Sunday LinkUp – 10September2023

CALL TO WORSHIP

• Opening Choruses
• Opening Prayer

WELCOME and THANKS for joining us.

OPENING COMMENTS

• As we continue through Ordinary Time — a season of focusing on how we can participate in the work Jesus is doing in the world — followers of Christ will inevitably come across those who have set themselves against the movement of God.  It is important to understand that God is just and deals with wrongdoing.  At the same time, Christians are still expected to love others, even those who behave badly.
• The theme for this week is loving others and trusting God to be just.

FIRST READING

OPENING SONGS

SECOND READING

Matthew 18:15-17

¹⁵ “Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.  If he hears you, you have gained your brother.  ¹⁶ But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that ‘by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.’  ¹⁷ And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.    

SERMONETTE  

From the transcript …

Human beings were created and designed for relationships.  God made us not only with the capacity to relate to him and each other but with the need to connect to thrive.  Despite these truths, human beings often do things that disrupt our relationships.  Even when we have the best intentions, we can hurt each other.  And we respond to that hurt in different ways.  Some of those ways are healthy, and some of those ways can perpetuate a cycle of harm.  It is no wonder that Jesus instructed his followers on how we are to respond when fellow believers cause harm. Let’s read from Matthew 18:

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.  If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.  But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.  If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.  Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.  Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.  For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  
Matthew 18:15-20 (NRSV) 

Jesus outlined a step-by-step process for how to deal with relational conflict that is very helpful from a practical standpoint.  Additionally, Jesus’ teaching provides two spiritually important truths about God.

• First, person-to-person relationships are important to him.  He is concerned about how we connect to each other.
• Second, God wants to see disrupted relationships restored and he takes an active role in healing our relational wounds.

This does not mean that believers can expect every hurt to be healed and every broken relationship mended in this life.  However, we can expect God to help us do our part to be at peace with all people.

This is good news for those of us who live in a world that often seems so divided.  If we create room for him in our relationships, Jesus will show up in our squabbles, grudges, and estrangements and provide healing.  He desires to be in our midst when we sit down to reconcile with a neighbor who has harmed us.  In fact, when we prayerfully seek God’s help, the Holy Spirit will help us see our neighbor as Christ would see that person and treat that person as Jesus would treat them.  This changes the dynamic of the relationship and puts the relational conflict in perspective.  Jesus is the restorer of all things — even broken relationships.

I’m Greg Williams, Speaking of Life.

SERMON    

When A Relationship Gets Broken

Matthew 18:15-20

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.  If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.  But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.  If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.  Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.  Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.  For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  

WHAT CAN WE TAKE AWAY?  What should we take away?

Below are some thoughts based on commentary by William Barclay …

If anyone sins against you, spare no effort to get things right again between you and him.  Basically it means that we must never tolerate any situation in which there is a breach of personal relationships between us and another member of the Christian community.

a plan of action for the mending of broken relationships within the Christian fellowship.

(i) immediately put our complaint into words. The worst thing that we can do about a wrong is to brood about it. That can poison the whole mind and life, until we can think of nothing else but our sense of personal injury.

(ii)  go to see him personally.  Don’t write or text.  A letter or text message may be misread and misunderstood; it may quite unconsciously convey a tone it was never meant to convey.  A face-to-face meeting is more likely to settle a difference that a letter, which can be misread or misunderstood and make matters worse.

(iii) take some wise person or persons. … NOT to prove that he has committed an offence … BUT to help the process of reconciliation.  A man often hates those whom he has injured most of all; and it may well be that nothing we can say can win him back.  But to talk matters over with some wise and kindly and gracious people present is to create a new atmosphere in which there is at least a chance that we should see ourselves “as others see us.”

(iv)  we must take our personal troubles to the Christian fellowship … NOT to a court.    Because troubles are never settled by going to law, or by Christless argument.  Legalism merely produces further trouble.  It is in an atmosphere of Christian prayer, Christian love and Christian fellowship that personal relationships may be righted.  The clear assumption is that the Church fellowship is Christian, and seeks to judge everything, not in the light of a book of practice and procedure, but in the light of love.

(v) If that does not succeed, then the man who has wronged us is to be regarded as a Gentile and a tax-collector.  The first impression is that the man must be abandoned as hopeless and irreclaimable, but that is precisely what Jesus cannot have meant.  He never set limits to human forgiveness. What then did he mean?

We have seen that when he speaks of tax-gatherers and sinners he always does so with sympathy and gentleness and an appreciation of their good qualities. It may be that what Jesus said was something like this: “When you have done all this, when you have given the sinner every chance, and when he remains stubborn and obdurate, you may think that he is no better than a renegade tax-collector, or even a godless Gentile.  Well, you may be right. But I have not found the tax-gatherers and the Gentiles hopeless.  My experience of them is that they, too, have a heart to be touched; and there are many of them, like Matthew and Zacchaeus, who have become my best friends. Even if the stubborn sinner is like a tax-collector or a Gentile, you may still win him, as I have done.”

This, in fact, is not an injunction to abandon a man; it is a challenge to win him with the love which can touch even the hardest heart.  It is not a statement that some men are hopeless; it is a statement that Jesus Christ has found no man hopeless — and neither must we.

What about loosing and binding?

• It cannot mean that the Church can remit or forgive sins, and so settle a man’s destiny in time or in eternity.
• What it may well mean is that the relationships which we establish with our fellow-men last not only through time but into eternity — therefore we must get them right.

What about Matthew 18:19-20, where Jesus says that, if two upon earth agree upon any matter for which they are praying, they will receive it from God?

• If that is to be taken literally, and without any qualification, it is manifestly untrue.
  • • Two people have agreed to pray for the physical or the spiritual welfare of a loved one and their prayer has not, in the literal sense, been answered. 
    •  God’s people have agreed to pray for the conversion of their own land or the conversion of the heathen and the coming of the Kingdom, and even yet that prayer is far from being fully answered. 
    • People agree to pray — and pray desperately — and do not receive that for which they pray. 
• There is no point in refusing to face the facts of the situation, and nothing but harm can result from teaching people to expect what does not happen.

But when we come to see what this saying means, there is a precious depth in it.

(i) First and foremost, it means that prayer must never be selfish and that selfish prayer cannot find an answer.  We are not meant to pray only for our own needs, thinking of nothing and no one but ourselves (See Matthew 6:11-13); we are meant to pray as members of a fellowship, in agreement, remembering that life and the world are not arranged for us as individuals but for the fellowship as a whole.  It would often happen that, if our prayers were answered, the prayers of someone else would be disappointed.  Often our prayers for our success would necessarily involve someone else’s failure.  Effective prayer must be the prayer of agreement, from which the element of selfish concentration on our own needs and desires has been quite cleansed away.

(ii) When prayer is unselfish, it is always answered.  But here as everywhere we must remember the basic law of prayer; that law is that in prayer we receive, not the answer which we desire, but the answer which God in his wisdom and his love knows to be best.  Simply because we are human beings, with human hearts and fears and hopes and desires, most of our prayers are prayers for escape.  We pray to be saved from some trial, some sorrow, some disappointment, some hurting and difficult situation.  And always God’s answer is the offer not of escape, but of victory.  God does not give us escape from a human situation; he enables us to accept what we cannot understand; he enables us to endure what without him would be unendurable; he enables us to face what without him would be beyond all facing.  The perfect example of all this is Jesus in Gethsemane.

• He prayed to be released from the dread situation which confronted him, he was not released from it; but he was given power to meet it, to endure it, and to conquer it.

When we pray unselfishly, God sends his answer — but the answer is always his answer and not necessarily ours.

(iii) Jesus goes on to say that where two or three are gathered in his name, he is there in the midst of them.  The Jews themselves had a saying, “Where two sit and are occupied with the study of the Law, the glory of God is among them.”  We may take this great promise of Jesus into two spheres.

(a) We may take it into the sphere of the Church.  Jesus is just as much present in the little congregation as in the great mass meeting.  He is just as much present at the Prayer Meeting or the Bible Study Circle with their handful of people as in the crowded arena.  He is not the slave of numbers.  He is there wherever faithful hearts meet, however few they may be, for he gives all of himself to each individual person.

(b) We may take it into the sphere of the home.  One of the earliest interpretations of this saying of Jesus was that the two or three are father, mother, and child, and that it means that Jesus is there, the unseen guest in every home.

There are those who never give of their best except on the so-called great occasion; but for Jesus Christ every occasion where even two or three are gathered in his name is a great occasion.

CLOSING SONG

CLOSING SONG

BENEDICTION