As we turn to Scripture today, one of the things I like to do is when I read the Bible and I look at it, a lot of it is put in narrative, so it’s about different characters and how their relationship works with God. And I don’t know about you, but one of the disciples I always related to was Peter. Peter had a habit of speaking and putting his foot in his mouth.
And he would say something like, you know, he would say something amazing like Jesus said, who do you think I am? And he said, you’re the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus would say, blessed are you, Simon, son of John, for you did not receive that from man, but you received that from my father. And then Jesus went on to tell him about the crucifixion.
And Peter said, no, no, Lord, I will never let that happen to you. And Jesus said, get behind these Satan, oh, when he’s so close. And then at the campfire, he denied Jesus three times.
But eventually the Holy Spirit came and he became a powerful witness for Jesus. Now, one of the things that Jesus did when he would tell them stuff, he would talk in parables and sometimes the disciples just didn’t get it. You know, he’d say this and they’d say, oh, that’s a good story, but they’d go, okay, what does that mean? They’d pull him off to the side.
And then when it was time for them to go to the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus said, grab some swords. And they were probably shorter swords, more like daggers. And Jesus said, grab some swords.
And he made it so he wanted to say, they’ll see we have swords, but we don’t do anything. But Peter took that literally. And when they came to arrest Jesus, he chopped the ear off of a servant.
And Jesus said, no, this is not what I wanted you to do. Sometimes we jump out ahead of God. Sometimes we move ahead thinking we have our own purposes.
I mean, thinking we have God’s purposes, but they’re our own purposes. As we wrap up this sermon series on our calling and purpose, we’ve talked about the importance of loving God, how that fits into our calling and purpose is first and foremost to love God. And then we talked about how we have faith to save.
And last week was the outside perspective. We’re connecting this all to Noah and looking at verses in the Bible where Noah is brought up in the New Testament and what that has to do with our calling. Because, I mean, I was told after the first sermon of someone who saw, who heard the sermon and then saw the logo we have that is a boat, and they said, thanks for telling me.
And I was like, oh, okay, I guess we need to talk about this a little more. The boat is connected to Noah when God told me to build a boat, and then we connected with, when I connected with Dana and with some other people, and they decided they felt called to be builders. So we’re talking about today what it means to be builders, because it’s much different than Noah.
Will you stand as you are able? Our text for this week comes from 1 Peter 3, 18 through 22, and we’re going to talk about our work. What is our work? What are we called to do? What is our purpose? For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh and made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison. Because they formerly did not obey.
When God’s patience waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is eight persons, were brought safely through the water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him. The word of God is inspired by God.
For the people of God, thanks be to God. Amen. You may be seated.
Now, we can get one thing clear that Peter is telling us. When Peter learned what his work was, he told the churches that it was Jesus’ work to suffer and die for the sins of others. It is not the church’s work to do that.
It’s already been done. Thanks be to God. It is Jesus who did that for us.
And in that, he talks about how it was in the days of Noah, and Noah was called to build a boat, to build an ark. And when he was called to build an ark, it said, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah. Jesus had gone to Hades, or maybe more literally, to Sheol, the land of the dead, and he visited those who had died.
And when it says those spirits who were in prison, it’s those people who didn’t obey and died in the flood. And it also says there were only… How many saved? Remember we did the math? Eight. There were only eight saved in the flood.
And Peter reminds them of this. But two things or three things that really stand out. It says, because they did not obey.
And then it says, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared. God’s patience. How long do you think it took Noah, and maybe if all eight of them were working on that ark? I mean, how long does it take to build a house these days? Well, sometimes they go up pretty quick, but I don’t know if I’d want to live in one that went up too quick.
But it probably took decades to build that ark. God’s patience. He had already made the judgment, but he waited while the ark was being prepared.
Now that connects us with who we are. If we’re called to build a boat right now, God’s patience is there. Peter also talks about God’s patience in 2 Peter 3, 8 through 10, where he says, but do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the day of the Lord is a thousand years and a thousand years is a day.
That comes from the Psalms. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promises. Some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but all should reach repentance.
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. When Peter talks about patience here with God, he says God’s patience was there while the ark was being built. And now he says God’s patience is there while giving an opportunity for everyone to repent and come to Jesus.
God is patient with that. Now when God called Noah, he gave him all the details. Noah obviously, if you look at Noah’s location in the middle of the land, he was not a boat builder.
He was not raised in an apprentice to his dad, but here he was building a boat, showing his kids how to build a boat. And God said this, make yourself an ark of gopher wood. Make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch.
Now the pitch would have been a sealant to keep the water out of the boat. And then it goes on to talk about the dimensions of it, and it was really, really specific, as in other people have built arks based on the biblical formula that God gave Noah to see. And then they get them and they go, oh, that is big enough to house two of every kind of animal.
Wow. Now, in that, after we met for a while and we were meeting in homes, I remember the conversation coming up where I might have said something and somebody else said, I wish God would make it that clear for us. You know, this is specifically what you do.
You get gopher wood, not pine, not cedar, but gopher wood, and it was specific and it had it there. And the thing is, I don’t know if I, when I look back on that, if I just don’t listen as well as Noah did, or if God revealed it over time, that as we have grown, we have a specific calling and purpose now that God has brought us into, that we invite everyone to be a part of and why we build. Now, you don’t have to be a boat builder, you don’t have to have a lot of construction experience.
I mean, somebody asked me once, when we build a church, is it going to be a boat? And I was like, ooh, that’d be pretty cool, but I don’t know. All of this reminds me of Special Agent in Charge Leroy Jethro Gibbs, who was an NCIS agent. Has anybody ever watched NCIS? Naval Criminal Investigative Service, I had to look that up, I could not remember what that meant.
NCIS. Now, Agent Gibbs, in the office, was stoic. You did not want to cross him.
He was not your friend, and they were going to get to where they were going to get to, and you were going to solve the case, and you were going to stick to it, and you weren’t going to goof around, and they goofed around a lot. But he was strict and tough, and they were a little scared any time he came in the room. Do you remember that part of it? But what he did on the side was he built boats in his basement.
You’d come to the end of the show, and this same guy, who was so almost mean, would be building a boat in his basement, and apparently he built several boats throughout the seasons, decades, how long was it? I think it’s still going, but he’s not on it anymore. But anyway, if somebody really wanted to talk to Gibbs, they’d come over to his house late at night, go down in his basement, and help him work on building a boat. And they could talk, and they would get real at those point in time, and their relationships would be transformed because they would build the boat together, and they would get to see the depth inside of Agent Gibbs.
Now a lot of times in church, what we have is a conflict of interest when it comes to our work. What is our work? Is it busy work, or is it purposeful work? In John 5, 19, Jesus is pretty clear about what his work was. He said, So Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing on his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing, for whatever the Father does, that’s what the Son does likewise.
Jesus’ work was to watch the Father. Now this leads to a point of one of Jesus’ toughest teachings, where the people flocked thousands to go see him, and he said, Oh, you didn’t come here because of wanting to know my teachings. You came here because you enjoyed the bread that I multiply.
And he told them, That’s why most of you are here. And then he proceeded to say, You know, we’re supposed to be very cautious with new believers, but Jesus told all those new believers, You cannot be a part of me unless you eat my body and drink my blood. No surprise, a lot of the new disciples left.
And Jesus, in that, was trying to tell them, you know, he was introducing communion that nobody knew about yet at that time, but he was saying, You have to fully take me in. It’s all there. And then later in that conversation, he said, Do the work that leads to eternal life.
And then they said, What is that work? What can we do? You know, because works, I mean, a lot of Christians even think that today, that works get us to heaven. Works get us to the presence of God, but Jesus said, This is the work of God, that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you think of belief as work? I mean, we think of it as mental assent, like I agree with that, but in the Greek sense of the word belief, it means response.
If I believe what Jesus says, then I will do what Jesus says to do. If I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, then I will live my life by watching what the Father is already doing and doing that. Believing is action.
Believing is what God has for us. Noah’s call was to build a boat. Our call is to build a boat, but what is our boat? Let’s say this together.
Our calling is to build a boat where people of every generation can experience God’s grace like Noah’s family and trust in Jesus who is our one hope from the overwhelming floods of life. We’ve been saying that and when we say build a boat, you look at that calling and it’s not as specifically clear as we might want, but there’s more to it than that. You see, we’re called to be about the Father’s work, not about our own work.
We’re called to be about what Jesus has called us to do. So, our purpose is this. Let’s say it together.
Our purpose is to build passionate worshipers, to build connections through love and scriptural holiness, and build witnesses about life with Jesus who is our one hope. The ark was one hope for the people. Jesus is one hope for the people today.
Our work looks a lot like this. Last slide. Oh, sorry, I sent it last night.
I forgot to tell you about it. Our work looks more like the construction of the boat with holes, with slots, with pieces that need to be filled in. Instead of that cool boat you see flying on the water, our work at this point in time is building the boat.
Our work is building and when we go through the purpose to build passionate worshipers, to build connections through love and scriptural holiness, and to build witnesses about life with Jesus who is our one hope, is connected to the mission of the Global Methodist Church. So what we do has to be about building passionate worshipers, that we worship with passion, that we connect with God, that we worship and pour it all out before God, that we make connections with one another and with God, and we grow in love and scriptural holiness. And finally, that we build bold witnesses, bold witnesses who tell people about life in Jesus Christ, who tell people that they need Jesus.
I mean, the truth is, if God wanted someone to build a boat, He might have called me and it might have taken me more decades to build a boat than Noah, but this is what I know, that we build disciples, that we build up people, that we build the body of Christ, that we create an environment where people come to God and Jesus becomes their ark, their one hope, and it becomes a place where not only do they receive Jesus as their Savior, but of course we’re Wesleyan, so it’s also about growing up in our faith, that we build up in our faith until we reach entire sanctification, until we reach that perfection. And our work is always about building and building and building disciples and coming together in that scene through worship, through building connections, and through witnessing. That’s our boat.
It’s the environment. It’s the place where people can meet and connect with Jesus, so that when Jesus returns, we’re safe. Of course, God promised there wouldn’t be a flood, but when Jesus returns, He’ll take us all home.
God is patiently waiting for us to bring people into a life with Jesus. I pray that you would pray on how you’re on board with that, what you would like to do to help people, to help yourself first of all, and then help one another and help others who don’t know Jesus to know Jesus really well. Why don’t we go ahead and pray, and then we’ll sing our song of response.
Almighty God, help us to build. Builders of the boat, you’ve called us to do things administratively that draw people into the presence of Jesus. Builders of the boat do things ministerially that draw people closer to Jesus.
Builders of the boat use their gifts and their talents to build disciples, to build the body, and to build the kingdom of God here on this earth. In Jesus’ name, amen.