Four C’s of Display
I’m excited to continue our Missions Month series that we have been calling 3D Living. In this series we are looking at our discipleship model in Scripture to see how we can Discover truth about God, Deepen our relationship with Him and how we can then Display that Faith to a world that desperately needs it. This week we will be focusing on that third aspect of Display. It’s made me think this week of an online trend where people document the changes in their lives after days or weeks of doing something specific. I think of comical examples like only listening to emo music or trying to live like Ron Swanson. They show us day one, after a couple days, after a week, after 2 weeks, and after a month of these things. It’s comical to see the joke that they make over the transition. The normal, preppy looking guy starts to take on emo clothes, looks, and characteristics as the video goes on. By the 2 week to month mark, the emo listener is in full black with dyed hair that swoop and they only speak in punk emo whiny voice. What those jokes show us, is that the more you follow something or take part in it, the more you begin to take on its characteristics. It’s funny to see this with unserious things like music taste or favorite anime, but it is essential that this would be true of us when it comes to following God.
Skeptics: This shows that the Bible calls Christians not to be hypocritical. This is how we are supposed to live.
Let’s take a look again at Isaiah 6 and later 1 Peter to learn about what I am calling the 4Cs of Display. The Big Idea for today is: As we follow God we are called to Display it to those around us and trust God with the results. (Repeat)
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2 Seraphim[a] were standing above him; they each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one called to another:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Armies;
his glory fills the whole earth.
4 The foundations of the doorways shook at the sound of their voices, and the temple was filled with smoke.
5 Then I said: Woe is me for I am ruined because I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips, and because my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Armies.
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, and in his hand was a glowing coal that he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth with it and said: Now that this has touched your lips,
your iniquity is removed and your sin is atoned for.
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord asking:
Who will I send?
Who will go for us?
I said:
Here I am. Send me.
1. The Call to Display: Isaiah 6:8
This follows after the discovery of who God is and the redemption that happens when Isaiah confessed his sin before God. This is not God’s way of having Isaiah earn the redemption or clean lips that he now has. It is Isaiah’s obedient response to his relationship with God. This may be a specific calling to Isaiah, but it is echoed in more general ways throughout Scripture. Jesus called all believers to make disciples in the Great Commission, in Acts 1 Jesus says that with the power of the Holy Spirit we can be witnesses in both locally and to the ends of the earth, and that Jesus saw the world as a field ripe for harvest if only enough workers could be found.
When it comes to God’s specific call to any one of us when it comes to where we should be displaying our faith, even to the extremes of going into full-time ministry or moving to become a missionary internationally, that becomes an area of prayer and discernment that we would love to help everyone at City Awakening walk through. But we know for sure that God has generally called all Christians to be lights for him and display what it means to follow him. The best rule of thumb is to start focusing on how to do this without adding anything else to your life. Do you display godliness and the grace of the Gospel in your current workplace, with your friend and family, at your kids practices, games, or recitals. If not, God is clearly calling all of us to do so.
Transition: This is where we want everything to be happily ever after. That now everything will work out for Isaiah and us because he has both discovered God and deepened his relationship with God. But instead we will now look at…
2. The Challenges of Display: Isaiah 6:9-13 & I Peter 2:4, 6-8
Isaiah is told that he will go forth to prophesy to those who will not understand or perceive what he is saying. They will hear him but they will not listen to him. He pleads with God hoping that this will only be temporary, but he is told that it will continue that way until Judah is wiped out and sent away into exile. We do see a flicker of hope in the end as God promises that there will always be enough people that listen and respond in order to leave Him a remnant of followers.
This is our first challenge when it comes to Displaying our faith, Rejection. Many times people will not respond to it. We can say all the right things, we can love them as Christ would, we can pray for them, but they still may never understand and respond by following Jesus. If we aren’t careful, this can be incredibly frustrating to us and threaten to derail our spiritual lives and ministries to the world. What we have to learn and become comfortable with is that our personal ministries to others may actually have a hardening effect instead of a winning effect. Sadly, for many of us it is just the fear of rejection, not even true rejection, that keeps us on the sidelines. The potential loss of reputation or “coolness” keeps us stagnant and secretive. What all of us have to decide for ourselves is if Jesus is worth it. We have countless Christian brothers and sisters around the world who judge that Jesus is worth their very lives, we should judge Him worthy of our reputations or feelings.
For many people that reject God as their Lord, the display of God’s goodness and grace serves to reveal their hardness of heart and rejection of God. Think of Pharaoh in Exodus, we don’t know how he would respond to God until Moses goes before him and demands that he let the Hebrews go. Plague after plague happens to Egypt and Pharoah’s response is not to soften and submit, but to harden his heart further. The presence of David and his godliness in King Saul’s court only proves to reveal more and more that Saul was in fact not the godly king that Israel needed. Now this may not sound like the most encouraging news, but it is biblical and we can see that it applies even to the saving ministry of Jesus.
Let’s flip to the New Testament and continue to look at the challenge of rejection when we display our faith to see how it doesn’t need to stop us. We’ll be in 1 Peter 2 starting in verse 4.
4 As you come to him, a living stone—rejected by people but chosen and honored by God—
6 For it stands in Scripture:
See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and honored cornerstone,
and the one who believes in him
will never be put to shame.
7 So honor will come to you who believe; but for the unbelieving,
The stone that the builders rejected—
this one has become the cornerstone,
8 and
A stone to stumble over,
and a rock to trip over.
They stumble because they disobey the word; they were destined for this.
The Him there is Jesus, see what Peter is saying about Jesus. That he was rejected by people but honored by God. We learn in the book of Acts that when Jesus ascended back to Heaven after his resurrection that there were around 120 faithful followers that remained. Around 33 years of life and 3 years of active ministry that grabbed the attention of a whole region, and only just over a hundred remained. In our instant gratification culture, that sounds like a failure. But Jesus’ ministry and display of faithfulness wasn’t supposed to gain a huge following, it was supposed to faithfully live, die, and rise again as the sacrifice for all who would come to believe.
Then we get confirmation that Jesus himself served as a stumbling block or source of hardening for many people. Not because Jesus desired to make people stumble or because you needed special knowledge to follow him. Those who stumble over Jesus are those who come to see that they must lay aside their pride and self-sufficiency in order to trust Jesus as their savior but realize that they cannot do so. Jesus certainly wasn’t a failure, so we don’t have to think of ourselves as failures if those around us choose to reject Christ.
In the same way, our display of faith doesn’t have to be measured by success or results, but by our willingness to obey God as a response to what God has done for us. Our chief goal in Displaying our faith is to honor God himself, in doing so, we hope and pray to bring others along with us to praise him, but that is ultimately between them and God.
3. The Career of Display: 1 Peter 2:5, 9-10
5 you yourselves, as living stones, a spiritual house, are being built to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praise, of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
We are called to live as priests that offer sacrifices, serve, and proclaim God’s greatness. Notice that results are not mentioned here, that’s God’s prerogative not ours. The role of the priest is to lead in the worship and sacrifice to God. Our work is to bring glory to God, to proclaim what he has done, because he and he alone is worthy of such praise. It would be weird to see a traditional Buddhist monk come in here and lead us in songs of praise to Jesus. It should be just as weird for us then when we allow other things in life like comfort, money, success, and pleasure to take God’s place of worship and trust in our lives. We are called to be priests for God, God and other worldly things when we feel like it.
We don’t need to over-spiritualize or think of this too religiously. What we do as part of the “church” is only one aspect of our display. All of our lives should showcase our being disciples of Christ. Martin Luther described this well with a couple of quotes.
“The works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they may be, do not differ one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but all works are measured before God by faith alone.”
“Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool—though that father is acting in the spirit just described and in Christian faith—my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling—not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.”
Like what we see in that second quote, we are too tempted to think of certain tasks or jobs in some kind of arbitrary hierarchy. We think that normal or menial tasks, like basic care for our kids, can’t possibly be as meaningful as starting a ministry or leading someone to Christ. But the priestly role that we have means that all of life is a chance to Display God’s glory and saving grace.
The idea of priests does bring up the idea of intercession, though. So, our display of faith is supposed to serve as a bridge from people to God. We are to faithfully live out that role as God reaps the harvest of those that submit and follow him.
4. The Conduct of Display
11 Dear friends, I urge you as strangers and exiles to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul. 12 Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that when they slander you as evildoers, they will observe your good works and will glorify God on the day he visits.
This shows us the Conduct of Display. It involves both abstaining from sin and producing noticeable or honorable good works before others. Both of these matter greatly. We all know people who have been hurt by churches or religious people because they focused almost solely on abstaining from sin and not doing much of anything to help and serve those outside of the church. This can make people feel like there is no concept of grace in Christianity. It leaves people feeling too dirty or impure to be part of what God is doing. Now don’t get me wrong, we should have high standards when it comes to fighting sin and we should be quick to repent and correct when we do sin. But we as the church should do so from a place of understanding that we are still fallen people in a sinful world. We should expect that we and others will sin, but we should also have a quick and healthy way of confessing and turning from those sins as the best way to help us and others overcome those sins.
We know there is also a danger of Christians and churches that do great works of service out in the world. They care for the poor, they help single mothers, they beautify their cities, but we soon find out that they are incredibly lax on sin even going all the way up to their leaders. They may get a huge following, but what are they calling people to follow exactly, good vibes and fun? What Peter is telling us here is that we have to do both of these things well in order to be a good Display of Jesus to the world. We can’t do the Talladega Nights thing of picking and choosing what kind of Jesus to Display. Showing the world an all loving and serving Jesus that doesn’t care about sin is not helpful for them, it only makes the world a more comfortable place to live in before going to hell. But showing Jesus as a vindictive God who is ready to destroy or defame them for any sin also pushes them away from the true grace that Jesus offers.
As we circle back to the Big Idea. As we follow God we are called to Display it to those around us and trust God with the results. The question that you should ask yourself is where are you in the process of Displaying your faith?
Call to Display: Maybe today is the day that you answer God’s call on your life for the first time. That you say I that you know enough about Jesus to deem that he is worth living out your life for him. We would love to walk you through that decision today if you’re ready.
Challenge to Display: Ease the weight off your shoulders by recognizing that God call’s you to live for him regardless of the response of those around you. People in your life may not respond well to your faith initially, but that reveals more about them than you.
Career of Display: Begin today to evaluate how every part of your life should reflect God’s goodness and glory from the most public and grand gestures to the menial tasks that only God sees. Do all for the glory of God.
Conduct of Display: Ask yourself this. Do those around you notice that you handle sin differently then the world does? Do you blend in with the world, do you make excuses like your stressed or tired? Do you talk about people at work the same way your non-Christian coworkers do? Or are you quick to admit your error and seek forgiveness? And do they see your good works for them, your family, and your church?