For Feb 1

 

Sermon Notes: Coming In From the Cold

Intro: These last weeks of January have been very cold. Wind chill effects make the thermometer temperatures feel even colder and make exposure dangerous. We might reminisce about our youth when we would go outside and play for hours. Street hockey, football, snowball fights. Cold didn’t seem to bother us as long as we were dressed for it. As we grew older, we’d rather watch the winterscapes from our windows with a hot drink in hand. Most of us, anyway, except those guys at football games who go shirtless in the freezing weather.

   But in this cold world, terms like cold feet and cold hearted can also be used to describe our spiritual condition. Using Bible imagery, we might describe someone as having the cold heart of a Pharisee or a tax collector. But this morning, I want to invite you to come in, out of the spiritual coldness of the world, and into the warmth of the family of God.

 

I.  Spiritual Coldness

A. As an illustration of spiritual coldness, there’s a story about six people stranded in a bleak and bitterly cold place. Each one possessed a log of wood, and their dying fire was in need of fuel. The first man held his log back, for on the faces around the fire he noticed one was black. The next man looking at the other five, saw one who didn’t look like he belonged to a Christian church, and couldn’t bring himself to give his log to ‘one of those’. Another sat in tattered clothes. As he drew his clothes around him tighter, he refused to use his log to warm the idle rich. The rich man just sat and thought of his wealth, and wasn’t going to use what he had earned to aid the lazy poor. The black man, filled with revenge, withheld his log, for all he saw in withholding his wood was a chance to spite the bigots. The last man of this pitiful group never did anything for someone else without getting anything in return, and since no one gave anything to help him, he wouldn’t give to help them. They were found there with their logs still clutched closely to their frozen bodies around that campfire of ashes. They didn’t die from the cold without, they died from their coldness from within.

B. Now, in another illustration, a mountain man, in his cabin on a cold night, was sitting in his rocking chair near a roaring fire. There was a knock on the door, as the door opened and the preacher came in, pulled up a chair, and silently warmed himself by the fire. After a few minutes, the preacher stood up, grabbed the tongs, and pulled a glowing ember out of the fire and placed it on the hearth. The ember soon turned to gray as it cooled. The preacher then took the tongs, picked up the dying ember, and put it back in the fire. Soon it was glowing red hot again.  

C.  The preacher’s wordless message was received loud and clear. When a glowing ember was surrounded by other glowing embers, it glowed and gave off its heat to others. But when the ember was by itself, it quickly cooled and faded into ash. But when it was again surrounded by other

glowing embers, it revived and was soon a glowing ember again, receiving heat from the others as well as giving its heat to those around it. The

mountain man knew the preacher was telling him that on his own, like that ember, his faith would soon fade. But surrounded by other embers, like in church, he would become one of the glowing embers. When the preacher got up to leave, the mountain man looked at him and nodded. He was in church the following Sunday.

D. Two stories, illustrating our need for each other. What happens when we minister to each other. Or, when we don’t. On our own, we become dying embers, losing our spiritual warmth and eventually overcome by the world’s coldness. Each having our physical and spiritual gifts to contribute, but withholding them for self-centered reasons results in spiritual coldness and eventually spiritual death. Churches, as well as families, even friendships have failed because of such spiritual coldness. Cold churches that don’t minister to others become known as “The Chosen Frozen”.

E. What are some signs of spiritual hypothermia?  One of the early signs of physical frostbite is felt by the ears. It’s natural then to cover your ears with your hands or with clothing, which also blocks hearing. People with spiritual hypothermia cover their spiritual ears to protect them from hearing the Word of God. Their refusal to hear God calling in their lives eventually develops into spiritual deafness.

F In the early Church, a Spirit filled deacon named Stephen was performing great wonders and signs among the people. Opposition from a powerful group began to challenge his testimony for Jesus, and brought him before the Sanhedrin. When Stephen testified about looking into heaven and seeing Jesus, they were furious, covering their ears and yelling loudly to prevent them from hearing his words. Then they dragged him out of the city and stoned him for blasphemy. Their deafened ears were closed to the Word of God as their cold hearts became dying embers within them.

G. Other signs of physical hypothermia are cold hands and cold feet. Every time God presents an opportunity for Christians to tell someone about Jesus, or do a work for Him, their cold feet and cold hands won’t move. They become spiritually frostbitten until God can warm their hearts and revive them for His use again.

H  As hypothermia sets in, a person will want to go to sleep. And once they fall asleep, they may pass into a deeper sleep until death overcomes them. People who grow cold in the Spirit are in jeopardy of being lulled to sleep by the devil. They become oblivious to their spiritual condition and unless God comes to their rescue, they will sit there and freeze to eternal death in their sins. So, we need to guard against becoming cold in the Spirit, not letting evil lull us to spiritual sleep, lest we succumb to spiritual death, unaware of God’s reviving grace. Only when we stay close to God can we feel the warmth of His love and the power of the Holy Spirit’s fire.

I. The best way to prevent spiritual hypothermia is to come in out of the cold world, into God’s warmth. Our Call to Worship this morning was an invitation to come into the warmth as God’s voice gathers us in worship. His warmth brings us together as one family, our refuge from life’s storms. How good it is for our hearts to be warmed in the family of God. John Wesley himself, although a practicing Christian, had a profound spiritual awakening in Aldersgate, London at a Moravian gathering. Hearing Martin Luther's commentary on Romans, his heart was “strangely warmed”, feeling an assurance of God's love and salvation by faith, transforming his intellectual faith into a heartfelt, personal reality, and eventually sparking the Methodist movement. It was a pivotal event for him that shifted his focus from earning God's favor to receiving Christ's grace, inspiring his lifelong mission to preach salvation by grace through faith. Wesley was in no danger of spiritual hypothermia before then, but his heart had been strangely warmed to come further into the family of God.

I. Like Wesley, as practicing Christians, we may not find ourselves in danger of spiritual hypothermia, but wanting to know the full warmth of being in the family of God, here in our church family. The apostle John and the evangelist Paul, provide some essential guidelines on living in the family of God in today’s Scriptures.

 

II. John 4:13-21

A.  Here, John focuses on God’s love. Remember, John had been transformed from a quarrelsome, temper prone disciple, to the ‘disciple of love’ through Jesus. He had known Jesus, seen the power of His love, and then lived a life of knowing and teaching about God’s love. Our Epistle passage began with John writing “This is how we know that we live in Him, and He in us.” If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, then God lives in them, and they in God. That’s just getting our cold feet in the door, because then he says that whoever lives in love, lives in God and God in them, making his love complete so that in this world we become like Jesus, and we will have confidence of our salvation on the day of judgement. Being made perfect in love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment, and we no longer live in fear of punishment, the judgement, because God lives in us, and we in Him. In fact, outsiders called followers of Jesus, little Christs, or Christians, which is how we came to bear that name.

B. John then says that we love, because God first loved us. We can’t earn His love if He has already loved us as we are. Then, if God lives in us, and we live in His complete love, we then love our brothers and sisters. But, if we say we love God, yet hate a brother or a sister, we are, to be very blunt, liars. We can’t love God, whom we have not seen, but hate a brother or sister whom we have seen. God’s love is never conditional, so that if we live in God’s love, our love cannot be conditional.

 

III. I Corinthians 13:1-6

A. While John talks about love and its effects, Paul is more specific in his first Epistle to the Corinthian Church about what love is, and what it is not. John was speaking to the church he pastored that was strong in their faith. However, an opposition group was turning some of the believers away. John’s epistle was trying to keep the church together, reminding them about God’s love. Paul, however, had his hands full trying to teach the once pagan members of the church about God’s love.

B. Paul begins his Epistle saying that if he spoke in the tongues of men and angels without love, he would be only a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. The Corinthian church had many who could, or seemed to speak in tongues. But everyone was speaking at the same time, making worship total chaos. The imagery of a "noisy gong" or "clanging cymbal" conveys noise without meaning, rather than a time of worship. In the cultural context of Corinth, gongs and cymbals were used in pagan rituals, often associated with the worship of two specific gods, where noise was used to invoke the presence of those deities. Paul uses this metaphor to illustrate that without love, spiritual gifts are as empty and meaningless as pagan noise. Paul then addresses other activities like prophecy, faith that could move mountains, gifts to the poor, and even intentionally living in hardship for the purpose of boasting, saying that even doing all those noble deeds, without love, meant nothing. He shows love as patient, kind, without envy, not proud or boastful, not dishonoring others, forgiving, not keeping a record of wrongs, all the things the Corinthian Church seemed to have been dealing with. Although no one will ever reach God’s complete perfection in love in this lifetime, the Corinthian congregation still had much to learn about the complete love of Christ, while John’s congregation seems to have come further along in becoming a warm church of love. Even so, these two churches had come out of the cold, and into the warmth of the Christ’s Church.

C. But we must never overlook the presence of the Holy Spirit, the fire of God’s Love. He is the life Jesus breathed into His church. The force that nudges us to accept Jesus as Savior. The force inviting us into the Church, and the very breath of God breathing life and love into our souls, binding us together. We can read about God’s love, learn about His love, but we cannot really know God’s love or experience the warmth of His love, without the Sweet, Sweet Spirit within us, as we sang in our Call to Prayer. He encourages and teaches those still getting warmed in the family of God, and reassuring those wanting to know more about God and His love.

 

Conclusion: We of Waltz Church gather in the warmth of our church family. Led by the Holy Spirit, each of us have specific gifts and understandings that we bring to make this a stronger church, a stronger family. And being bonded in the love of Christ Jesus, putting our faith in Him, and in each other, we continue to grow as family. I thank God for the warmth of our church family, and pray that we can invite those still wandering in the cold world of sin to Come, feel God’s warmth, reviving us by His love within us. Amen