Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

The Key Person

by Dave Wilkinson

Romans 12:3

April 11. 1999

I was feeling pretty important there for a few days last fall. I was almost to the point of becoming insufferable. I had good reason. I had been officially declared a "key person" by no less than an official agency of the Presbyterian Church.

It’s because we’re building. As a requirement for getting loans for the new construction, the Session of our church was required to take out a half million dollar "key person insurance policy" on my life. The loan program felt that we were outside their usual debt to church size criteria for approving funds. We are well able to repay what we’ve borrowed -- and then some. But the bean counters felt that any disruption in the forward movement of our ministry -- my untimely demise for example -- could temporarily impact our ability to fulfill our commitments. Therefore, I was officially declared a "key person."

Now I have to confess that it sounded at least worthy of note. I prepared new business cards that read "Dave Wilkinson, Pastor and Key Person." I ordered a new sign for my door -- in gold leaf -- with diamonds.

But then, three things happened to bring my spiraling ego back to earth. The

first was that a few members of the Building Committee and Session were all too ready to observe that I am now worth more to the church dead than alive. The second is that the Loan Program then began to list more and more requirements that I had to characterize as bizarre -- and why shouldn’t this insurance requirement be put in the same category? But the third and by far the most devastating event is that I started to work on this sermon from Romans 12:3 where Paul writes: "For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned."

God’s Word certainly has a way of interfering with my ego trips.

The pastor of a large congregation who was going through a season of the "blue funks." Discouraged and depressed, he entered the church sanctuary on a Monday morning to pray. Falling to his knees before the altar, he lamented aloud again and again: "0 Lord, I am nothing! 0 Lord, I am nothing!" The associate pastor happened by the sanctuary about that time and, overcome with the spiritual despair of his colleague, went forward and knelt beside him. Soon he began to pray aloud, "0 Lord, I too, am nothing! 0 Lord, I am worse than nothing!" Just then the choir director entered the sanctuary and, moved by the pleadings of the two ministers, joined them at the altar and before long he was also chanting, "0 Lord, I am nothing! I am worse than nothing!" The associate then nudged the pastor and whispered, "Look at who thinks he's nothing!"

Biblical humility is hard to hold onto, especially when we’ve achieved it. People even write books about humility — with a part of the secret agenda to become world famous humble people. This is because we generally lean toward being just a bit pronoid -- even in our humility.

I came across this great word "pronoid: in the movie "Fierce Creatures." Jaime Lee Curtis tells Kevin Klein that he is pronoid. Pronoid, it turns out, is the opposite of paranoid. A paranoid person believes, without any hard evidence, that people are out to get him. A pronoid person, on the other hand, believes that everyone thinks well of him and wants to be with him -- equally without any real evidence.

It is important to get past our natural pronoia in order to relate to each other and to God in a healthy way. This is why Paul hits the issue of self-evaluation head on in this verse.

Paul follows a simple outline in Romans. The letter begins with our great human need. It continues by telling us what God has done. It then tells us what God’s action means in our lives. And now, beginning this morning, we are looking at what our lives should mean in the lives of others. There is nothing at all theoretical about the rest of Romans. It is very practical. It is the nuts and bolts of how we as Christians are supposed to live with each other and in the world. It is very practical and very specific and it is something we need. We have not yet reached perfection in our relationships with each other.

The place to start is with ourselves. This is always where God starts. He never wants to change others until he changes us. Romans 12 is about life together in the church. But Paul starts with a believer’s self examination. Paul knows that none of us will ever properly value other Christians if pride is in the way. A quick summary of Romans 12:3-8 is "thinking rightly about ourselves, thinking rightly about fellow believers, and thinking rightly about our gifts."

In Romans 12:3 the Apostle writes: "For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you..." This is a different use of the word grace that the one with which we are familiar -- grace as the undeserved love of God poured out into human life. Paul’s use of the word grace here is related but somewhat different.

The word "grace" is a translation of the Greek word charis from which we get the words charisma and charismatic. The word charis is also translated by the English word "gift". The idea is that one who has received God’s grace has received a gift and is therefore gifted or charismatic.

But Paul is not talking here about God’s gifts in a general sense. He is talking about the very specific gifts given to the church through each believer though the Holy Spirit. He is basing what he is about to say on the gift that God has given him -- the gift of being an Apostle of Jesus Christ with the authority that goes with that office.

In a sense Paul is saying, "By the power vested in me as an Apostle sent by Jesus Christ for the building up of the churches, I order you to do this because this is straight from the mouth of God."

The Jerusalem Bible translates verse 3: "In the light of the grace I have received, I want each one among you not to exaggerate his real importance." The New English Bible has it: "Don’t be conceited or cherish an inflated view of yourself. The Wilkinson Modern paraphrase translates it, "Don’t get a big head."

There are two possible errors in spiritual self-evaluation.

The first, the greater of the two, is that we think ourselves more highly than we ought to think. This is the greater of the two dangers, because it is the one that comes to us most naturally. The reason is that it is linked to pride -- the first and most deadly of the seven deadly sins. Almost everyone of us thinks more highly of ourselves than we ought, and want others to have equally exalted opinions of us.

Now it is true that some people really do have too low an opinion of themselves and need to find a proper self-esteem. That’s the second problem. But it is also true that there are others who seem to think who pretend to think poorly of themselves who actually think of themselves very highly. Sometimes poor mouthing ourselves is really pride, because when we tell people bad things about ourselves what we really want them to say is, "No, I don't think you're like that at all. I think you're really intelligent or wise or attractive or kind or whatever."

"That helps," we say. "Keep it up. Tell me more. I'd like you to talk me out of this." When we act like that we are really being proud rather than humble, and we show it at once if the other person agrees with our earlier negative self-evaluation. We are offended when a friend says, "Yes, now that you mention it, I guess you really are stupid -- or ugly or ineffective or a hopeless case."

One of the problems we have as people is that we usually think about ourselves too much. Yet the solution Paul offers is not to stop thinking about ourselves entirely but instead to start thinking about ourselves in a right way.

This has two parts. Paul says first that we are to think of ourselves "with sober judgment."

Not long ago I was rereading a study of Romans by the late Ray Stedman who served for many years as the pastor of Peninsula Bible Church up near San Francisco. Stedmen wrote on this verse: "When I get up in the morning I try to remind myself of three things: First, I am made in the image of God. I am not an animal and I don’t have to behave like an animal, because I have an ability within me, given to me by God Himself, the ability to react and relate to God. Therefore I can behave as a man and not as a beast. Second, I am filled with the Spirit of God. The most amazing thing has happened! Though I didn't deserve it in the least degree, I have the power of God at work within me. I have become, in some sense, the bearer of God, and God Himself is willing to be at work in me in terms of the little problems and the little pressures that I am going to go through this day. Third, I remind myself that I am part of the plan of God, that God is working out all things to a great and final purpose in the earth, and I am part of it. What I do today has purpose and significance and meaning. It is not just a meaningless thing that I am going to go through. Even the smallest incident, the most apparently insignificant word or relationship is involved in that great plan. Therefore all has meaning and purpose. That gives me confidence without conceit. I have a sense of being able to cope, of being able to handle life. I know I don't deserve this gift of worth and grace, and yet I have it. Therefore I can't be conceited about it, but I can be confident in it. I don't know anything else that can set you on your feet like that."

Confidence without conceit — that’s what it looks like to think of yourself with sober judgement -- as the person God has made you to be through His love -- as a person who holds life as a great gift to be used for God’s glory. As Paul asks the Corinthian Christians while they were in the middle of an ego trip, "What do you have that you did not receive?"

Paul says second that we are to think "according to the measure of faith God has given."

The key to an accurate self-appraisal is faith. As Earl Palmer, pastor of University Presbyterian in Seattle points out in his study on Romans: "The more faith you have in God’s love, the more you are able to be realistic about yourself. Some people think that faith causes a loss of touch with reality but the opposite is the case. In the New Testament understanding, faith makes you more realistic, which means if you really have faith in God, you don’t have to have false fronts about how great and powerful you are. You can be ordinary. You can be sober about who you are. Prideful arrogance, then, in this sense, is the opposite of faith, just as despair, at the other is the opposite of faith.

Humility is not sitting in a chair in a dark room thinking "I’m no good, I’m nothing, I’m garbage." This is not humility. This is sinful self-destruction because it denies that you are a person created in the image of God and a person for whom Christ died. Humility is not selling either yourself or the Lord Jesus Christ short.

Rather, humility is the ability to see ourselves in the light of God’s grace. We have humility when we recognize that our real abilities and all that we have are gifts from God and that we cannot become falsely proud over what is a gift. Humility begins and ends with thanksgiving to God for what He has given to us.

A key to humility is the acceptance of our limits. We cannot do everything nor has God given any of us the ability to do all the jobs that need to be done. I learned very early in the construction of our new building that there are many things about what I know nothing and I’d better leave to those who know what they’re doing. You can all be very grateful that I did not draw a line of the plans or lift a hammer on the new building. The building will be much better for me keeping out of it.

A definition of a conceited person is a man who thinks that if he had never been born, the whole world would sit around and wonder why. But God, through Paul, calls us to a realistic appraisal of ourselves.

The Apostle Paul did this. He freely acknowledged that he was not a spellbinding speaker. One time after Paul had preached for about three hours an young man went to sleep and fell out of a window to the courtyard below. Paul acknowledged that he was not physically impressive. But Paul also knew that he has been called by God and that, despite his handicaps and maybe because of his handicaps, Jesus Christ could work through him.

Now it’s pretty clear what this verse means. You’re not going to find it in a "hard verses of the Bible" book. But it’s not so easy to live -- especially when we compare ourselves to others and think we stack up well. This is something a man named Bob Husband learned through experience.

He tells how he once struck up a conversation in an airport restaurant with a guy carrying a guitar. After a few minutes of casual chatter the guy suddenly said, "You know, there are a lot of lonely people out there." Bob perked up. "All right, Lord, do you want me to tell this guy about you? he wondered. So he asked, "What do you think causes them to be lonely?"

Without hesitation, the guitar guy answered, "It's because they don't know Jesus." And then, for the next fifteen minutes, he preached at Bob -- evidently assuming he was a pagan junior executive. By the time Bob was able to get a word in, he decided it would be too embarrassing to tell the guy he was already a Christian So he played along.

As he said farewell, the guy took a handful of Jesus newspapers out of his guitar case, gave them to Bob, and told him they'd help him find the truth.

Bob boarded his plane thinking about how incredibly insensitive the guy was. To prove to himself how much better he was at reaching out with the Gospel, he decided to use the Jesus newspapers to minister to the person sitting next to him on the plane.

Rather than preach in the man's face, Bob opened one of the newspapers and hoped his seat mate would notice it and initiate a conversation. Nothing happened. So Bob held the newspaper further out, almost at arm's length. Nothing happened. He subtly moved it in the man's direction. Still nothing happened. He rattled the newspaper.

Bob was about to give up on his witnessing plan when the stewardess came by. "Mr: Nelson," she said to the passenger next to him, "just stay seated when we reach Cleveland and I'll come back and help you off the plane."

That's when Bob realized the man in the window seat was blind. And at the same time he learned the sober judgement Paul calls for in this verse. Bob suddenly realized that his ability to reach out was as in limited as that of the man in the airport -- and that he was just as unaware. It was a moment of true sober self-examination. Mine was in wrestling with this verse.

I’m not the key person at Moorpark Presbyterian Church. I know that the cemeteries are filled with people who thought that they were indispensable. Some of them are probably there because they were worth more dead than alive. There’s nothing like having a price on your life.

You aren’t the key person at Moorpark Presbyterian either. There is only one key person at Moorpark Presbyterian Church -- or in any church -- and that is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the head of the church. Jesus is the source of the church. It is Jesus who brings us together and who calls us to live our lives and shape our relationships in the light of His grace. And He tells us through His Apostle: "Don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has given you."

That’s the only way we can become the church Jesus wants us to be.