St. Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church – Watertown, WI
Pastor Mark Gartner
Sermon for November 15^th and 18^th, 2001

Dear children of God who have been rescued from eternal darkness.

As some of you might know, I enjoy coaching sports. I’ve had the privilege of being able to coach my own children and hundreds of other parent’s children in baseball, baseball and soccer. Throughout these years, I’ve had the opportunity to watch many children grow as people and as athletes. Coaching of kids is an unique opportunity to work with kids who come with varying degrees of ability. I’ve coached kids with lots a of talent and some with very little talent, but most of the kids fall somewhere in the middle. I’ve had teams who have won all their games and teams that have won very few games. It isn’t the winning that keeps me wanting to coach, but it is watching the kids improve week after week and game after game. I think that a coach is a good coach, if he can help every player to improve over the course of a season. But coaching isn’t always easy. Kids by nature don’t like to be corrected. Kids by nature don’t want to listen to everything a coach has to say, but a good coach will sometimes have to be the "bad guy" and say the things that might hurt at first, but will make them a better player. A coach will have to do things to get his players ready and motivated to play.

A pastor has a very unique job also. The pastors calling in many ways it like being a coach. A pastor has to deal with many people of different backgrounds and with different gifts from God. And much like a coach, a pastor is always seeking to lead people by the power of God’s gospel to grow stronger and stronger in their Christian faith and their Christian lives. The pastor in many ways is preparing and equipping the saints of his congregation so that they are ready for when Christ returns and willing to make sure others are ready for Christ’s return. The pastor is making sure that everyone is moving forward in his or her faith. So this morning let us grow together in our faith as we meditate on the theme:

Have you ever thought to yourselves, what is the job of a pastor? What is the main work of the pastor supposed to be? Is it preaching? Is it teaching? Is it counseling people who are suffering or going through difficult times? Is it encouraging people? Is it helping people? It is almost impossible to say exactly what the pastor’s main job is, but we do know exactly what the goal of each and every pastor should be. It is to make sure that every sheep that is in his care knows how to get to heaven and is growing daily in his knowledge of God and his thankfulness to God.

With this in mind, we will let Paul tell us what the most important part of a Christians life should be as he writes, "For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. ¹⁰And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way." It should be the desire of everyone of God’s children to be filled with God’s knowledge and wisdom. It should also be the desire of everyone of God’s children to pray that others would grow in their wisdom and understanding of God’s wisdom. With God’s wisdom in our hearts, we will live a life that is worthy of the Lord and will please him in every way. In simple terms everything we are talking about today can be classified under the larger heading of Spiritual Growth. We are looking to strengthen our spiritual lives.

But how does God’s wisdom come to us? We all know the struggles and joys of waiting and watching for our children to take their first steps. For months they will experiment with getting their balance and then with moving their feet and then to put it all together and let go and actually wobble a few steps before crashing to the ground. Much in the same way, we as Christians need to learn to "walk" before we can "Walk the Walk" of being a Christian. For all of us gathered here today the story is exactly the same. The Lord has come to us and given us the ability to spiritually walk.

Paul puts it this way, "For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, ¹⁴in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." Our very firsts steps were taken the day that we were led to believe and trust that God had rescued us from the darkness of sin and brought us into his kingdom. Our first steps came as our heavenly Father reassured us that "we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." The beginning of our spiritual lives has everything to do with what happened that one Friday on a mountain in the city of Jerusalem which is the Good News of the work of Jesus who rescued us from the terrible destruction that we deserved. Unless we are firmly holding on to this point, we can’t continue our encouragement to "Walk the Walk." This is the very motivation that we have as we seek to grow in our faith and to serve God and those around us.

2. As a growing child of God

How do you measure growth? As a coach of a team you might measure growth by new things learned or maybe by progress being made. Growth in the classroom might show itself in better grades or maybe become more efficient in doing your homework. Growth of our bodies can be measured by our weight and height. But how can we measure our spiritual growth? That isn’t quite as easy. There is no chart that you can plug in how many times a person goes to church -- how many times they are in Bible class and attend the Lord’s Supper and out pops a letter grade. . There is no chart that says if you give so much money you are growing. So how do we gauge growth?

If I was person who believed in the concrete numbers of statistics I could say that on average about 46% of St. Luke’s members are in Church on any given Sunday. I could say that on average that about 17% of our membership is involved in Church’s Sunday School or Adult Bible Class on any given Sunday. I could say that on average about 40% of our Communicant members attend communion each time it is offered. But those numbers don’t really answer the question about how to measure our growth in the knowledge of God, do they?

The real answer is between you and your God. The real way to measure growth is not by how you measure up to the person sitting next to you in your pew. God doesn’t want us to think that because we come to church more often or that we give more in our offerings, I am growing in my faith. The real measure is to see how you are progressing. Are you continue to move forward with God’s help and guidance as you grow or are you willing to stay at the status quo? Are things moving forward or are they moving the opposite direction? How many times have I taken the opportunities that God has placed before me to receive the Lord’s strength either through his Word our in the Lord’s Supper? As a coach I have always said that I would like to have video-taped the very first practice and then show them that tape at the end of the season to show how far they have progressed. I wish I could do the same thing for every member here at St. Luke’s, myself included. I wish I could take a quick snapshot picture of your faith and your life and then show you that picture again in a year or 6 months. Would there be growth? I pray that there would, bit if we are honest we realize that all to often we are willing to stay at the status quo. But it doesn’t’ have to be that way.

As I move into this last section today I want to begin it with the thought that I am thankful beyond belief that God has brought us all together to grow in the knowledge of the fact that Jesus has rescued us. At the same time I pray just as Paul did for the Colossian Christians that God will continue to move us forward both as individual Christians and as a group of Christians in our congregation. Let me start things off as I bounce a question off you today, What kind of expectations should we place on ourselves as we talk about spiritual growth? Would it be better if we placed low expectations on ourselves and the members of St. Luke’s so that everyone can achieve these low expectations, or should we set lofty expectations so that we have something to challenge us to strive for greater things?

The way that I boiled it down was to think about the expectations that God has set before us. Does God set the bar for being a Christian low so that I can skim by or does he set it high? We know that the answer is that he sets it very high. He sets the bar at perfection. I know that we can never reach that expectation, but it shouldn’t stop us from giving our all to serve or Lord and Savior out of thanks. As we look at it from this point of view we realize that there will always be room for improvement. Every day of every year we are asking the Lord to move us further along in our Christian life.

So how can we "Walk the Walk and what are some of the blessings that might happen as we "Walk The Walk?" The way that I see it is that we need to look at a couple of things. First we need to take an inventory of our "Walk." It is easy to say that I am a Christian and that I know I am going to heaven, but on a scale from 1 –10 how would you rate that walk. Is it a very slow walk, or is it a medium paced walk or is it at the crawling stage? And once we have looked at our walk we need to look at specific parts of "Walking the Walk." You can break things down into 3 main areas. How well are doing at thanking God with your Time, Talents and Financial Treasures.

Under Time, you might look at how well are you doing at attending Church and Bible Classes and Sunday School. Make a list of reasons why you might not attend church or Sunday School or Bible Classes. And as you look at your time, you might ask yourselves how well you are modeling your time for your children and your family. It is easy to say that Jesus is important, but your children can clearly see that church isn’t important or Bible Class isn’t necessary when you don't attend regularly.

Under Talents, you might take a look at the various abilities that God has blessed you with and then figure out how you can volunteer your time and efforts to use your gifts. This one many times goes hand in hand with managing your time. When you are asked to use your gifts, how many times have you said no or it doesn’t work at the present time. How many times do we see the same people doing all the work, because the rest of us are too busy?

Under Financial Treasures, we would do well to figure out exactly how well God has blessed us with financial blessings. Once this has been done, we can then under the guidance of our God decide what is the best amount to give back to God. You may want to look to see if your offerings have kept up with your increasing blessings, or are you giving the same or less than you did years ago. Maybe we can ask God to give us the strength to increase our offerings by 1% each year or even more. There is no cap or limit that we reach and say that I’ve reached the top.

As a coach I am the first person to praise a child when they improve and work to improve. As a Pastor I want to also be the first to say thank you Lord for blessing our St. Luke’s family beyond anything that we deserve. At the same time I pray that we all continue to "Walk the Walk" of being a child of God. Whenever we take a look at our walk and it isn’t heading the right direction, please take it to the Lord who has granted us the complete forgiveness of your sin. God has given us the strength and the power to "Walk this Walk." May God bless us and strengthen us as we seek to serve our God with our lives and our actions. To God alone be all power and thanks. Amen.