Spirit, to describe the heart of what “living a life worthy of the Gospel of Christ” means.  Though he never explicitly states what these false teachers are teaching, it’s clear by the beginning of chapter two what they are saying.  They’re saying many of the same things we hear today from well-meaning, moral, upright, religious teachers.  They’re saying that pleasing God means doing the right thing and avoiding the wrong ones.  It means pulling yourself up by your own spiritual bootstraps and pressing on to be all you can be in Christ.  But the truth of the Gospel is the opposite of that.  And Paul provides two gloriously transparent examples – Jesus and himself.

Since September we have been looking at what it means to live Beyond ourselves.  In the last few weeks we’ve been looking at what it means to serve the world with the Gospel by gathering ourselves and our stuff, and giving to those God sets before us.  This week is the final message in the Beyond Series, “Gathering to God.”  And it’s here in Philippians 3:12-21 that we see how Paul instructs us to do that.

Like everything in the Christian life, gathering ourselves to God is counterintuitive.  Rather than standing up for ourselves, it requires laying ourselves down.  Rather than focusing on bettering ourselves, it requires taking our eyes off ourselves and focusing them on Jesus.  Rather than changing our ways, it requires us to change our minds about who God is and who we are.

The question before the house this communion Sunday morning is “How are we to gather ourselves to God?”  In preparation for receiving the answer we may wish to consider the following:

1.      What did Brit Hume of Fox News say about Tiger Woods a few days after the scandal broke?

2.      Why did the media react as it did?

3.      How does Jesus’ example of going Beyond Himself (Phil 2:1-11) inform us of what gathering to God means?

4.      How does Paul show us he “gets it” in Phil. 3:2-11?

5.      How do you square Sunday’s text with Romans 7?

6.      What does Paul mean when he says, “I press on” in verse 12?

7.      What does Paul forget about his past when he says in verse 13 that he “forgets what lies behind and strains forward to what lies ahead”?

8.      What is the “goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus”?

9.      What is the “mature” way of thinking Paul references in verse 15?

10.  What is the meaning of verse 16?  How do you define “attaining”?

See you around the Table on Sunday!