"Multiplication or Fragmentation: How to Develop Healthy Relationships" by Melvin Lehman | CGS 2024

Lesson Transcript

Yes, this is home territory for me. My wife just grew up, I don't know, four or five miles from here in Middlespring. I grew up in Chambersburg, and we've had a bit of a journey since that. Honored to be asked to come here and share. There are many people in this congregation who have better credentials and far better position to speak on this subject, but I'll do my best. Flashback to 1989. I was teaching school at Anchor Christian School, again, just not too far from here.

And I remember when we began to receive the news about the collapse of communism, the collapse of Eastern European governments, and particularly the destruction of the Berlin Wall, or the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. And I remember going into the classroom that morning and telling my students about how I grew up in the 1960s and the 1970s, graduating from high school in 1973.

And if you would have told us then that the Berlin Wall would collapse without firing a shot, we would have said, "Guess again." Well, the Lord opened a door suddenly. And I tell you that because a few years later, my wife and I made a trip or two to Poland, to Minsk, well, actually Warsaw to begin with, and then eventually Minsk, Mazowiecki. And thus began a journey in international church planting. I don't have much experience, but I sure learned a lot in about 10 years. Just two events come to mind.

I remember lying in an old cabin outside of close to Dębów Wielki. And Sheila was not with me that particular trip. And we had some rugged discussions. And I remember lying in that cot in that cabin and looking out that window with just a few tears and saying, "What in the world am I doing here? Anyway, I don't know this language. We don't have any resources." And then finding some trust and rest in the Lord.

And then maybe a little bit more pointedly, on another trip, and this time Sheila was with me, we were in Eastern Poland, right on the border of Belarus, in one of the old simple Brethren churches there. And what was most astounding about that particular meeting, it was held in an old farmhouse on an upper floor. And it had the feel of, oh my, it had a feel of a church that was still trying to hide, even though those days were over at that particular time.

But the memory that sticks in my mind was an old brother who was sitting there blind because he had spent five years in prisons somewhere, lost his eyesight. And now he's back home. He's sitting in his congregation. He's not doing the preaching. But I shall never forget the look on his face. And he can't see, but he's sitting there singing the songs that I didn't understand being sung in Russian, but just very, very powerful.

And feeling that resonating power within, you know I'm one of his brethren, and he's one of us. What I'm asked to do here this morning is address the question of multiplication or fragmentation. I would really like to know all of your stories because I'm afraid I'm going to do some thrashing around here that might not be all that popular with quite a few of you. But well, we'll see where we get to here. So we'll just jump in.

I can only share with you what's in my heart and what I've learned, a few things that I've learned over the years. So kind of a subset here is how to develop healthy and helpful relationships with other church groups. So I'm feeling kind of a little tension here. So the focus is on church planting. That's what this group is about. But kind of layered on top of church planting is how in the world do you get along in this world of multiple, diverse ways of doing things and thinking about things and so on.

Well, we soon face that in Poland. But we face it today too. And there's bookends on this, I suppose. But in some ways, we're trying to figure out how to get along with each other, let alone how to get along when we actually step out into the world of church planting. So it's a pretty big challenge from what I can tell. A couple of verses here, a passage that we'll just jump into to begin with.

So here, Paul speaking, "I therefore the prisoner of the Lord beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with long suffering, forbearing one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all." I know you know that passage well.

I just want to say here at the outset that this is a concept that we have to hold in our hearts and in our minds and in our lives. Listen, you can ask me a million questions, and please don't during the panel discussion because I can't answer them anyway. But I do know one thing. We had better hold tightly to this truth that there is one body, there is one faith, and so on. Now, I just wanted to say that here to begin with so that I'm not mistaken on some of the things I may say that may not sound like that.

But I have tried to hold this truth in my heart here for years. So just a bird's-eye view of some statistics to begin with. So you can see them there. I don't have time to talk about all of these. But just notice the large size of the Roman Catholic Church and the small size of the Anabaptist. Perhaps to give a little perspective to this, if you just draw a little circle diagram, this is today. The Roman Catholic Church is still, by far, in the Western world, the dominant church in numbers, hugely so.

There you can see its size, the Orthodox Church. Again, these are just relative figures, but it gives you a little bit of an idea. After the Reformation, the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church, the Reformed Church, and all of its various versions and all of that, I'm sure there's some inaccuracies here, so don't ask me to straighten it out. But relative size here, they're about that big, kind of equal in size in general, but much smaller than Roman Catholic Church even today.

And then if you look at the Anabaptist, that little green spot there, that's about how large we are in numbers. It's about 2.13 million in there somewhere if you sort of count everybody who makes some kind of claim to be Anabaptist. So don't ask me to break it down. It's not my point. I just want you to see that. I want to be sure that you hear this.

Whatever that looks like to you, I live in the confidence that the Anabaptist groups, they represent the most accurate effort to actually reform and return to the form and function of the early church. And I grew up Anabaptist. That's one of the reasons I am. Let's just all admit it if you're in that background. That is part of the story. I'm a historian. I care about history. I'm not a professional, but I care about history.

And as I've studied and thought and considered the issues, I'm a convinced Anabaptist from this perspective. I have the Baptist on there because they're kind of related in some ways. And you see the circle gets bigger if you kind of just include all of the Baptists and their relationships. More importantly, here's a little work I've done on church history before. I'm not going to take time to work on this.

But if you look at our own, just watch me start through just the generalities whoops, let me back up just a moment, just the generalities of the diaspora of the Anabaptist. So you might be able to find yourself on there somewhere. But just saying that I'm talking a little bit about fragmentation. Okay? And so again, I don't want to take time to work with that, but just show it to you. Here's the one that I really want you to see. Let me see where am I headed here.

So if you look at the Anabaptist scene today, and these are really, really big generalities. Okay? So those of you who are better scholars on this than what I am, just forgive me for being very general. And you're probably going to be able to push some numbers one way or the other a little bit that might not be I might not be so accurate. But on the left-hand side here, I call these Old Order Anabaptist. And the little C there means about. It's in around 200,000 strong. It includes the Amish, Old Order Amish.

It includes Old Order Mennonites. It includes Old Mennonites, those of you familiar with the terminology, Old Mennonite, Lancaster Conference, Franconia Conference, and the Offspring. So in that group would be the Eastern Church, would be Nationwide Fellowship, and so on. So they're included there in that big red circle. Along about 200,000 is an approximate number. The next number, they're 30,000.

And I have an arrow because almost all of us I don't know everybody in this room, and certainly it's not everybody, but most of us very likely followed that arrow somewhere along the line and ended up among the approximately 30,000. Again, who are they? Well, they're moderate conservatives, I suppose you might say. BT Amish are in this group, Midwestern, Southeastern, Cumberland Valley Conference, places like that, and others. I think maybe Charity Fellowship we might even have in here.

These are not all my numbers. It's what I've picked up the places. Around 30,000. Notice smaller, of course. From that entire movement, the flow that I've observed at Faith Builders, at people coming through Faith Builders and getting connected with them and their groups and sort of doing some study along those lines, there is this migration along the way going across the chart here. And I call it church plant. This is Church Planters Forum. And I also include the word remnant here.

I have a whole sermon on this, but I'm not going to get into that sermon for sure. The white arrows top and bottom are to show you that the church plant movement is fed from the Old Orders just as well. In fact, there is, generally speaking, a natural growth. They are the fastest growing groups in the Anabaptist community, largely because they have large families. All right, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, pay attention. There's something about having large families. It does make a difference. Okay?

So they don't bring in very many from outside of their circles, a few but not many. Okay? However, they tend to feed things going to the right there. I won't ask you to raise your hand, but I would guess there's probably a significant number of people in this audience who are from Old Order Amish. Your background is there somewhere, okay, and kind of float across there. Mine is not. I'm from the Old Mennonites, actually. But so that flow. Why do I have that remnant thing in here?

Well, the question is, why do we have these arrows? Is this fragmentation, or is it multiplication? What's happening as you flow across here? Okay? And it's a very, very interesting thing to dive into. Again, I won't ask you to raise your hands. But the reason I put remnant in there is we have a certain remnant theology kind of down in our psyche. It's like if we can't get along, what we do is we divide and plant another church. And that new church, we are the remnant.

Now, I don't want to hammer this too hard, but you get the feel that we are the remnant who are preserving the true faith because we have moved on and found it necessary to move away. I told you, if I'm stomping on toes here, forgive me. I just stopped saying that. It's kind of in our psyche somewhere. And I would not say it's all bad.

There is a remnant theology taught in Scripture, not so much in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament, the split between I've heard preachers pontificate on this before that the split between the northern and the southern kingdoms in Israel was an attempt to actually it was God ordained in order to retain a remnant of people who actually served Him and let those idolaters go on to do their thing.

So I'm telling you, there is kind of a you can create an argument for what I'm calling remnant theology and remnant practice. However, I do think sometimes this argument has been used not to our good. So I'll just say that for whatever it's worth and let you process it however you care to. But back to the idea of church plant. Oh, I shouldn't mention yet. I'll get to that here in just a moment. So why does this happen? Why does that arrow move across to the right? Well, a lot of times, there's reaction to abuse.

It almost always is abuse of authority of some kind that folks get very, very weary of, and so they decide to move on. There could be other things. There is a mission focus. I put this one in green because it well, it's a good idea. And I'm going to guess that quite a few of you have maybe moved along this line toward church planting because you really care about the gospel being spread to different places in the world, maybe urban settings or foreign settings or whatever. I'm on board. I understand. Revivalism.

What's the thinking here? Well, churches get old and stale and dead, and then there's a time for things to change. There's a stirring within. And sometimes revivalistic movements tend to I don't know. They're good, and they also have a side to them that have tended to fragment us at places. So Sheila and I grew up in the 1960s and the '70s, the years of the rebels, right? It's also the years of the kind of the charismatic movements among conservative Mennonites.

And so it's something you should always remember, something to look for. Almost all movements are a reaction to something. If you can get your finger on that something, you will be a couple of steps ahead in trying to figure out how to respond to it. And I choose the charismatic movement just to actually get at the point. The charismatic movement among the Mennonites grew up because there was some course correction needed. The truth is that the Holy Spirit was minimized, I suppose you might say.

And again, I'm not finding fault there. I grew up in these churches, and I love the church that I grew up in. But it was true that it was pretty easy for people to come in the back door of a church and sit down and make themselves at home and even be members there and participate in some fashion or another and walk out. And it was like as if pardon the terminology, a dead bump on the log.

So my point here is when you see movements, ask yourself the question, "Why did that movement happen?" Because it almost always is pointing towards something that needed some attention. And that's been very helpful to me to ask myself the question and then to respond to it by saying, "Well, how should I respond to it?" So for my wife and I during that charismatic movement era, I think we just began to become aware that, "You know what?

There are some missing pieces here that we should pay attention to." And I began to read passages like Jesus saying, "Look, ask, and it'll be given. You seek, and you shall find." And in Luke, He says specifically, "Ask for the Holy Spirit." I said, "Well, I don't know about the baptism of the Holy Spirit and all the details that are with the charismatic movement, but I do know one thing. Lord, would You please pour out Your Spirit on me?

I want that gift." Well, I'm just saying if we can get our finger on what is behind the movement, it probably would help us in some course correction. Acculturation, this one, of course, I feel pretty negative about. So the movement across this graph that you see sometimes is driven by if you just called it crass worldliness, that might be the right term. Okay? We just want out from under whatever. There are others. Some of you would be better scholars in this. I could talk about it and just let it like that.

Do look over at the far right-hand side here and note that the problem I don't know if it's a problem or not, but there is this dispersion that you see and we sense and feel happening among us. And the question is, "Well, so what should we do about this?" Okay? I'll come back to it in a bit. So I just want you to see that general sense and note the question. Is this multiplication, or is it fragmentation? Are we just spinning apart at the center?

Or are we actually creating a basis by which we can find a way forward in a modern world that gives us a place to stand? I'm going to try to get to some practical details on that. Here's a little diagram I created sometime back that has helped me think through the issues a little bit. So in the Christian community or the worldwide community, there what I'm showing is at the center, the local church and family.

And I try not to separate them here because I'm hesitant to put one at the center and the other one after that. I kind of like them kind of together. Okay? So the local church is a family. And of course, there are families within that family. And then going outward there too, an inner circle of fellow believers, defined fellowship or conference, the evangelical denomination, broader evangelical denomination. Number six there, the invisible historic Christian community.

And by the way, that's the way a number of scholars have dealt with the issue of fragmentation. They just have created the invisible church. A fact of the matter is, the invisible church was hardly spoken of until after the Reformation for sure and not until fairly recent years because, see, it gives us at least a little bit of a place to stand. So all right, things are bad at the local level, but there is the church worldwide. You're going to hear me push back really hard on that.

Truth of the matter is, our Christianity is lived out in a local community. And it is quite easy to love that Chinese brother who is in prison and needs a little money, and we need to pray for him. Why do we find it far easier to love him than that brother and sister by our side, which we rub shoulders with in the local community? And there we find ourselves nose to nose with other issues, and we struggle more. So I'm going to push hard to say, "Life from the Center Out, local church.

Let's pay attention there." Okay? I want to let that lay. The next slide here just gives you the eight issues resisting fragmentation that I want to talk with you about. So I'm not going to go over those now. Just want you to see them. And by the way, if you're frantically taking notes, I do not copyright anything in any way. And so if you want this information, just ask, and I'll give it to you. You can write too if you care to. So we'll be looking at these eight here in the next 20 minutes.

So embrace the mystery first versus you're familiar with. And I say also unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Do you believe that? I do. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. And so true authority is conferred upon this church in which he's going to build.

We're struggling here, brothers and sisters. Probably the question I have given the most attention to in the last 10 years of my life is, how in the world is this notion that Jesus is Lord of all and Lord of my life, how does it translate into everyday life? How has that authority actually worked out on the face of the earth? You follow the question? And we're really stumbling here. At least in my circles, we're stumbling around, not quite sure what to do with this. And I'm not here to solve your problem.

You see what I have here? Embracing the mystery. So I'm not quite sure how to solve all that. If I jumped ahead, Ephesians 1:9, having made known unto us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed in himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times, he might gather together in one all things in Christ—excuse me—both which are in heaven, in which are on earth, even in him.

I suppose some of you may have read Lord of the Rings or something like that, and you have that mystery of whatever is going on in that book. Well, it's child's play. The great mystery of the ages, he says, even maybe not in this passage, but before the world was established, the great mystery was the idea that in the fullness of times, everything would come together in Christ and be exemplified in the church. Do you believe that? I do.

And you're going to say some of you may say, "Well, that's not facing reality." Listen, that's what I mean by embracing the mystery. Somewhere in the early years of Sheila and I's married life, we made up our mind that, "You know what?" Or we thought this thought: the only organization on the face of the earth that will indeed transcend both time and eternity is the church, the body of Christ. IBM will not. The United States of America will not.

They can bicker and fight all they want to at the DNC and the RNC and all of that. But the fact of the matter is, sooner or later, if time lasts, we're sunk. But the church will go on. Now, I ask you a simple truth. If that really is true, and if we really believe that, if that's held in our hearts, why wouldn't we give our entire lives to the cause of the church as described in the kingdom of God? Why not? Pray tell. John, I saw you raising your hand back there.

And of course, we worked together for a while, so we know these ideas. It really was the pivotal point on which Sheila and I's lives turned about 20 to 23 years of age was when we said, "Look, if we believe that well, first of all, not first, but if it's not true, why are we playing games? And if it is true, then it demands, and I want to give everything I have got to it." So I stand on the side of the mystery that was from the beginning of the ages brought to us now.

And I call it a mystery because, brothers and sisters, there are a lot of things I can't begin to explain why in the world they have turned out as they have. But I'm holding tight to this truth. Next, rejoice in diversity but respect boundaries. Very interesting passage here, Paul speaking in chapter 12, "For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ.

For by one spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free, and have been all made to drink into one spirit. For the body is not one member but many." And he repeats it again in verse 19, "But if they were all one member," he even asked it as a question, "if we were all one member or all alike, well, where were the body?" But now are there many members but yet one body. Somehow, we have to learn how to embrace that diversity.

Paul didn't know about cells because that wasn't until Robert Hooke's time and the discovery of cells, a body with a microscope, and we could see cells.

So he talks about hands and feet and eyes and so on and argues at different places that, "Well, the hand can't say that he doesn't need the eyes and so on." Well, if you take that to the microscopic level, you actually see something a little different there because, as I stand before you, one body, but I have cells within my body that are very busy at work right now. And some of them are grouped together: my thyroid gland and in my thymus and in my brain.

And they're grouped together with specific functions that they carry out so that I can do what I'm doing right now. But each one of those cells has a nice—it's encapsulated in a cell membrane. Why is it encapsulated in a cell membrane? Well, so that it can do its specific function. What does that cell membrane do? Here's your boundaries now. It sets a boundary around the function of that cell. And that boundary is capable—it's called a semi-permeable membrane.

So it can let things in and out, let some things in, other things not in, let things out and not other things out. It maintains the integrity of that cell. That's the boundary issue here. And boundaries are to be respected. If I can just hinge you one thing here on this, and I speak both directions, both—we have this liberal-conservative divide. The issue of respecting both directions is one that Sheila and I have tried to cultivate.

Let me give you an explanation here just so you would understand what I'm talking about. So from my own life, a certain congregation that I've been associated with over the years decided that if a wife wears a veiling, then a husband is not permitted to preach on the pulpits. Okay? Now, you can immediately say, "Well, that's what?" Well, listen, respect it. So when I was talking to the brother who was sharing with me about this, I said, "Oh, brother, you don't have to worry at all about me.

You need to know where your boundaries are at." My wife had begun to wear a veiling by that time, a hanging veil. You need to know that I will deeply respect your decision and what your congregation decides to do. Why? Every congregation needs to know. They need to think through their issues. They need to lay them before the Lord, and they need to make the kind of decisions that need to be made. And you need to respect them.

I can't see any other way in which you can live good and wholesomely in the Christian community. I just have found that that's the best way to find my place. And if I'm restricted here, no deal. If the door's open here, praise the Lord, whatever. Remember the word respect here. Remember there are boundaries, and there's only one way for boundaries to work, and that's if they're respected. And that's why I'm pushing at them.

Of course, you didn't hear me say that we don't have to think through very carefully what those boundaries look like and why we have them in place. That's another whole subject. But I'm just saying that rejoice in diversity. Yes, respect boundaries when it comes to this business of having healthy inter-church relationships, I think, very important. The next one, I just simply call mind your own business. It's kind of along the same line in some ways. But I have some verses here.

First of all, an idea: think global, live local. So respect the practices of others. Submit first to your local brotherhood, then to the global church. We've kind of lost track here of this word submission. And I just want to say that, again, this is so powerfully a theme that runs in the New Testament that we can't ignore it. It's one that we need to learn how to live with. I mean, not how to live with. I mean how to embrace and understand the power of it. Romans 14: "But why doth thou judge thy brother?

Or why doth thou set it not thy brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. For it is written, 'As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue confess to God.' So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God. Let us not therefore judge one another anymore, but judge this rather." Here's what you're to pay attention to: that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother's way. Now, think on that because that's the side of the coin.

That's the glass we should be looking through when we are relating to each other. Pay attention to not laying a stumbling block. He says, "Don't judge." Mind you, anybody who knows me and Sheila knows that we are both very strongly opinionated people. You're not hearing me say, "Don't take up opinions and state where you stand." But the scriptures do urge us: don't be judges of each other, jumping in and having all the answers for the congregation that's about 500 miles away or wherever it is. Just don't do that.

Rather, ask yourself the question, "What can I do to remove what may be in the way of that church's or that brother's progress or my own progress?" Pay attention. Don't put a stumbling block or an occasion. So I call it mind your own business. Now and then, Sheila and I are praying in the morning or talking in the morning, and I get into grumbling. Can you believe that? I'm actually a grumbler. I go on and on for a little while, fussing and fuming about this and that.

Then finally, she'll say, "Well, okay." And then I'll say, "You know what?" Or she'll say, "That's really none of our business. You know that." And I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do know that. Thanks. Needed to be reminded. Pay attention to your own business. And for whatever it's worth, I got plenty of it there in my hometown of Guys Mills without trying to solve other people's problems." And I really mean that on the local level again.

I want to say, if you don't hear anything on a practical level, anything else that I've said this morning, remember this one: live out your Christian life in your local community. That will give you the platform to be a church planter. If you can't do it there, pray tell me why you can do it somewhere else. That's why I really urge: do it at home first. Next, or I'll run out of time here quickly. Culture gratefulness for roots and traditions. Passage you're very familiar with: the parable of the sower.

And he made many things he spake many things unto them. And I don't have time to do all of it, so I'll just look at verse 5. "Some fell upon stony places where they had not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up because they had no deepness of earth." If I were to describe this generation—and I'm not pointing fingers—I'm just saying if I were to describe it, I would say that the soil has gotten shallow. And the comment here that Jesus makes is very interesting.

He says that's specifically the reason why the plant springs up quickly. It's because, note, there's growth here. But it grows up very quickly because it's shallow. You farmers know that if you have shallow earth and you have a little sunshine, all you need is a little sunshine and you can get that seed to germinate and grow. But it is the day that declares what's going to happen. And he says here, "Where there's no deepness of earth, shortly it dries up and it's gone." I'm afraid it describes this generation.

Now, why do I point this out? Well, I grew up in a church. In many ways, if you would have visited that church, you would have said, "This church is unhealthy." In many ways, it was. But you know what? That church nurtured me. That church started to dig up the soil in my life when I was just a lad. It started to go even before I went to Sunday school.

When my father took me into that church and sat me down beside him and insisted that I learn to be quiet and not have to play with toys and eat Cheerios and all the other stuff that goes with it, he made that very clear to us. Boy, the soil was just being dug up, just being dug up. We went down to Sunday school class, and those dear sisters who were single sisters in their 30s or their 40s or whatever they were, and they took us into their class and they taught us, we were being nurtured. We were being taught.

I have learned—I have tried to learn hard—to cultivate gratefulness for what went on before me. I already told you this was by far not what you would call a perfect church. Some of you knew it, know what church I'm speaking of. But God was good. When you turn against it with ungratefulness, that kind of stirring up, something dies. The soil gets shallower, and there's difficulty from there. And I could say a great deal more about that. I've actually viewed my role as a teacher primarily right there.

My role as a teacher over the years has been to deepen the soil through knowledge, through discipline, and through other ways, but to deepen that soil because I've seen it repeatedly, this very phenomena that you're looking at here. And traditions themselves also have nurtured me deeply. I really urge us not to be so reactionary to our past and so reactionary to the traditions that actually nurtured us.

And I know some of you are saying, "You don't know what you're talking about." Well, for me, that's what I experienced. I am largely who I am today by beginning to be grateful for what God gave to me upfront through my parents, through my church, through the community that I grew up in. And note, verse 9 says, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." Next, be proactive and not reactive. Oh, my. I could tell a story or so here, but I'd just be a little reluctant to do that.

But you know it's the people who step into the water and say, "How can I help? What can I do here to be helpful?" Those are the movers and the shakers of our world. Too many of us are sitting and waiting for something to happen, and then we're going to react to it. Don't do it. It's the stories we tell or omit. And the way we tell them that skews history one way or the other and draws our children and our grandchildren toward the church or pushes them away from it.

Oh, by the way, Sheila and I now have a great-grandchild, and so we are thinking more and more about these things. It's the stories we tell, and it's how we tell them. And I urge us: you did not hear me saying that we should ignore some of the nasty stories. I'm not saying that. It's still, how do you tell it? How do you actually communicate that to the next generation when things have gone awry? Is it said in such a way that you lament deeply what has happened? Is it said in such a way as they deserved it?

Or you know what I mean. Take care how you do this. Romans 8: "And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose." Here again, I can't answer all your questions, but I do know one thing: that it is a heart set and a mindset that is helpful when I come at a question and come at an issue with a clear grasp on the sovereignty of God and my yieldedness to that sovereignty and some level of truthfulness that is here. I know I don't know what to do with this verse in every respect, but I want to embrace it.

When I see things spinning off to the right and to the left, well, God, what do you want to do here? And what can I do? What should I do? What should we do? Be proactive, not reactive. It's a point within the parameters and the understanding of the sovereignty of God at work among us. Be humble. Consider the beam and splinter of teaching. I want to say that to you. I may act like I really know what I'm talking about. I hardly do. A few things I've learned I've been trying to share with you.

It's when we get proud and we know better, and we are the ones—and they are not the ones—that it's the wrong road. It's just the wrong path. Humility goes a long way in just humbling myself and saying, "Brothers, I'm sorry it went this way or that way. How can I help?" And when it's my turn to say, "We tried, but we failed." So be humble. And you see the verses here. I'm out of time. Prayerfully identify friend, foe, and love always. Don't have time to read this, but you can look at it. Look at it yourself.

Mark chapter 9 and verse 40, particularly Jesus, when the disciples are talking to Him about so-and-so over here doing this and so-and-so doing that, He says, "Well, for he that is not against us is on our part." This is a discernment that we need to make. This is something we need to work at. Again, I quickly—well, there's another one, another passage you don't have time to look at. That's in Philippians 1:15 to 18. I want to just talk a little bit about the autoimmune system and then sit down.

Again, a body story here. You know, oops, that I stand here in front of you, and if the system within my body fails, that system that is discerning between friend and foe about all the activity that is going inside of me, if it fails, I'm done. It has to make a difference between friend and foe. I happen to have had Crohn's disease not all that long ago, so it cuts two ways here. What's Crohn's disease? It's when my body thinks its own body is its enemy.

And so I had my immune system attacking my large intestine for no reason, it seems. We do this sometimes in the church. Again, I just don't have time to unpack all this, but I want you to think about this. Our own living body is very dependent on its capacity to discern between friend and foe, or it's done. Our churches are the same. We have to make a difference. Why should friend fight friend? Pray tell. Friend should fight foe. Friend should help friend fight foe, not the other way around.

Believe me, there are foes, but let's take care to pay attention here. And finally, practice mustard seed faith. Already told you many things I cannot answer. I'll just say this. You can look here in Mark chapter 4. I like particularly verse 27. The sower goes out, and he comes, he sleeps and should sleep, it says, "And rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up. He knoweth not how." Don't think you have to get it figured out. You have good seed in your hand. Sow it.

You don't have to figure out how it's going to happen. A story I'm going to sit down, a really quick one. Not too many, not real long ago. Well, I taught school in this community, and I was back here in the community. I went to a certain church and sat down on the pews. And when we got the when we got the bulletin, it said that a certain brother was going to preach, and I'm like, "Wow, this should be good." I had him in school.

Let's say it this way: he didn't let his education get in the way of his fun when he was in school. But a good boy in a whole lot of ways. That brother got up, and he preached a sermon. He had his act together. I could tell he had spent time on this thing. He had his notes together. The seed sprung up. I have no idea how, but it did. Well, I let you with that because in the end, this is the work of God and not ours.

And the fact of the matter is, if we can plant the seed the best we know how and link arms for the cause of the kingdom, I think we have the best chance of seeing the church go forward in our day. God bless you.