Anniversary Sunday (2004)

On the church's 13th anniversary, Tom Shrader presents a campus building master plan and invites the congregation to information meetings, then turns to the church's core mission of equipping believers for service. Drawing from Ephesians 4:12, he walks through twelve characteristics of a spiritually shaped-up saint, including genuine conversion, biblical literacy, heartfelt worship, obedience, a biblical worldview, outward focus, faithful stewardship, using spiritual gifts, consistency, fruitfulness, love for the lost, and dependence on God. He challenges the congregation to evaluate their own spiritual growth and calls East Valley Bible Church's thirteen-year history an unmistakable work of God's grace.

“Your faith ought to affect the kind of husband you are, or wife you are, or date that you are, or employee, or employer, or mom or dad, or friend, or citizen — there ought to be some connection between what you believe, how you think, and how you behave.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: EVBC Anniversary Sunday - 2004

Recorded: 2004 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 48 min

Themes: spiritual growth, church anniversary, stewardship, worship, obedience, spiritual gifts, evangelism, discipleship, new believer, longtime church member, feeling spiritually stagnant, questioning church commitment, young adult, parent, searching for purpose, ready to serve

Scripture: 1 Peter 5, Ephesians 4:12, Romans 12, James 1

Theological Themes: sanctification, becoming holy, ecclesiology, spiritual maturity, biblical worldview, equipping the saints, ephesians 4, means of grace

Full Transcript

Anniversary Sunday and the History of East Valley Bible Church

This is a great time. This all started back in 1992, when I thought we ought to celebrate, and it has become a really meaningful time at East Valley Bible Church. I got on the campus this morning early, and as I started to walk around, people were saying happy anniversary to me, stopping to tell me stories, talking about their kids who were there. I would ask how old they were, and they would say twelve — which meant they weren't even born when the church started. It has truly been an extraordinary day.

I want to do two things on this anniversary Sunday. I want to talk to you a little bit about the building, and then I want to share the message I have decided to attach to anniversary Sunday this year. You all have been extraordinarily patient with us regarding this building, so let me give you a little history.

Someone this morning said they didn't even know when the church started or how it began. November 3rd, 1991 was the first service. A group of us gathered together early that summer and held a series of six classes over at the Hilton near Alma School. I had completely forgotten about this — Jewel Knowtham reminded me of it this morning. Out of those six sessions came a group of men, and we asked ourselves: what do you think about starting a church? We got together and said, let's do it.

The first hill we had to climb was deciding what to name it. We probably had fifty suggestions — Beulahland Community Church and everything else imaginable. Finally, in a moment of perhaps frustration, I said: we're in the East Valley, we teach the Bible, and we're a church. Thus, East Valley Bible Church. Not a lot of creativity, but that's what we were.

We started, as I said, November 3rd, 1991, meeting in Desert Christian Community Church over on Dobson between Elliott and Warner. It was a small building that could seat perhaps two hundred people. We started that first Sunday and began to grow. There was no staff — it was all volunteers. Gary was our first employee, then Les, then Jerry Taylor, Lorraine, Kathy, and there was all sorts of expansion from there.

From a Borrowed Building to Our Own Campus

We stayed in that building from 1991 until about the middle of 1995. In an exit interview, I met with someone who was leaving the church, listened to them for about three hours, and as they were finally walking me to the door — something I think they had wanted to do about two hours and fifty minutes earlier — they said, "Can I give you a piece of advice?" I said sure. They said, "Everyone's waiting for you guys to lead. You need to get a building." Within months, God had provided this location. It was amazing.

A group of roughly four hundred adults and children gave a million dollars and then borrowed two million more to build this building — the one we are in now, including the inner courtyard and classroom space, about thirty-three thousand square feet. We opened this facility in October of 1997. We had roughly enough people to fill this room halfway once, but that first Sunday we were filled. Most of it, I think, were contractors and subcontractors wondering if they were ever going to get paid. There was a lot of tension in the room that day.

God was good, and we started to grow numerically — and very quickly. It was literally six months before we doubled in size. After a year, we had doubled that again. Within two years, that group of four hundred fifty to five hundred had grown to twenty-five hundred to three thousand. It was at that point we stopped and said, we need more space. We need more room.

A New Master Plan

We sat down and began to plan, and out of that came a project with two phases. The first phase — which you have seen and used — is what we call the wrap on the classroom space, along with the office building and the conference center. The second phase was to be a worship center. We worked on that plan, reworked it, did drawings, went through the town of Gilbert, and then sat in a meeting where the consensus was: we need to stop.

That project started five years ago, and this body is very different now than we were five years ago. Our makeup, our philosophy, the things that drive us are different than they were then. So we stopped, we regrouped, and we brought in the DeBartolo Group. Jack DeBartolo, whom many of you know as someone who attends church here, took us all the way back to square one. We started meeting with staff again, talking about our needs, which had changed substantially over those three or four years of planning. Out of those meetings, more work, and new drawings came a brand new master plan.

What I want to do now is give you a satellite view — a flyover — of that new master plan. Let me orient you to what you're seeing on the screen. On the left is Elliott Road, and to the right is North. Those gray buildings are the existing structures: the worship center we are in now, closest to Elliott; then the classrooms; then the office building; and then the conference center. Everything else you see is newly proposed building. I want to take you through them one by one.

The first element is the commons area — that is the area right...

Campus Development Plans

Smack in the middle of the campus, we're using rough square footage. We still need to program these buildings, plan them, and lay them out, so they may change a little bit, but we think we're pretty close. Those buildings in the middle contain a cafe, a bookstore, an information center, and a welcome center. Around that you see a shaded area, and the combined area is about 18,000 square feet. To put that in perspective, I think this room is about 7,500 square feet — so it's about two of these and then some.

That space is, cut me some slack here, like a student union. It's like the town square. As we talked to people — staff, people who go to church here — what we heard over and over again is there's no place to hang, no place to meet people, no place for community. That's what that space is designed to provide.

I may have a vision of this that's a little more vibrant than it should be, but I just see people out there all the time. I see Wednesday night when Fuel is going on and parents who've placed their kids in there hanging out in that space. I see Friday night with the singles and Axis going strong, Saturday morning after things wrap up, the guys hanging out, and Wednesday the ladies. Small groups, growth groups, all sorts of people are going to want to take advantage of that space.

The next building is the new worship center. It seats about a thousand people less, plus or minus, than the one that was previously proposed, and there's some mathematics that lend themselves to that decision — we'll talk about it a little later. What we're trying to illustrate with the shape of that building is that we want to capture what people seem to like about this building. What I hear about this building is that it's intimate. There are 13 rows of pews here, and there are about 13 rows in that new building as well. You would come in and down, so it would be tiered — a very intimate place of worship. That's not necessarily the finished design, but we're giving you a sense of the building and its shape. It is about 33,000 square feet.

The next building is a blue building of 18,000 square feet containing junior high, high school, college, and the offices that support those ministries. It would give us the opportunity to take those ministries, move them out of the conference center and other existing spaces, and put them in their own dedicated facility.

Additional Facilities and Parking Strategy

After that comes something you probably wouldn't have expected: a series of red buildings to the west comprising an entire new wing of children's facilities. This gives us an opportunity to combine and condense children's ministry, get it under roughly 25,000 square feet, add a great element of security, and provide covered playground area for the kids. There is also some strategic planning built into this. There are about 450 parking spots on the Elliott side, and the families with kids in elementary would park out there and move toward the building, dropping children off along the way — fifth grade, then third grade, then first grade, then second grade, then preschoolers — and then you arrive at the church. You're pooped, but you get there. When church is out, you simply reverse the process and you're back at your car. A lot of strategy went into that.

There is one more area — a light blue section behind the conference center and student ministries — designed to house facilities, maintenance, and much of the equipment needed to maintain the campus. And then there is a red triangle out in front. We don't know exactly what that will be, but it is something we want to use to let people traveling down Elliott know that we're here.

Information Meetings and Next Steps

There is a lot there. It's about 100,000 square feet in total, and it is an ambitious project. I want to give you all the details, but this isn't the place for that. So I want to invite you to a general information meeting either on the 29th or the 30th at 7 o'clock. We'll probably divide it alphabetically — A through L on the 29th and the rest on the 30th — so we can spread people out. We'll likely meet in the conference center or in here, and we're going to take a lot of time. Jack DiBarlo, myself, and others will walk you through some of the history, how we developed this project, and where we go from here.

As you look at all of that, I want you to be praying about some obvious things. First, we need to sequence this. It is an expensive project, and there is no way — at least unless God does something extraordinary — that we can build all of it at once, so we have to prioritize, and we need to resolve that. We are getting close. Pray also for the finances attached to it. So that's the first thing I wanted to accomplish tonight — not to answer questions, but to raise more questions than I answered, and to entice you to come to a meeting on the 29th or the 30th where we can talk through it in detail.

Anniversary Sunday: Talking About You

Haley is over on the coast and Sarah is working today. Both of them called me yesterday and asked, "What are you going to do — a State of the Church thing?" I went back and looked at my notes, and every anniversary Sunday I've done something just a little bit different. We've spent Sundays doing a lengthy history, and a couple of years ago I went through all the numbers it takes for us to pull off a Sunday and what that looks like. We've done the State of the Church. But you're going to like this, I think, because we're going to talk about your favorite subject tonight. We're going to talk about you.

The Elders Who Serve You

We are going to talk about you, and we are going to talk about East Valley Bible Church. As we start this, there is a group of men that you need to know about. They are your elders. You do not always see them around campus and recognize them, but they are here all the time. They love you, and they care for you.

Peter writes this in 1 Peter 5. Let me read it to you from The Message, Eugene Peterson's translation: "I have a special concern for you church leaders. I know what it's like to be a leader, in on Christ's suffering as well as the coming glory. Here's my concern: that you care for God's flock with all the diligence of a shepherd. Not because you have to, but because you want to please God. Not calculating what you can get out of it, but acting spontaneously. Not bossily telling others what to do, but tenderly showing them the way." These men do that.

I have had the privilege of working with some of them for all 13 years, and others for different lengths of time. We serve together. We are life partners in this. And when we began — I mean this — we did not know what we were doing. We had that book, and that was our guide, and we were working our way through it.

God has done extraordinary things in the hearts of each one of us on that list, and consequently through these men to the body. As you think of them, as you see them on campus, as a name comes to your mind, you need to pray for them. Pray for wisdom and pray for strength. Pray that they would be God's men doing God's work, God's way.

The Purpose of the Church

We were in an elder meeting a couple of weeks ago, and I was trying to generate a conversation on church. I started talking about what a church is, what a church should do, what a church looks like, and we had all sorts of things going around. Finally, in a little bit of frustration, one of the men said, "Well, we know what a church is supposed to do. That's easy. That's Ephesians chapter 4, verse 12." Paul said this — here is the purpose of the church: "equipping of the saints for the work of service."

That word equipping is the only time it appears in that form in the New Testament. It is a derivative of a word we see in several other places. In one of the Gospels, Jesus is walking along and sees Andrew and Peter mending their nets. It is the same root word as this word equipping.

Looking at those two together, Ray Stedman writes: "The word mending is the word translated here equipping. They were mending. They were equipping their nets. They were getting them ready. They were fixing them, preparing them. The word is also translated in our Scriptures, fitting them out or preparing them. Thayer, who is an expert and authority in this area, says the word means to make one what it ought to be. The nearest modern equivalent is to shape up."

Therefore, our job, our subject, is the shaping up of the saints. Why does the church exist? To get you in shape. To get you in shape so that you can serve in the body of Christ. That is why we exist. That is why the church is here.

Every church has that same mission. They are going to apply their own personality and their own form to it, but fundamentally, when we boil it all down, that is what it is about. That is the purpose. That is the function of the church — to equip you, to get you in shape, to equip and prepare.

You Are a Saint

Remember what the Scripture said: the saints. Have you gotten used to that identification of yourself yet? When I was a boy, we did not see a lot of saints running around. To us, a saint was somebody with a halo, somebody who had been through a process of canonization and all sorts of things going on in their life. We did not think about it. We did not think that the person next to us was a saint.

But Scripture says that you and I, who have come to faith in Jesus Christ and know Him as our Lord and Savior, are saints. The church exists to build the saints up — to whip you into shape. If we were getting a little carried away here, we are personal trainers. The goal is to get you prepared to do the work of service so that the body of Christ is strong.

What Does an Equipped Saint Look Like?

In our discussion, I said — and cut me some slack here because I know this sounds a little pragmatic and almost businesslike — but we like to start with the end in mind. So what does an equipped saint begin to look like? We had about 30 or 40 things up on the board. I made a list of them, took that list, and combined it down to about 11, then added one of my own.

What I want to do is take about 25 minutes, put this list up, and have you evaluate your own life. How are we doing as a church? You are going to be able to tell me that in a bit, because it will be determined by how we are doing with you in shaping you up — mending you, preparing you for the battle.

Characteristic One: Genuine Conversion

Here is the first thing. It is so obvious that we could miss it, but I feel compelled to put it on the list: I was genuinely converted. One of the things that continues to be a source of encouragement and blessing to me is when people come here from other churches, worship for a period of time, and suddenly say, "I was never a Christian. I came to realize I was not converted at all." We hear that story over and over again.

Or it may be that you asked Jesus into your heart as a child, but not much happened after that. Whether it was a Young Life camp, a church camp, an InterVarsity camp, a businessman's breakfast, or whatever it might have been, there was perhaps some profession of faith but no genuine conversion. We challenge you regularly to examine your life — not to make you uncertain, but to make certain that you know you are a believer.

Characteristic Two: Feeding Yourself

Once I know that I am a believer, I need to be able to feed myself. If we are going to grow physically, we need to eat. It is a perfect illustration to watch a mom or a dad with a baby — to watch them feed him, starting with the bottle, and then

Feeding on the Word

Taking these pears and scooping them into their little mouths, taking the spoon to clean them off, and just when you got it all in, they'll do something like spit it right back at you. There's just stuff everywhere. It's sloppy and it's messy, but it gets easier. Pretty soon they start to feed themselves — they're grabbing it in chunks and sticking it in, and it's not always getting there; it's here and there and everywhere. Then pretty soon that eye-hand coordination kicks in, and now they can eat, and it looks as though they'll never stop.

The Bible is that food, the bread of life that we eat, and we're here to help you in those early stages — to feed you. One of the things I'll just confess to you, one of the things I don't think we're doing very well but we're going to be doing very well in the next three or four months, is give you a real easy road map as a brand new believer on how to get from a brand new believer to maturity in Christ. But you are ultimately responsible for feeding yourself.

When somebody says to me, "I'm a baby Christian," I say, "How long have you been a believer?" And they say seven years. If you're seven, eight, ten years old in the faith and you don't know anything, whose fault is that but yours? There are so many tools in that bookstore, so many tools on the internet, so many tools available that will allow you to learn to handle the Scriptures. You are equipped. You are shaped up for service.

Worship as a Way of Life

If you can handle the Scripture and there's heartfelt worship — and when I say worship, you immediately associate it with the experience you had here about a half hour ago. You think of coming in here singing songs, and that's worship, and indeed that's magnificent, that's beautiful. It's been an extraordinary day of worship here, as it is every Sunday. I've got the best of it all because I'm in the conference center in the morning for two services and in here at night.

But Paul tells us in Romans 12 to present our bodies as a spiritual service of worship. In other words, from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep, everything I do is worship. We have those exhilarating moments where we can come together collectively as a church — we can worship and sing, take communion together, study together. There are those collective moments, but all my life is to be an act of worship.

All of my life is to be glorifying God, praising Him for who He is, adoring Him for who He is, thanking Him for what He's done. Everything that I do is an act of worship. As I start to grow in that, all of a sudden there's a spirit of submission and obedience.

The Reflex of Obedience

My contention is you'll know you're growing when obedience is your reflex. I need to go to the doctor — whenever I can get in to see him — and I'm not too excited about it. He does a lot of stuff I don't like, but he does some things that are all right. One of the things he does in a physical — and nothing's wrong, so please don't email me and ask — is he tests your reflexes. That drives me crazy. I'll try to go like this when he swings, just to screw him up every once in a while, and he'll say, "Knock it off." He'll say, "Hold it still." And I can't hold it still. You can't stop it. It just happens.

A mark of real maturity is when my flinch in a situation is to submit or obey, not to argue or rebel. You're shaped up and equipped for service when your reflex is to obey, is to submit. When I think of submission, I think of submission to government. I think most women probably think of submission to their husband. People ask me, "Is Susan in submission to you?" I say yes. They say, "Give me an example." I really can't think of one — and not because she isn't in submission, but because we don't have that many issues. It's a hard issue; I just know that. Submission and obedience are cornerstones of a mature Christian life.

A Biblical Worldview

You're beginning to shape up if you're submissive and obedient. If you have a Biblical worldview, you're starting to see things around you through the lens and the grid of Scripture. Your faith is no longer segregated, no longer segmented — it's integrated into everything.

I want to give you an illustration here, and I want to talk about the election last Tuesday. This isn't me — I didn't say this. This was someone on TV, because I know some of you are going to misunderstand this. I have long had a theory about the blue states and the red states. It's a theory, that's all it is — though I'm quite certain it's correct. I'm watching the other night: Chris Matthews is ashen, he doesn't know what to say, Ron Reagan is speechless, people don't know how to begin to process the results.

In fact, I just sent a long email to Chris Matthews, and I started with, "I know you'll never read this, but I nonetheless feel compelled to write" — to explain to him what's going on in the red states and the blue states. I'm watching CNN, and Bill Schneider, the senior political analyst, is on. Here's what they're talking about: who voted for whom and why. They're saying they're confused. They've never seen a result like this — people making $100,000 and more, which I don't know what you think about that figure, but it used to be considered a whole lot of money and now doesn't seem that far out of line for a lot of people. Among those higher-income voters, they saw a significant

Faith Shaping How We Live

Bill Schneider — not me, Bill Schneider — says there is one infallible indicator of how a person will vote. If they go to church, they vote for this candidate. If they don't go to church, they vote for that one. Now, I am not saying anything about who God's man is; I am simply telling you what Bill Schneider said.

To me, the point is this: all of a sudden there is an acknowledged connection between our faith and how we live. We have been saying this to you for thirteen years. Your faith ought to affect the kind of husband or wife you are, the kind of date, employee, employer, mom, dad, friend, or citizen you are. There ought to be some connection between what you believe, how you think, and how you behave.

Your faith is no longer relegated to what happens on this campus. We move from here out into the world, and for us there is no secular and sacred — it all comes together. That is a biblical worldview.

An Outward Focus

As you shape up, there is an outward focus. You are actually thinking about others. It begins simply by noticing that people have a need, and then you start to meet it.

It is as small as walking across campus and seeing somebody who seems a little disoriented — you know almost instinctively they are here for the very first time. Your old instinct was, "Where are those greeters when you need them? Where is the person in the tangerine shirt?" But all of a sudden you say, "I don't need a name tag to take somebody to a classroom."

All of a sudden the "one another" passages of Scripture come to life — love one another, pray for one another, live at peace with one another. Scripture is filled with them. This outward focus is completely supernatural, because the natural thing is to be inward focused and to think about yourself. Through shaping up and equipping, you find yourself thinking about other people: What about them? What can I do for them? How do I live at peace with them?

So that is the first six. How are we doing in shaping you up? Here are the next six.

Stewardship: Not Wasting Your Life

You live a life that is not wasted. That means stewardship. Now, when I say stewardship, you immediately think of money — you are already grabbing your wallet, thinking, "He presented a master plan and talked about stewardship in the same message." But stewardship applies to every area of your life, including your money. It is your time, your energy, how you live. It is not wasting a life. It is not arriving at the end and saying, "I really didn't accomplish much. My life was a waste."

Here is what I hear all the time: "I'm so busy. I know God has things for me to do, but I'm too busy." Stop for a second. If God gave you a task to do, He is going to give you the time to do it. So either He has given you a task and you have expanded it far beyond what He gave you, or He has given you a task and you have cluttered your life with other things.

Let me be direct here, even though it is Anniversary Sunday. If you are too busy, my friend, there is nobody to blame but you. I love you, and I am getting tired of hearing about how busy you are. Nobody made that happen but you.

The Tyranny of Over-Scheduling

I am watching parents running kids to football, ballet, music, guitar, karate, and everything else — going from one thing to the next. You are the parent. Look at your child and say, "You are a dependent. I am in charge." You may not feel like it, but you actually have more disposable time than your grandparents did. You are simply filling it up with all this stuff.

Some of it may be fine, and some of it may even be good. But I wonder if you are filling your life up with good things and never getting to the great things.

I was driving on the freeway one day, going about sixty, and a good friend of mine said to me, "Your life is so easy. It's really simple — you don't have a bunch of nights out, you're not running people around town, you're not doing all of this." That has become a defining moment in his life and an interesting one in mine, because I did not think much of it at the time. I said to him, "That's my design. That is how I live. I am not going to wear myself out running around doing things that don't matter when I have things that are truly important to do."

What Will Matter in the End

Let me give you the bottom line right now. When this is all over — when you are lying on that deathbed — three things will matter: faith, family, and friends. That is it. That is all that is going to matter. The rest of this stuff...

supposed to be here at 6:15 to make the coffee. He said, well, I got here at 6:30 and that's close enough. And I said, no, it's not close enough. 6:15 means 6:15. That's faithfulness. That's consistency. If you can't be faithful in the small things, how are you going to be faithful in the large things?

Using Your Gifts with Joy and Faithfulness

You don't want to live a wasted life. You're using your gifts, you're serving. Some tasks are simply jobs that need to get done. But you have a spiritual gift — a special enablement that you received at the moment you became a Christian — to perform a function in the body of Christ with effectiveness and efficiency. And with joy.

Years ago I was teaching a class, and a man called and asked if we could get together for lunch. My policy then was never to ask what it was about, but I've changed, because when someone says there's no agenda, that's when you're really in trouble. Everyone has an agenda. So he told me upfront: he wanted help identifying his spiritual gift.

I hung up and thought, perfect, because this man was the first one in the room every single night. He set the room up, got the air conditioning going, got a fan up so I wouldn't be sweating at the front, made the coffee, got everybody squared away. When it was over, he cleaned everything up. This man had the gift of service like you've never seen.

So we went to lunch, ordered, and I said, "I've thought about this a lot — you have the gift of service." He said, "No, I don't." I said, "Yes, you do." We went back and forth, and finally he said to me, "It can't be the gift of service, because I enjoy it so much."

There it is. In our minds, if something is a God thing, we assume it's going to hurt, it's going to be awful, there's going to be pain. But there is a joy and an energy even in the midst of it.

The Zone: Recognizing When You're in Your Gift

Any time I get autobiographical, I know we run a risk. But I don't know how else to illustrate some of this. When we were doing four services and then six services, that was a lot of work — the team, the volunteers, all of it. It's physically hard and difficult. Literally, at the end of a Sunday night when I get home, I am physically spent. But it's a good kind of spent. I can't wait to reload and do it again.

Why? Because when I'm using my spiritual gift, I'm in the zone. If I'm a baseball player in the zone, the ball looks enormous. If I'm putting, the hole looks huge. If I'm using my spiritual gift, it's just there. So the question is: what is your gift, and are you using it? Part of our responsibility as a church is to help you figure out the gift thing and then help you start using it.

Consistency: The Mark of a Maturing Believer

There should be consistent faithfulness in your life. As you grow in the Lord, you become more and more consistent. We don't go through this world from mountaintop to mountaintop — there is prep time, there are valleys, there is hard work, and you need to be consistent.

There should also be a consistent attitude on your part. I shouldn't be up one day and down the next, up one day and down the next. Now, is that being phony? No. Your joy lies with the Lord, so there is a consistency in your life even in the middle of circumstances that inevitably go up and down.

Faithfulness also means that if you say you're going to be somewhere at 7 o'clock, you're there at 7 o'clock. If you sign up and say you're bringing eight kids and need childcare for eight kids, you bring eight kids. We want to go for the big things, but it starts with being faithful in the small ones.

Leading Starts with the Small Things

I used to run something called the Leadership Forum. It wasn't really a forum and it wasn't really about leadership, but I knew men would come to it if it was called that. One man showed up and said he wanted to be a leader — in fact, he believed he already was one. He was a leader in business and wanted to be a leader in the church. I said, "All right, I've got a job for you. Next Saturday morning you need to be here at 6:15 to make the coffee."

He said, "But I'm a leader." I said, "You're going to lead by making the coffee at 6:15."

I arrived around ten minutes to seven, walked to the door, took a deep breath, and noticed the absence of that fragrant aroma of freshly brewed coffee. All the men were there drinking water. Right behind me, this man came bouncing in. He said, "Hey, how are you doing?" I said, "I've got an issue — there's no coffee. You were supposed to be here at 6:15." He said, "Well, I got here at 6:30, and that's close enough." And I said, "No, it's not close enough. 6:15 means 6:15."

That's faithfulness. That's consistency. If you cannot be faithful in the small things, how are you going to be faithful in the large things?

Faithfulness Before Leadership

He came up to me and said, "I need to get with you." I said, "Really?" He said, "I'm a leader, I want to lead." I said, "Let me help you out here, pal." I told him that if I can't trust you with coffee, I can't trust you with somebody's soul. There is faithfulness, and there is fruitfulness.

The Fruit of a Changed Life

What does that fruitfulness look like? Well, it starts looking like this: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control. When I say fruitful, you want to run out and begin to quantitatively measure it — and we will get to that, and there should be that. But your life should begin to change first internally, and you will be the first one to notice it. Then those closest to you will notice it, then we will see it. There will be a heart condition that changes, a character that changes.

You will have love for the lost, and I am not sure that is where it needs to be in our life here corporately. I was talking to somebody just tonight, standing right back there. Her sister was saved in an extraordinary way just a few weeks ago — literally, she was not looking for Jesus, she was not trying to figure this out, and if anything she was antagonistic, then moved to ambivalent, and God saved her in the midst of it. And she said a fascinating thing to her sister: "For the first three days, what I did was grieve for my family and friends that don't know the Lord." That ought to be in our hearts.

You know what is sad? I will bet that has already started to fade away in her life, because it does in a lot of our lives, does it not? There is a whole lost world out there — but that is too big to hold onto. There is a whole lost world around you. God brings people into your life each and every day that you can touch. You are the vehicle.

Dependence on God

We are in the process of studying this, and we know it is all up to God — I have that figured out, which is why the last point is there. We are God-dependent for everything. We cannot save anybody. I cannot even put one foot in front of the other and take a breath if God does not provide that. We are entirely dependent upon Him for everything, and yet we work as though we are a key part of it. We work diligently, knowing that God is the one responsible for the results.

It is funny — I have been talking a lot about the building with people, and I keep saying, "humanly speaking, humanly speaking," and then it occurred to me: I cannot speak any other way. Somebody the other day was asking, "Do you think God wants you to build?" I do not have the foggiest clue what God's vote is in this thing. I cannot find a chapter and verse that says, "Build a conference center." I know this: God calls us to be faithful and dependent upon Him, and then to use the mind He has given us and the tools He has given us.

Suffering as a Tool for Maturity

Our responsibility is to be part of shaping you up, and God gives us some tools for this. The Bible is a tool, prayer is a tool. Let me give you another tool in your maturity that God provides: suffering and testing. "Count it all joy when you encounter various trials, because you know the testing of your faith produces endurance, and endurance, when it has its perfect result, results in you being mature."

Now if you stop and think about that list of twelve characteristics, our tendency is to say, "Wow, those are the people you build statues for and name halls after — the superstars of the Christian faith." But here is what is really interesting: those are the characteristics of what is supposed to be the normal Christian life. That bar, measured by those twelve characteristics, is a very high bar, and what the Bible says is that it is the norm. Do not look at those and say, "Well, I know those are for the really serious..." No — those are for you. Those are your goals, your targets.

The Bar of Expectation

I have been very successful in life, and here is how: I keep the bar very low. I say, "Man, that was a success," because I like the bar low. You do that too, do you not? Somebody asks how many people you think will come, and you say, "Oh, five," while you are thinking fifty, or five hundred. How many deals are you going to make? "Oh, ten," while you are thinking twenty, thirty, forty — you just do not want to say it out loud. We play these expectation games, and most of life is spent dealing with our own and other people's expectations. Most of the time we are frustrated, and then we argue, and marriages break down over it.

It is our job collectively to shape one another up, to mend us, to equip us — to completely furnish us, as one translation puts it — for the service that God has brought to us.

Thirteen Years of God's Grace

It has been an extraordinary thirteen years. There is not a better example on this planet of God's grace than this church and the people in it. This is utterly a work of God from beginning to end, and I am sensing it is just the beginning. It is amazing what God has done — far beyond anything we would have reasonably expected — and yet He has begun a great work. My guess is that at the twenty-sixth anniversary, we will be stunned at what He has done.

At that one-year anniversary, if we could have fast-forwarded to this room, this moment, this time, we would have said, "There is no way." And I think we are in the midst of that same reality now. There is something significant taking place — at the elder level, the director level, the staff level. There is a whole rethinking of how we can do ministry better, more exciting, more God-honoring. It is a great time for you and me to be part of what God is doing.

Closing Prayer

Father, thank You for this day of celebration. Thank You for the extraordinary work that You have done in this church, in our lives. We give You all the glory and all of the honor and all of the praise, because this is from beginning to end a work that is utterly dependent upon You.

God, thanks for the reminder that our purpose is to shape each other up. Help us do that, to Your honor and to Your glory. God, we love You because You first loved us. You have done an extraordinary work in our lives, and God, we pray that we will be faithful servants till the day we die. In Jesus' name, amen.