Grace Emmanuel Church

Pastor Sam Chess

SERVING TOGETHER

When God created all this in six days he said over and over that creation was good… very good...He reached a point in creation where he said…now that’s not good… What was that point?

When Adam was found alone.

This wasn’t just about Eve or husband/wife relationships…God was stating a divine principle We were made for relationships. We’re wired for it, and God doesn’t want you to go through life by yourself….you need people in your life….. Even though some of the one around you are so, so ,so hard to take!

God put each of us in this world to accomplish certain purposes, and as much as we would like to think otherwise…Every single one of our life-purposes revolves around dealing with other people!

God did not put you on earth to live a self-centered life. He wants you to make a contribution with your life. He wants you to give something back.

The only way you can serve God is by serving other people. You can’t serve God directly. It is in serving His children that you serve God,

Why can’t I just serve God on my own? Why do I need anybody else in my life?

A) We were created to become family!

Everybody has weaknesses!… and We all have strengths, and God equally divided the strengths so that we would need each other to compensate for our weaknesses.

The Bible compares the church to a body. And God says, “We’re all different parts of that Body.” Some of us are the hand . Some of us are the foot, the eye and the ear and the nose; lots of us want to be the mouth.

If we claim to be Christian and are disconnected from this Body that the Bible describes, we don’t have a whole lot of relevance in this world.

Romans 12: 5“Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of Christ’s body.”

God wants to use your life in ways you’ve never expected…. but He wants to do it in relationship to other people.

(Ecclesiastes 4:10) If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! (NIV)

So were all supposed to be part of God’s family… his Body…His team….

Let’s look at four things; and just for fun, we’ll use the acrostic ‘TEAM’

The “T” in TEAM is trust.

Trust is the emotional glue that binds people together. When you study the Bible, you find that Jesus and Paul and Peter a lot of other people always served in teams. They never went anywhere alone. They took teams of people with them, disciples or followers or groups that they were co-working with.

One of the guys who was in Paul’s team was a young man named Timothy and Paul gave him some fatherly advise in a letter to him called 1 Timothy:

(1 Timothy 6:20) Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. (NIV)

In order to build a team, you’ve got to trust some part of your life to other people If you go home today and you watch a football game on TV, you know that a quarterback cannot pass to himself. And if the team is going to win, the quarterback has to pass the ball, or he has to hand off the ball to somebody else. The number of times that the quarterback actually gets to score himself are very, very few.

My question is: When other people consider your interaction in their lives would they call you trustworthy? If you want people to learn to trust you, you must do three things.

A) To be trustworthy, you must be consistent!

Unpredictable people are fun to watch at a magic show but you don’t entrust your life to them. People trust others who are consistent, who are dependable, who can be counted on to respond in certain ways.

(Luke 16:10) "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much…. (NIV)

It is in the little things in life, not the big things…. that you prove your character

And God says, “If you are faithful in little responsibilities,” he says, “I will give you greater ones and greater ones and greater ones and greater ones.” And other people tend to value this characteristic in you…just like God does.

B) To be trustworthy you must be confidential!

When people tell you something confidential, they want you not to blab it. When they share their feelings, they spill their guts to you…. They want you to be able to keep a secret.

(Proverbs 11:13) A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy man keeps a secret. (NIV)

Gossip is when you share information, and you’re neither part of the problem nor part of the solution.

Let me just remind you the people who talk to you about other people are going to talk about you to other people. Count on it. If they gossip to you, I’m guaranteeing this, they will gossip about you.

The Bible says avoid gossips. It’s like receiving stolen goods.

‘Stick together’ implies proximity. You don’t trust people you don’t know.

Distance creates distrust. And so in order to build trust you have to spend time together.

….Trust takes time.’

You see when you spend time with people, then you start to learn to love them. And when you start to love them, then you start to trust them. And when you start to trust them, then it opens up for sharing truth that you would be afraid to share otherwise. And truth ends up in producing deeper fellowship or intimacy.

That one of the reasons God created the concept of a church……

II. The second key to building a life-team mentality is EMPATHY.

E is the empathy in ‘TEAM.’

1 Peter 3:8 says “Live in harmony with one another. Be empathetic.”

You’re never going to have harmony with your friends, with your wife, your husband, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, the people you work with, the people you go to school with. until you’ve got the second thing, empathy. Empathy creates harmony.

Everybody needs empathy for two reasons. It meets two of the deepest fundamental needs in your life:

1) Need to be understood. You need somebody in your life who gets you…. understands you.

2) Need somebody to validate you. You need somebody in your life who says, “You’re not weird. You’re okay. I like who you are.

The empathizer is somebody who validates the frustrations, the feelings, the fears, the fatigue, the failures that you experience in life.

A. How can you become a more empathetic person? Well the Bible tells us three ways:

1) SLOW DOWN The speed of life destroys empathy because we miss the details in others lives……when we’re going so fast.

We are relationally skimming the surface. We are not seeing the details in the lives of the people we care about most:

(James 1:19) …Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry. (NIV)

A human being can listen to 650 words a minute? The average human being only speaks 150 words a minute? That leaves a 500-words-per-minute boredom factor.

Thus the tuning out that we all tend to do with each other… We are proud of the fact that we “ can watch TV and listen to my wife.” Turn down the RPM’s

2) ASK QUESTIONS

Proverbs 20:5 “A person’s thoughts are like water in a deep well, but someone with insight can draw them out.”

Most people don’t blurt out their emotions. You ask , “How are you doing?” They’ll say, “Fine,” almost inevitably. ..they don’t think you really want to know.

So ask again…. “Tell me more.” It’s probably the second question that shows the empathy, not the first.

3) SHOW YOUR HEART.

Romans 12: 5, Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.”

What is he saying here? He’s saying you’ve got to be willing to cry with people. Have you ever cried with anybody? When was the last time you cried with somebody? When was the last time you wept with those who weep?

You see, empathy is more than saying, “I’m sorry you hurt.” Empathy is saying I hurt with you. How do you stay empathetic in a world that’s full of pain? There is only one way. There is only way. You’ve got to stay filled up with God in your life; otherwise you’re going to get passion fatigue and you’re going to run out of empathy. If you get low on God, you’re not going to be empathetic. You’re going to just be thinking about your own needs.

III. The third key to building a life/team mentality is ACCOMODATION.

That’s the ‘A’ in ‘TEAM.’ It takes accommodation. Why? Because we’re all different. Have you figured out God likes variety? God has made us all different and so we have to accommodate each others’ differences.

Now what does it mean, accommodation? Well you know, when you make accommodation for somebody, you get them a room. You make room for them.

My question for you is not: Are you easy to get along with? My question is: Would the people closest to you say you’re easy to get along with?….That’s the real test.

“Do your part,” that means obviously there are two parts in a relationship, you’ve got to do your part and everybody else has got to do their part. And so it says you be responsible for your part…. Just you do your part to get along with everybody as much as possible. Even God realizes that some people are unpleasable.

A) 4 specific ways that you and I can accommodate one another.

1) We must accommodate EACH OTHER’S NEEDS.

Romans 15:2 “Each one of us needs to look after the good of the people around us, asking ourselves, ‘How can I help?’”

Needs take time. Needs take energy, and the truth of the matter is I don’t have enough time and energy to take care of my own needs. Let alone everybody else’s needs.”

And the sad truth is you never will.

But here’s the incredible thing: While I can’t meet all my own needs, us... we together… we can meet one another’s needs. That’s the way God’s designed it. He’s made it so that we can meet needs together that we could never meet on our own.

So we accommodate one another’s needs and through that, we meet one another’s needs. There’s a question at the end of that verse; it’s a great question to make a difference in somebody’s life, “How can I help?” How can I make a difference?”

2), We must accommodate EACH OTHER’S IDEAS

Proverbs 18:15, “The intelligent man is always open to new ideas. In fact, he looks for them.”

Another possibility it might be a new way of looking at it, a different way than you’ve ever looked at it. And the fact that they have a different idea might open you up to some refreshing new way of living your life.

3) We must accommodate EACH OTHER’S PERSONALITIES.

God has made all of us to think differently. God wants to use our differences to compliment each other. He wants to work through our differences change this world in a way that we could never accomplish on our own.

4) We must accommodate EACH OTHER’S FAULTS.

Ephesians 4:2 “Be patient with each other. Making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love.”

You know, you get into a new group and at the beginning you think, “Wow, this group is almost perfect. It doesn’t take long to figure out, “These people have faults, I mean San Andreas-type faults. What do you do next? Run? Smile and Pretend? Accept?

Here’s the incredible thing about accommodation. It sounds like a word that would somehow make us weaker, but it does not. It makes us stronger because now it’s not just me….. it’s us.

You need people in your life that you trust, that you empathize with, who accommodate you and you accommodate them because life is about relationships. And God wants to use our collective lives to accomplish his purposes in this community.

IV. The fourth key to building a life/team mentality is MISSION.

Teams are formed to have a purpose. They have to have a mission. They are trying to accomplish something together.

Philippians 2:2, “Be of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose.”

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the giant redwoods, but they are the largest living things on the planet. They are enormous. They can grow hundreds of feet tall. Redwoods very shallow roots. So how do they stay standing strong? Redwoods always grow in groves, and they intertwine their roots, and they hold each other up in the storm.

Now you’re going to have storms in your life, relational storms, financial storms, health storms. You’re going to have all kinds of problems in your life that will knock you over if you’re on your own. You need a group of people who are walking together with you through life.

Phillipians 1:27 “Live in a way that brings honor to the good news of Christ. Standing strong, with one purpose, working together, as one for the faith of the Good News.”