Message Series: Continuing the Work of Jesus – Part 2 – “Simply”

Sermon Series:  Continuing the Work of Jesus – Part 2

 Message Aim:   To teach about the Brethren’s core value on Simplicity

 Sermon Title:     “Simply”    

 Scripture:    Matthew 6:24-34

²⁴ “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. ²⁵ “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷ Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?  ²⁸ “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ²⁹ Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ³⁰ If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹ So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³ But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Synopsis:

 Today we continue with our sermon series about who are the Brethren.  And we are looking at the Brethren identity through its motto or tag line, “Continuing the work of Jesus: peacefully, simply, and together.” This week we turn our attention to the word “simply” in the Brethren motto which gets us to the idea of simplicity or living a simple life. Where simply here points us to something that’s really been a part of the Church of the Brethren for a very, very long time, really all the way back to day one (300 years).  Every single generation of Brethren has wrestled with what does it mean to live a simple life.

I came across a study from several years ago where they were looking at whether or not you can in fact buy happiness.  Well actually, you can buy happiness, provided that you spend your money in some very specific kind of way.  The conclusion of this study is that if you spend your money on other people, particularly people who need it, that will almost certainly bring you happiness. But if you try and spend your money on accumulating more stuff that will almost certainly not bring you happiness.  Living a simple life is something that has influenced almost every single generation of Brethren and in one way or another.  There are a lot of different expressions of simplicity or the simple life. 

 As I observed the Brethren over the years and done a bit of reading and study on this, I have picked up on three things that seem to make up the simple life, or the idea of simplicity, for the Brethren. In the first of which has to do with humility.  There’s this sense that part of our task in life is to not be self-centered, to be more centered on God’s mission and on the needs of other people than necessarily on ourselves.  We look at Philippians 2 verse 3 which says, “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit but in humility regard others as better than yourselves, let each of you not look to your own interests but to the interests of others.”

 The next idea that shows up a lot in simplicity is this whole idea of stewardship.  You can find in the Brethren church in each generation that there is this sense in which the world, the physical environment, all of the resources that we have access to all of that does not belong to us.  It is not ours, it is God’s. We look at Ps 24 which says, ‘the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it the world and those who live on it.” 

 The third part of simplicity that shows up across the board is a willingness to be counter cultural or non-conformity. And again this has different meanings for different people but it does have a biblical basis. We look at things like John chapter 17 vs 16 where Jesus was praying to God about his disciples and saying, “that his disciples maybe in the world but they are not of the same character of the world, they do not belong to the world, just as he does not belong to the world.”  

 So, from my observation the Brethren version of simplicity is shaped by three things: humility, stewardship, and nonconformity.  Simplicity is a pretty core Brethren value.  It’s a value that’s based on putting Jesus first. It’s about becoming less self-centered. It’s about caring for God’s creation. And it’s about living in a visibly different way than the world around us.  And what I find interesting is that as I look at the world around us and I look at all the things that Brethren believe, this may actually be one of the most culturally relevant things that we believe in and that we try and live out.

 I think our value of simplicity really connects with; it has something to say with the culture that we are living in at this time. And as Brethren, we say that simplicity means putting Jesus first and ordering the rest of life around that. The thing that we have to offer the world at this moment in time is the truth that there is in fact another way of living, and that there have been a group of people who have been attempting to do that for a very long time.