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What looks successful is not always healthy, especially when everyone depends on one gifted leader. In Exodus 18, Jethro watches Moses carry the people’s disputes from morning until evening and warns that both Moses and the people will wear themselves out. How does God actually intend his people to serve together?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
Moses was successfully leading the people and they were coming to him willingly, yet Jethro identified this as unsustainable and unhealthy. What are some ways that success or effectiveness in ministry can mask underlying structural problems? How can we discern the difference between healthy growth and unhealthy centralization?
The sermon compared the tulip mania—where people paid enormous prices for diseased tulips—to investing all our spiritual capital in a single leader or pastor. What are the warning signs that a church has become too dependent on one person, and how can we protect ourselves and our churches from this vulnerability?
Jethro’s advice to Moses about delegation challenges our modern tendency to centralize leadership around a single charismatic figure. How can we apply the “Jethro plan” in a small church setting, and what practical steps can a congregation take to reinforce a shared ownership mentality as the church grows?
Drawing from 1 Corinthians 12, how can we better identify and empower the diverse gifts within our church body? Which “parts” of the body do we tend to undervalue or overlook, and what happens spiritually when those parts are neglected?
The sermon emphasizes that a healthy church’s “engine” is Jesus alone—not programs, styles, buildings, or personalities. Reflecting on examples like Mars Hill or family businesses that collapsed when key individuals left, what does it look like practically to build a church whose identity and hope remain centered on Christ across generations?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So how many of you are feeling like it is spring today? We sprang forward today. You feel like it’s spring? Kinda, sorta. Brian, you and I were talking right before the service about, you know, what does spring in St. Louis look like? And, you know, there’s nothing like that. First snow of spring. We know that’s still coming. It is coming. Just like Christmas. It’s coming. So it’s not quite warm weather spring like we think about yet, is it? But the flowers seem to think that it’s about time.
The last few weeks we started to see daffodils come up and tulips come up. And sometimes I wanted to say, slow down little guys, you don’t wanna come out. I don’t think you know what’s coming. Although I was reading recently that apparently for the most part both tulips and daffodils don’t really mind even if it freezes. So maybe I worry too much about them. God has it under control, right?
However, even when God has it under control with flowers, and that’s absolutely true, we sometimes get out of control. And one thing that’s fascinated me in history is the so-called tulip mania that happened amongst the Dutch years ago. And if you ever read about this, the Dutch folks in the 17th century really, they still like their tulips, but they really, really liked their tulips. For example, one tulip was known to sell for 10 years wages of a skilled laborer during the height of tulip mania. They loved their tulips. There’s records of people trading acres of land for a tulip bulb. Now, I don’t know where you put your tulips once you’ve given away your land, but somehow people really love their tulips.
And here is the interesting thing. The ones they loved most weren’t the solid color ones. They were the ones that were variegated with all kinds of different colors in them. For example, these ones right here. Here are some of the most famous tulips of all time, the Semper Augustus and the Viceroy. These were the ones that were trading for those astronomical prices during the height of tulip mania. How many of you would pay 10 years wages for one of these two tulips here? I have three pictures. There’s only two different kinds there, but one tulip. Anyone want that? No? Well, this is what people would pay for them.
Now you might say, well, okay, so tulip mania ended maybe now by a Viceroy or a Semper Augustus. Ironically, though, for something with the word Semper in it, you can no longer get either of those tulips. They’re extinct. And why is that? Well, here’s the fascinating thing about tulip mania. Tulip mania, people thought these are the best tulips. These are the ones that are just absolutely amazing and worth paying whatever you can find to have. These were the tulips infected with the tulip virus. The variegation in them was the tulip struggling to stay alive.
And so what happened, each generation, the bulb was smaller and smaller until one year it wouldn’t sprout at all. And so here they thought they had these tulips worth giving away 10 years worth of a laborer’s wage, giving away acres of land for. And they were buying the sick tulips. If you went and bought the ones that people weren’t paying much at all for, you might still have passed down from generations. Maybe someone today has a tulip bulb that they could trace back the lineage in their family all the way back to that time, but not those. They’re gone.
We have a false sense of what’s healthy. We have a false sense of what’s good. We look at it and we say, wow, look at those beautiful tulips. And they are, in fact, beautiful. I can’t deny that. I mean, they’re really quite spectacular looking. Apparently there was one that had like this chocolate brown petal with flames on it. I mean, some just absolutely beautiful, beautiful tulips. I mean, yet they’re gone. The very thing that made them look beautiful was actually deadly to them. And we run into the same sorts of problems.
And in a sense, Moses is running into those same sorts of problems when he is leading the people once they’re out of Egypt. Cause here they are, they’ve left Egypt. We’re exploring what their time in the wilderness is like in this series. They’re out of Egypt. And now how do you run a mobile nation, as it were? A bunch of people, intense. They’re nomads at this point. They don’t have a place they can just call their own. And yet they’re gathered together as a nation. God’s leading them, but Moses is their human leader. How does that function?
And for Moses, he’s just going about it what seems good. I don’t think we really can criticize Moses for doing that. God sent them out there to lead the people. He’s leading them. He’s trying. And yet then he gets a visit. And sometimes we need that outside visitor, someone who can look at what we’re doing and see it in a way that we don’t cause we’re in the situation all the time. That visitor for Moses is his father-in-law, Jethro. And Jethro comes with his daughter, Moses’ wife, and Moses’ kids.
They’ve been with Jethro for a period of time while they were getting ready to leave and go through this process of the Exodus, so they were safe. But now Jethro’s bringing back Moses’ family, and Jethro comes to stay for a while as well. And he decides to impart some wisdom in his son-in-law. And what we know, we don’t know a ton about Jethro, but we know this. We know that he was said to be a priest of the Most High God. We know that he was very supportive and loyal to Moses, and we know right before where we’re going to pick up in Exodus 18 that Jethro rejoices as Moses tells him what the Lord’s been doing.
So Jethro is a priest of some God. We have every reason to believe Jethro is a priest of the God, and he’s here to see his son-in-law, and he wants his son-in-law to be able to succeed at what he’s doing. He’s excited what God’s doing, but he sees a problem. And that’s where we’re going to pick up and look at verse 13.
Since the next day, Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood around Moses from morning till evening. When Moses’ father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, “What is this that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?” And Moses said to his father-in-law, “Because the people come to me to inquire of God. When they have a dispute, they come to me, and I decide between them, one person or another, and I make them known the statutes of God and his laws.”
Moses’ father-in-law said to him, “What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out for this thing is too heavy for you, and you are not able to do it alone.”
So Moses received some advice, and as we’re going to see, he implements that advice. He listens to his father-in-law. But we’re not merely doing a study on how Moses led the people of God. It speaks to how God wants his people to function both then and now.
And so as we look at what God values in leadership and what God wants us to do, let’s go ahead and come before him in prayer and ask that he would help us to think about how we play a role in God’s people. Let’s pray.
Father, you have called us together, and I thank you for each person that you’ve gathered here, whether in person or online, that you’ve brought us together as the people of God to worship you, to serve you, to be your lights in this world. And Lord, as we do that, as we function as the people of God, would you help us to see what you value, what you desire of us, what we are actually capable of doing, and then to do it understanding that we’re doing it not to prove something, not to prove ourselves and our worth, but rather to point to you, for you have given us your grace. You’ve already called us your own.
So would you give us the grace to receive what you are saying this day? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
So Jethro has a pretty simple message when you really boil it down to Moses. He says, “Moses, you need to delegate. Moses, you’re doing too much. Moses, do you see how many people are out there? You can’t be judging every single day. You can’t go day and night now.”
Now, why is Jethro offering this advice? Is it purely out of fatherly concern for his son-in-law? Is he thinking, “Moses is never going to see my daughter and their kids if he keeps doing this. He needs to slow down a little.” I don’t know exactly the full perspective that’s running through Jethro’s head. Maybe both, both would actually be good and healthy.
But what we do know is that what Jethro sees is that what Moses is doing is not sustainable. And it’s not good for anyone. It’s not good for Zipporah. It’s not good for their kids. It’s not good for Moses. And it’s not good for the people of Israel who wait all day long to get to talk to Moses.
I referred to before the joy of sitting on hold, and I think we all know that. They’re basically on hold, but Moses doesn’t have, well, maybe he has hired musicians. There’s no record of that. So there’s no hold music. They’re just waiting, waiting in line. Your case is very important to Moses.
Moses needs to delegate because it looks healthy. Here is the leader, and Moses doesn’t think of himself as a charismatic leader, but by this point we see apparently the people are starting to actually accept him and believe that he really is the leader from God because here they are. They’re actually wanting Moses to hear their cases. That’s a good thing. So Moses is thinking, “Hey, this looks pretty good.” The people are thinking, “Hey, this is pretty good.” We know that God speaks through Moses, yet Moses is the one that part of the sea. Moses is the one that did these miracles. This seems pretty good, but it’s not good.
Moses needs to delegate. And it takes just through coming in and saying, “Wait a second here. Everything centralized around you, Moses, it doesn’t need to be that way.” Not healthy. It’s not all about having a charismatic point man or even a non-charismatic point man that people have accepted as it may be the case with Moses. They need to dig deeper into what actually looks like a healthy functioning people of God because the problem here is that while Moses could do this for a time, it’s not sustainable.
And even if Moses could do it for the entirety of his life when Moses died, what’s going to happen to the people if they think that the only way to have their case justly heard is to come to this one man? Moses dies, the people fall apart. How often do we see that today in organizations, certainly in churches, but other organizations too. You hear about this company that has a charismatic founder who starts the company and builds it up. You have family businesses. Maybe it goes for a few generations and the trade is passed down from generation to generation, some restaurant or something and finally get to the point where either there’s not an agreement on who the next generation charismatic leader of that business is or the kids have no interest at all in the business or whatever it might be and the business closes down.
Often, again, do we see that in churches. Works until the pastor retires. Or the pastor gets a different call. Or the pastor is caught in a scandal and steps down and then the church splits and it goes away and why is that? Because everyone’s built everything around this centerpiece. This is who we follow. This is who’s going to lead it. And for not bad reasons, that’s where Moses has found himself in this situation. Moses is the one whom everyone’s coming to because they know that he’s in charge. He’s the one that’s being led by God. And so everyone’s coming to him and Jethro says that’s not going to work.
Moses, you need to appoint wise men, men who aren’t going to take bribes, who value justice above all and you need to instruct them on the law of the Lord. And then you need to enable them to go and hear these cases. You have a job, Moses. You’re the one that God speaks to. That’s your job. Now give these other jobs to other people who have the gifts to do them.
So what does Moses do? Moses does that. Moses listens, that’s wisdom. I don’t know if there’s any grumbling amongst the people initially. Did they say, well, but, so Moses doesn’t think he’s in, he thinks he’s too good for us now. We’re gonna have to talk to these other people and said, I don’t know. Some of that may have happened because they had put their value in Moses and Moses had seen success in being able to do all this. I’m sure it was uncomfortable in some ways, but the key thing was it wasn’t healthy. It looked good, but it wasn’t good. It wasn’t where they’re supposed to center themselves.
What do we put too much stock in in the church today? Oftentimes the pastor. We see that especially in our culture. And it makes me think about what we’ve been hearing in the news the last few days. I don’t know if any of you have been following this and I’ll admit that the intricate details of how it’s unwinding go way, way above my pay grade, but I’m fascinated by it. But the apparent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. And maybe some of you are really nervous if you have your retirement in the stock market. You’re really nervous about what’s going to happen tomorrow morning when the market opens again. Maybe if you work at a company that has some connection to the companies that had much of the money that pays payroll in that bank, you’re nervous about what’s going to happen tomorrow.
I think for many of us, we’re just looking at it and thinking, how’s this going to spread? What’s going to happen? But here’s the really, really dumbed down sense that I’ve gotten of what’s happening with that bank is that they took a perfectly good thing. They took the money that had come in and a bank needs to invest it so they can continue to make money themselves. And they had invested it in different bonds. They bought up mortgages for houses and so on that aren’t even defaulting. They’re not bad, they’re not junk loans, but they’re at the very low interest rates of a few years ago.
So they have all this debt that they’ve acquired as investment that’s now worth less than the current interest rate and no one wants it. Now in 10 years or 15 years or whatever, it’d be worth something, but people want their money out of the bank right now and they don’t have the money. That is my understanding that the basic thing, they put too much of their money. That’s the core thing from what I’ve read on an unhealthy bank like this one versus a healthy bank. They put too much in this thing that seemed like a good thing at the time, but isn’t actually a good thing.
Wiser banks diversified further so that they wouldn’t get caught like this. And now it’s going to ripple out and who knows what’s going to happen. And that’s what happens when we put too much stock in a single leader or a set of leaders. We put all of our investments in it. And here’s the thing, when we’re putting our investments in human leaders, the interest rate is always low. It’s never going to pay off well. If the people put all their investment in Moses, Moses was going to die. The investment wasn’t going to go up. It was going to go down at some point. And the question is what happens then?
Meanwhile, there’s all these other people that God has gifted that God can work through that aren’t being used. And so someday their investment of their emotional capital, their belonging capital was going to plummet if Moses didn’t do something. We see this over and over again in the church. A few years ago, we saw that perhaps most notably with the collapse of Mars Hill Church. I don’t usually mention problems that happen in churches by name. I will with Mars Hill because Mars Hill doesn’t exist any longer. It collapsed completely. It was a multi-church, megachurch that spanned the entire West Coast. Tens of thousands of people went to Mars Hill Church. Countless millions probably bought the books that were put out by Mars Hill Church. Many of our churches sang the songs that were published by Mars Hill Music.
What happened? They put their stock in the pastor and a few of his leaders who did some things that were very unfortunate. And then what happened? When that came to light, since that was what their investment was in, it wasn’t in what God was doing in Mars Hill Church. It wasn’t in the overall people of God. It was in this centralized few people. The church collapsed. Doesn’t exist any longer.
What did it do? It set up the opportunity for scandal because they’d given way too much power and they overlooked whenever there was a problem in the use of that power because there was too much at stake. It was too big to fail. You couldn’t possibly ever see this go bankrupt, right? This is a leader that is doing so much. We need to leave him alone and let him be successful. And tell you what couldn’t be. And it collapsed.
Now that’s the big one that I can think of in our American culture in the last few years, but it happens over and over and over again. And even when it doesn’t actually lead to an obvious collapse, there are so many times our churches become spiritually dead because we’ve invested in one or a few people as the spiritual capital controllers of the church. And it goes bankrupt. It’s like buying those tulips at the tulip mania. And if you bought one and you gave your 10 years wages or you gave out that land and then you waited from, I think it was October to February, it was worth virtually nothing. It collapsed like you think it should, right? A tulip shouldn’t be worth that much. And apparently it took decades of the tulips continuing to plummet before they stabilized.
Jethro is pointing to something different. He’s saying, here’s how you invest in each other. ‘Cause when you’re investing in each other, you’re investing in the people of God as a whole. You’re not investing in one fallen human being ‘cause we’re all fallen, we’re all sinful. We need each other. And even when we’re not talking about outright sin, we just get tired. Moses was getting tired. It’s not a matter of sin in his case. Moses just couldn’t do it.
Church leadership is about helping each other. And here’s the thing, especially for a little church like Little Hills here, if you kind of notice, if you get involved here, you’re essentially part of the leadership. We don’t have like a lot of formal structures yet. We’re just a little church and it’s all hands on deck. If you’re here, you’re serving. Let me let you know a little secret though. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And if we get bigger and I should, let’s get rid of that if. When God grows us, when God expands us, let’s not change that.
Let’s not go to the point where, okay, there’s the professionals that do the work and there are the people that fund the work or there’s the professionals that do the praying and the really hard spiritual stuff and we’ll do the non-spiritual stuff, whatever. That’s not how God wants it to be. He wants all of us to be all hands on deck all the time. If we, whatever size we are, if God wants us to be a small church, if God wants us to be a little larger church, whatever he wants us to be, the call is the same to use every person that’s in here in a way that allows it to grow.
‘Cause when we start to centralize and when we start to say, here are the people we’re going to count on and everyone else is just going to count on them, there’s going to be that loss of investment. It’s going to crumble. Here’s the healthier view. We’re meant to do it together and that’s what we see that Moses adopts from his father-in-law.
Verse 24, we’re gonna skip just a little bit to the implementation. Says, so Moses listened to the voice of his father-in-law and did all that he had said. Moses chose able men out of all of Israel and made them heads over the people, chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, of tens. And they judged the people at all times and hard cases they brought to Moses, but any smaller matter they decided themselves. Then Moses let his father-in-law depart and he went away to his own country.
Just a quick note before we kind of have this running in the back of your head. While we’re talking about everything else, if you’re thinking of that last line, Moses let his father-in-law depart, you’re thinking, oh yeah, he said, okay, enough advice, dad. You go ahead and go back to your land. I’ll stay over here. That doesn’t seem to at all be the case. It’s a very neutrally worded phrase. He’s just saying that after the visit was over, they depart in peace. And there continues to be interaction between Israel and the descendants of Jethro in Scripture, very positive. They follow the Lord. This is a good thing. It’s a good relationship. And it gives us very good advice. Jethro, it would appear very clearly is speaking wisdom from the Lord here.
We need to hear that wisdom. Now, why’d I say that now? I say that now because we all need to help each other on this. We need to make sure that we don’t get to that point. And that isn’t to say, this is not some subtle message that too many of you were talking to me or something. You’re thinking, oh, is he saying that he’s Moses and he’s wearing out? No, for one, I’m not Moses. Two, that’s not at all it. But here’s the thing. We need to be thinking about this as we do our ministry here at Little Hills. And whatever you’re doing here, we need to be thinking, well, how do we incorporate more people into that? How do we use our gifts? How do we make sure not that anyone is replaceable because everyone is a unique person with unique gifts from God. But at the same time, we never make our positions irreplaceable.
This isn’t my church, it’s our church. And that’s the really, really important thing for us to hold together. This is ours. This is God’s church ultimately, but it’s from a human point of view, it’s ours together. It’s all of ours together as we serve the Lord. And so what we need to do in each of our different parts of calling as we serve in the church is to make sure we’re thinking, how do I help other people serve? How do I encourage more involvement? How do I make sure that I’m not building up a situation where I’m like Moses? Instead, I’m like Moses post talking to his father-in-law. We’re on the Jethro plan. That’s what we wanna do. And thankfully, not Jethro Bodine. We’re talking about Jethro Moses’ father-in-law, who has much better advice.
Moses has a unique position. And this is the other thing that we see here. Jethro doesn’t say, “Moses, you are just an automaton. You’re not doing anything particularly unique. Moses just pulled up your job because you have nothing special to offer to the people of God.” That’s not what Jethro says. He says, “Moses, there are certain things that you’re called to do. These are your things that you’re called to do. Focus on those things, delegate out other things so that together it’s a healthier, more sustainable system.” And that’s true of each of us.
We’re going to have those unique things that we bring into the body of Christ. Wherever God places us, we’re going to have those things to provide to the body of Christ and to the wider community as the body of Christ serves that community. ‘Cause why do we gather here? We gather here to serve our community. All those houses that surround us through these neighborhoods here, we’re here to serve them, to pray for them, to share the hope of the gospel with them, to share Jesus’ love when they’re hurting and they’re lost and they’re sick and they don’t know where they’re going. That’s why we’re here. And the more that we build each other up and we use each other’s gifts together, the better we’re able to do that.
In a few weeks, we’re going to get to some of the issues where people can test Moses’ leadership. Aaron, Miriam, so two family members, his own siblings, right? They get kind of irritated. Yeah, sibling rivalry, right? We have others like Korah that rise up and have a rebellion. We have these cases and I think part of the problem is even when Moses delegates, they’re still saying, but Moses is centralizing the authority. He’s the big dude and we don’t like that.
And I think in some sense that reveals as much about them as it does about Moses because we’re told again and again, Moses is meek. Moses is not out for his own power. What’s their problem? What are they basically admitting? They want the power. And what God’s calling us to do is not to be people who seek after power, but people who seek after each other.
First Corinthians chapter 12, verse 14, Paul says, for the body does not consist of one member, but of many. If the foot should say, because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?
But as it is, God arranged the members of the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, nor again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker or indispensable. And on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require, but God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together.
One of my professors years ago liked to have, he had these ridiculous PowerPoints, and I don’t have a copy of it here, but he’d take a body, a picture of the human anatomy, and he’d start moving the limbs around. So, like, you know, if you imagine taking your arm, taking my arm and I’ll attach it down here, and then, you know, I’ll put my other leg up here, or let’s see, I can’t even do that, I’m gonna fall over. See, there’s a problem, I can’t even start, I can’t even go a little bit in real life, because suddenly my body doesn’t function.
Imagine if our face was just a giant nose. Well, I guess that’d be great for the plastic surgery industry, right? Yeah, ah, yes, yeah. But generally speaking, it would be awful, it would really stink, because we couldn’t see anything. Imagine allergy season, it’d be terrible. I mean, it’s ridiculous, but it also gets to the point, because here’s what we do, when we say the church is all about whatever I value. Whatever it is that I value, and the answer, and we haven’t put in the blank, Jesus, okay, if you put in Jesus, okay, I’m gonna go with that with you.
But if you put in, it’s all about the preaching. Now, I hope that we value a church that’s actually preaching God’s word faithfully. Or we say, it’s all about the music. Well, I hope that we actually take time to do music in a way that honors God, that is excellent. But if we put all, if we say, well, it’s all about the preaching, so I don’t care if the church actually loves anyone, as long as it’s accurate. That might, I’m not sure that’s a big mouth, or a big eye, or a big nose, but it’s not going to function right.
If we say, it’s all about the music, well, I don’t know if that’s an arm, or a leg, or whatever, but imagine if you don’t have any eyes, but you just have arms sticking out of your face. I mean, it doesn’t work, we need it all.
And whether what you’re doing is greeting, or serving communion, or running the live stream, or playing music, or preaching, or doing the liturgy, or doing the slides, or chatting on the live stream, giving the folks that come on for the first time a sense that there’s actually someone there that cares, or you’re answering the prayer ministry that we have going, or you helped serve at events like the prayer walk last week, or whatever it might be, whatever it will be. We’re all part of the body and we’re using our different gifts.
And sometimes it’s gonna take a little while to figure out exactly where we fit. Maybe we’re a little confused and we’re trying to put a glove on our foot. We need to realize, wait, that doesn’t work. What are we called to do? We’re called to delegate it out, to help each other to serve.
And I think really what Paul is saying there is just a logical extension of what Moses encounters from Jethro. Jethro doesn’t say, well, you need to make sure that every Israelite has a place to serve, but he starts the process. ‘Cause Moses, you can’t do everything. But once he does, then he says, but look, there are men in this community that are just and won’t take bribes. They love justice more than they love any money that could be given to them. They would be great if you just instruct them in the law and you send them out, they would be great for this.
And Moses is being open to the idea there’s going to be different needs. We see that throughout the Torah. If we look at the whole journey in the wilderness, what do we see? We see craftsmen, and we see those who are knitting, and we see those who are doing everything. You think about the tabernacle and the amount of different skill sets that were needed to build it, or later the temple. There are lots of different skills, lots of different gifts, but they’re all needed. So it is today.
Who is Little Hills Church? Little Hills Church is every person who comes in these doors. Little Hills Church is every person who serves in it. Little Hills Church is every person who is part of our online community. It isn’t any one person. May it never be that Little Hills Church is the pastor or anyone else here.
Yeah, and what are you saying there, Jim? That’s a little too enthusiastic. I think I might watch if he gives me anything to drink later on, make him have him drink some first.
No, but seriously, it really… This is something that I think is really important as a pastor too, say, because I’ve seen so many people in our church culture say, “Well, if the pastor says we should do this, then that’s good.” May it be. May it not be. I’m not infallible. You will never meet an infallible pastor until the day that Jesus is the only one shepherding you.
I need accountability. I need people to give me advice like Jethro gave advice to Moses. And every single one of us does. We all need to help each other. We need to help each other when we’re tired. We need to help each other when we’re just blockheaded. We need to help each other over and over again.
And at some point, each of us, my prayer is that Little Hills Church is here in 100 years. But realistically, that means probably none of us are going to be here. Unless we have huge medical advances. And that’s okay because we’ll be with Jesus, right? If you’ve trusted in Jesus, then it’s perfectly okay. But the key thing, if this church is gonna be still ministering in 100 years, then is that it isn’t dependent on any one of us. It isn’t about any one of us.
Now, I’ve heard people quote out of Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose Driven Life.” It begins with the phrase, “It’s not about you.” Or rather, it’s purpose-driven church, I think. I think I’ve just reversed those two. But anyway, one of those purpose books. And I’ve seen that weaponized. You disagree with someone. Well, it’s not about you, right?
That’s not the point. Because then who’s about? Well, it’s about the person saying it’s not about you. It’s not that. There is an insight there, but it’s been terribly, terribly misused. The point is it’s not about any of us. It’s about all of us. God has assembled us together as the people of God. And so what are we worried about? We’re not worried about building great programs. We’re worried about building up the body of Christ.
God’s gonna build up people. And then whether we have nice formalized programs or we’re not as formalized or whatever the case might be, God is going to be doing the work through those people. May we always put people before programs at Little Hills. That’s my prayer. And may we always do that as a broader body of Christ. May it be not about a single person. May it not be about programs. May it be about the people of God.
And when we make it about the people of God, then we are enabled as we strengthen each other as we are the arms and legs and hands and nose and toes and hair and whatever else of the body of Christ. Who’s the hair of the body of Christ? I’m not sure, but whoever it is, whoever it is, all of us are contributing something and then we’re able to expand the body of Christ.
And that’s the neat thing. You know, we can’t add extra limbs. Sometimes you might think, I wish I had an extra pair of arms. I could really use some extra hands right now. Well, guess what, in the church, we can’t. In the church, we can. What do we do? We go, we share the hope of Jesus and Jesus brings more people in and those people are enabled either to serve here or to be sent out someplace else so that the ministry continues.
It starts with understanding where the center is and the center is twofold. The center, of course, ultimately is Jesus. And so if we’re basing what makes the church successful, if we’re basing our hope in the church on anything other than Jesus, then we need to do a reality check. And if you’re ever in a church that bases its hope on anything other than Jesus, get out of there as fast as you can.
If Little Hills ever has a hope as its center as anything other than Jesus and I hope you leave. I really do. I hope I leave too. Because then it’s not doing, it’s not a real church anymore. Jesus needs to be the center. I said it’s twofold though and the other part is Jesus has sent his body into this world and so the other part there is the people of God as a whole working together as the body. We need to know what the center is.
How many of you like cars? I do, yeah. Any of you like watching racing? Anyone like playing racing video games maybe? Anyone looking forward to the day you can drive? (audience laughs) Well, let’s see how you are with cars. I’m gonna show you a couple of cars. I want you to tell me which one is faster, okay? Here’s one.
What do you think? Is this a nice car? Anyone like it? No, I want you to notice here, just in case you didn’t, this is the, I will never own a car that has this on it ‘cause this is the Rolls-Royce Insignia, okay? So if you ever see this car, you know I’m not in it. But does that look like a pretty nice car you think? Probably be a good car to drive, probably pretty fast.
Okay, how about this car? Yeah, it’s the family truckster, right? So which one do you think is gonna win? Which one would you take? Do you want the family truckster or do you want the Rolls? Fair enough. Okay, how many say first? Okay, one, two, three, four, five. How many say six? How many say second? One, two, three, four, okay, five. Hey, we’re tied.
Well, maybe that’s actually revealing ‘cause let me let you know a little secret. Those are the same car. You see, the car was built as, with the goal of having the record as being the world’s fastest car. And in fact, it was for a period of time. You could find it in the Guinness Book of World Records because even when it was in its first iteration, it didn’t just have any engine in it. It had an airplane engine in it. It got two miles per gallon, but it could go really fast.
Same actually when it became the family truckster. It was still the same car. Here’s the problem, Rolls-Royce sued the guy that built it and said that he couldn’t use the Rolls-Royce grill until he made his own body here. Same car though, same engine.
And yeah, if you had those two cars parked there, now see, if I just saw the two cars, my thought would be I’m going to take the first car because even if no one would ever trust the ministry I was involved in if I was driving a Rolls, even if that were the case, I could sell it and I could buy several cars, right? I mean, why not? But the second car actually would have been even better because it was the continued improvements on the first car. We’ve got the same car, same engine.
And here’s what we do in the church. Sometimes we look and we say, well, this church has a certain style of preaching. This church has a certain style of music. This church has a certain building. This church is in a certain spot. This church looks valuable. And we’re looking at all these things. We’re looking oftentimes centralized at one or two things, whether it’s a person or a facility or a program, we’re saying that’s where I’m going to put my hope.
Here’s how you tell if a church is healthy. Just like if you tell if that car is going to be a fast car or not, you look at the engine. And the engine of a healthy church is Jesus.
And what happens when that is the center where everything’s, I’m not sure if it was a turbine engine, but everything’s spinning around that. We’ll just say, we’ll just go with it. Everything’s spinning around Jesus as the engine. What happens? Then the church isn’t my church. We’re not doing things for me. We’re not doing things for any individual here. We’re doing things for Jesus and we’re doing them for each other.
I always loved when my old mentor and pastor Dan took in new members at his church. He would go through the new members class and you’d have vows afterwards. And he would say, okay, now you can no longer call this my church because today it’s yours as well. It’s our church. I thought that was so good. Let’s say that too. Isn’t that my church? This is our church. And it’ll never be, may it never be whoever’s behind the pulpit’s church.
It’s Jesus’ church and it’s our church that he’s entrusted to us. And may we be ready to follow that one true center to communicate his hope to the world. Because we best serve when we serve together, when we’re using each other as gifts. That’s what he’s called us to do.
Would you pray with me, please? Lord, would you help us to see that our only hope is succeeding as the church is to be centered on you. There is no other worthwhile course. And whatever external things we might value, whatever stylistic things we might value, may we toss those aside and value first and foremost.
May you guide us as those serving to communicate your gospel faithfully. To communicate every single letter of every single word, of every single page of your scripture faithfully. To encourage each other, to build each other up and to build our community up that we might turn more to you through the power of your Holy Spirit.
Lord, would you help us that we might see what you’ve called us to be centered on and never to lose sight of it. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
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