What’s My Position?

 

 

 

 

Put Me In Coach – What’s My Position?
Sycamore Creek Church
November 16/17, 2014
Tom Arthur

Peace friends!

We’re continuing in the third week of this series: Put Me In Coach.  So far we’ve explored some fundamental questions of the game we’re playing here at Sycamore Creek Church:

What’s the game?
Who’s my team?
Next week: Who’s my coach?

Today: What’s my position?

There’s a key thought throughout this whole series:

There are too many fans of the game and not enough players in the game.

Take football for example.  In football there are 22 people on the field in desperate need of rest and 22,000 people in the stands in desperate need of exercise.  I don’t want to be the kind of church that has 22,000 people in the stands watching 22 people play the game.  I want to get those 22,000 people in the game.  This series is about that: getting in the game.  It’s about serving.  It’s about volunteering.

When it comes to getting in the game there are different distances people have from getting in the game.  Farthest from the game are those who simply aren’t fans.  They don’t even want to watch the game.  Then there are those who are fans.  They watch the game from a comfortable place.  Next closest to the game are the fanatics, the season ticket holders.  The next step into the game is the farm team.  These are the people who are working on playing the game and getting better at the game.  Then there’s the first string players.  These are the ones who are all in.  They’ve committed everything they’ve got.  Where are you at?  I’m guessing if you’re reading this then you’re at least a fan?  Are you a fanatic but not yet in the game?  Are you on the farm team or are you a first string player?  But if you’re a player, what kind of player are you?  What position do you play?  That’s the question I want to explore today.

In any sport, while there are specialized positions, there are some positions or some plays that everyone on the team plays.  The same is true of the game we play here at SCC.  There are some positions that we all play.  We all play the position of praying.  Are you praying for your church?  We all play the position of inviting.  Are you inviting by sharing our events on Facebook?  Are you inviting when we do a big buzz series or a big day?  Are you considering how you can invite by joining the “launch team” of our new venue?  We’re buying a building to be our Sunday morning venue.  It’s like we’re launching a new church.  So we should have a launch team.  Launching is about inviting.  Are you inviting?  Every player on this team invites.  Every player on this team also plays welcoming.  We’re all on the hospitality team.  When someone invites a friend to worship with us, they’re depending on you to be welcoming.  We welcome by running the 5-10-Link play.  FIVE minutes before the service and FIVE minutes after you cover a zone TEN feet around you and you meet the people you don’t know.  Then you LINK them to other people you do know.  Are you welcoming in this way?  We all play welcoming by engaging the meet and greet question at the end of worship.  It’s designed to prime the pump of conversation with those around you that you don’t know.  Are you playing welcoming?  We all also play the position of giving.  God has given each of us a certain amount of resources.  How are you doing being a steward of God’s resources?  How are you doing giving 10% back to God?  We all play the position of giving.  We all play the position of praying.  We all play the position of inviting.  We all play the position of welcoming.  But we all then specialize in one or more other positions too.  These positions are called spiritual gifts.

Throughout this series we’ve been exploring Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.  Paul was the first missionary of the church and he wrote a letter to the church at Ephesus.  The letter is in the Bible and is six chapters long.  Go home today and read all six chapters.  It will take you about thirty minutes.  We’re really drilling down on chapter four in this series.  Paul tells the Ephesians:

The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers.
~Paul (Ephesians 4:11 NLT)

You’ll see here that Paul is listing some very specialized positions in the church.  The Bible contains several different letters Paul wrote to different churches, and in two of those other letters Paul lists some other specialized positions.  They can be found in chapter 12 of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and chapter 12 in the letter to the Romans.  Throughout this series we’ve been exploring fundamentals of the game.  Today is no different.  Today with Paul’s help, I want to explore three fundamentals of playing a position in the church (I’m indebted to Bruce Bugbee’s book, What You Do Best in the Body of Christ, for giving me the framework for these three fundamentals).

1.     Be Aware of Your Spiritual Gifts

The first fundamental of playing a position is that we are expected to be aware of the spiritual gifts that we have.  Paul says:

Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.
~Paul (1 Corinthians 12:1 NRSV)

So what are spiritual gifts?  What gifts does God give to us?  The first gift of God is God’s very own self.  God’s presence with us is the Holy Spirit.  We must remember that God doesn’t give us unique abilities independent of giving us God’s very presence.  James A. Stewart, a 20^th century preacher in the Church of Scotland said, “Many want the Spirit’s power but not the Spirit’s purity.  The Holy Spirit does not rent out His attributes.  His power is never separated from His glorious Self.” If we expect God to use us to the fullest, we must be aware of how God is present in us purifying us and calling us to be ready for what God is going to do in us.  It’s out of the relationship with God, the source of all power, that the Holy Spirit works through us and gives us special gifts.  Hudson Taylor, a 19^th century missionary to China, said, “I used to ask God to help me.  Then I asked God if I might help Him.  I ended up by asking Him to do His work through me.”  God gives us God’s very own self and when God is present with us, then God works through us.  This happens in one of two ways.

First, God gives us certain God-given talents, passions, or abilities that are to be used in the service of God’s purpose in our lives.  They are at times supernatural talents, but at other times, they are natural talents used to accomplish supernatural results.  Paul says:

We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
~Paul (Romans 12:6-8 NRSV)

If you want to know more about your spiritual gifts, we have an online tool that we use that will take you about ten or fifteen minutes to fill out.  You’ll get a report on your personality, leadership style, and spiritual gifts.  It will help you know what specialized position God has you playing.  You can find the tool at www.assessme.org/2364.aspx.  The tool is free to you through us, but if you did it on our own it would cost you $15.  So take some time to learn about your spiritual gifts.  When you take this inventory online, your results will then be available to use to help get you in the game.

The second way that God uses spiritual gifts is to give us the unique gifts in the moment that we need them to accomplish God’s purposes.  This may mean that God supernaturally empowers you in a moment in way that you have no natural aptitude.  But because you have received God’s first gift, God’s very self, God can use you in a way that no one, even yourself, could have imagined.  Thus, the spiritual gift and passion may not come until the purpose is pursued.  This happens because while the world may count you out, God does not look at you in the same way the rest of us do; God sees your heart.  There’s a great modern classic movie about baseball called Moneyball.  It’s about the use of statistics to build a team.  There’s a scene in the movie when the coach goes to recruit a washed up catcher to play a position that he would never have imagined playing, but the statistics say he’ll do well enough at to benefit the team in other ways.  Watch what happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyvu1nWjOlI

This is a real life story.  Scott Hatteberg was the catcher for Boston Red Sox.  He had an elbow injury which meant he couldn’t throw the ball to second base.  This resulted in his inability to play the position of catcher.  But the Oakland A’s saw something in him no one else did and recruited him to play first base.  It was a risky move by most recruiting standards.  But Hatteberg ended up hitting a walk off homerun to help the A’s make an American League 20-game winning streak record.  Sometimes you won’t be able to see what position you can play and how you have the talents to play that position until you say yes to the position.

The first fundamental of playing a position in the game of following Jesus is to be aware of your spiritual gifts.

2.     Expected To Use Your Spiritual Gifts.

Paul gave some advice to a young preacher named Timothy and we have two letters he wrote mentoring Timothy in how to play the game.  Paul said:

Do not neglect the gift that is in you.
~Paul (1 Timothy 4:14 NRSV)

God expects us to use the spiritual gifts that God has given us.  When it comes to using those gifts, we can underuse them or we can overuse them.  We underuse them when we’re ignorant of them.  Or we underuse them when we’re just flat out disobedient.  When our spiritual gifts are underused then it’s like a part of the team or the body becomes dead.  The rest of the body ends up having to overcompensate.  This puts stress on the rest of the team and leads to burnout.

But we can not only underuse our spiritual gifts, we can also overuse them.  This happens when we use our gift to dominate the team.  We don’t allow the rest of the team to develop.  There’s a great scene in the classic basketball movie Hoosiers when the coach intentionally benches a player who is on a scoring streak.  As you watch the scene, ask yourself: “What’s wrong with this guy doing all the scoring?”

 

A team and a church can’t be dependent all on one person.  Pastors and key leaders in a church tend to fall into this trap quite a bit.  Let me give you an example of how I’ve been over using a spiritual gift I have for the last couple of years.  I’m a pretty creative guy.  I love creating new ideas.  Most of the sermon series we do around here have been my ideas.  Most of the big outreach events we do around here are my ideas.  But about a year ago it hit me, we’re being creative but it’s all based on me.  If I’m in a car crash tomorrow or if the bishop appoints me to another church, then there is no creative team to keep this work moving forward in a creative direction.  So I’ve been busy over the last year beginning to build creative systems and teams to provide the creative scaffolding for what we do at SCC.  Two quick examples.

First, instead of planning the preaching calendar by myself for 2015, I pulled together a team.  We met on a Saturday in October.  I was a bit nervous about how this was going to work.  I was giving up something to allow others to help make decisions about what we’d be teaching at SCC from the “pulpit.”  I was nervous about how the creative process would work.  We scheduled the entire day from 9:30AM to 4PM to accomplish as much as we could.  I went in thinking that the day would be successful if we got through half the year.  What were the results?  We had the entire year of 2015 planned by 2:30PM!  This was a serious team effort.  The players came ready to play with really good ideas.  And now if I die tomorrow, there’s a system of creativity that isn’t based on the pastor overusing his creative gifts.

The same thing has been true when it comes to creative elements in worship.  Most of the creative worship elements we’ve used in the past have been developed by me and Jeremy, our worship leader.  But this wasn’t a sustainable team.  We needed to include more.  So now each month we invite people to join us for a two hour brainstorming session of a series that is two months out.  We just met this week with a group of people to help us plan January’s series.  We came up with more ideas and better ideas than we would have had we done it by ourselves.  And we’re making more positions for people to use their gifts rather than Jeremy and I overusing ours.

The second fundamental of playing a position is that you are expected to use your spiritual gifts.

3.     Held Accountable for the Use of Your Spiritual Gifts

Peter was one of Jesus’ closest team members.  Peter wrote a couple of letters that we now have in the Bible.  In one of them he encourages us saying:

Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.
~Peter (1 Peter 4:10 NRSV)

We don’t often use the word “manifold” but “mani” means “many” and “manifold” can mean assorted, multiple, or various.  There are assorted, multiple, and various gifts of God’s grace that God gives.  And we are each stewards of those manifold gifts and graces.  A steward is someone who does not own the property he or she is using.  Someone else owns it and the expectation is that they will use it well and return it well.  Some day God will ask: “How did you use the gifts that I gave you?”  How did you play  your position?  Will we be left making excuses?

Perhaps one of the best athletes to play any sport is Michael Jordan.  There’s a great commercial where he’s talking about the game.  But the kicker comes at the end.

 

 

Will you be left standing before God making excuses for why you didn’t play your position?  Will you be left standing before God making excuses why you didn’t get in the game?  Jesus tells a parable about a master handing out talents (Matthew 25)

Parable of the Talents.  To one servant he gives one talent.  To one he gives five.  To another he gives ten.  Then he goes away.  The five-talent servant and the ten-talent servant use their talents to make more talents.  The one-talent servant goes and buries his talent.  When the master comes back, he rewards the five and ten-talent servants and he’s furious with the one-talent servant.  He’s not upset because the servant has only one talent.  He’s upset because he buried it and didn’t even risk trying.

So one day you will be held accountable to how you played your position.  One of the ways you play your position is you volunteer somewhere in the church.  You can explore volunteering by filling out our Service Inventory Sheet.  On it you’ll find all kinds of ways you can serve in our church.  You circle the ones you’re interested in. You’re not signing up for the position, you’re only expressing interest.  When this series is over, someone who leads each area you circled an interest in will be in touch with you to talk further about that position to play.  You can download a Service Inventory Sheet here.

Here’s the three fundamentals of playing a position:

1. Be aware of your spiritual gifts.
2. You’re expected to use your spiritual gifts.
3. You’ll be held accountable to using your spiritual gifts.

Let’s go back to that image I used at the beginning of the message.  How far are you from the game?  Are you not a fan?  Not even watching the game.  Probably not or you wouldn’t be here today.  So you’re at least a fan.  You watch from the stadium.  Or are you a fanatic?  You’re a season ticket holder.  You come all the time.  You cheer.  You cry.  But you’re still not in the game.  Or are you on the farm team?  You’ve made a commitment to serve somewhere.  You’re learning a position.  You’re exploring a position.  You’re learning the game.  Or are you a first string starter?  You’re all in.  You’re playing a position and while you do commit errors or fumbles from time to time, you’re learning from them and you’re in it to win it.

Team, I hope throughout this series you’re saying to yourself:

I don’t want to be watching the game at home.
I don’t want to be tailgating.
I don’t want to be in the stands.
I don’t want to be on the sidelines.
I don’t want to be on the bench.
I want to be in the game.
I want to be on the team.
Put me in coach!

Prayer
Almighty and merciful God, it is only by your gift that your faithful people offer you true and praiseworthy service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.