A Pilgrim's Journal

I was invited some years ago now to speak at a conference of pastors in the city of Boston in the United States. It was organized by the New England Association of Evangelicals. New England, of course, is the six states in the north eastern part of the United States. And they came together for this conference and there were several speakers, and one of them was a man called Juan Carlos Ortiz. He was a pastor of a church in Buenos Aires in Argentina. And he... gave us a message... one day that challenged me thoroughly.

He told us that he had gone to Buenos Aires to pastor a church of 300 people, and it had begun to grow very quickly, and it soon became 1000 people, and he said, he became known as the pastor of the fastest growing church in Buenos Aires. And he was delighted with the reputation that gave him, he said.

He said one Sunday morning he had planned to preach a message on love. During the week, he prepared his message, and he came to the church that morning, very confident of what he wanted to say. And he sat on the platform during the time of worship and music, and during that time he felt a very strong impulse that he should not preach his message. But he had nothing else to say.

When the time came for his sermon, the worship leader said, "And now brother Juan Carlos will bring us his message," and he said, "I came to the platform, I opened my Bible, and I said, 'Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is, "Love one another."'" Then he stopped, closed his Bible, and he went back to his seat.

And there was silence.

And with the silence, there was confusion. The worship leader leaned across and said, "Are we supposed to sing another song?" But he sat their quietly, and after about two minutes, which is a long time when you don't know what is happening, he told us that he got up, came back to the pulpit and he said, "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is 'Love one another.'" And he went back to his seat.

He said his wife was sitting in the balcony and she thought, "He's flipped! I knew it would come one day." After a couple of minutes of silence again, he got up a third time, came to the pulpit, said, "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is 'Love one another!'"

And I think it was after the third time, and he went back to his seat, that somebody sitting somewhere in the congregation turned to the person next to them and said, "Excuse me. I don't know you. Is there any way I can love you?"

Somebody else turned to somebody else somewhere else in the congregation and said, "Excuse me. Is there something I could do for you?"

And within a few minutes, the whole church was alive with people talking to each other. He said, "We had 28 people in the church that morning who were unemployed. Every single one went home with a job." And he began to give other statistics, and I was writing fast, and I haven't got the figures exactly, but he said there were single mothers with children in the congregation that morning who were struggling alone, and every one of them went home with a family committed to help them and share with them, [and] help take some of the burden with them.

He listed other things. He said, "That Sunday morning changed our church." He said, "If I had preached my message on love, people would have come to me, shaken my hand and said, 'Brother, Pastor Ortiz, that was a good message. I really enjoyed that. Especially liked the differences you explained between the different kinds of love.'" They would have said all that, but he said, 28 people would have gone home unemployed, and to be utterly honest, he said, most of the church couldn't have cared less.

But something happened that day. He said, "The next Sunday, I got up for the message, and I said, 'Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the same as last week: "Love one another!"'" Went and sat down, and people said, "Well, who can I help this week?"

He said, "I didn't have any liberty to preach for three months. I just said, 'Here's my text, "Love one another." Go to it.'" He said, 300 people left the church. They said, "We don't employ you to stand up and say, 'Love one another.' We want you to teach us the Word!" But he said, for those who stayed, who really didn't want just to know the Word, they wanted to obey the Word, and they were discovering that it was obeyable, (If there is such a word as that) their lives, their relationships, began to change.

He said, "After three months, I got up and I said, 'Brothers and sisters, the Lord has given me a new text this morning.'" And they broke out in applause. He said, "My text this morning is, 'Love your neighbour as yourself.'" And he stopped, and their was a silence. He went back to his seat again.

Somebody got up here and began to go to the door. Somebody else got up, began to go to the door. Somebody else went to the other door. And before long, in 10 minutes, the whole church was empty, the parking lot was empty, there was a line of people at the bus stop. And they went home, went next door, knocked on the door, and said, "Excuse me, I'm a Christian. Is there anything I can do for you?" He said, it was the worst time to do it, because it was just before Christmas. He said, "My wife and I, and I have two daughters, had presents that we'd bought for each other, to give them at Christmas. And we discovered need in our street that we had no idea about, and we took our unopened Christmas presents and we gave them away to other people."

He said, "If that first Sunday, and the three months after that, changed our church, this changed our community, because, I tell you what began to happen," he said. "We had tried to reach our community in all kinds of ways. We had all kinds of methods. We adopted all kinds of programs. And some of them worked okay, many of them didn't work at all." But he said, what began to happen was the telephone began to ring at the church, and people would say, "Is that the church that helps people? My son is on drugs. My daughter is pregnant and unmarried. My wife has been diagnosed with cancer this week. Could you come and help?"

And he said, instead of saying, "How in the world are we going to reach our community?" the community began to come to us and say, "Would you help us?"

Now let me say this. I'm not going to do that, because that was a divine moment in that particular time. But I do want to ask you the question. Did you come here this morning expecting to bless somebody? To minister to somebody? Did you come here this morning, and when this service is over in a few minutes, are you going to look for people to talk to? Are you going to be bold enough, if they tell you something's wrong, to say, "Can I help you?" Because they might say yes. Were you going to talk to the person next to you, who you don't know? Or just get up and go? Have you thought you might invite some stranger home for lunch? Or out to a restaurant with you for lunch?

I'm only asking you the question. Because when a church begins to live, not just in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, but in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, the life and character of God begins to flow into the community. Because God is love.

And I want to ask you this morning, is this the kind of church we want to be, or do we want to be a safe, easy, be-as-comfortable-as-you-want-to-be, kind of church? [With the attitude of] "But please don't expect me to take these things seriously."

How is the Christ Life in you? For as we have seen, Christ is the Head of the body, His Spirit is its life. And the life of Jesus, endwelling us by the Holy Spirit, is totally committed to loving, through you and through me.

If this isn't the kind of Christian we want to be, if this isn't the kind of church we want to be, and recognize we need to be, and recognize we are instructed to be, and recognize we have the resources to be, we're better shutting up shop. Because if you have the tongues of men and of angels, if you engage in all kinds of activities that other people applaud from a distance, but you do not have love, and you're not kind, and patient, and long-suffering, and trusting, and all the other qualities that are there, then you're just a noise, and all the neighbours ever think of us is, "We're glad when the service is over on Sunday, because then they can park their cars outside their houses." There is no sense, "Here are people that actually care."

And I'm preaching to myself. And I've preached to myself all week, and not just that, but I have brought my own heart once again to the cross of Jesus Christ where all this is made possible.

But it's not lots of individuals Paul is talking about, he's talking about the church in this chapter. This is how the church, made up of individuals, is going to function if we're going to please God.