Not long ago during a chat with my brother, I mentioned I had just finished writing a sermon entitled, "Coloring Outside the Lines" and I told him a little of what it was about. I knew he would be interested because he also studied for the ministry. Because my brother is six years younger than I, we did not spend much time together while growing up. When I was in college, he was in high school. When he was in the seminary, I was in the mission field. As the years have passed we have not seen each other more than once or twice a year. But we do talk regularly by phone.

My brother generally agrees with the concerns that my preaching suggests, but in this conversation he made some comments and asked me some questions that really made me think. I am glad we talked together. In fact, I believe it was providential. You see, we can all learn from one another, and I want to find the middle of the right road.

Many have pointed out that until recently our church has been works-centered, and they may be right. At least some were works-centered. Through the years great emphasis was indeed given to lifestyle issues.

But it doesn't appear we are works-centered these days. Perhaps we are even going to the other extreme. Many are now falling into the ditch on the other side of the road.

If you drive out to Cape Kennedy here in Central Florida you will most likely take a road a stretch of which has a swamp on both sides. It is not unusual to see alligators floating in these swamps, hoping someone will stop and throw them something to eat. The point is, in the area of faith and morals there are alligators on both sides of the road.

Some would say much of my preaching tends to be based on projections. I admit I often preach to what I see as trends. I recognize that, if the conditions change, the trend will change. But I believe that, if we are going to have some idea of where we are going, it is necessary for us to see not only where we are but also from whence we have come.

I preach not only to projections; my preaching also tends to be theology based. That is, I am sensitive to the state of theology and the aberrations that may be influencing it at one particular time or the other. Someone once asked me if I was sensitive to the changes that are coming into theology and if I had ever asked myself why these changes may be happening. In other words, I was being asked to go deeper and wider, and not only address the changes and the attacks on our faith and morals, but to try to consider what some of the conditions are that may be contributing to the current dynamics in the church.

For instance, no one dies of AIDS; they die of something else. AIDS is simply an attack on the immune system. When the immune system is not functioning, the person dies of TB, pneumonia, or even a type of cancer that the system might otherwise have been able to resist.

There is no doubt that something is going on in the community of the church. There are definite diseases, so to speak. The challenge is to address not only the disease but to explore what might be, in fact, a breakdown of the immune system in the community of faith that has somehow allowed this disease to proliferate when it otherwise could have been easily resisted.

This sermon is a companion to the one entitled, "Coloring Outside the Lines." You should read that one first, if possible. I hope that when this sermon is over, or, better still, when you have heard both sermons, together they will be a fair treatment of some of the fundamental challenges we face and will serve to help steer this ship of faith in a straight line. I suppose I could have entitled this sermon, "Coloring Outside the Lines II" so that you would know you hadn't gotten the whole picture until you had heard them both.

This sermon may sound somewhat negative to begin with, like "Coloring Outside the Lines." By the way, it is hard to preach a sermon that is really positive unless it also has some negative components. The negative components of a sermon help us see our need. We have needs that we know and we have needs that we don't know or that are less obvious. We know, for example, when we need to keep warm or to keep cool, but we may not know when we are not getting sufficient vitamin C in our diet.

I hope you are not opposed to hearing negative things. The Bible presents the negative side of many things. Otherwise, how could an intelligent choice be made? Unfortunately, these days many people don't like to hear negative preaching, especially if it happens to be about things they don't like to think about. Telling me how to get rich is much more pleasant than telling me what to do about bad breath. So this sermon is going to challenge the way some of us think and maybe even the way many of us behave.

It would not come as a surprise to me if someone labeled me a conservative preacher. I guess if you must designate someone as either conservative or liberal, I would not be given a high score by those who call themselves liberals. But we all have to start somewhere to get anywhere, and I suppose I start as a conservative. Jesus was condemned by both the liberals and the conservatives. The liberals thought He was conservative and the conservatives thought He was liberal. I should expect no better reception than He had.

If you thought the sermon about coloring outside the lines was against a liberal point of view, you may feel this one is against a conservative point of view. No matter where we are coming from, it's not my mother, nor my father, nor them, nor theirs, but it's me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

The text for this sermon is Matthew 14:14: "And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and He healed their sick." In this sermon we will compare some of our prevalent attitudes with the attitudes of Jesus. It goes without saying that whenever we compare ourselves with Jesus, it makes us realize we are not as far along in the process of growing in grace as we might have imagined.

Have you ever heard someone remark how thankful they were that their church has so many professional members or so many doctors? We are indeed glad to have doctors and other professionals in the body of Christ, but what about the rest who aren't professionals or doctors? Our Lord Jesus was a journeyman carpenter. But have you ever heard anyone say they were thankful there were three carpenters and four electricians in their church? In the book of Acts it said that the Lord added to the church those that were being saved, without regard to their titles or professions. Once in a while the New Testament does mention what someone did for a living, but it was because in those days what you did for a living helped to identify who you were. How many of us these days have the last name of Smith or Carpenter or Hooper?

Remember, we are being challenged to try to figure out the root causes for the troubles apparent in some places these days. Some might say it is because we do not treat people the same and that we are not sensitive to people as people and so we often hurt each other. The church is supposed to be like a hospital where a person can come to get over their hurts, but often it is just the opposite. When we exalt one group of members as being more valuable than another, how does that make the rest feel?

We may be very close to greatly displeasing the Lord by the way we carry our social preferences into the Body of Christ. Listen to this text in James 2:1-5:

"My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons. For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; and ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, 'Sit thou here in a good place'; and say to the poor, 'Stand thou there', or 'sit here under my footstool': Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts? Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which He hath promised to them that love Him?"

While that text simmers in our consciences for a while, let's think about other challenges we face. Before I mention one specifically, let me say that whenever two people get together at any particular time, one of the two emerges to be the leader. The point is that churches must have leaders. The Bible is clear about that. So the issue is not if we will or will not have leaders, but what the Bible expects the leaders in the church to be.

Studies have been done in the smaller churches. They have shown that churches with a membership of around 100 members or less will usually have what might be called a patriarch or a matriarch. This is a man or a woman who is more or less in charge of what goes on in the church. We are not talking about a leader in the absence of a pastor but in spite of whether there is a pastor or not. A pastor of one of those typical little churches told me that sometimes when the church would have a board meeting, one particular matriarch would vote in favor of something or other if it were obvious things were going that way; but then when the board meeting was over she would get word out that no matter what the vote had been, nothing had changed, and so it was.

This same pastor told me that one year the church decided they would pray for 25 new members, and God answered their prayer and they got 25 new members. Some of the new members became deacons and others became Sabbath School teachers, but it wasn't long before they had all left the church. You see, this church didn't mind having new members but the old guard was not about to sit still for new leaders. A new member could be part of the congregation, but they should forget about being a leader. All the leadership slots were filled by people who had tenure!

There may be reasons other than theological reasons for the many changes that are going on in the church today. These reasons may be like the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. They are attitudes that wear away at the spiritual health of the church until all kinds of strange things come in to scatter the flock, including tinkering with the doctrines and changes in lifestyle. Lifestyle includes attitudes, and attitudes account for the way we treat other people, and the way we treat other people is included in our lifestyle. It's a circle of cause and effect.

It is possible that people like me, who emphasize doctrinal orthodoxy and are sensitive to what could even be considered heresy, to not have sensitivity in relating to other people and their feelings. Jesus was always sensitive to the feelings of people, and if we are going to have the power of the gospel take hold in our lives, we must be sensitive, too.

Many times people who are into theology are mean, whereas people who don't seem to care about theology are nice. As a result, people can easily be down on theology and up on what are called these days "relationships".

The bottom line of the gospel is that we must sooner or later learn to love the Lord our God with all that we are, and then having put Him first, next we must love everyone else with the same regard we have for ourselves. Inasmuch as our tendency is to put ourselves first in everything, if we are going to love our neighbor as ourself, then we will put everyone else first.

It has been said that the church is not to be a rest home for saints, but a hospital for sinners. Of course, it is not to be a rest home for sinners either. The church is a society of practicing sinners who have come together in Christ to learn what it means to be practicing saints.

We must not forget that though we come to the church with all kinds of baggage and dysfunctions, we have not come to perpetuate our weaknesses and to hone our pride and selfish skills in the context of the body of Christ. Rather, we come as we are. But now born again and sorry for the way we have been, we are determined by God's grace and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we will be made whole.

The church is not the place to come to if you are into, "Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" The church is not for people who consider themselves to be the fairest. People who consider themselves to be the fairest don't need what the church has to offer. The church is not for people who see themselves as rich or smart or beautiful or powerful either. The church is for people who feel that all they have or are is nothing and that Jesus is everything.

One of my responsibilities is to work with Men's Ministries. I suppose a person could argue about why the need to have men's ministries, or for that matter women's ministries, or whatever special interest group that has decided it needs a ministry. There are definitely some negatives in special interest groups, but there are some positives, too. One positive is that when women have problems, they ought to go to godly women for advice. The same could be said for men going to godly men. And there is no doubt the singles feel lonely and neglected. Perhaps the fragmenting going on in the church these days could be summed up with the plea, Doesn't anybody care about me?

When Men's Ministry conventions are held in our area, I invite men from all over the country to come and speak. The advertisements give the name of the speaker and where he is from but not what he does for a living. The purpose is to fellowship at the same level. Unfortunately, all men are equal until it comes to what they do for a living. The proverbial pecking order seems to be determined by what we do for a living and how much money we have. If you were to attend a Men's Ministry convention in Florida you could be yourself, because for all you know the guy up front is just like you.

I am not suggesting that we should not have doctors or lawyers or even people with money in the church, but we should not hold that either for them or against them. Here is where, according to the prevailing notion, Jesus made His first mistake when He was here on the earth. It signed His death warrant very early on, and that was that Jesus was no respecter of persons. This was a direct attack on the status quo. In those days who you were was who you were; and if you were a nobody, you had no possibility of rising above that status.

Jesus treated all the supposed nobodies as somebodies. Now, we must be careful with this. This is where we can get all tangled up and flunk the gospel's final exam. In the body of Christ everybody is treated as somebody, but if you ask them who they think they are they will tell you they are a nobody. This is where we are starting off right and ending up wrong in our approach these days. We start off by saying that everybody is a somebody, and then we institutionalize pride and selfishness, which is the opposite of all that the gospel stands for. Jesus treats us as a somebody, but in the next breath He tell us to get down and wash each other's feet. In the context of modern life, those two approaches are a contradiction of terms.

In the body of Christ, which is the church, a person who considers himself a somebody is in the eyes of God a nobody, and a person who considers himself a nobody in the eyes of God is a somebody.

Listen to Luke 14:11: "For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." And James 4:10: "Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He shall lift you up." And there are even more texts that could be quoted.

The point is we are wrong in comparing ourselves among ourselves. We may do it now, but before this life is over we must stop it, because it is an attitude incompatible with the kingdom of heaven.

How does one put the right principles into practice? Put down the professional people and put up the blue-collar people? That would only create another problem. In plain language, it could be said that Jesus wants us to treat everybody as though they were doctors and engineers.

Returning for a moment to the church that prayed for 25 new members and got them, I don't know if they will ever pray for new members again, because the new members were seen as a threat to the established leadership and were rebuffed until they left. Some would be quick to counter that if the 25 had really been converted they wouldn't have left. I will not speak to that here. The fact is, they are gone from us and we would have to talk with them about their reason for leaving. This kind of thing has happened before and will no doubt continue to happen.

You will recall that at the beginning of this discussion I suggested that there are churches that are, we might say, ruled over by resident patriarchs or matriarchs. I also submitted that there must be leadership when there is more than one person involved in an organization of any kind. So the dilemma is not whether or not a church should have leadership, but what kind of leader that person will be.

When Jesus was here on this earth they called Him "Rabbi". Rabbi means teacher. Here was Jesus, the Creator of heaven and earth. If anyone was ever a leader in the true sense of the word it was Him. But notice His leadership style. They called Him "teacher". A teacher leader is the opposite of a dictator leader, because a dictator leader tries to keep other people from becoming leaders and a teacher leader is constantly seeking to create leaders. A church that is lead by dictator leaders cannot grow, because to grow would mean to share leadership, and a dictator leader sees every new person as a potential threat to his or her position.

A teacher leader is not threatened by new people or the thought that this might mean more leaders. After all, they see their leadership role as making new leaders and they will actually be happy to see new people come in and move into leadership positions. A teacher leader has nothing to fear for his style of leadership because teacher leaders will always be in demand. On the other hand, a dictator leader is insecure of his leadership role and wakes up every day with the fear that someone is going to take his place.

Where is all this leading? We began with the challenge to look deeper than the obvious theological issues in order to discover what may be behind some of the destructive things happening today in the body of Christ.

It could be that some of the tumult in theology is being enabled, or should we say facilitated, in part at least, by the way we are treating each other. It could be that some of the youth feel justified in creating a youth church because there is no room for them in what might be called "the establishment." It could be that the congregations that emphasize being nice to each other are more attractive than the congregations that may be theologically sound but fundamentally unfriendly and have a closed leadership loop that is impossible to break into.

A friend of mine went on a ski trip to Utah. While he and his wife were there, they went down to Salt Lake City to see what was going on in the world of the Mormons. He told me he took the tour, which was lead by young people. You are no doubt aware of the prominent role that young people play in the Mormon Church. They are the cutting edge of the church. They are the ones who beat the streets and are the evangelistic outreach of the church.

We need to learn something from our Mormon friends. The Mormon youth do not try to represent a new Mormon theology, but they are, believe it or not, carriers of the orthodox faith. Mormon young people are required to come up to the level of orthodoxy in all that has to do with Mormon theology and lifestyle. And having done that, they are then passed the torch of responsibility.

It may not be universal in our church, but it seems in some places at least there are those who seem to feel that if we are going to involve Adventist young people in the workings of the church we must re-tool our theology and lifestyle to a level that the young people are comfortable with. This approach may well do two things. First, it dumbs down the theology and lifestyle that was given by Inspiration to this church, and secondly, to accommodate this phenomenon we are in some places seeing the development of a new church. I hesitate to say it is splitting the church, but it could come to that unless this situation is addressed fast.

The challenge to us as leaders is to become teacher leaders. This will make us less susceptible to the temptation to create a parallel church in order to involve our youth. But I would say to the young people, or for that matter to anyone who wants to get into the action, we must not forget that we must agree among ourselves to play by the same rules. The body of Christ is not about everyone for himself or doing it our way. There is an old saying, "Too many cooks spoil the broth," and the same applies when it comes to how we regard faith and morals. It must be the Bible and the Bible only that determines the rules of the game.

I hope you are following along with some of the things I have said. To put it simply, we must not think that all the challenges that have come into our church are purely theological. I am afraid much of our problem has to do with the way we have been treating each other.

Perhaps we have been openly and in an on-going way, disobeying Scripture that says not to treat rich people better than poor people or educated people better than those who have less education. In many places we have locked the door of church growth by adopting a leadership style that does not encourage personal growth, but may actually keep it from happening.

I intend to continue preaching against what I feel are the dangers of false doctrines and worldliness coming into the church and into our homes. And I now feel convicted that we must also include the way we treat each other as an important part of our theology and lifestyle.

One of the challenges we have when our eyes are opened to the importance of treating each other nicer is suddenly we may see the story of the woman caught in adultery as being the last word in dealing with all adultery. The net result can be that adultery and fornication may actually become, though not preferred, an acceptable behavior.

We must continually remind ourselves that, as the Lord leads us into a greater understanding and experience with truth, there is no time in which we must throw out old truth to make room for the new. A new understanding of eternal principles establishes timeless principles and never diminishes them.

The church is to be not just a place where we come to get correct theology and to get away from the world; it must also be a kind of haven, if you please, from the storms that rage around us. The world is a dog-eat-dog place, but the church must never be. The church must be where we come away from the world. It is to be an environment where the rich and poor, the young and old, the men and women, no matter the race, come to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I am reminded of a memory verse I learned in elementary school. It is found in Luke 2:52: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man." I believe this is essentially what the church is to be about.

None of us is alike. When God made you He threw away the mold. You are one of a kind. For me to compete with you or to try to put you down makes no sense, because we are in some ways as different as apples and oranges. None of us is self-sufficient either, although we may sometimes think we are or would like to be. The human race was meant to be a family. Sin has messed that up badly, but the church was established here in this world to be a shelter where the original plan of God in this regard could be seen and experienced.

If we are to address some of these problems of the church, we are going to have to take them on at home, too. Surely we must recognize that the church is looking more and more like our homes. The theology and lifestyles we practice during the week are more and more in evidence in the church on Sabbath.

I don't mind the challenge we have before us in this respect, because when we really get down to basics and begin to address the way we treat each other in the context of the church it will mean we will also have to address the way we treat each other at home and on the job. This means that, by the grace of God, we will, as they say, be able to get two birds with one stone.

My brother recently shared a little song with me. He heard it sung once but couldn't remember all the words, so he called a music store and asked them to read the words to him. The title of the song is, "Don't Laugh at Me." The words go something like this:

I'm a little boy with glasses, the one they call the geek,
The little girl that never smiles, because I have braces on my teeth,
And I know how it feels to cry myself to sleep.

Refrain
Don't laugh at me; don't call me names,
Don't you get your pleasure from my pain.
In God's eyes we are all the same.
Someday we'll all have perfect wings.
Don't laugh at me.

I'm that kid on every playground who is always chosen last.
A single teenage mother trying to overcome my past.
You don't have to be my friend, but is it too much to ask,
Don't laugh at me.

I'm a cripple on the corner. You pass me on the street,
And I wouldn't be out here begging if I had enough to eat,
And don't think I don't notice that our eyes never meet.
Don't laugh at me.

I lost my wife and little boy when someone crossed a yellow line.
The day we laid them in the ground is the day I lost my mind.
And I'm down to holding this little cardboard sign.
Don't laugh at me.

I'm fat, I'm thin, I'm short, I'm tall.
I'm deaf, I'm blind,
Hey, aren't we all?
Don't laugh at me.

My brother, my sister, why didn't we think of it before? Friendly, compassionate people make friendly, compassionate churches. Friendly, compassionate people make friendly, compassionate homes.

The establishment hated Jesus because of the way He treated people. We must not forget that the truth must manifest itself in two ways and in this order. When we are living the truth we will (1) Love the Lord our God with all our souls, with all our strength, and with all our minds; and when we do that we will (2) Love each other.

Unless we get this all together, all the rest won't matter. Someone once said that health is not everything but without it everything is nothing. That could be paraphrased to say the way we treat each other is not everything, but unless we treat each other like Jesus did, everything else is a waste of time.

One Sabbath Jesus was visiting the church where He was raised. He was invited to come up front and read the Scripture. He did this, and what He read sent them into a rage. The account is in Luke 4:18,19. He read, quoting from Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He hath sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised and to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."

This is what we are supposed to be doing in the church and in our homes. We try our best to do those things but often it doesn't seem to stick. For a number of years we made a big thing about calling ourselves The Caring Church. What happened? We don't hear about that anymore. What does this mean? Does it mean we don't care anymore? Or did we just wish we were a caring church? Jesus said that the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him. If we are going to treat people the way Jesus did, we must have the Spirit of the Lord rest on us, too. When the Spirit of the Lord rests on us, the first thing we will do is to confess to God that the way we have been playing church in many respects has been almost completely out of phase with what the church is supposed to be about. We must not forget that all change must be preceded by repentance. This is so because, if we don't stop doing what we have been doing, that which we try to add on won't stick.

But this is no cause for alarm. Repentance is a gift of God and is the key that unlocks the salvation process in our lives. God is gracious; He is merciful, forgiving, and abundant in goodness and truth. If we will but come to Him and confess the way we have been respecters of persons and that we have even been holding the doors of the church shut, keeping people from growing in grace, He will forgive us and He will abundantly pardon.

Then we must pray that the Holy Spirit will engraft into our lives the attitudes of Jesus. This change will not facilitate worldliness, it will not bring in a new theology, but it will bring just the opposite. It will make us completely different from the world and establish in our lives, in our homes, and in the church the truth of the gospel that is from everlasting to everlasting.

Thank God that, although our mistakes have been great, His power to heal and restore us is greater. Now unto Him who is able to give us a new start and heal our personal lives, our homes, and our churches, and who will one day present us faultless before the glory of His presence with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Father, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, now and forever more. Amen and Amen.