Morning, brothers and sisters.
Good morning, Jim.
It seems like a long time since I’ve been up here.
First of all, I promised I would do this, so please don’t hold this against me. There was an Irish fellow at the conference. Know his name? Bernard. And he said, next time I do this, to say, “Hello, Bernard and all the people in Ireland. God bless you all.” Okay, so I’m just fulfilling that request.
Yeah, I was quite taken aback by him—in a good way. Encouraging brother.
Let’s read some Scriptures. We’re going to be in the book of Ephesians—not that I’m going to give an exposition—but we’re going to look at a few verses in Ephesians 4. We’re going to start with verse 1 and read a few verses.
Starting with Ephesians 4:1, Paul is writing to the brothers and sisters there. This is after he gives all this wonderful revelation in the first three chapters. Then he gets to chapters 4, 5, and 6, which are really the practical parts of the letter. Paul always has practical parts of the letter.
So he starts the practical part of this epistle in Ephesians 4:1:
I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called,
with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love,
endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were 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.
But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
Therefore He says: “When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men.”
Skipping down to Ephesians 4:11:
And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers,
for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,
till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God,
to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ;
that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine,
by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting,
but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him Who is the head—Christ—
from Whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies,
according to the effective working by which every part does its share,
causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we come to You this morning through Jesus Christ, Who is victorious over death and sin. We thank You that we stand in Him and in His train as He comes to glory. We are in this train, thanking You and praising You that we have this place—this place of honor, and, Lord, a place of honoring even You. We bless You this morning.
Lord, as we come this morning, we have come to ask that You will—I don’t want to just say enlighten us, Lord. I just want to say that You’ll speak to us in a way that will speak into our lives today. Lord, that this would not just be some teaching, but that it would apply to the things that we, as a fellowship, as an assembly, are facing today.
Lord, You have plans for us, and we want to be in those plans and walking with You in them. Lord, enlighten us in how we do that, we pray. Thank You for Your Word. By Your Holy Spirit, we pray that He will bring it to us in life. In Jesus’ name.
I’ve asked and been given permission to have three messages in a row. Now, you don’t have to take notes on that.
The inspiration for this came this last Memorial Day. I was asked to come to Alhambra for their family retreat, and they asked me to speak on growing together.
I thought of it not just because I know the folks in Alhambra. I helped with their youth. You guys are listening to David Pang now. David Pang was sixteen when I started helping with the youth group over in Alhambra. He was just a junior in high school. I used to help him once in a while with his AP U.S. History.
So we know each other, but it has been distant since that time. You wonder, “What do they need?” But I started thinking about us.
I’ve been here twenty years. When I first came here, stuff was happening—stuff that was pulling people apart and things like that. We had some stuff happen, and things have changed.
Some of us are—how can I put this better?—children of the exile. What I mean by children of the exile is this: when the Israelites were exiled, that generation knew about the temple and everything like that because they had seen it. The children of the exile were those born in exile. They were born into a company, and they did not really know the glories and everything else that had been left behind and that they were going back to.
Some of us came in with experiences similar to what happened here in Richmond. Some of us came in from other places. We were going to other types of assemblies, whether denominations or non-denominational things, and we came in and just joined in. We were just going with the flow.
But I feel that the Lord is doing something, and He is saying to us that it is not enough to go with the flow. You do not just enter into the flow and ride along, because He is saying, “I’m building something. I’m doing something.”
It takes everybody. There has to be a solid thing. If you are building a building, you have to put the things together; they fit together. Even in our body, our body fits together. I have fingers and toes and knees. I have my innards—my intestines and stuff like that—but they all fit together, and they all have a place.
Not only that, they are not meant just to be there. For example, a body is born, but it is not fully formed yet. It is going to grow, and it is going to become whatever it is. That is really what the church is supposed to be. That is what we, as an expression of the local church, are supposed to be: a body.
At first, little babies have things, but those things have to grow into place. They have to get better and mature and do the things they are supposed to do. Well, it is the same for us.
I think we need to start seeing it that way: we are not just meeting. The Lord is not after a meeting, right? The Lord has not said, “I want to dwell in a meeting. That would just cheer My heart, just to dwell in a meeting.” That is not what He is after.
He wants a house. He wants a body. That is where He wants to dwell. That is where He has chosen to dwell. Really, it is the body that grows.
That has been on my heart. I am going to give three messages: one today and one in each of the next two weeks.
Today, I am going to talk about the picture of what growing together looks like. Next week, I am going to give some instructions for growing together. Then, the following week, I want to talk about the fruit of growing together and the motivation for growing together. I want to give those three things.
I want to be really simple. I just want to be simple. I do not want to say, “These are things you need to do.” I just do not want to do that, and I do not think the Lord is doing that either.
I think the Lord is gentle. He was even gentle to Laodicea. When He talked to Laodicea, He said, “I’m outside knocking. If you only realize this is what you were, but I’m outside knocking. I want to come in.” That is what Roger was talking about a couple weeks ago, right? “I just want to come in.”
It is the same thing here. I think the Lord is gently saying, “I’m moving, and this is the way I’m moving, and I want you to move with Me.”
I want to give a picture today—a picture of growing together. We can look at growing together in two ways.
First, we can look at growing together with the emphasis on together. There is a bonding together of us as believers. There has to be a growing together in which we are bonded. We come into some kind of relationship.
I am not talking about some lovey-dovey relationship. I am talking about a relationship where we are connected in a way that something can be done—a working relationship.
Second, we can look at growing together with the emphasis on growing. As a group together, we are growing. We are growing into what we are supposed to be.
I am not going to separate them any further than that. There are two ways of growing, but both are desired by the Father. God wants both these kinds of growth in us. That is what He is after in us as an assembly.
Like I said, I wish that thing was not there, and I wish there was no taping, so it was just talking to us, because that is what I really desire more than anything else.
I am going to focus on two little sets of verses here: Ephesians 4:4-6 and Ephesians 4:15-16.
The whole thing begins with this: when Paul is talking about walking worthy and all these things, he says that we are to endeavor to keep the unity. We have to start at this starting point: there is a unity. There is a unity together.
I want to talk about this in a way that is not really spiritual. It is going to be really secular, if I can say it that way.
How many have seen the movie Hoosiers? I am going to give you a different view of Hoosiers, California style. I guess instead of the Hoosiers, we were dudes. Does that make it better? Or California?
We are talking about unity and being a body together. I cannot think of a better way to apply it without getting so spiritual that we get into spiritual language and think only in spiritual terms. Let’s put it in life—in a way that we can see and understand it. Then we can apply the other things to it. But let’s see what it looks like first.
In high school, in college, and even a little after college, I played basketball. As a matter of fact, that is why I went to college. I did not go to college to get a degree; I went to college to play basketball. The only way I knew to keep playing after high school was to go to college, so that is what I did.
Even when my eligibility was up, I was four classes short of my degree and I quit school. I did not like school. It is interesting—now I am a schoolteacher. But I quit.
It was a couple of years before I went back, thanks to a couple of sisters from the fellowship. “Jim, you’re not far away. Go get it.” But I could not play basketball anymore. Why should I go? That was kind of the feeling of it.
I want to take one year that I played, when I was a junior in college. I went to community college for two years, then I went to my four-year school. In my first year at that four-year school, we had a team.
Now, when you think of a team, what does it mean that we had a team? We had a team picture, and everybody was in it. We were all in it. Does that make us a team? Well, it is a team picture, but I do not know if that makes a team.
We were a team on paper. At every sporting event, they give you a program, right? In the program, they have all the people on the team, their height, their weight, their year in college—junior, senior, sophomore, freshman—and sometimes their major.
My coach lied about my weight. He said, “You’re too skinny. I can’t put that weight. I’m putting you bigger.”
So we had a team on paper. You could also say we had a team because we all wore the same uniform. When we were visiting, we wore blue jerseys and shorts, and our name, Titans, was written on them. We were the Titans—the mighty Titans. Our mascot was an elephant. I do not know what a titan and an elephant have in common, but I guess it is because they are big.
But is that what a team is? Just people wearing the same uniform, or people listed in a book together? Does that make them a team? Or are they a team on the floor when they are playing together? Are they a team in the locker room?
Those are good questions, aren’t they? A team has to be more than that two-dimensional, “Hey, it’s in the program,” or, “Hey, here’s the picture,” or, “Hey, we’re in the uniform.” That does not make you a team.
During that season, we started out pretty good. I think we were about four and one. Then we lost four of the next five games.
I remember this because I had never experienced anything like it before. We had just lost to the University of Pacific, and we lost pretty handily—by thirteen or fifteen points.
One of the senior guys on the team said, “We want to have a meeting in our hotel room, and we don’t want the coach to be here. We just want the players.”
There were about twelve guys on the team, and we all went into this room. Three guys—two starters and one important bench player, like a sixth or seventh man—quit the team.
It was shocking. Two starters—that is forty percent of the team on the court. Then, if you looked at the top seven guys, three out of seven said, “We’re quitting.”
It was out of the blue. Where did this come from? What do you do with this? A lot of us were in that room bewildered, like we had just been hit in the face.
We began asking, “Where is the unity of your team then? Where is it? Where did it go?” The question had to be, “What really unifies a team?”
We looked around the room and wondered what this did to the team. The only thing we had in common was that we played basketball. That was it.
A lot of us were not friends. We had different majors. Some guys were Black, some guys were white. We had all gone to different schools before coming to this one. Some had gone to high school together, and they had different types of coaching. They looked at the game differently. Some were from Texas, some from Northern California. What did we have in common?
Could the love of basketball hold us together for a season? We had sixteen more games to go. That is a lot of games. What were we going to do? That was the big question.
There was a reason these guys quit. That year, the school I was going to had a brand-new coach. The team had not been very good the last couple of years, so they brought in this new guy. He had been a successful coach at the junior-college level. He had even won a state championship.
But when he looked at our opponents and who we were playing, he had a different brand of basketball—a different philosophy, a different offensive scheme, a different defense.
I cannot say this for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the guys who quit did not feel the system fit them. One of the starters who left was our leading scorer. As athletes, we have egos. Some of us want to be this man or that man; we want to do this. It just was not sitting right with them.
Maybe they were saying, “My role has been diminished from what I think it should be, and now we’re losing.” It is a great way to look at things, right? “If it was my way, it would be different.” I cannot say that was in their hearts and minds. This is just my speculation.
The guys did not even fly home with us. They found ways home. They called somebody. They had a friend pick them up. We were in Stockton, by San Francisco, while our school was in Fullerton, down in Southern California by Disneyland. We were playing like Mickey Mouse anyway.
So the question was: where were we going to find our unity as a team?
We found it in this: we had to accept the coach. Here were three guys who said, “We’re not doing this anymore because of blah, blah, blah, and this.” The rest of us could have said, “Well, we’ll just play through the rest of the season. We’ll do what we can. We’ll salvage it that way. We’ll just play and have fun.”
But if you are an athlete, do you play to have fun? Is that number one? No way.
There are a lot of Christian people who do not play cards, so they made a card game Christians could play: Rook. You remember Rook? I have been to retreats where, after the meal, they play Rook. You should see people with their game faces on. Nice Christian older sisters have their game faces on, and I have seen people get really mad at somebody else: “You should have played this card when I was doing this.” They are out to win.
Even in a card game—I mean, even when I play cards, Tom knows this—I have to win. As an athlete, I do not want to just play for kicks. I want to win. When I play, I play to win.
I look at the goal. What is the goal? We are going to have a winning season. We are going to be in the playoffs. That is what you want. If you do not do that, your season is a failure. That is the way you should look at it, right? Otherwise, what kind of team are you going to have that says, “Oh, we’re just out here to play”? You think you will get big crowds? No, I do not think so.
We had to come to the place of saying, “We have to accept the coach for who he is. He is the coach.”
For us, if we were going to do this, we needed to buy into that. We needed to buy into who he was, his system, the way he substituted, the way he thought about the game, the way he thought about winning the game, and the big picture of the game that he saw. We had to buy into all of that.
If we did not buy in, what kind of team would we have? We would not have one.
Those of us who stayed—and there were nine of us—were set on a path to grow together. Because of that decision, we were set on a path to become a team, to grow together to be a team.
We had to come to this place of saying, “You’re the coach, and we’re not. We will bow to you and go by what you say because we are going to trust you. We are going to trust that you know what you are doing. We are going to trust that you have a winning record. We are going to trust our careers into your hands, so to speak.”
That is the first thing, and probably the most important thing: saying, “We’re yours. Do with us as you will.”
That does not happen automatically, but it starts with the attitude of saying, “Okay, you’re the guy. You are the man, and we aren’t.”
There are two other little phrases I would like to use: “fitly framed” and “every joint supplies.”
If you look at Ephesians 4:15-16, “fitly framed” is connected with the idea of every joint supplying. There is a connection there that is not broken. Fitly framed together and every joint supplying go hand in hand.
But at the same time, who does the fitting? Who does the fitting together? Who does the framing? Who is being knit together, and how are they being knit together?
Who really is behind the framing? Who is really doing these things? You have to understand that it has to be Christ.
In this basketball situation, the person who is going to fit and frame the team together is going to be the coach. He sees what he wants to do, first of all. Then he looks at what he has, and then he goes from there. He says, “Okay, now I can form and fit things the way I want, so I can carry out my plan and we can win games.”
This idea of being fitly framed together has to do with a Greek word. It is all Greek to you, right? The first part has to do with a joint in a building. We have joints in our building here. We have a hallway that goes here, and things that are joined together.
The other word added to it means to choose. Now, I am not a Greek scholar, and I am not going to give an exegesis on that, but I will say this: choosing a joint. Who is choosing the joint? Whoever is building, correct?
The builder looks at the building and says, “Okay, I need this. I need a piece that is going to go here.” He is looking for it, and he is choosing it because it goes there.
God chooses the joints. Just as the coach chooses the players who will be in the starting team and the substituting team, God chooses the joints to be fitted by bringing us to make choices. We have to make choices.
Like us on the basketball team, our first choice was saying, “You’re the head man.” God lets us make choices too, to bring us into the place of what He is doing.
I believe the first thing the Lord does for us as Christians—and it happens as soon as we are born again—is that we are able to discern His voice.
Sometimes we are helped in doing that. Samuel kept going back to Eli: “You called me. You called me. You called me.” Then Eli discerned what was happening. From that point on, Samuel discerned the voice of the Lord.
It is the same with us as Christians. Even as basketball players, we began to discern the voice of our coach in a different way. In that voice, we discerned the authority he had. We discerned the wisdom he had. We submitted to those things.
As Christians, in being fitly framed together, God gives us this great grace: we can hear His voice. Maybe in listening to a sermon, maybe in reading the Word, maybe in reading a book, maybe in someone talking about the voice of the Lord, we recognize, “God is speaking to me.”
Then, from hearing His voice, we have to make a choice. My choice is, “Will I come out after Him? Will I go after Him?” That is the first choice we make.
Once He gets us out after Him, He proves us.
Our coach put us in situations to see whether we would carry out his desires. He ran a scheme in practice. Then, when it came to the game, were we going to revert back to our old ways? “I’m just going to take my shot.” Or were we going to stick to it?
He proves us to see if we are going to be faithful. He proves us as to what we have heard, what we have seen, and what we know to be true.
A coach explains things to you. Coaches are teachers. “This is why I’m doing this. When this happens and this happens over there, it frees this guy up over here. As long as you carry this out over here, this thing over here will work, and that guy will be open. He will have a shot.”
So you have to be proved. Are you going to stick to it? Are you going to be shown as faithful? The same is true with us as Christians.
Then we prove Him. We often do not think of proving God, but we prove God all the time.
I think there is a hymn:
Only those who prove Thee know
What a grace Thou dost bestow.
Only those who prove Thee. What do you mean, prove Thee? When the Lord tells you, “I want you to move and do something like this,” and you go out in obedience, does He prove Himself faithful? You are proving God.
Not in a bad way, as though you are tempting Him: “If You really love me, do this.” But rather, “Lord, You have told me to do this. I do not see it happening, but I am going out here anyway.” Then the Lord comes in, and you have proved Him. You have proved Who He is.
He is faithful. He is a faithful Creator. He is a faithful Redeemer. We prove Him by obedience and by faith.
The way we proved our coach to see who was right was that we started doing the things he wanted us to do. We started to have some success.
We began to have confidence in the system—the way he wanted us to play—because it started to work. We started to have confidence in him. We began to believe in him as a coach.
We began to mesh together in two ways. First, we began to see what he was trying to do. We were being connected with him, as it were, in his mind for basketball. We were understanding it because things were happening. We were coming to see his mind. We were seeing the bigger picture of the game because of what he was teaching us.
It was not just gut reactions—like AAU, where they just run and gun. There is no rhyme or reason. But there is a rhyme and reason to how to play a game and how to win the game.
It was not just me getting mine. It was, “Win the game.” That is the focus: win the game. We do it together. We are in this together. It is not just my thing. I am not just out for my points.
Then we began to mesh with each other. As the coach started putting us in different roles and team situations, we began to know how each other worked and to feed into what he was doing. That helped all of us in playing the game and winning the game.
As we brought him in as coach, he began to fit us into places according to our own roles among the team. We began to move forward.
We were five and five. We did not win every game. It was not like Hoosiers, where they won the championship. We did not win the championship, but we began to move forward toward the goal. The goal was the championship.
We missed being in the playoffs by one game that year. It was wonderful. We were really close, considering what had happened.
Every joint supplying—that is the last thing we want to touch on here.
The Bible says in Psalm 139, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” What about the body of Christ? Fearfully and wonderfully made.
A team is fearfully and wonderfully made if it is going through what the coach sees and coming into what the coach sees it to be.
There is nothing like seeing a basketball game well played—an offense really working. Almost today, if you want to see really good basketball, you have to watch women’s college basketball or European-style basketball.
Fundamentally sound: all the pieces are moving. It is like a clock. Have you ever opened up a watch and seen all these pieces moving? That is what it is supposed to be. None of this one-on-one stuff—beautifully moving.
It is like watching Princeton. Princeton would get into the Sweet Sixteen every once in a while, and the thing was that they were a team. They were a well-oiled little machine, just working it out. They hit all these back doors and things like that. It was wonderful to watch, because that is what basketball is supposed to be—in my idea, anyway.
Every joint supplying: we all had roles to play on this team. Not everybody is a scorer.
If you can buy into that—if you can buy into the fact that it does not have to be me—there is a wonderful freedom in playing. The pressure is off in a number of ways.
That does not mean that sometimes you will not be that person. You can look at the box scores of our season and see that one guy was high scorer three times in a row, then someone else was, and then the guy who was not even known for scoring—maybe he averaged four points a game—was the high scorer in that game. Or there were different rebounders and things like that.
But there were roles to play. We had guys who were rebounders. We had Robert Smith, a big African-American fellow from Texas. He was not as big as William, but about an inch shorter. The guy was like a truck. You could not get around him. If he was screening you out, there was no way you were getting around him. He was strong, and he had strong hands. If he got a hold of the ball, you were not getting it out of his hands.
We had a point guard. I remember Steve Wright. He could not shoot that well—I think his shooting percentage was about thirty percent—but he could see the court. He could see the court and make a pass. That was really important.
We had what we called a swingman—the person who just knew how to get open and get an easy shot, working in the offense to get open. We had defensive specialists. Then we had people who played every part of the game, but they were just steady.
I remember Norm Eggert. He was a senior on the team, and he was so steady that he was unflappable. Whatever the condition was, you looked at Norm, and Norm was just in that zone. He was playing the game. Nothing bothered him. He was just right there.
So you have all these different roles, and we all played those roles. Sometimes you were brought into other roles because things closed up one way and opened up another way. Everybody was prepared for what happened.
But you knew your role, and you were not seeking another role. You were not jealous of another person because he got all the points, or he got this or that. You were saying, “All right, that’s good. We won.” That was the main point. We won. We were going forward.
Then you have bench players. There are two types of bench players.
The first are the substitutes. On a team, you have about twelve guys, sometimes thirteen. Five are going to start. What do the rest do? They sit on the bench. But probably two others are really going to be put into the game. That is where you get the sixth man and the seventh man.
They are really important because they are ready to step in when something is needed. They are prepared to step in. They have the gift to step in. You might put them in because they are a shooter, or because they are a defensive player. The coach needs something, and they have that gift.
It is not just that they are ready to step in; they are willing to step in also. They have taken their role. They say, “I know I’m not going to start, but I’m ready. I’m willing to take that place I’ve been given. I’ll take it as it comes up, as the coach sees fit to put me in.”
Sometimes these guys were a spark. The team was lethargic, and you put a guy in. All of a sudden, he sparked the team and they started going forward.
Sometimes they just kept things going the way they were. When someone was pulled out, the team did not miss a beat. It just kept going. That is important. You do not want to lose momentum in a game.
That is the same thing for us. What happens if so-and-so is not here for a meeting? Or so-and-so is not here to serve in such-and-such a way? The Lord has substitutes.
One of the hardest things is that some people want the starter, and they do not look highly on the substitute. But who sent the substitute? The coach—or the Lord. You have to look at it that way.
Then there is the bench. I know the bench because my senior year, I was very familiar with it. I think I was all bench that year. We moved up to a different level, and I just was not big enough.
The bench is made up of the guys who basically are not going to substitute. They have front-row seats to the game. Basically speaking, that is what it is. They keep the seats warm for the starters when they come out at a timeout.
But let me tell you about the bench. We had nine guys left. The guys on the bench are who you practice against.
They have to try to do the other team’s offense and things like that when you are preparing for them. These are guys who do not roll over. They are not just going through the motions. If a coach wants his team to be ready, the bench has to be a great practice squad.
They have to be. Your team is trying to prepare for its opponent, and they are not just rolling over. As a matter of fact, some of these guys are trying to move up the food chain, so they play really hard.
I remember in high school there was one guy I hated to practice against: Jerry Brower. I still remember him because he played so hard against me. It was tough, but I will tell you this: he made me a better player.
He practiced hard. I had to practice hard, and that much harder. You might say these people are in the background. They are extras, like in a movie. No, they are not. They are integral parts of the team, even though they do not get the limelight.
Are their names on the trophy when you win a championship? Oh, yeah. Are they in the team picture? Oh, yeah. They are there. They played an integral part.
You never know—some of them might get into a game here and there. I am not just talking about games where you are pulling away. We did not have too many games like that that year.
Another thing is, we only had nine guys. How do you practice with nine guys when it is a five-on-five game?
Our coach went down to the JV team. I played so long ago that they still had peach baskets. I played so long ago that they still had JV teams.
They used to have freshman teams, but when freshmen were allowed to play, we kept the JV team because it warmed up the crowd and things like that. These JV players were not scholarship guys. They might have played some high school basketball, but they were not the stars on their high school teams. They were not our ilk, you know what I mean?
But the coach went down and brought up four dudes. I remember three of them: Rick Porter, Kevin Hill, and Tim LaMaster. I forget the other guy. He brought them up, and they became the practice squad. They played hard against us, and they helped us.
Not only that, but those guys got into some games—not blowouts, because we did not blow people out that year. The coach put them into games in tight situations. I remember a couple of them scored.
The whole thing is, the coach brought them in. He knew they were not the players that maybe he could have gotten scholarships for, but he was choosing them. He was choosing them up.
That should be something for a lot of you younger brothers and sisters, or a lot of you who say, “I have nothing to do.” The whole body—it is the whole team. The whole team is in place. Everybody is on the team. Everybody has a role.
These guys practiced really hard, and some got into games. They did not play very much, but there were a couple of guys who scored a bucket that helped us.
I remember Kevin Hill’s bucket. I remember seeing his eyes pop up when he scored. It was the only shot he took all year, but he made it. It was something. The adrenaline the team got from that—here was somebody who should not have been there but stepped in because he had to be there, and boom, he helped us. Incredible. Just incredible exhilaration for the team, not just for him.
All these things—the coach is taking the people and their talents, putting them together, and putting the substitutes in. Why? Because if they are doing their job, they feed into what the coach is trying to do. They are supplying something.
I think the NIV says, “If they do their work.” I love that, because it is the work you are doing. It is a work. You are a joint supplying, not just while you are working. You are working with the Lord.
I want to put in a plug for the assistant coach. Assistant coaches do not get a lot of credit, but I will tell you what assistant coaches do.
Assistant coaches have the coach’s ear. They see things the coach is sometimes not aware of because he is concentrating on something else. They make suggestions.
To me, that is a person who is an intercessor. He is aware of the whole thing going on, and he has the coach’s ear.
He is praying: “There is a person here who needs to be brought up into the situation. Coach, You need to see him. You need to see him. I’m bringing him up to You.” And the coach says, “Well, I’ll give him a try.” Boom.
There are all these things. It is not just people speaking and things like this. There are all sorts of things that go on in the team, and it is the same with the body.
What makes this a body? Everybody doing his thing. Everybody doing what he is supposed to be doing, therefore supplying what he is supposed to be supplying to the assembly as a whole—not merely to the meeting as a whole.
Yes, we have functioning in the meeting, but we do not want to limit what the Lord is doing to a meeting. He is doing something in the lives of everybody in the assembly. He wants to do something in the places where we live—with unbelievers and things like that.
We are fighting battles, and we need to be helping one another in that. We need to be taking our place. To think that we do not have a place is wrong.
These substitutes might never have gotten in the game, but did they have a place? They did. Not only did they have a place on the team, but they had a place in how the rest of the team thought of them.
We did not think of them as just bench players. We thought of them as teammates. They were there to help us. They were there to hone our skills. They were there to show our weaknesses.
When you are playing against someone else and suddenly you are not doing something, weaknesses pop out. Then the coach addresses it because we are made aware of it.
That is the whole thing. All these people stepping in—this is how the body works. It is how a team works. Anybody who has played a team sport should be able to agree with me.
Some of us, like I said, have ridden the bench. Did that make me say, “I’m riding the pine this year. I’m just going to lollygag in practice”? No. You know your role. You do what you are supposed to do. You step up and you step in. That is what you do.
We started five and five. I think in Alhambra I said we were four and six, but I checked. I have a scrapbook, and I checked to see. We were five and five, so I gave us a little more credit in Alhambra.
We finished the last sixteen games eleven and five. We were eleven and five.
Why was that? We were not any more talented than we were before the season started. Same talent. What happened? What made it so that we were eleven and five?
I will say this: it was because we became a unit. We became unified. We became the team that we should have been from the beginning, but we were not.
That is okay, because it got righted. Isn’t it wonderful to know that things that are not going right can be righted? So it got righted.
We will end with this verse and just a couple of comments. Psalm 133. This is the experience of growing together.
Psalm 133 is a Psalm of Ascents. Matter of fact, isn’t it the last one? No, it is the next-to-last one. So, almost at the pinnacle.
David says in Psalm 133:
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
For brethren to dwell together in unity!
It is like the precious oil upon the head,
Running down on the beard,
The beard of Aaron,
Running down on the edge of his garments.
It is like the dew of Hermon,
Descending upon the mountains of Zion;
For there the Lord commanded the blessing—
Life forevermore.
I want to bring this into a little more focus. Before this crisis, we did not do this, but after it happened, we started to have team meals.
The team went out before the game and ate together. We were together, and the coach was with us. I thought that was a wonderful thing. The coach would sit with us. He would not sit at an opposite table; he would sit with us.
You could say that we were seated with him. We had fellowship. We conversed together. We conversed about past games and about things that did not matter, just to loosen us up. He knew things were tense.
Nobody always sat with the same people. We sat with different people all the time, and we knew one another. We accepted one another. We knew everybody was there for one another. It was a wonderful thing.
I had gone to team meals before and things like that, but that season was so much different. You know why it was different? Because we had that struggle at the beginning.
The unity that was created actually should have been there all the time. In one sense, it was there all the time because we were a team. We had uniforms and everything. We had a team picture. We had the program.
But there is a unity that is on paper, and there is a unity that is real.
A lot of us have a theology that is on paper. We have read books, gone to conferences, and we know a lot of stuff. But that blows away.
The unity that counts is a unity that is found in your life.
We found that unity as a team, and it all started when we had that crisis. That crisis led us to say, “You know something? He has to be coach. If he is not coach, everything we are doing is in vain. It is not worth it. It is not even worth staying here. We should be like the other ones and just leave.”
My brothers and sisters, the biggest thing about us growing together, more than anything else, is that Jesus is Lord.
Jesus must be Lord. Each of us had to come to our own place, in our own minds, regarding that coach, and say, “He is my coach.” Not just our coach, but he is my coach first.
Then, as we all came to that place of saying, “He is my coach,” as we came together, he became our coach.
It is the same with us, brothers and sisters. Jesus must be Lord—my Lord, individually. He has to be it.
But remember, I am playing a team sport. I am brought into something greater. He is my Lord, and He is your Lord. As we come together, He becomes our Lord—our Leader and our Shepherd.
We give ourselves to Him as a flock together, even as we do individually. But the whole key to it is that He must be Lord.
There is no unity without Him being Lord. You can agree in doctrine. You can agree on these things. You can agree on how the Lord should be served. It does not matter. He has to be Lord.
If the Lord does not build a house, the builders work in vain. If He is not Lord, what He wants to do among us is not going to fly. No matter what we think, no matter what theology we have, it is not going to fly.
One other thing I would like to say, talking about some of us being children of the exile: when they came back, they came back as one.
It says in Ezra 1:5 that all those whose spirit God had moved came back. What did they do when they came back? They built what had been destroyed.
They built because the Lord told them to build, and the Lord provided everything they needed to build.
So, brothers and sisters, when we start thinking about how we grow together, how is it we grow together? The first step is that we make Him Lord.
That is the first step. It is the first step of many steps, but that first step has to be: “He is Lord of me. He is Lord of us.” That is what counts.
So let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, I want to thank You for experiences that show us what You are like.
Lord, as things are happening in our midst right now, we have been talking about wanting to hear Your voice and discern it. That is true; we do.
We want to bow the knee. We want to bow the knee to what You want to do in our midst and in our own lives.
Father, some of us are so compartmentalized in our lives. We ask that You would help us to see that, and we ask that You would help us to give over the reins and make You Lord, because what You are doing is far greater than what our lives are full of.
Lord, some of us are walking with You now and praying and going that way. Strengthen them, and help them not to give up hope. Help them draw us in, O Lord, to that place where You are Lord.
Lord, as we come and meet together, we ask that You would be Lord over us all, and that we would see the way You are going. That we would buy in, Lord, to Your plans and the way You see.
Begin to open up what You are doing, so that we can go in and agree with You, and we can go in and walk with You in what You are doing.
Lord, we cannot do anything without You. Unless You are Lord, there is no hope of really accomplishing the things that You want.
Lord, You are so gracious to us. You want to lead us in such a wonderful way.
Lord, we tell You that some of us have failed in that way. You are not our Lord all the way, and we confess that to You. We ask, Lord, that You would help us to make it right.
We want to be more than just willing for You to be Lord. We want You to be Lord. Whatever that has to do, or whatever You have to deal with in that way, we pray that You would.
Lord, we especially pray and thank You for those who have been faithful—those for whom You have been Lord all the time and who have been waiting for us to catch up.
Lord, help them continue in their faithfulness. Help them continue in praying to You, having Your ear, and interceding for what You are doing here. Bless them.
Bring us to that place, Lord, where we have what You want. We have that team. We become that team that we are supposed to be, all the time, with You as our Head.
We ask this in Jesus’ name.