Living in Harmony: Rejoicing and Mourning Together

If you would open your Bibles, Romans chapter 12, verse 15. And this is January the 5th in Romans chapter 12, verse 15. Join me in prayer. Father, we ask that you would open our minds and hearts as to how we are to live in relationship with each other. We ask that you would give us guidance so that we would be the church that is controlled by your Spirit. And help us to be introspective about your Spirit's work in us. In the name of Christ I ask this, Amen. Chapter 12 is all governed by how Paul starts it. He starts by talking, I urge you brothers, view the mercies of God to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship. And then he's challenged, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Paul assumes the reality of the world we live in. The reality is that from the time we are born into this world, our mind and life is being shaped by the environment around us. We watch our parents, we watch the field people around us, we learn how they think, we learn the values that they have, and we grow up automatically having those values inside of ourselves. So now when you come to face Christ and you commit your life to Him, your life is already shaped by those. Paul's concern is, once the Spirit takes control of your life, you're not to any longer allow that pattern of thinking and acting to control your behavior. Instead be transformed by letting your mind be renewed so that you learn to think a different way. And then he talks about how this thinking should shape our behavior or our action. Now I want to start at verse 15 where he's talking about, he's talked about just the previous verse, how we are to bless those who persecute us and to bless those who do and bless and not to curse people. He's talking about relationships outside or inside the church, it could be either way. So how do you handle circumstances where people are upset with you, where they try to hurt you, where they try to do bad things to you? The normal temptation is to do the same thing back to them. He said you don't do that. Now he changes a little bit of direction in verse 15. Instead of talking about how you deal with people in conflict, he talks about how you deal with people in relationships. What is the church like? What is when the Holy Spirit is in control of your life? Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. He's talking about the community of believers. This is the way we're supposed to be dealing with each other. Now if you think about the church and what the church is like, you think about not a setting in where you have a hundred people or a thousand people, but he's talking about the interaction between believers with one another. Our role in the church is to know each other well enough so that you know the times that other people around you are rejoicing. What is it that makes other people feel that their life is fulfilled or blessed? This opens up the whole concept of what the church is about. It's not about gathering in a congregation with a large group of people. It's about the fact that you're building relationships with people like they are part of your family, brothers and sisters in Christ. It doesn't mean you can't have a large number of people who are members of a church, but it does mean that however the structure of that group is, it should be developed in such a way so that all people have someone in the life of that body who knows when they are rejoicing and they can celebrate the good things that have happened in their life. And if you live, if you're in a part of a church, a group that's so big that you can simply go, sit down, listen, and go home, you fail to function this part of the spirit-led church. The spirit-led church is a group of people who are conscious of each other and the needs that occur in a person's life. Rejoicing requires other people to affirm your rejoicing. I remember one time I was in, on Thursdays, whenever I was, had the church at Larned, with this one, I'd go over there on Thursdays, visit all day, come back at the church at night and get ready for the Bible study. And I'd gone back, just closed, just sat down in the church, and the door burst open. This lady came in. She was a very active lady anyway, and she was talking everywhere. She came in the office and said, I'm so glad you're here. She said, I got a call on the telephone today from a lawyer, and he said, an aunt of mine died and she left me $10,000. My husband's out of town. I have nobody to talk to, and I've had this on my mind all day, and I wanted to find someone I could tell it to. Rejoicing sort of needs someone else to be a part of the scene with you, to be able to affirm and to celebrate the joys of your life, and so we should always celebrate the things that happen to people. Birthdays, we try to focus in our bulletin, birthdays, anniversaries, all those things are a part of what you should feel as a part of the family of God, that people are living with you and affirming the positive things that take place in your life. That's what God requires of us, to be a part of a Spirit-led church. Now what happens is whenever you discover that someone has a joyous occasion, if the Spirit is free to work in your life, He wants to make you desire to affirm the good things that have happened to people around you, and sometimes in our prayer times, we spend a lot of time talking about the difficulties and tragedies that people are in, and not nearly enough affirming the positive things that take place in the lives of people. Affirming the rejoicing that people have, says to them, I am glad that good things have happened to you. Sometimes it's hard to do that, because we don't necessarily really understand how much it means to other people for things to take place in their life. To be able to rejoice with people, you have to know what's valuable to them. Not everything is the same value to all kinds of people. If you're married, you understand that sometimes things that you think are tremendous and wonderful, your spouse doesn't have any consideration for those things. They don't even mean a thing to them. You come in excited about something that you are excited about, a ballgame or whatever it is, and you realize that that person has no interest in affirming whatever value that was to you. Love opens the door to your life to rejoice in the pure fact that the other person has joy in their life. You see, love takes great pleasure in seeing other people have pleasure. Our self-centeredness oftentimes focuses so much on ourselves that the joy other people feel, we don't listen to them. We don't value what they do. We don't appreciate what's important and valuable to them. So make a point. When you hear people talking about things that you can tell they're excited about, think in your own mind. Something that excites you may not be the same thing that they're excited about. If you think about something that excites you and respond to them in the same way of interest, affirming the joy that they have, now it may not make any difference in the world to you what they're excited about, but you can be happy that someone you care about is happy. That's what the church ought to be. In all of our Sunday school classes where there are small groups, we need to be aware that the events come in the lives of people that need to be celebrated. It's a command of God that if the Spirit controls your life, you will rejoice with others who rejoice. Now think this week as you go around, when you hear people telling wonderful things that have happened to them, how do you react? The Spirit of God should draw out of you joy that you would want to give back to the person who's rejoicing over what takes place with them. We're more commonly concerned with mourning with people who mourn. I don't know why that's true. Maybe the mourning of another person causes us to be drawn into their sorrow so that we're more prepared to cry with them. We're more prepared to respond to their suffering, to be with them. I guess maybe rejoicing causes us to feel, well, they're having something great happen to them. They don't need me around them. It's enough that they've been blessed with that. But in mourning, we have more of an awareness that something has happened to them that causes pain to enter their life. So he's calling us to be attention to both the joys and the sorrows of the lives of people around us. We do a good thing in oftentimes listing the problems that people have that we pray for them about. But there's a step further past just talking about the pain people have. Sometimes when people have difficulties, like if they have to go into a nursing home, they are beginning to feel the end of their life coming. There are many events that take place in our life that remind us that we're growing older. In each of those stages, there is a sense, a kind of mourning, a sense of loss that comes to people. I remember one time, I had a, my knee hurt real bad, and I mean, I've run since I was like, you know, in my early 20s. And so I went to the doctor and he said, you're going to have to quit running. I didn't think that would be a big deal for me, but I really felt sad about it. I really felt like a big part of my life had been taken away from me. And in a sense, there was something that died about me in that process. Fortunately, I had a resurrection, so I got to able to run again, so it didn't have to happen. He told me I'd never run again, but that wasn't the truth. I mean, I was able to later, but it surprised me that that event caused me to feel some mourning or a sense of loss in my life. It awakened me to the reality that all kinds of things in people's lives cause them to grieve or mourn. I remember you talking about losing your dog and how you mourned about that. Now, that's not a big thing to me, but I should be sympathetic to the fact that it hurt you. See, that's what he's talking about, sympathetic to the fact that this, my brother or sister in Christ, is grieving over what takes place. And all kinds of things can cause us to mourn, sometimes moving, sometimes a friend who moves away, sometimes the loss of a job, sometimes losing some physical ability that we've had in our lives. All these things can cause us to feel our mortality. Something has happened that shows me that a part of my life is taken away or is going to be limited from now on. And being aware of that, now, here's a very important thing for you to remember in mourning with people. When he talks about mourn with people that mourn, that's important to understand what he's saying. If you are grieving, I grieve with you. One of the biggest problems we have in our relationship with each other is not mourning with people when they mourn, but fixing people who are mourning. So if you see someone who's mourning about something, you say, well, you get over it. Or you say, well, you know, tomorrow will be a better day. When people are mourning, they want you to feel sad with them. They want you to understand their pain. You may not understand it or feel pain at what they're going through. And if you think, well, if I went through that, I wouldn't have any problem. When I said I was grieved over mourning, I think you were laughing because you were thinking, well, I didn't have to run. That would be a great thing. And some people might feel that way, you know. But what you're looking for is to say, when I lost something in my life, how did I feel? And see that that person has that feeling of loss. And so you encourage them to trust God in their loss. And you grieve with them. You accept their grief. And you affirm that you understand that they do have grief. When grief comes, we don't want to be fixed. We want to be able to come to grips with our sorrow of the loss that we have. And so when we come across people who are grieving about things, we say, get over it or you'll be better tomorrow or it didn't really matter anyhow. None of those things really help because the hurt is emotional and it's not mental that you can fix. What this does is it brings about the beginning of this paragraph that Paul uses. Your sense that your love must be genuine. If your love is genuine, when you see somebody who is rejoicing, you will want them to be rejoicing more. And you will try to do whatever you can to enhance their rejoicing. And if you really love someone, you won't try to fix them. You will try to suffer with them. Suffer in their mourning also. Grieve in their grief also. Grief is simply the expression of the fact that you've lost something in your life. And when you come alongside someone who's lost maybe a thousand dollars, can't find it, you say, oh, I'm so sorry, I really know that's a problem, that's really hurt you. You try to express the feelings of loss that they would have. In the church, you should never be alone. In your rejoicing, there should always be someone who rejoices with you. In your loss of grief and mourning, there should always be someone who's mourning with you. That's true in a family. And the church is a collection of people who are spiritual family. That's what Paul talks about. This idea of the connection we have because of our common relationship that comes from Christ. The next thing that he talks about now, he switches back to talking about what happens in the church. He says, live in harmony with one another. The Bible has a pretty powerful focus on the reality that church people ought to live in harmony with each other, that Christians should live in harmony with each other. And the basic idea comes from the fact that we have one common person in charge of our lives. Harmony means that there are people who are working together, not against each other. So he sees, Paul sees, one of the evidences of the Holy Spirit is the fact that people are able to work in harmony with each other. Here's the way you'd think about it. If I was going to have you help me pick up the tables, and I wanted you to put the tables over against the back wall, and you came to me, one of you came to me and said, what should we do? I said, well, I want you to take the chairs off and take the tables and put them against that back wall. And then someone else came along and said, what should I do? I said, well, I want you to take the tables and put them against that wall. And the two of you go over there and you start working, what is going to happen? Confusion and uncertainty, and maybe even conflict. Now what the Bible talks about is when the Holy Spirit is active in the life of a person and in the group that the people are in, there should be harmony. God, what do you want us to do? Okay, I talk to God, I get an answer from Him. You talk to God, you get an answer from Him. There should be some kind of harmony in that answer because there is one source guiding everything we do. The Spirit-led church will not have knock-down, drag-out fights. They just won't because the people who are controlled by the Spirit of God are going to find some harmony. They're going to find some relationship in which they can find a common ground with each other. There are several places in the Bible where Paul emphasizes this and all of them are in the books of the Bible where conflict is found, like in 1 Corinthians where there's a great fight about a lot of different issues, about spirituality, about marriage, about all kinds of things, the Lord's Supper. And in that book he constantly focuses on the idea that these people should be in harmony with each other. They should have one mind, one way of thinking about things. There shouldn't be a confusion about that. He also uses this in the book of Philippians chapter 2, beginning that book, where he emphasizes that the people should be able to have a common direction, a common idea about what God wants for them since there is one direction. I often read this passage whenever I'm talking to couples who are getting married. If there is any encouragement from being united with Christ, you see that unity? If any comfort from his love, that is, if you have his love living in you and gives comfort, if any fellowship with the Spirit, that is, if you and the Spirit are connected to each other, if there is any tenderness and any compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded. This is a secret to marriage, thinking the same way. You see, what Paul talks about is we should learn how to think, and the learning how to think, then it results in the right kind of action. Thinking the way God thinks about things will prepare you to make the right choices. That's the way it works. Now, whenever you look at what happens in human relationships, all of us have different opinions, right? About almost everything. What kind of colors you like best, what kind of automobiles you like, what kind of food that you like. All of us have different opinions, and the human nature that is what we're conformed to in this world, the pattern of this world, is when you have a difference of opinion, people are stuck. One has to give up, or the other has to give up. One has to win, and the other has to lose, one way or the other. And whenever it happens, it causes us to feel as if when we lose, it causes us to feel as if we're now owed something. Now, I get to win next time. Sometimes in marriages it's that way. I won last time, you get to win next time. No, the one you won was more and bigger than the one I won. I won a little bitty thing, you won a big thing, so I have to get two wins. What he's talking about is that's the common way people do. I want to win. Not so with the spirit-controlled church, or the spirit-controlled person. Instead, what you do is you live in harmony with one another because you have one person directing your life. All of us have one person directing our life. The result of that is whatever questions we bring to God, we should get the same answers. And if we don't get the same answers, it means in some way we have misunderstood God's direction. God will never ask us to do something, and the other person we're dealing with to do something that is in such conflict that we can't deal with each other together. So what we do, if our opinions are different, is we sit down and say, why did you have this opinion? Why did I have this opinion? What is common about that, and what is different about it? And we work together to find a common direction. Now, what happens in the church is that oftentimes people have something they're strongly convinced about, and they have to win because it's a spiritual issue. But what you can find if you're among spiritual people in the church, if you step back far enough, you can see that the motive behind other people who are different in their thinking than you is really the same as yours. I remember one time we were going to hire a staff person, and we were meeting in here in this building in a meeting, a church business meeting, I think it was, or maybe it was a church council meeting. And so we took a vote, and everyone voted to do this except one person. And this person said, I don't think we should do this. So I was kind of taken aback about it. I mean, it was so unanimous, everyone else was saying, yes, we could have said, OK, we're going to do it, it doesn't matter what you think. I mean, just go on ahead and done it. But it occurred to me that we needed to be together. All the way through Paul's discussion about church life is he emphasizes that decisions made among believers should be unanimous. And when I talk to pastors about that as a principle of church life, they say, you're crazy, you can't get that to happen. But that's what Paul says should happen in a spiritually led church. So I asked this man, I said, we'd like to make sure that we're all together on this, and maybe you're the person who has seen something from God that we need to hear, so maybe we all need to change our mind. What is it that causes you to say we shouldn't do it? He said, well, when you look at our budget and see what we have, we lack about $250 a month being able to pay the salary of this person that we're talking about bringing. And I know all of you think that we'll get this money, but it bothers me that we're going to bring somebody here and we don't know for sure that we can pay them. So I thought a minute about that and I said, how can we solve that problem? Maybe some of you here have felt led to increase your giving so that we could do this. And people spoke up and said, well, I thought I would give $25 a month more. Someone else said, well, I'll tell you, I'll be glad to give $25. And right there, we made up that additional amount in pledges from people. So I said to the guy, if these people actually are prepared to give that much more than their normal giving, would that cause you to feel that this was something God wanted us to do? And he said, sure. And then we were all together. You see, you can fight about this and you can go ahead and do what you want and leave this person out. And then they feel like they're not a part. Harmony, unanimity should be the result of the Spirit of God in us. Now, of course, you can have people that are so obstinate and so controlled by Satan that there's not any way in the world you can agree with them. But if you have people who are genuinely Spirit-led, unanimity and oneness of mind and harmony is the result. And you can know if your church is Spirit-led if when you come to make decisions, you can find harmony. That's what Paul says, live in harmony with one another. It's a command. This is your requirement. We are not free to create fiction between each other in the church. We are obligated by God to find the answer that all of us can support and agree with. Now we're coming to look at seating in our church and already I hear people say, well, I like this and I like that and I like this and I like that. And a lot of our preferences are going to be different. But it's a test for us, I see. All these things are a test to see whether or not we really are controlled by the Spirit of God or we're controlled by our own personal desires. Now there may be some people in our church who are so controlled by their personal desires that they can never change their mind, but the rest of us, if we claim to be Spirit-controlled, we react to them, not in a negative way, but constantly searching for God to give us common ground. How we go through this will reveal something about whether or not the Spirit of God is in control of our church. And so this is a wonderful test for us. We get a lot of them, but this is one of them. For the Bible wants us to understand, I mean, how can you get better or get well if you can't define your sickness? So if we know as a result of what happens in this event that we're not able to harmonize, then we know that the Spirit is not in control of our lives. When the issue is really not seating or fixing the auditorium, our problem is our hearts. So this will be an important thing for us because the Scripture says, without hesitation, Spirit-controlled people are in harmony with one another. The Spirit-led church is different than the churches we see around us because we're so driven by our own desires that God does not want it that way. He does not want our families to be that way, and He does not want our churches to be that way. Would you bow your heads with me? I'd like to ask you to think about someone you might be in conflict with, another believer. Maybe you haven't generated that conflict, maybe they have. I'd like you to think about circumstances and situations where you do have conflict. Will you promise God that you will try to find harmony with your Christian brothers and sisters? I want to ask you this week that every time someone's excited about something that happened to them, if you would consciously ask God, how can I rejoice with them? Or if you meet someone who has a great loss in their life, ask God to teach you to grieve with them. These are the ways by which your mind is transformed and renewed. So Father, teach us to live in this world as you are, that when people get to know us, they will get to know a little bit about who you are and what you're like. In the name of Christ, we submit to you to live this life Spirit-led. Amen. Amen.