Let’s bow our heads:

What a sweet sound Lord, we thank you that we have the opportunity to come and sing before you in such a way that you can test our hearts. Father we know that our words and our appearance may be fouling people around us but Father we know that you are the one who tests are hearts and rewards according to each man’s deeds. So Father, we know that we are here because we want to be here. You have called us to be here this morning for a very special purpose. There is something here this morning that you want us to have. There is something that you want us to be challenged with, there is something you want us to know. Father we ask this morning that you would teach us and you would instruct us, that you would speak to our hearts, that when we leave this place that we would know we have been in the very presence of the God of the universe. We thank you in Jesus name, Amen.

I was gone the last two weeks in case you didn’t notice. I am back, and my Grandson who was here missed me and he wanted to come up here on the pulpit with me and so they took him out. So if you cry we will take you out. We had a great time by the way, I did not actually go to Mexico even though I said three weeks ago that I was heading off to Mexico for the winter sun and then I backed off and said no we were actually going hunting for a couple of weeks. Some still thought I was going to Mexico anyway and so, No we did not end up in Mexico. We ended up in Illinois for a week of hunting with my son and Steve Evans and Jay Jay Schlafley and a fellow down in Illinois and then went to Kansas and hunted for week with Rick Harris, Zack Harris and one of the guys from Illinois. We had a great time. If I am changed it is because I spent a week with Rick Harris. If he has changed it is because he spent a week with me. We had a great time and as always when we get back from vacation we are supposed to report in as to what we learned on our vacation, so I thought I would do that this morning.

It is always fun to be a lay person for awhile because you see life from a whole different perspective when you are not responsible to do any preaching or anything like that. You just kind of, your responsibilities as pastor are gone and you are in a whole different territory in southern Illinois and Kansas and so nobody knows you as a pastor so you kind of go incognito in that respect anyway but you get to observe life from a very different perspective. It was a lot of fun. The first thing I learned is that two weeks is two long. About the fourth day out I started missing my wife to much and I said if I could come home right now I would but I am the one who arranged the trips so kind of like you had to go. I also want to appreciate my wife before you, we have been married, as of last week, thirty years. She is a rare breed who encourages me to go hunting on our anniversary. We do all our celebrating before and after so we, the day itself we are usually apart but celebrations go before and after. So I appreciate my wife so much and am beginning to appreciate her much more after a few days gone.

I also learned that 750 miles from your two granddaughters are to many miles. They change to much in between times. We hadn’t seen our newest granddaughter since last spring at Owen and Marcy’s wedding and Cora who was born last December 1^{st is now walking and starting to say a few little words and it is to far away when they live in Missouri and now they are going to be going to Texas by the first of the year. So that is way to far, so we may have to do something about the Army and change that.}

We also learned that southern Illinois has just discovered teepee! I bet we saw 50 homes teepeed in southern Illinois. It is like they discovered a new toy and every place they had to try it out. You would be driving along and there would be a house teepeed over here and the next one teepeed over there and over there would be another one and pretty soon the whole place was teepeed and we thought they had just discovered it but the guy who lives down there said they have known about it for some time. Or we thought since they wouldn’t take credit cards a lot of different places we thought maybe they had just discovered toilet paper and were out drying it. So we weren’t really sure which it was.

We also learned that Kansas does not look anything like Michigan. The fellow that I meant here in Michigan who just moved here from Kansas when I said, ‘Boy I always kinda wanted to hunt Kansas, do you have any people out there who have property?’ ‘Oh yah, my friend owns two thousand and my cousin owns another two or three thousand, he said you can probably hunt there. So I thought oh great.’ Well, it is four thousand acres and a hundred acres of cover. Because it is all open, it is all open ground the only cover is in the ditches that are to steep to farm. So we had about two hundred acres of cover to hunt and saw lots of bucks and they were all dumb. There are not hunted much and I did happen to get one and Zack got one, just in case you are wondering. Owen got one in Illinois the week before. So we some success.

Had a great time and I learned two jokes that were fairly humorous at the moment, you might like them. One was at the church I went to the pastor was doing a kids time with the children and he ask the kids if they knew why witches don’t ride there brooms when they are upset? Because they are afraid they might fly off the handle. And you probably heard about the lady who was pulled off the airplane yesterday in Detroit because she was trying to get knitting needles on the plane. They were afraid she might knit an afghan. That’s not all I learned on vacation but that is a couple of things I learned.

The best story that we got, well there were some good stories but one of the first best stories in the hunting woods at least was two weeks ago in Illinois. Jay Jay Schafley, whose parents and maybe sister are here this morning, set a decoy out, a doe decoy. He was sitting in his stand and was along near a river area and towards dark he begin to hear the sound of a fawn lost in the woods. So for about forty minutes this fawn is wandering around and lost and he never sees the deer and pretty soon he looks over, sees motion and here comes a hunter through the woods real slow and careful and he thought well he will see the decoy pretty soon and will look for me and we will just acknowledge each other and he’ll go hunt somewhere else. Pretty soon he loses sight of the guy and he hears an arrow flying through the air and the guy misses his decoy. He shot at the decoy and it hit the ground behind the decoy. He thought well he will figure out that it is a decoy pretty soon. Well pretty soon he hears an arrow again except the decoy is hollow hard plastic and so it makes, bong, real loud. In fact, Steve Evans who was about three hundred yards away heard it hit and knew what had happened and we had walkie talkies so Jay Jay was filling him in as he went. Steve Evans couldn’t even talk back to him because he was laughing so hard. He knew what had happened. Jay Jay sat in the tree stand just wondering what the kid was going to do. So after that he just kind of trudged on through the woods to the decoy and pulls his arrow, unscrews his tip and gets it out finally. Made a really good shot on it. Then he starts looking for Jay Jay, like oh boy and sees Jay Jay. Jay Jay waves at him, nice shot. It was a kid from Mississippi who was just first hunting with his Dad up there in Illinois and doesn’t know what to do then of course, he was so embarrassed. Jay Jay, I am sure, consoled him. But we have a good story to tell now about the Mississippi stalker. Shot the decoy. If you want to hear anymore hunting stories there are some other good ones you might have to ask Rick Harris about his trip, how he faired. We had a good time, a great time, in fact. The weather was hot, there was 78 degrees Wednesday in Kansas and in the 60's and 70's all week in Illinois. So the hunting wasn’t as good as we’d like but we did see a good number of deer and passed up bucks and finally took a couple of them. So we had a great time. We are back and it is nice to be back.

We also hunted within a half mile of Nebraska. I had never been in Kansas, I had never been in Nebraska. I was informed by the guy from Illinois, his name was Roger Rone, that when we get into Kansas, when you leave Kansas, there is an appropriate thing you have to say. Anybody know what it would be? You have to say, I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore toe dough. OK so as soon as we left Kansas and it said Welcome to Nebraska, which is only half a mile from where we were hunting he says, I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore toe dough. So we were supposed to do that every time. What we did was drive along the middle of the road, so he was in Nebraska and I was in Kansas. That was quite a thrill! So we got to see some new territory, Nebraska looks just like Kansas. You can look at one and you see both of them actually.

I learned some other things though, very interestingly, as I attended two different churches the last couple of weeks. I went to a church with Audrey, our daughter, in Richland, Missouri, a little church called the First Christian Church. Christian Church is the name of a number of churches out there and this was the first one I guess. We went to that one, a church of about 70 people or so, not a large church. Real friendly, and nice people, and a very, if you had been in our church twenty years ago it would have been the very same service, in terms of musical style and that sort of thing. We have changed things obviously since then. The sermon was good, the spirit was good, the music, I did learn one thing, that you can sing hymns to fast. They sing at 80 miles an hour in that church for some reason I had trouble catching my breath between verses and words. It was enjoyable, nice people and a good service.

Last week I went to a church in Hiawatha, Kansas, a church of probably a couple hundred or so. I was in the second service which was at 10:45 and I can not understand why anybody would want to go to a late service. 8:30 in just right, 9 o’clock is later than I like but 10:45 the day is all gone. You have your preferences, of course, but we were getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning, 4:30 so by the time 10:45 came around I wasn’t ready to go to church I thought the day was gone. I was ready to go back to bed. Finally got to church, well it was enjoyable but very different, it was what we call high worship. Had classical music, which I like classical music but it was classical weird. OK, not classical good, classical like you kind of wanted to go can you pick another piece there. They had a chancellor choir, a bell choir, they had the young people come up light the candles and carried the cross up and things that we don’t normally do here but other churches do regularly. Very interesting, enjoyable to be in, the hymns were hymns that I had never heard of before. I can read music and I can sing alright and I couldn’t sing any of them and nobody could sing around me either. So most of the ones who sang were the chancellor choir because they practiced them. So Scott always says I don’t know if I like hymns or not but if you grew up in that kind of hymn singing you wouldn’t like hymns either. I wouldn’t. They didn’t sing any songs that I knew, so I thought this is interesting, I can appreciate being a visitor in our church. Say somebody comes from that kind of background and sits in here and sees long haired hippies playing guitars, and drums and things like that, it would be very different from their experience and so I got to look from a little different view point. It was really enjoyable. I learned to watch with a little asterisk when to stand up and sit down. Nobody told you. When everybody stood up I stood up and when they sat down I sat down. Wanted to make sure I didn’t stand up or sit down in the wrong spot. They had a children’s time, the pastor told a couple jokes and told a little story with the kids and it was interesting because when they had the kids come up the whole congregation sang a children’s song while the children came up to sit down. Very formal, very interesting, it was not terribly challenging to me in terms of the worship it self because the song leader was truly just a song leader. All he did was led the songs, he didn’t encourage you to look and see what we were singing, or the lift your eyes toward God or to focus on God’s character of anything. It was just a matter of standing up and being the one who was in front while the songs were sung. None of them were singable but I also learned something else. There is no way in the world I could be in a bell choir because I am not coordinated enough. As I watched those ladies, they were watching the music and watching the director and nobody made a mistake, not me. I would be playing at the wrong time and they would know who it was every time. So I decided I was not going to be in a bell choir.

But I also learned the importance of lay people. That means people who are not professional Christians, like me. I am a professional Christian, in the sense of being a pastor. So I have my time when every morning I can be in my office have quiet time before the Lord and have time to read and pray and to do the things that keep me fresh with Christ and out there it is very different. You have to make the time, you have to find the time, you have to insert the time in your schedule, you have to prioritize so that you can do that. It is much more difficult when your schedule is all messed up because of being on a different schedule than you are normally. I began to listen to as we were listening to the news cast about the war we are involved in. President Bush keeps saying that we are in a war on two fronts, we are at homeland security and we are also attacking the enemy out there where he is. I thought you know last Sunday part of the sermon that the pastor preached was encouraging his people to kind a place of service within the body. I thought you know that is, and then of course I was not apart of any body of Christ there except the universal body of Christ. I am not part of any church there. I realized that for two weeks I was a lay person with no pastor. And so I had to be the influence for Christ. I had to be the person who was influencing those around me for Christ. I had to be the one who was honest when honesty was required. The person who didn’t hunt property that didn’t have permission on. The person who was full of integrity and had an attitude that would be honoring to Christ. One of the things that I watched, Missouri is in the Bible belt, that band across the middle of the country that has churches around every corner and everybody is a Christian whether they are or not. It was very interesting because Audrey and Adam have some neighbors that are very nonchristian in their attitudes and we have had some dealings with them and it is like nobody would be impressed for Christ by their attitude but every time we have gone to the church there they are the ones who invite us to church and we sit near them usually, they are neighbors of there’s and it is like that is interesting, we are doing battle on the home front but we are not doing much battle on the outside of the church. We have two fronts that we as Christians fight in, we fight church, we try not to, but there is two areas of ministry. One is within the body of Christ, I mean there are a number of things a church needs to have done within its own body in order to minister as a church. But then us as individuals who are the military out there, today by the way is Veterans Day. We are the officers, the military, for Christ. We have the homeland offices in a sense that the homeland work within the body of Christ. There is that body that we serve in. Ephesians 4 says that the body grows as each individual part does its work. So there is a place of ministry within the body that we are required to be in service. God does not give us the out and say, well I go to church, no we are not to be here in the pew, we are to be here in the ministry. We are servants of Christ and so we need to be able to say, ‘Yes here is what I do within the body of Christ.’ Everyone of us has a calling from God to do something within the body of Christ. What is it you are doing, how are you serving Christ within his body? And to go to church is not it. To be in church, to be in a pew is not service, that is attendance. It doesn’t mean anything to show up, it means something when you serve thrist with your life within the body of Christ. That is what is says in Ephesians 4, everyone of us are part of the body of Christ, as ligaments and parts of the body, that says the whole body is built up as every part does its work. So each one of us has a calling within the body to serve the body. That is kind of the homeland security area.

Then we are called to be witnesses of his outside the church. We are to be in the world but not of the world. We are to be servants of his so that our neighbors come to find Christ because of our influence because of our words, because of our witness and so we do serve within the body, we serve outside the body in terms of within the world. Turn to I Peter Chapter two, I began again to understand the importance of lay people, the importance of us as individual people who do not hold a professional position within the church but are still Christians called to serve Christ within without the church.

I Peter Chapter 2, says this in verse one, ‘Therefore, putting aside all malice and all guile and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.’ So that is the first step, you need to be saved. Obviously you need to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior. You are not saved until you do. You are outside the kingdom, you are outside the body til you accept Christ then that point you are given entrance into the body of Christ. So he says, ‘Long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.’ There is that personal growth that is like a baby. A baby is ministered to until they are old enough that they can start helping others. At some point we expect a child to help around the house with chores. They need to do some dishes, they need to burn the papers or take out the trash now days. In the old days you got to burn papers. And so a child is expected to assume some of the responsibility for the work of the household at some point. Same with baby Christians, early on they are ministered to, they are taught, they are trained, then at some point they become producers not consumers. So we grow in Christ and we begin to produce, we begin to minister within the body of Christ. In Verse 4 it says, ‘Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected by men, but choice and precious in the sight of God, you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For this is contained in scripture: “Behold I lay in Zion a choice stone, a precious corner stone, and he who believes in him shall not be disappointed” This precious value, then is for you who believe, But for those who disbelieve, The stone which the builders rejected, this became the very corner stone and “A stone of stumbling and a rock of Offense”; for they stumble because they are disobedient to the word, and to this doom they were also appointed.’ So he says, Jesus Christ some accept and some reject. Those who accept Jesus Christ, of course, are saved and it becomes a great thing for them. Verse 9, ‘But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.’ So he says, you are a chosen race, those in Christ are chosen by God to be his representatives, his priests. Now if you know anything about priests, in the scriptures it talks about prophets and priests and kings. In Christ they are all three offices, they call them the offices of Christ, the prophet, priest, and king. The prophet spoke for God to the people. Thus saith the Lord, when Isaiah, Ezekiel or any of the prophets spoke they said this is what God says to you. Well, the king of course ruled in a governmental sense. The priest was the one who offered sacrifices and also administered the mercy of God to the people. When people repented and confessed their sin the priests gave them the assurances of forgiveness of sin upon there repentance. So the priest administered the excellency of God to the people. He administered for God, the mercies of God to the people. Says, we are now a chosen race of people of God’s own choosing, a royal priesthood so that we now as Christians represent the mercy of God to the people around us. Do we represent the excellency of God to the people around us? That is the outside the church thing. We minister to each other obviously within the body, the homefront. But also outside the church when we are not in church services how do people see us out there? Do they see reflected in us the excellencies of Christ? Of his marvelous grace and mercy, do they see in us the thing that God sees in us? His mercy, grace and love showered upon those around us. That they are drawn upon him because they are drawn to us as Christians? We are to minister within the body, we are also the royal priesthood to administer the excellencies of God who saved us to those around us.

I have a new appreciation, a new understanding, how important you folks are because almost the whole week goes by in your life without me around. I am not the minister of the church, by the way. They call me the minister, I am not. I am the pastor. I am the equipper, the trainer for the works of service for you folks to do because you are the ones who administer, you are the ones who represent Christ wherever you are. The old statistics say that if you as a person and I as a person have about nine significant relationships in our life, that we have great influence over. Now your nine are not my nine. And I only have nine but if each one of you have nine that multiplies us by three hundred or so. That is a lot. That is twenty seven hundred people that you influence compared to nine that I influence. So I am not the minister of the church, you folks are the ministers of the church. When we leave this place you minister to the people out there. You are the one who prays for your neighbor when they are ill, you are the one who says, Yes God can forgive you upon the basis of your repentance, confession and acceptance of Christ. You are the one I can help with Biblical council, you are the one who ministers to those nine or ten people around you. I only have nine or ten around me. You have 2700 people if you put us all together. So he says you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood that you may proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Verse 11 says, ‘Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may on account of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God on the day of visitation.’ So it says keep your behavior such when they look at our life they glorify God. Within the church what is our calling? What are you doing within the body to help the church to minister? What is our place within the church? What are you doing? What has God called you to do and how have you responded to his calling? Outside the church how are you living? How are we living outside the church? Are people glorify God because of our lives? Remember Jesus said, Let you light shine before men in such a way that they will glorify God because of you. On account of your good deeds. Peter says about the same thing. So we have the homeland security part. We have the work within the church, we also have the influence outside the church. We are the royal priests who administer the mercies of God to those around us. They should come to us and say would you pray for my friend, would you pray for my daughter, would you pray for my husband, would you pray for us? Here are some situations that we don’t understand, can you help us? Because they know us as people who know the word of God, who know God personally and they can come to us because of that. So what is your calling within the church and how are you living outside the church?

Let’s pray:

Father we thank you. Thank you Father for the time away but Father I thank you so much for the time back. I thank you, Father, that you have given us the ability to be away and travel this great country without fear, without hesitation, without road blocks, and armed guards and things. Father I thank you that we have to chance to visit family and spend time with friends out in the woods and along the country roads and seeing wonderful new territory and just having a great time. Father, I also thank you for these great people that I can come back home to and know in a place where I am loved and I love them and all these people that I missed so much while I was away. Father, I thank you for Kate and my family here for April and Owen and Jeff and the boys and for Audrey and Adam out there in Missouri and the girls there. So much Father we love them and thank you for the chance to see them but also Father we thank you that you have a place for us here. A place of ministry, Father I don’t make a great lay person, Father I pray you would help me to be a great pastor. I pray that you would help these great people to be wonderful servants within the church and that they would live lives exemplary outside the church so people glorify you as a result of there lives. We ask it in Jesus name, Amen.