Full Kingdom Potential

Here's the 2nd of my Walking By Faith Sermons.  The printed version is the different, though, than the proclaimed.  I made several changes along the way that morning.  Please be kind with any typos in the copy.  I do not have a dictated copied, although, eventually, these sermons will be on our church website (www.fbccornelia.org).  Thanks to George Bullard for the concept of Full Kingdom Potential.  I pulled a good bit from his book as I planned this sermon.  

Full Kingdom Potential

Matthew 13:31-32

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Walking By Faith Series #2

Marcus Dupree, from Philadelphia, Mississippi was the most highly recruited high school football players in the 1980’s.  During Senior year in1981 his coach was fielding over 100 calls a day from college scouts and head coaches who had all seen Marcus’ potential for success.  As a freshman in 1978, he ran a 4.4-second 40-yard dash, scored five touchdowns as wide receiver and seven more as a kickoff and punt returner, including a 75-yard kickoff return touchdown on his first play in high school.  Everyone wanted this kid to live out his potential at their school.

            Barry Switzer and Oklahoma University won the recruiting war.  They started him his freshman year and he led them to the Fiesta Bowl on New years day – only to lose.  Barry Switzer – true to his personality – blamed the loss on Dupree’s lack of passion and training.  By the next year, Dupree’s potential began to fade.  His stats fell.  He suffered a concussion.  Then he disappeared from the campus.  By the time he resurfaced in Mississippi – he had quick OU and faded from memory. 

            ESPN has created a movie about Marcus Dupree with the great title:  The best who never was.  This is what can happen to potential.

2 years ago as Marcia and I entered into a discernment process about God’s call to First Baptist Cornelia – this is word we kept hearing.  Potential.  A few comments went like this as I asked around about the church.

·         “First Baptist Cornelia is full of potential.  They have wonderful people who are ready to see where God leads.”

·         First Baptist Cornelia has incredible facilities.  They have the potential to be used for great ministry.

·         “First Baptist Cornelia has the potential of being the leading Baptist congregation in Northeast GA.”

            Potential does not guarantee a bright future – it only reminds us of what might be.

            The same is true for congregations.  God’s potential for First Baptist Cornelia does not guarantee a bright future – we still have a say in what will happen.  

            Walking by faith as a congregation means striving to reach our Full Kingdom Potential.  It means not settling for being known as the “Best that never was.”  Reaching our Full Kingdom Potential requires us to set faith oriented goals for ourselves as a congregation rather sight oriented goals that simply try to close the gap between where we are and where we want to be.   

            George Bullard is a Baptist congregational expert.  In his book Pursuing the Full Kingdom Potential of your Congregation he outlines sight oriented goals that keep us from reaching our kingdom potential.  These are things churches – like ours – can spend all of our time and energy trying to achieve to make us better organizations – more successful in the way our community measures successes – but have nothing to do with our full kingdom potential.

1. Church Growth:  Church growth is an outward expression of our desire as a congregation to attract as many people as possible into God’s kingdom and into our congregation through our worship services, evangelism practices, and discipleship programs.  At its worse – our desire for just church growth can form us into a self-serving, competitive driven congregation whose chief purpose is to win by often treating people as objects rather than persons of worth. 
2. Church Health:  Church health is an outward desire to close the gap between an emotionally unhealthy system to an emotionally healthy system – where member get along, have a good working programs, and a balance of purpose.  At its worse –focusing only on church health can lead a congregation to lose sight of God’s journey or destination of their congregation. 
3. Church Faithfulness:  Church faithfulness focuses on the past by centering a congregation’s attention on what the church has always done, always believed or forever refused to do.  At its worse – it becomes a reactive means of protecting the congregation from patterns of thought or action that do not fit our understanding of church.  Bullard says – faithfulness is often the rallying cry of aging, plateaued, or declining congregations.  
4. Church Success:  Church success focuses on the organizational or managerial success of a congregation rather than the spiritual.  At its worse – church success is only measured by meeting the budget, keeping the building looking good, offering good programs for members, and having no conflict. 

Church growth, health, faithfulness or success – are not goals as we strive to reach our full kingdom potential.  However, these are often the result.  When we strive to reach our full kingdom potential – people will want to join us, we will grow healthier, we will build on the strengths of our past, and we will see success in management of all that we do.  These results though – are not our purpose or our ultimate goal – they are God’s blessings for seeking the harder path – striving to reach our full kingdom potential. 

The Mustard Seed

            In our scripture passage today – we find a familiar parable of Jesus focused on potential. 

            Jesus stands before the crowds holding up a tiny seed – a mustard seed.  The crowd immediately would have recognized the seed and understood the context of Jesus’ words.  They would have associated that phrase – “Birds of the air come and make nests in its branches" - with stories about giant cedars, which were stories about the world’s great kingdoms. The cedar was a symbol of political power, so when you heard the phrase, "giant cedars in whose branches birds come and make their nests," you thought of empires – they thought of Rome.

            The mustard plant was quite different, though.  It didn’t grow into a mighty cedar.  It grew into a large scrub – maybe 6-9 feet at the largest.  The mustard seed with its tiny potential – grows into a large scrub.  But Jesus has more to say about its potential. 

            The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; 32it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’

            When the tiny mustard seed is planted – it not becomes the largest of scrubs – it is transformed into a tree which allows the birds to rest and make their nests.  God’s kingdom seems small – insignificant in our sight oriented world oriented around the media and politics and power – but God transforms this small potential into something great. 

            This transformation occurs through our preparation.  In order for the see to grow – it must be planted.  It order for God to transform the scrub into a tree – it must be planted.  The kingdom of God comes as we prepare our hearts, lives and world. 

Full Kingdom Potential

            Reaching our full kingdom potential as a church and as a individuals occurs as we prepare for God’s Kingdom in our lives.  As we plant the seed of our potential and walk by faith into the future.

            How will we know that we are there?  What will our full kingdom potential look and feel like?  What will the great tree transformed from the small seed look like among us?

Comprehensive – Like the great redwoods on the California coast – the Full Kingdom Potential will be expansive.  It will influence all that we do as a congregation as it transforms our lives as Christians.  It will ask important questions such :  Why does First Baptist Cornelia exist?  What is our calling in the world?  What is our purpose?  How can we best achieve this mission?  To reach our full kingdom potential we will look at how we organize ourselves, how we fund ourselves, how we use our buildings, how we empower ourselves for ministry.  God will transform us from who have been to who God desires us to be!

Kingdom-Focused:  Like the challenge to walk by faith, not by sight – our full kingdom potential will reign of God as our focus rather than the realm of humankind.  We will spend time during the year learning more about what it means to seek to live out the Kingdom of God.  To be kingdom focused, though simply means – our priorities will center more on growing the Kingdom rather than growing our church. 

            Our Fall Festival last October was an example of a kingdom focused event.  9 area churches came together – pooling together resources to serve our community.  It wasn’t about us – it was connecting our community to Jesus.  Our full kingdom potential will expand our vision of the work of First Baptist and broaden our capacity to celebrate the world of the Holy Spirit. 

Divinely Formed:  Like clay in the potters hands, our full kingdom potential is shaped by the gracious love of our heavenly parent.  Our potential as a church comes not from our vision, our hopes, our gifts, our work – it comes from the work of the Holy Spirit among us – shaping us first as people and then as a church.  Our ideal destination or image as a church is not something we can achieve by closing the gap between where we are and where we want to be – it comes as we are shaped by Jesus.  Achieving our full kingdom potential occurs as all of us as a congregation grow spiritually through the spiritual disciplines.

To begin to allow ourselves and our church to be divinely formed – I am inviting everyone in our church to read through the books of Luke and Acts as many times or as slowly as needed in the coming year.  Join us on Wednesdays at Noon to study about what we are reading in our Brown Bag Bible Studies.  Make worship a priority this year.  When you have choices of what to do on Sunday – make worship a priority. 

When we begin to make  more space for the Spirit of God to move – we prepare ourselves and our church for God’s full kingdom potential. 

            In the end – our Full Kingdom Potential will always be just beyond our grasps because it is in the process of being revealed as we travel toward it. 

            In C.S. Lewis final book in the Chronicles of Narnia – The Last Battle – he describes potential which is further up and futher in.  After the children have made it out of Narnia into the Kingdom of Aslan, one of them describes it by say, “This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it until now.”  He goes one to say that the “further up and the further in you go the bigger everything gets.  The inside is larger than the outside.” 

            Lewis concludes with these words to the ongoing nature of our Full kingdom potential:

            ”And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they lived happily ever after.  But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia h ad only been the cover and the title page:  now at last they were beginning chapter 1 of the great story which no one on earth has read;  which goes on forever:  in which ever chapter is better than the one before.”

            From where we stand today – Our Full Kingdom Potential seems far and distant.  Something we are just now beginning to understand.  As we travel toward it – walking by faith, not by sight – where we stand tomorrow will give us a different perspective on our potential.  Our story will only continue to grow.  The closer we get to God’s future – the futher up and the futher in it will appear to be.  Our potential will always be in front of us – being weaved and ordered by our God who loves us and calls us to follow him – futher up and further in!  Amen