Gateway Church Sermons
Alder Road Site | 23rd June 2024 | Matthew Hosier | Indifference & Ingratitude
Brilliant. So it's good to be together. So that video being reminded of a bigger world we're involved in. James did cast out that invite in all seriousness, Gareth Bowley from South Africa who in our advanced team is the guy who's helping to look after that church in Ghana. He's organising a trip for April next year. So if there were any from here who wanted to go out to Ghana next April with Gareth we'd certainly be really keen for some to go. It's great saying money but obviously looking for a meaningful personal connection as well. So if you fancy a trip to Ghana next April come over chat. Right, here's our text. First John chapter 2 verses 15 to 17. Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away but whoever does the will of God lives forever. What's the best known verse in the Bible? John 3 16. Yeah I'd say so as well. So global sporting events, there's always somebody holding up John 3 16 on a banner. It's the first verse that probably most of us teach our kids. It says for God, for God so loved the world. Now this is framing for all that we believe about the nature of God. God is loving, God loves the world. First John out Texas morning from his first John 2 but first John 4 says categorically God is love. John 3 16. God so loved the world. One John 4 8. God is love. And this understanding of God as love begins in the very person of God himself, the dynamic of the Trinity. We worship God who is one, there is one God but in the wonder of the Trinity, one God who is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and for all eternity Father, Son and Holy Spirit have existed in a relationship of perfect love. God is at the heart, our love is at the heart and the essence of who God is and we Christians believe that creation, the world, the universe, us, the reason that anything exists is because of an overflow of God's creative love. And that's a very different way to understand ourselves, to understand the world from the secular materialist worldview which says well it was just something, something happened at the big bang that somehow nobody knows how, from nothing at the singularity at the beginning of a time. Something, everything was created out of nothing by nobody and by chance and random forces you and I are now here. That's a very depressing worldview if you think about it, it offers no hope really. The Christian worldview, our understanding is that at the heart of it all the centroidal is a God who is a God of love, who has always lived in love, always existed in love and the creation is an overflow of his mighty and amazing love and that love of God culminates in the sending of his son, for God so loved the world he sent his only son. But then we get to our text 1 John 2 verse 15 and John says do not love the world, do not love the world. So John 3 16 and 1 John 4 8 tells us God loves the world and then 1 John 2 15, John tells us do not love the world which can seem a little bit confusing. What John is doing here is showing us there are different kinds of love. If we, God loves the world but us loving the world actually puts us in opposition to God because what he's describing here is a different kind of love. The love of God is a love which is pure and creative and redemptive whereas love of the world, what's being addressed in 1 John 2 15 is a love which is lustful and corrupted and destructive. It's a very different kind of love from the love of God. There's a fork in the road which John is describing, either love the way that God loves a pure creative redemptive love or love the way the world loves which is lustful and corrupted and destructive. That's a fork in the road. It's about where is your motivation? What is your orientation? What are you living for? Are you living for what is passing or are you living for what is eternal? There's that fork in the road. And these three weeks we're looking at this theme of suburban sins. These are sins of respectability. Last week we were looking at the sins of pride and unbeliefer. I thought maybe nobody would come back after the last Sunday so kind of relieved you here again. Today we're going to be looking at the sins of indifference and ingratitude. These are two things which can very easily wrap their way around our hearts. These are two things which are often thoroughly acceptable in the eyes of the world. But they're thoroughly unacceptable for those who want to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ. The things that indifference and gratitude represent, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. And they're things that don't come from the Father that come from the world. So we need to be alert to them. So let's think about these two issues that face us. First of all indifference. Matthew's already referenced the football. I'm guessing a lot of people probably feel fairly indifferent about the football. I made being old and skeptical. I made the decision that I assumed that England playing football would mean boredom and frustration. And so I chose not to watch. I got a better things and not enough time in my life to spend two hours watching football games. And from what I've heard, my perspective, my indifference was thoroughly, thoroughly vindicated. So I won't be on there on Tuesday. But enjoyed if you are. Although you probably won't because once again it would be frustrating and boring. So there you go. So indifference about that is fully justified. Perhaps slightly more significant and important couple of weeks time, general election. But to be honest, I'm sure a lot of us feel pretty indifferent about that. Whenever we have an election, I always get up beforehand and say, "Look, we should get out. Let's vote." It's part of the way that we submit to Jesus by submitting to the governing authorities. The way we do that in democracy is by casting our votes. I believe all that stuff. I think it's really -- who gets whose governing is really important, but I still don't know how I'm going to vote for and I feel pretty indifferent about the whole thing. And I'm guessing I'm not the only one. So we might feel indifferent. But there are other things where we see people are not indifferent at all this past week in stains when a cow got hit by a police car. Suddenly there was no indifference about that. The whole world was an uproar. Even the home secretary making pronouncements about the behavior of Surrey police and how they ran. I was thinking, "Why didn't they call Chris Clark to come and sort of --?" It would have been no problem at all. But when we're talking about -- the kind of indifference I'm talking about is not those kind of examples. What I'm thinking about is spiritual indifference. A spiritual laziness, a spiritual selfishness, a looking after number one. And these are attitudes actually, which are very acceptable, socially, very acceptable in the world. But they are a real problem for the Christian. Because we are meant to be motivated by the love of God, the love that sent the sun for us, that kind of love. And the thing about spiritual indifference is that spiritual indifference would keep us introspective and safe. It would actually just suck us into worldly ways of thinking, living and acting. Whereas the love of God compels us to join God in his mission to the world. And that's something about which we should not be, cannot be indifferent. We need to be diligent and engaged in the mission of God. God so loved the world that he sent his son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. We're called into that mission with God. And that's something about which we should not be indifferent. We can see how seriously the Lord takes spiritual indifference in the book of Revelation. Beginning of the book of Revelation, the Lord Jesus, seen by the Apostle John, speaking to seven churches in Asia, representative of all churches. And the Lord speaks to the church in Sardis with this warning. He says to them, "I know your deeds. You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up. Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. Remember therefore what you have received and heard. Hold it fast and repent." That seems to have been a spiritual indifference which had come upon the church at Sardis. They were spiritually lazy, spiritually sleepy, and the Lord won't stand for it. Indifference is the reason why churches die. Churches become spiritually indifferent. They become indifferent, lazy, introspective, worldly, no longer really concerned with the mission of God on the face of the earth. And the warning that Jesus spoke over the church of Sardis is spoken again and both churches die. Now we can be so prone to indifference. It's such an easy suburban sin for us to slip into. So easy. A quote from John Piper about this, "We can be drunk with private concerns and indifferent to the great enterprise of world evangelization. But God will simply pass over us and do His great work while we shrivel up in our little land of comfort." Ouch. That really ouch to me when I read that and I was in sabbatical last year and read that. It's a telling phrase, shrivel up, we'll just shrivel up in our little land of comfort. That's where spiritual indifference leads. Now do we want to settle for that? I don't want to settle for that. I don't personally want to settle for that and I don't want us as a church to settle for that. And yet I know how easy it is to end up settling for that because this is a suburban sin which so easily gets around my heart, our hearts, we need to see the great danger of indifference. If we are spiritually indifferent in the end, Jesus will speak over our church, death. We don't want that. We want life. The other suburban sin that runs right alongside indifference is ingratitude. Now parents, we teach our kids to say please and to say thank you and we get frustrated if they're not. Thankful you at that moment of Christmas when you've had all the effort and hassle and money spent and then your kids don't seem as thankful for what you've given them. As you think they should, they seem to just wish they had whatever you've given to their siblings and instead of what you've given to them. The cause of many happy Christmases around the land. A lack of thankfulness in our children but there's actually a, so we teach our kids thankfulness but we try to. We try to teach them to say please and thank you but there's actually a greater education, a greater schooling going on which is teaching us every single day. It's really what every single advertisement is doing. It's actually what is happening, it always happens in an election campaign. This is what we're schooled in. This is a message that we constantly receive. Whatever you have is not good enough and you could actually, you should have much better. That is the message of every advertisement and every word that comes out of every politician's mouth. Whatever you have is not good enough and you couldn't, you should have much better. Now, I have to be a little bit careful here because this of course is double edged because the reality is that it's striving for more. It's dissatisfaction with how things are which is actually what it is, what enables human progress. If there wasn't a dissatisfaction with how things were and a desire for more, we wouldn't have penicillin and we wouldn't have central heating and we wouldn't have comfortable shoes. We'll still be sitting around fires burning cow down and walking around in clogs and dying at the age of 15 from some terrible infections. So the desire for more and the dissatisfaction with how things are can be good because that's what drives human progress and advancement. That's good. But the trouble is this good so easily gets twisted in a worldly way and ingratitude is an acceptable suburban sin which can do us so much damage. It's how John describes it as the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes. In our culture, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes are seen as entirely acceptable but they are actually spiritually ruinous. And of course the prime, probably the prime biblical example of this is found in Numbers 11 where God through his great mercy has raised up a leader for the people of Israel. Moses had been slaves in Egypt for 400 years. God raised up Moses as a great deliverer through Moses. God rescues his people out of slavery in Egypt, brings them into freedom and then as they're on their journey to the promised land, we get to Numbers 11 and God is providing for them. He's providing miraculous food, manor from heaven and the famous moment where the people grumble murmur against God is like, oh, he hates this manor. If only we were back in Egypt. Life was so good back in Egypt. Back in Egypt we had all we wanted to eat everything that was tasty. It was all good and Moses brought us out here to die in the desert. And this is extraordinary but so revealing example of ingratitude. You were slaves. You were under Pharaoh's lash. You've been brought into freedom and you're complaining because you're a bit bored with the cold flakes you're getting in the morning. It's a complete lack of proportion, a complete lack of recognition of what God has done for them. But it's so easy for us to fall into that and the thing is that we can fall into that exactly that kind of attitude and actually be applauded for it by the world. That to express dissatisfaction in gratitude, complaining is often seen as commendable in the eyes of the world in a way which really for Christians should not be commendable. So what are we to do? The opposites have been different in gratitude of diligence and thankfulness. And if we're to be true to Christ we need to cultivate those virtues, the virtues of diligence and thankfulness. We need to be diligent about the Lord's work and we need to cultivate thankfulness for all the Lord's benefits. Now how do we do that? I want to work through four hours which help us to do that. They should be easy to remember. We can prompt ourselves during the week. The first thing is that we need to resist. We are called to resist these suburban sins and in order to resist them we first have to recognize them. So we need to recognize the reality and the danger of indifference and ingratitude in our own hearts. We need to see the fight we're in. We are in a fight because everything we are schooled in every day is you should be ungrateful and you might as well be spiritually indifferent. You should live in number one. That's what we're schooled in every day. So we need to see the fight we're in. It's so easy for us to submit to these sins. There is a battle going on. Worldliness trains us in indifference and ingratitude. We're taught to be indifferent to God's mission. We're taught to be focused on our own comforts. We're taught to be dissatisfied with whatever we have and we're taught that life is a long battle for our personal rights. That's what we're taught the whole time and that can cause us to miss the wonder of God's grace to us. This means that we can't resist. We can't resist these sins passively. It's actually going to take some self-discipline for us to resist these sins. It's like if you go into a hotel or an office building with more than one floor, there's always a lift and you have that choice. Am I going to take the lift or am I going to take the stairs? All of us know that you're meant to take the stairs because the huge health benefits of taking stairs rather than taking the lift. Walking up a few steps has massive health benefits. Sorts out your blood pressure, all the rest. It's good for you. Take the stairs. Don't take the lift. Also, you're saving the planet. You're not losing using electricity. It's all good. I hate lifts. I always feel freaked out. They're going to get stuck and we're going to die in a tower of foreign inferno. I don't like lifts. Take the stairs. That's a good choice. We have many moments like that every day. In this moment, right now, it's a world scalling me in indifference. In this moment, am I being led? Are my attitudes being conditioned by in gratitude? What would it look like right now for me to choose diligence and thankfulness instead? What would it mean right now for me to choose the stairs rather than the lift? As in Houston for our conference recently, in American hotels. You can't even find the stairs. You walk in and the lifts are very obvious. It takes some effort to find the stairs in American hotels. They don't want you to find the stairs because in America, they assume that you don't have legs and you cannot walk. So you have to have a golf buggy to the lift and use that to go up because the idea of walking is terrifying for Americans. So I go hunting for the stairs to try and find them and there's always some dingy back corner of the hotel. Every day, so a slide there can be hard to choose diligence and gratitude rather than indifference and thankfulness rather than indifference and gratitude. And you know, the reality is I'm not good at this a lot of the time. It's so easy. It's so much easier just to take the lift and it's so much easier to just respond just to find that indifference and gratitude is what naturally bubbles up in us because that's what we're scalding the whole time. This week, I came in and somebody in my family who will be named, this was making a coffee and I wanted a coffee and said, "Oh, can you make enough coffee for me?" And they did and then I went to pull the coffee and they'd only made enough for me to have half a cup of coffee. And I was like, "What? What are you doing? It's only half a cup of coffee." In gratitude, immediately bubbling to the surface about a cup of coffee, which for most of human history, people haven't even had. And if I don't get my coffee when I want my coffee, it's like the world has ended. What is wrong with me? But it's so easy to fall into that kind of ingratitude. It's what we're scalding. It's what we're choosing diligence and thankfulness as an act of resistance. I did fairly quickly realize the folly of my own heart and to offer repentance. And the amusing irony that I'm preaching on this subject today, it was God poking me, I think, right. So we need to resist. We need to then repent. We need to repent where we have fallen into such worldliness and difference and ingratitude. We need to repent of it. There's no real healing without repentance. We don't get healed unless we confess these things before the Lord. And probably around these things, it needs to be our daily prayer. Jesus taught us to pray, forgive us our sins. And probably in our context, a daily prayer for us needs to be, Lord, forgive my indifference, forgive my ingratitude. Lord, help me today to be diligent and thankful. A confession. We need to confess where these suburban sins have gripped us. And the thing about confession, the thing about repentance is that we don't repent in order to punish ourselves, but we come confessing our sins before God in order to receive fresh grace from God. It's not about trying to earn our way back into God's favor. If you follow Jesus, you already stand in the place of God's favor. So that means our repentance and confession is actually about embracing what is already ours. Series titles, suburban sins and cosmic grace, there's cosmic scale grace available to us. And often the way that we experience and access a fresh measure of God's grace to us is by coming and confessing, Lord, I recognize I've been foolishly ungrateful. I recognize I've been stupidly indifferent before you, Lord, let me receive grace from you afresh. And he is gracious to us. The third hour is to receive. We need to be more alert to the blessings of God's common grace. We need to receive them joyfully. Christians need to learn to suck the marrow from life. We need to learn to notice the details and give thanks to God for the small things. These two scriptures, one from Proverbs, one from Ecclesiastes as examples. There are three things that are too amazing for me. Four, I do not understand. The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on the rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a young woman. Light is sweet and it pleases the eyes to see the sun. These examples of Solomon writing this, paying attention to the details and being amazed by it. This is amazing. So an eagle in the sky. Amazing. We don't get many eagles here. You might see the occasional seagull actually flying over from the out of white. If you see one of those, you should definitely delight in the details. Got a few ospreys flying around Paul hyper, lights of buzzards, quite a few sparrow hawks, seagulls, pigeons. The way of a pigeon in the sky. Light is sweet. I mean, everybody says it's been a good moon this morning. Why? Because sun's shining. After months of misery in the rain, about which we were not in grateful. Oh, my gosh. But the point is that the small stuff, just the everyday blessings God's grace put out indiscriminately on those who know him and those who don't. Just to pour that. Wow, thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. I think we've been lifted for 60 years, but Grace and I still do this pretty much every time we're driving along and you get a view of the perbex from somewhere in Paul, it's like, wow, that's beautiful. What an amazing place to live. Let's be thankful for the small things. I think that's very different from what the Apostle John describes as the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes. It's not a distorted lusting, but there's a grateful receiving we need to do from the Lord for all his blessings to us. This might mean that we actually need to there needs to be a slight shift in how we approach Jesus. I think about, it always strikes me when we sing to him, turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. Now, that is true. That's a good lyric. When we see Jesus, when we see Jesus, the lusts fall away. The lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, like if we're looking at Jesus, those things can't stand. They have to fall away. They have to fall away in the light of him. But when I sing this, I normally change a lyric to and the things of earth will grow strangely bright because the thing is when you're in relationship with Jesus, that should make what is black and white for the world become technicolor. Because in the light of Jesus, we see things more as they really are. We see them in the light of God's grace. Walking with Christ, receiving from him helps us to see in technicolor that we can look at a pigeon in the sky and go, wow, with an extra degree of insight because of the work of God in our hearts. Things of earth grow strangely bright from Jesus illuminates. Indifference and ingratitude shrinkers as people. I mean, in the people who live a life really committed, as some people do, of just indifference, indifferent by everything and ungrateful, those are not fun people to hang out with. It's diligence and gratitude that expands us. I think of my friend Scott Marks, who I've talked about a few times over the last few months, church leader in Zimbabwe leads a network of churches, part of the New Front, his family church as we, as a day of praying, fasting from a few weeks back. This has got this past weekend hospital in whatever round of chemo he's now in. He's got these lines in his jugular and he was being pumped through full of chemo all night and most of the next day, though. He's from Hirari, he's been treated in Johannesburg, that's where the treatment is. He's not going to go home for a whole year. He's got diagonals in January, the day I was out and I saw him in the beginning of January was the day he got diagnosed. He's not going to get home until the end of this year because that's how long the treatment is going to take and it's brutal. Any of you who've experienced chemo all along side those who have, it's brutal. Everything about it is grim, hard, desperate and every day Scott is sending out these WhatsApp updates about what's happening. The diligence with which he is still working and the thankfulness which he constantly expresses, it's actually really helped disciple me these past six months because what he displays is so Christ-like. His diligence and his thankfulness in a way which really challenges me with my proneness to indifference and ingratitude. And the thing about Scott is even though he's kind of shrunken his experience, he's confined to this hospital occasionally getting out the little walks, actually as a person I think he's expanding and his influence is expanding because of what he's demonstrating of spiritual diligence and godly thankfulness and the way he's rejected ingratitude and indifference. We need to receive, he's received from Christ even in his context. We need to receive from Jesus suck the merit out of life and then the final art is to reform and this is nothing to do with Nigel Farage. Let me just make that clear. This is about being a people who have different values and habits. The churches like ours are called to be outposts of heaven. We are go with church, we're called to be a community of diligence and thankfulness. We're to respond to, we were to respond to the gospel and we're to respond to God's grace. And that means that we can't be indifferent, we can't be spiritually indifferent, there must be an urgency amongst us about God's mission to which we are called, in which we are called to participate. We need to have an alertness to how we get to serve in God's mission this coming week. God so I love the world. He said it's only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. We are caught up in that mission of proclaiming the Savior and the way to life. We can't be indifferent about that. We need to be a community together, a reformed community, have a sense of diligence about this. And it means that we need to be alert to every example of God's grace and thankful for it. This means that we need to be a people who live with constant wonder at God's grace to us. It's beautiful this morning to come in for us to start worshiping right from the get-goer sense of celebration in the presence of God. We need to be alert to God's grace. And that's true even though despite the fact that there's whole numbers in this room who are going through some really difficult things at the moment, some really wrenching things. And we need to recognize those things and we weep with those who weep when we mourn with those who mourn. And yet at the same time as God's people, reformed people or community living differently, we need this alertness to God's grace which does cause us to wonder and praise in his presence. These things need to define us as a community, but we are not a people who are known as indifferent and ungrateful, but we are a people who are known as diligent and thankful because, as John says, the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. Lord, I pray for us. I pray that you would help us to resist and repent of our indifference and gratitude. It will help us to recognize the way that these things so easily can get into our hearts. Just to be alert to how the world is schooling us, teaching us, training us in these things the whole time and to take us stand against them and to learn to receive from you more joyfully, more fully, all the blessings you pour into our lives and that we would be reformed again and again as a community of your people who diligently and joyfully proclaim the wonders, the grace, the gospel of Jesus Christ. Help us in this. I pray, pray for us personally right now. I pray that if there are things which, Holy Spirit, you're putting your finger on in our hearts whether it's the small things like frustration over half a cup of coffee or massive things which really dogging us, the whole kind of habits which are deep ingrained in us which need to change. I pray Lord again that we would have the courage to come to you and to allow you, Holy Spirit, to put your finger on those things and to open our hearts to you again that we might repent and be healed and receive again the amazing cosmic grace that is out in Christ Jesus. So this we ask an expectation of your mercy, of your kindness to us because of your great sending love. Thank you, Lord. Amen.