Faith Outside of the Box

Introduction

Teenagers uh here Friday night for uh some uh for a work session, and then he spent most all day yesterday with some twenty-five teenagers, including uh several who were visiting from area congregations. I understand the day went very well, was very productive, had some great dialogue and discussions, and I think if you were here for the Bible class hour, you got some insights into uh his ability to uh get to know some of our our young people, which is a good thing. Uh I first uh met uh Terry some uh two just about two years ago now when I helped uh Gregory move to uh Memphis and uh that was to be for a a three-month internship when Gregory was gonna work with the the church there at East Shelby and uh Terry and so uh depending on your perspective and what you think about Gregory today, Terry either gets the credit or the blame for some of who Gregory is.

Uh Terry’s been at East Shelby, I think for what would you say? He’s about seven years, and uh they have a very bright vibrant and a very growing work there. They’re very active, and uh we’re just delighted that uh Terry has come to be with us and spend the weekend uh with us. We’ve heard two great lessons already this morning, and we’re looking forward to another one yet this hour. So it’s my privilege and my honor, my pleasure to introduce Brother Terry Francis. Good morning.

When Ralph said he was going to introduce me right before I spoke, that kind of makes me nervous a little bit. What’s he gonna say? And uh his kind introduction, thank him for that. Uh I I’m here largely in part because I’m sure of the Klein family. I uh worked with Greg a couple summers ago and was so blessed to have that opportunity. Uh he said if uh if you like what Greg’s become, I get credit, and if not, then I get the blame. I would say if you don’t like him, he worked with some other guys besides me. So I can give you their names and you can send them cards of blame too. But uh I gotta tell you, I uh I sure am excited and glad to see the young man that Greg Klein’s become.

I think you’re blessed to have him here. And uh it speaks highly of you as a church. Uh the Bible once said that prophets are not welcome in his own land. And uh a congregation that can put up with a guy that grew up there so young, that speaks highly of you. I think it speaks highly of Greg, it speaks highly of his family as well. I’m just appreciative of the of the guy he is, and I hope God continues to bless him in his work. And it’s good to meet Willingham and to be with him and so thankful that he’s here with you. I was good friends with Josh Creel, don’t hold that against me. But uh but I’m glad Josh was gone by the time I got here.

Because he’s an Alabama fan, they’re just not smart. But uh, and I know a lot of you will amen that. But uh good to meet uh you’re not an Alabama fan, too, are you? Oh no. Uh well, I mean can’t speak for Greg, he’s a Florida fan. Uh but it’s good to be with you. Thankful the elders extend the invitation for me to come. I hope it’s been profitable for you. I know it’s been profitable for me to be able to be with other Christians in other places. Well, Romans 15 4 tells us that the things written in the old times are written for our learning. And we learn a lot from Israel. This morning I’d like us to turn in our Old Testament to 1 Samuel chapter 4.

And I’d like us to just take a moment to look at a story there in 1 Samuel chapter 4. One of the mistakes that Israel made in their history is they put their faith in a box. They literally put their faith in a literal container. Now we don’t often think about the ark that way. But the Lord commanded back in Exodus for the tabernacle to be constructed and for the contents of it to be built. And one of the most significant pieces that was going to go into the tabernacle, into the Holy of Holies, was the Ark of the Covenant. And in this ornate box would be placed three important items, the Ten Commandments that represented God’s promises. The manna that was reminder of God’s providence.

And the staff, the budding rod of Aaron that showed God’s power. And it was this ark that sat in the Holy of Holies. And once a year the high priest would go in, and he would take the blood of sacrifice for atonement, and he would sprinkle it on the mercy seat of the ark there. He would sprinkle it on the ark on behalf of the people. And we go from the period of the Exodus to the period of the judges, and the period of the judges ends with this statement. It’s rather concerning to me, but it says that everyone did what was right in his own eyes. And in the process of that, we see God’s people making a lot of mistakes, don’t we? And 1 Samuel chapter 4 is just one of those places.

It’s a place where they put their faith literally in this box. Read with me, starting in verse 1. The word of Samuel came to all Israel. Now Israel went out to battle against the Philistines. They encamped at Ebenezer, and the Philistines encamped at Aphak. And the Philistines drew up a line against Israel. And when the battle spread, Israel was defeated before the Philistines, who killed about 4,000 men on the field of battle. And when the people came to the camp, the elders of Israel said, Why has the Lord defeated us today before the Philistines? Let us bring the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord here from Shiloh. That it may come among us and save us from the power of our enemies. So the people sent to Shiloh, and they brought from there the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord of hosts, whose enthroned of the cherubim.

And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phineas, were there with the Ark of the Covenant of God. You know, Israel wasn’t used to being defeated very much, were they? In fact, the battle of Ai always stands out to me in the period of Joshua. You know, it’s the second battle they had. They go to Jericho and the walls fall, and they take everything and they destroy it and give it to God. Well, almost everything. Achan sinned. He took some things back to the camp with him. And at Ai, they are given what is a resounding defeat. It just crushed their spirits. Thirty-two people died. Oh, how things have changed by the time we come to 1 Samuel 4. Here in this defeat, they killed 4,000 men of Israel.

And Israel is troubled by this. Why has God defeated us? And they say, you know what we need? We need the Ark of the Covenant. That’s the problem. And so they sit for the Ark. You see, the children of Israel put their faith not in God, but in the ark. And you can see that by their response. Look at verse 5. As soon as the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel gave a mighty shout so that the earth resounded. I mean, they praise so much when the ark comes that the earth shakes. How much do they believe in the Ark of the Covenant? They go on. And the problem in the battle of the Philistines is not that the Ark wasn’t there, but that they hadn’t put their faith in God.

And they go to battle with the ark. And instead of 4,000 people, the Philistines kill 30,000 people. And not only that, they kill Hophne and Phineas. And they carry the Ark of the Covenant away. And you remember the rest of the story, how it was taken to the temple of Dagon. It was collected like the other gods that the Philistines had defeated. And the story from there. Sometimes we don’t, as a kid, I could never understand why the Ark of the Covenant looked like a box and Noah’s Ark looked like a boat. Reason for that is Noah’s Ark didn’t look like a boat. It looked like a box. You know, Noah’s Ark wasn’t built so it could be streamlined and aerodynamic. It was built to float.

And I don’t know if you realize this, but you make a box out of wood and cover it with pitch, it’ll float. That’s what happened. And all the word ark means is box. And so Israel had put their faith literally inside the box. I wonder sometimes if our faith isn’t in a box. Do you think we as Christians could put our faith in a box? I think we can.

1. Our Faith Stuck in the Box of the Church Building

I think we put our faith and our trust in quite literally what is a box. What do I mean by that? Well, we don’t think of it this way. But a church building’s just a big box. It may have more than four sides. But it’s nothing but an order eight box. And if you and I aren’t careful, our faith gets stuck in the box of the church building. The totality of our faith is limited to what happens here. Our worship and service as Christians is defined by what goes on at the box. Our conversations betray us in that regard. Somebody might say, Well, where do you go to church? And we give them the address of the box. Or we might try to involve somebody in our religious life.

And the way we do that is we try to be able to the box. We say, Do you want to go to church with me? We bring them to the box. Too often, this box has become similar to what the Ark was for Israel. And what I mean by that is that sometimes we just see the fulfillment of our duty as Christians to show up at the box. You know, we preach on attendance all the time. I do that too. My shepherds where I work, they want me to do that. They want me to remind people that we meet from 9 to 12. Because we meet just like you all do. They want me to remind people to be there on time, and those are all good things.

They want me to remind people that Hebrews 10, 24 and 25 tells us to stimulate one another to love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some. Hey, look, we’re supposed to be here to encourage one another. But I have to tell you that as important as that is, that’s not the fulfillment of your obligation to Christ. In fact, that’s just a part of it. And beyond that, if we could get the rest of it right, we wouldn’t have a problem with attendance. But our problem is sometimes in our busy world and in the things that we have going on, we define our responsibility as attendance because we’re so busy, that’s about all we have time for. And even when it comes to our core members, every congregation has a core, don’t they?

You know who that is. That’s the group of workers. They’re the ones that teach class, they’re the ones that do the work. Even in that sense, our core is really the people that do the most work at the box. They teach classes at the box. They’re active greeting and welcoming people at the box. And by the way, this isn’t just something that’s kind of isolated to us as Christians. The entire religious world is that way today. The Bible tells us to practice hospitality. And what the religious world’s done is they’ve taken that responsibility away from the home and the individual, and they’ve allowed the hospitality and interaction to actually happen at the box, the social aspect, right? And evangelism is a responsibility we all have. But what we’ve done most of the times is we’ve taken that away from the individual, and we have people who are paid to evangelize.

Nobody else has to do that. We’ve taken everything and we put it in the box.

How things worked back then? 3,000 people were saved in Acts chapter 2. They weren’t at a church building, were they? I mean, they were at the temple, but that wasn’t the church building. It was really in the middle of the community, for lack of a better term. In fact, most of the conversions you see happened away from the church building. And in addition to that, what Acts 2 says at the end is that these individuals met daily to study. And they ate together from house to house and they prayed together. And I got to tell you, I don’t think all of that happened at the church building. In Acts chapter 6, the widows were provided for. They were given benevolent help. I don’t think they had to go to the church building to get that.

There was a lot of things in the book of Acts that happened outside of the box. We’ve got to get outside of the box. And I tell you what’s interesting is there’s a lot of people that use this phrase to mean something completely different today. They kind of tell us, hey, you know what? The church needs to get outside of the box. And what they mean by that is we need to change everything that we’re doing, even our belief system, because we just don’t need to be trapped into the same old traditional stuff that we’ve always done. Well, I agree that we’ve got to get outside of the box in the sense that we’ve got to get our faith outside of our church buildings and make it active away from just the assemblies.

But that doesn’t mean that we change what we do and who we are. It just means that we don’t confine what is holy to these four walls as God’s people. We have to get outside of the box.

2. Don’t Hide Our Light in the Church Building

Follows the Beatitudes. In verses 14 through 16, Jesus talks about us being light. You are the light of the world, he said. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to the whole house. In the same way, let your lights so shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who’s in heaven. Our job is to be the light of the world. To let our light shine so that it can be seen by others. But you know what I’m afraid is that the church building in our culture has become the basket that we hide our light in.

There are some people who the only time their faith is seen is when they’re here. And is that being the light of the world? Our young people have to let their faith shine at school. We as adults have to let our faith shine at work and in our communities and with our neighbors. We don’t hide our light in the church building. Romans 12, 1 and 2 tells us that we don’t be like the world, but we be different, and we offer our lives as a sacrifice. And I’ve got to tell you the way that’s done is you do that in every moment of the day outside of the box. So how do we do this practically? I just want to share some things about getting outside of the box practically.

3. Getting Outside of the Box in Our Families

And the first thing that we’re going to talk about is in our families. And it may be a little bit repetitive of what we talked about in our class, but we need to make sure we get the point here. I got to tell you, I can look around the room and I can see already there’s a lot of families here, right? A lot of your family. And that’s good. There is nothing better than worshiping with your family, is there? Something about that. Every time I have the ability to assemble with my mother, it’s special. It’s something that we share, our faith, and it’s it’s important that we have that opportunity. But I gotta tell you that our families need to be in fellowship of faith and practicing their faith outside of the assemblies as well.

There are some children who the only time they hear about God or about spiritual things is at the church building. There are some children who the only time they see their parents interested in spiritual things and the point of opening up their Bibles is at the church building. And I think that’s sad. I think that we ought to see our faith at home. Our children ought to see our faith away from the church building. Now we don’t have a problem putting a lot of effort into other things for our kids. When it comes to education, we do everything it takes to make our kids successfully in the successful in the area of education. We might hire them a tutor, we might get them educational games when they’re younger so they can learn to read and write and add and subtract and do all those things.

Maybe we choose to educate them ourselves. But we go to great lengths as parents to get our kids a good education. Because education’s important. I mean, that’s how you make your living, that’s how you get a job, it’s how you take care of your family. And the reality is I want grandkids so I can spoil them and send them home like my mom does. And so I want a son and daughters who have a good education to take care of my grandkids. And so I’m going to great lengths to make sure that my kids get a good education. Comes to recreation. We do the same kind of thing. My son’s a football player. He has to go and he has to work out. We hire a trainer to work out with him.

Take him to camps so he can get better and get faster and better technique. Spend lots of money and time making sure that when it comes to football and recreation, that he can excel and he can best that he can be.

What if my kid’s not smart enough to get into Harvard or Vanderbilt with his academics? Or he’s not athletic enough to get a football scholarship. Is his life ruined? No. But if he never develops his own faith that exists outside of the church building to the point that he has a hope of heaven, then I have failed as a parent. See, I make sure my kids get to their practices. I make sure my kids do their homework. I make sure my kids apply themselves. If they don’t get grades like they should get, they get in trouble. If they don’t excel like they should excel, they get in trouble. But none of that ultimately matters if they don’t follow Christ. And those passages we read earlier, like Ephesians 6 4, Father, provoke not your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

It’s my job to teach my children how to be faithful, to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of God. And part of that is them seeing my faith away from here. Deuteronomy 6 and 6 through 9. These words I command you today shall be in your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your children. And talk of them when you sit in your house and walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise, bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be frontlets between your eyes. You shall put them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. You know what that passage is saying? You teach your children everywhere. Not just at church. You show them the relationship you have with God everywhere you go.

At home, walking around, driving around, sitting around, you teach your children what it means to be faithful. What it means to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. You teach your children that.

4. Get Your Work Outside of the Box

It’s not how it works. You have to do more than that. You have to teach your kids outside of the box. What about our work? What about our work? I think sometimes we think as Christians that we’re okay because we go to the church. You know, every Sunday morning we get up and we and we shower. And I’m thankful for that. And we get dressed, we put on our Sunday go to meet and clothes. And regardless of what’s going on in our life, usually put a smile on our face, put everything okay face on. And we walk in here and we go to church. And then we go home and we come back and do it again on Wednesday night. And then we go home. And for some of us, that’s the totality of our work as a Christian.

We go to church. And if you ask somebody why they know they’re going to heaven, somebody might even say, Well, because I go to church. There’s a real danger in defining our faith as just belief, by the way. I think there’s a real danger in that. Sometimes we look at faith and we program our kids early on. When you ask them in Bible class, what’s faith? And the answer is belief. They really like one word answers, don’t they? Belief. And with the idea there is faith is what you believe. It’s believing in God and believing in Jesus. And it creates a nice little tiny package for faith, by the way. Believing the story of the Bible. And I’m not saying that that doesn’t include that. But I’m afraid sometimes that our faith kind of gets boxed up like that in our buildings.

It’s what we believe. And it’s even maybe the full extension of that is just not what we believe, but also, well, I go to church and I sing and I study and I pray. I want you to turn to James chapter 2. And we’ll probably read more than verse 15 through 17, but I want you to look first at James 2, verse 15 through 17. In James 2, when it’s talking about faith, he says there, if a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace, be warm and filled, without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

Well, the point’s pretty simple. You know, if somebody comes up and they need food, and you say, you know what? Walcott, I believe you’re going to get food, and I just walk away. What good is that? Right. Well, do I believe? Well, yeah, I believe he’s going to get fed. But that’s not faith. You see, faith is more than belief. And James 2, what James 2, by the way, we’ve abused this text, I believe. What James 2 is really about is that real faith is not just believing, it also works. You saw the end of that verse, verse 17, right? So faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Look down there at verse 26. For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.

I tell you what, if faith is just belief and doesn’t include anything else, well, it’s a dead faith. That’s what verse 26 says. Faith is not believing something, it is working. It’s not just seen and heard. Or not just heard, it’s seen, excuse me. Somebody might even say, well, look, you know what? When it comes to benevolence, that’s what the church treasury is for. I don’t have to take care of somebody. The church will take care of that. Galatians 6 10 said it do good to all men, especially those of the household of faith. If you believe that, then you have a responsibility to do the work. In other words, we gotta move our faith outside of the church building and look for ways to work.

And when I talk about work, work as a Christian is more than just assembling. It’s more than just professing. It’s more than just singing out, it’s more than just saying amen. It is something that is seen in everyday life. And I tell you what’s really interesting about it is when we have that kind of faith that works away from the church building, people start to see it. And when they start to see it, they start to go, you know what? I don’t know what it is about Cody, but I want to be like him. He’s different. I want to be like he is. Isn’t that what happened in the first century? Two men are in jail, and an earthquake comes and springs of jail open. And the jailer, because it’s a penalty of death if he loses a prisoner, is getting ready to kill himself.

And yet the prisoners haven’t left. And he sits there and he thinks to himself, I don’t know what it is about those guys, but I want to be like that. And they go and they baptize them in the same hour of the night. Their faith and behavior exemplified something that attracted the jailer to them. A centurion, raised in a heathen country, is stationed in Israel. And he doesn’t know what it is about these people and their God. But as Acts chapter 10 starts, it even says that he prayed to God and gave alms. He started imitating God’s people without even knowing what he was doing. Why? He wanted to be like them. Which opened the door to the Gentiles being converted. As Peter was sent to teach him.

Or how about the lame man in Acts chapter 3? Who wanted to be healed? And Peter says, silver and gold have I none, but what I have, I give you, and he heals him. And not only that lame man, but many saw that work. And they heard the teaching and they saw the behavior of Peter. And what it was was his faith was active, and they wanted that kind of faith. I’m going to tell you what, when we act like Christians are supposed to act, when we are the light of the world, a city set on the hill that cannot be hidden. People will want to be like us. Said earlier that only 17% of the churches in this country are growing, and only 2% are growing by conversions.

The rest are just growing by reproduction or shuffling. Why aren’t more churches growing? Because we’re hiding our faith inside our buildings. Who would want to be like us? The only time we act like Christians is here. What good is that? Get your faith outside of the box. And get your work outside of the box.

5. Get Our Focus Outside of the Box

And get our focus outside of the box. Children of Israel were convinced as long as they had the ark, God was on their side. Because the ark signified God’s presence. It was a representation of his power. I mean, after all, in Jericho, it was the ark that led them around the walls, wasn’t it? And when they crossed into the promised land, as soon as the men carrying the ark set foot in the Jordan, it separated. I mean, the ark had signified power. There was a reason why they viewed it that way. It was wrong, but understandable then. So when they bring the ark into the camp to fight the Philistines, it’s understandable why they focused on it so much. And yet God has it removed away from them and has them defeated to prove that that should not be their focus.

Can I just be honest with you for a moment? I think sometimes because we go to a building or a box that has a sign out front that says Church of Christ, and we don’t use instruments and we don’t practice some other form of salvation that doesn’t preach baptism for remission of sins and all of the things that are important. And I’m not saying they’re not important, but because we do that, we think we’re saved. And our focus on salvation and every aspect is really on what goes on in the building, the doctrine taught, what’s practiced, all of those things. So let me make sure you understand when it comes to our focus and when it comes to the definition of who we are. We are God’s people when we live like God’s people.

Now part of that is assembling. And part of that is doing the right things. But there’s more than that. And that’s the point is that our focus has to be broader. We are God’s people when we live like God’s people. That’s the key. I’ll give you one example of where our focus seems to be off kilter. And that’s the area of evangelism. Mark 16, 15 says, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. And our job then is to go and teach the lost. But you know what? And we do this right, and I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but one of the ways that we emphasize evangelism today is what? Get them to the box. Get them inside the building for an assembly.

Let them hear our preacher, let them meet us and see how friendly we are. And that will bring in people and they’ll be attracted that way. Now, I am not saying that doesn’t work. I know that works for some folks. That doesn’t work for the unfriendly congregation, by the way. You know, you bring some, you bring your neighbor in and nobody talks to him, good chance you’re not coming back. So part of our focus when we’re at the box has to be right. Let’s not forget that. But you know, there are some people who need to be taught the gospel who will never set foot in the church building until after they’ve been taught the gospel. In other words, our focus has to be broader. In the book of Acts, hardly any of those conversions happened in the context of an assembly.

You can argue that Acts 2 was an assembly. Maybe Lydia could be an assembly because she was down by the river to pray, but all the rest of them, Cornelius was outside the assembly, the eunuch was outside the assembly, the Jalob was outside the assembly. Almost all the rest of the specific conversions happened because somebody in their normal walk of life recognized somebody who needed the gospel and shared the gospel with them. They didn’t say, you know what, you need to come to our next assembly. They taught them the gospel. See when the only way we think we can save people is by getting them to the church building. It’s the wrong focus, isn’t it? Faith in the wrong thing. We’ve got to put our focus on what matters.

In other words, I’m not saying that the things that go on here aren’t good. I’m not saying that what happens in the church building isn’t important. I’m saying we need to broaden our perspective and realize that our faith cannot be contained in a box. But it extends well beyond that. And my friends who tell me that we need to get outside of the box and they want to change things about our assemblies and they want to change some of the ways we believe and some of the ways we teach. You know, I’ve got to tell you, I think one of the reasons why they want to get outside of the box is because they’ve seen that churches have put their faith in the church building for far too long.

Conclusion

Sweet and I’ve challenged your young people to have their own faith, not yours. Not their parents’ faith, not the church’s faith, their own faith. And I want it to be the kind of faith that works everywhere. I want your faith to be that kind of faith. And the reason I want that is because that’s what God expects of us, isn’t it?

I encourage you to get outside of the box when it comes to our faith and our service and our work to God. Now, we’ve talked about faith this weekend, we’ve talked about believing, we’ve talked about children walking with God, we’ve talked about our faith and what we do and how we serve God. You know, it all comes down to this. In order to have that kind of faith and to be that kind of a person, you have to be in a relationship with God. The same God who said, I am holy, you be holy. Well, I tell you what, I by myself, what I found out in life is I fall far short of being holy, don’t you? When it’s up to my own devices to become holy, it just doesn’t happen.

I can’t do it. Thanks be to God, that through the blood of Jesus Christ, I’m offered grace and mercy that can make me holy again. So I can be washed, sanctified, and justified and set apart as one of God’s people. I don’t know where you’re at this morning, what kind of faith you have. I don’t know whether you’ve obeyed the gospel or not. I know this, you have the opportunity right now to obey the gospel. And I know that Jesus came and he died for you, and he died for me, and I hope you believe that. And I hope that based on that belief, you’ll be willing to change your will to match his, that you’ll repent. That you’ll confess your belief and your faith that he is a Son of God, and that that faith won’t just be some mere confession of belief, but that it will be an active faith that follows him, and that will be an obedient faith that also includes the reality that in order to be saved from my sins, I believe I must be immersed, baptized to wash those sins away.

Now, friends, if you’ve not done that this morning, you need to know that you are eternally lost until you do. But here’s the great news. You can change that right now. And that’s what we’d like to beg you to do. I want you to become a Christian this morning.