Sermon: "Perspective thru Partnership"

3rd in the "Visioneering" series.
Delivered November 22, 2009 by Rev. Ben Abell - Grace Fellowship.
Sermon Text: Philippians 1:3-11

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Hello, I'm Phyllis DeSmit, and I am privileged to be on staff here at Central. Some of you may know that my husband is in his fifth day fighting a bacterial infection. He's in Shock Trauma. The antibiotics, at this point, are not winning. We want to thank you and appreciate so much the weapon of prayer in this battle. You might wonder why I'm here. Well, you can't visit until noon, and I can't think of a better place that I'd like to be with all of you.

My purpose right now is to have you meet Ben Abell who is bringing the message this morning. About five years ago, he and Pastor John met each other, and developed a very meaningful relationship, friendship with a common vision for seeking God's hand in transformation in Baltimore. And they've been praying together on a regular basis ever since.

Ben is the senior pastor and director of regional and international development at Grace Fellowship Church. The two churches have some wonderful things in common. In '07, they partnered together to form the HIV AIDS ministry, Hope Springs. Both pastors serve on that board. The relationship deepened in '08 when we worked side by side on adjacent houses in Sandtown with Habitat, and also the prayer thrust of Partners for Transformation. You'll learn more about that today.

Ben became a follower of Jesus when he was in college. After graduation, he held various roles for 15 years with Black and Decker. While there, he recognized the hunger in business people for meaning in life. In response, he facilitated Bible studies with coworkers. In 1997, Ben and his wife Laura sensed the Lord's call to leave industry and enter full-time ministry at Grace. Most recently, Ben is focusing on Grace's ministry outside the proverbial four walls. He holds a Masters in Theological Studies with a concentration in leadership.

Laura and Ben have been married for 24 years, and have four children. As a Hope Springs board member myself, I participate in many meetings when Ben and John are both present. Both bring a passion to see that God's work be done and a humility not to insist that things be done their way. When in Malawi, I witnessed Ben's heart for developing genuine relationships and his skill in creating situations that lead to that end. In Africa, Ben's observations resulted in profound passionate statements like, "I wonder if we can manage nine holes of golf before breakfast?" Just kidding. His insights were touchingly heartfelt with a statement like, "We experience God in ways we wouldn't experience him without each other." Ben is personally and spiritually qualified to share with us his thoughts about being the corporate Church of God, agents of transformational action. Welcome today, Ben.

Rev. Ben Abell: I asked Phyllis if she would stay up here because we are very thankful that you've been praying for Pieter individually, but I'd love for us to do that corporately.

Lord Jesus, we come before you now and we thank you for Pieter. He is a beloved son of yours, and a dear friend of ours and a husband of Phyllis. Lord God, he is in your presence now. We pray for the doctors that they would have tremendous wisdom from you to understand what's going on with these bacteria, God. And that you would heal him even now. We love you Lord, and entrust Pieter to you. In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. Bless you. She actually wasn't kidding about the golf thing.

It is so good to be with you today. Philippians 1:3 says, "I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now." It is an incredible honor to be standing here before you and to have the opportunity to share with you the Word of God because, you see, I live right across the street in Stoneleigh.

My wife and I moved here in 1985, and in 1992 had the opportunity to move into Stoneleigh. Literally, several times a day, I have the privilege to drive by this church, and to pray for this church and to thank God, just as Paul did to the Philippians, for this church. Because what you may or may not know, this church is a bright light up and down York Road, all over this region and to the nations. It has a tremendous reputation in this area.

I have such a deep affection and respect and thankfulness for each one of you in this church. And many of you actually are friends of mine. I think that one of God's greatest moves was a few years ago when you and God asked John Schmidt to come to be the senior pastor of this church... a great move by God. I want you to know that John's reputation and influence is not only being felt here at Central, but all over the region. He is highly respected. He has tremendous vision and passion and love for the Church, and God is using him in powerful ways in meetings that I'm in all the time.

For me, John has become a dear friend. I'm so thankful to be invited to come here today. So I'd love for us just to take a moment actually and pray for John and Debbie as they're away.

Lord God, I just lift up John to you and thank you for him. I thank you for his bride. I thank you that you called him to Baltimore and that you're using him, Lord, to transform this region. I pray that you would give them your supernatural rest as they are away and that they would be refreshed in the Spirit and sense your blessing. In Jesus' name, Amen.

So over the past two weeks you've been in this study, this outreach conference called "Visioneering." I remember John saying this year was going to be a little bit different, that he really wanted to highlight some of his favorite missionaries... you. And so I love that theme because the Bible tells us that we are all God's children. We're redeemed to go out and bring that redemption to every corner of the earth. And John declared that this series, "Visioneering," is seeing the world through God's eyes and seeing what's on his heart.

So in the first week of John's message, "Adjusting our Vision," he focused on the purpose of Central Presbyterian Church. And this is a tremendous vision. Moving people toward Christ by being a community of faith, which loves, encourages and equips them in Christ, sending them out to serve. This is a powerful mission, and one literally worth giving your whole lives to. John pointed us to the writings of Moses, and reminded us of God's steadfast love and mercy and justice for all people everywhere.

And then last week if you remember, if you were here, John asked us several questions. He says, "What does it mean to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ wherever we live, wherever we work, wherever we play, wherever we go to school?" He challenged us to seek and ask God, "What, God, is your heart? What is going on in the situations around me that you are already working in and how might I fit in?" Whether it's on the mission field or whether it's right across this street in Stoneleigh or anywhere else.

"Tapping into the answers of these questions will allow us to all," John said, "experience all that God has for each one of us." So graciously, he asked me to close this series out by sharing some stirrings, some movements of the Holy Spirit that we're beginning to see across this region that literally are unprecedented in our days. We're seeing God's people unite, come together in biblical, transformational partnerships. People who are experiencing God's presence and seeing his power, being unleashed for his glory through these partnerships.

So let me ask you a question. When you hear that word "partnership", what comes to mind? John promised me that you guys would interact with me and not leave me hanging up here. Okay, marriage... partnership, marriage. Okay, what else? Friends, business, common goals, teamwork, neighborhoods, that's excellent. So when you go back and look at the dictionary, and look at the definition, which includes much of what you've said which is terrific, it says, "A partner is a person who shares or is associated with another in some action or endeavor," which is what you just described. Terrific!

So what are some ways in our everyday life that we partner together? Well, maybe in business. Maybe we help each other build a deck. Maybe we help each other plant a garden. Maybe some of you have partnered with somebody to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. That would be fun. Maybe you've helped some people, some students with their homework. I suspect all of us in this room have been a part of some level of partnership, and some have been really good and some haven't been very good at all.

A few years ago, as Grace Fellowship began to partner with a whole host of different folks in the city and around the region including you, I was drawn back to the Word and asking God, "What is biblical partnership?" And I have to tell you I was astounded by what I found. There is an intimacy, a power in God's view of partnership that I hadn't seen before. It has the power, I believe, to change the way we view all of our relationships... husband and wife; parents and kids; ministries to ministry; churches to churches.

So as we begin to look at God's Word, I'd love for us just to pray for a moment.

Lord, I thank you so much for your Word. It is profound. It is deep. It is life changing, and I pray now that as we open it, you would reveal to us what you have to say to each one of us personally and as the Church of Baltimore. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Turn with me, if you would, to page 1072 in your pew Bible, Philippians 1. Philippians 1:3, says this.

"I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."

Now for some of us, we may see that it's just kind of a regular salutation that Paul actually puts at the beginning of all of his letters. And it's true. It is a salutation. But I wanted to give you a little historical context, and maybe that will help bring this alive a little bit further. Paul is a missionary, and he has been set out to spread the gospel all over the known Gentile world.

If you have the opportunity, go back and read Acts 16 sometime because this is where it's happening for Philippi and this area. It's an amazing story. It's a Roman colony, and a leading city in Macedonia. And Paul comes to visit to plant a church, and he finds, right out of the get go when he gets there, he leads a businesswoman, Lydia, to Christ, and then her whole family.

And then he goes on a little farther, and he exorcises a demon out of a young girl. This young girl is a part of a moneymaking scheme thing going on with some men in the town. He exorcises the demon, and the demon is gone. She is not making money for them anymore. So they get all ticked off and they get upset and they create a scene, and then Paul and Silas are flogged and then they're thrown into prison.

Well in prison, Paul and Silas are doing what? They're praying and singing hymns just like we did a little while ago. Earthquake comes, chains fall off, the jailor is saved, whole families baptized into Christ. I have to tell you. That's a heck of a way to start a church, isn't it, with a business woman, a girl who is exorcised and a jailor. I wonder if that's maybe what Murray did when he started this church, if he found some folks like that. Just kidding.

Paul writes this letter from a Roman jail, and he has heard reports that the Philippian Church is working hard. They're suffering. They're being persecuted just like he is. He remembers back, this partnership in the gospel that they have together. And it's a deep, long-term relationship and partnership. So I want us to focus in our text today on one little phrase... your partnership in the gospel. And then in particular, this word "partnership."

So we read from the TNIV this morning. If you read from the New King James version, it says, "your fellowship in the gospel." And in the New American Standard, it says, "your participation in the gospel." So which one is it? Well, it's all three actually. Partnership, fellowship, participation because you see what happens in the Greek often times, is one Greek word requires multiple English words to be able to give it the nuance and the flavor of what that word means, and this is one of those.

This Greek word is "koinonia." Say that with me... koinonia. Let's say it again. Koinonia. It's a great word. It has all these definitions... fellowship, communion, close relationships, joint participation, possessing things in common, and it even means financial contribution in Paul's writings.

So when Paul uses this word "koinonia" regarding his feelings about the Philippian believers that we just read about and their partnership, the images that come to mind that boot up in his mind, I want to show you some of those images in Scripture and in today's world that we are in right now.

So here's what Paul is thinking. He's thinking about the images of being present with, not distant from. Think about it for a minute. What did Jesus Christ do? He left this extraordinary place called heaven with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and he came down and he was present with us. He didn't save us from a distance. He came and was with us, so when Paul was thinking about this in 1 Corinthians 1:9, this is what he's thinking about... the intimacy of being close. God, who has called you into fellowship with his son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful. That's koinonia.

Paul is also thinking, another image that boots up is intimacy like communion, one of the hallmarks of our faith together. First Corinthians 10:16 says, "Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation [or koinonia] in the blood of Christ?" Taking communion, that's koinonia. And even in 1 John 1:3 there are images like experiencing real harmony with Jesus and with others. It says, "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship [there it is] with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ."

If we claim to have fellowship with him, yet walk in darkness we lie and do not live by the truth, but we walk in the light as he is in the light. We have fellowship. We have koinonia with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all sins. That's biblical koinonia, connection.

So what are some of the characteristics of biblical partnerships? Well one is being present with not distant from. It's being intimate. It's being in harmony with one another. And then we see how this deep and intimate and powerful word, we find that it is not passive. It's active. It's an active Greek word. It's an action word. It's a word that compels us to consider others and move out and be present among those who need God's love and his transforming presence.

You know as John said in the last two weeks, God is calling all of us to move outside of our walls, Central Presbyterian Church, Grace Fellowship Church, every church in the area to move outside of our four walls and to work in these environments where we are... school and work and play... and build partnerships.

I want to give you a personal snapshot of koinonia. About nine years ago, I was sitting on my front yard just kind of minding my own business. I don't know if this has happened to you before, and all of a sudden the Lord started doing some stirring, and he started speaking. Now it wasn't one of these like, "Hey," audible voices from above, but it was some stirrings.

And he started to say to me, "You know I called you to be a pastor of Grace Fellowship Church." Thank you Lord, I appreciate it that you did that. "But I want you to begin to think differently. I want you to think bigger and broader. I want you to think about what it would look like to pastor a neighborhood and connect and partner with others in that neighborhood and what it would look like to pastor a region." Not by myself, but with others.

So the next thing he said is, "What I want you to do, is I want you to start prayer walking up and down those streets right across the street." I said, "I've never done that before. I have no idea how to do that." Well he says, "Like just get up in the morning. Grab a partner and a friend. Get up in the morning and just start walking and start praying." It was that simple. What he was saying to us is that he wanted us to raise the level of the spiritual atmosphere of our neighborhood right across the street.

There were people actually, women before us who actually paved the way. Kim Turner is one of them who is a tremendous person of God in this church, and others who laid the foundation for us to do that. So over the years, what has happened is we have seen the spiritual temperature of our neighborhood go up. And one of the things he told us to do is to start a men's Bible study. This was four or five years ago. Now they're literally, from many different parts of this region, have been dozens and dozens of men and some of them are in this room today, who have been impacted by the power of God and a partnership that took place as we raise the level of spirituality in our neighborhood. Praise God! That's koinonia.

Another truth we've discovered both in the Scripture and in our partnership with you guys and others in the city is that biblical partnership is two-way. It's bi-directional. First Corinthians 12:12, says, "The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body." The benefits of biblical partnership must be two-way. They must be mutual, but it's not only that they're mutual, what happens when we partner together is each of the partners have something else to offer the other person.

So for instance, look what's happened over the last couple of years. As Sandy Boucher awakened John and this church in the HIV AIDS pandemic, and Cricket Barazatto awakened myself and others at Grace, and we come together, and we say, "Lord, how do we do this? We don't know how to do this. We don't know how to help in the HIV AIDS pandemic." What is forged is Hope Springs.

Now what's happened in that relationship? I personally am a different person because of my relationship with John and this church. And then as people are trained in Hope Springs and then are deployed out to engage with people who are infected and affected by HIV AIDS, here's what we're hearing, here's what we know happens. When we go, we're transformed because the folks that we're serving have parts of God in who they are that we need, and they need us. Bi-directional. I call it the divine exchange. Biblical partnerships. That's koinonia.

You know God's Word isn't to tickle our ears. There is always a call and a purpose as God reveals His Word to us. Don't we all want to see and experience transformation in our lives and in our communities? I believe Paul is saying to us today in the church through this word koinonia, this word partnership, "In order to experience Jesus' presence, in order to experience his glory, the transformation in our lives that we all long for and across this region, we must be intimate with one another, openly sharing our struggles. Must be present. We must be in harmony. We must be experiencing this divine exchange."

And I believe that God is awakening his church... locally, regionally, nationally, and globally to throw off the things that have hindered us and inhibited us from engaging in biblical partnerships and moving toward one another together in advancing God's kingdom. I believe that each of us are being called to a deeper level of koinonia.

One final snapshot regionally that I want you to hear about is Partners for Transformation. You've heard about it in this church before because John is intimately and deeply involved in it, and he has been a part of it from the very beginning... the idea of the coming together and praying and doing compassionate acts of service. So about five years ago, there were a number of pastors who came together and we started asking ourselves the question, "What is God saying to you about this region? What is he saying to you about this church?" And what was amazing was that around that table we were all saying the same things and none of us knew each other.

And God was saying things to us like, "We want to see transformation." He was saying, "You know, the way we've been doing church isn't really working to create the kind of change that God wants to do." We had one guy ask a haunting question that we still ask ourselves all the time, "If our churches went away this weekend, next weekend and we kind of closed up shop, would anybody notice except for the folks who are here or at Grace?" Would anybody care? If the answer to the question is no, what are we doing? It was a piercing question. It's a great question.

And so over the last couple of years, we've been coming together to pray and to ask the Lord, "What do you want to do in this region?" And one of our mentors, Pastor John Mulinde from Uganda, who has been a part of an experience transformation, has helped us to see the transformation is a divine visitation of God among his people, causing spiritual awakening and the transformation of all areas of society. Revival comes when the grip of darkness, the hold of darkness over peoples and territories, and we have to agree that there is a grip of darkness over our region, especially in our city, and that when that is broken and given the Holy Spirit gain more influence, it brings forth a greater manifestation of God.

So Partnership for Transformation has come together, pastors, leaders from all over the region and we exist to reveal the heart of God through the unity of the church by sacrificially praying and serving so that our region may be healed, reconciled and transformed. Now some of this language might be foreign or you might be thinking, "What does all that mean?" Well I need to help you understand that this is happening in other parts of the world. What I just described is happening where entire cities, entire nations are being transformed by the power of God as people come together in prayer and worship and repentance.

In Cali, Columbia, an entire drug cartel was brought to its knees as this took place. There is... In agriculture there are carrots that are being grown that are as long as our arms. In Uganda, where our friend comes from, 36 percent of the people in Uganda had AIDS in the 90s, and through education and through the prayer of God's people; it's now six... six percent. The power of God when he comes down.

So I want to show you a short video. It has two parts to it. The first part is what's happening around the world in some other places. I need pictures, or else this is just rhetoric. There are pictures and documents of this happening. Then I want you to transition to seeing some snapshots of Baltimore, and what God's doing through the prayers of his people and John Schmidt is in the middle of this. This church, Central Presbyterian is in the middle of what this is. And as you watch it, I'm just asking you, would you ask yourself, "Could this happen in Baltimore? And what would it look like if it did?" Take a look at this video.

Video Shown: "Has transformation begun in Baltimore?"
Source: Partners for Transformation (www.partnersfortransformation.net)

So I asked you, could this really happen in Baltimore... what we saw at the beginning of this video? We believe that it can, but it's going to require significant levels of raising the prayer and compassionate acts of service. So what is God saying to you today through maybe this message and through the whole "Visioneering" series? Maybe it's a fresh understanding of the power of koinonia and partnerships, the biblical understanding of it.

Maybe we're seeing a glimpse of what Jesus said, "You will do even greater things than these, than I am doing." Realizing the power of the collective whole. Maybe God is calling you to see yourself a little differently as a part of the whole Body of Christ, and that you too can partner with God and others to raise the spiritual temperature of your neighborhood, your workplace, you school, this church, wherever it is. You don't have to be a pastor. God's calling all of us to do this.

What part does he have for each of us and our churches to play? I'd like to challenge all of us, if we're not engaged in some way in the ministry of this awesome church, might God be calling you to ask him, "Lord, what's my next step? How would you want me to partner with Central and others to bring God's loving kindness?" And as John said, justice and mercy to care for the poor, the needy, the sick, the homeless, the widows, and the orphans in our area and to experience biblical partnership and see transforming revival. That is why I love this church so much because you are already doing so much of this, but is God calling us to a higher place, a deeper place?

Central, you are God's beloved community. I admire and love this church, and I can't wait to see the ongoing power that God wants to unleash through our partnership together and all the other partnerships going on around this region and the world. You are an inspiration to this community and region. God bless you.

Let's pray together: Father, I thank you so much for this church. I pray blessing over the leadership. Lord, I thank you for John, and I also thank you for George, God, a faithful servant of yours for years and years here. Lord, I thank you for every person in this congregation and the part that you have for each one of them to play in the expansion of your kingdom. Lord, bless us through your Word today. In Jesus' name, Amen.

© 2009, Rev. Ben Abell - Grace Fellowship
c/o Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org