Introduction
Last week, Paul talked about community. Today, as we continue to set out our foundational values here at King’s, I’m going to talk about belonging.
You might be thinking, wait a minute, that’s the same thing, isn’t it? Pretty well? Belonging and community? What’s the difference?
And they are quite similar to be honest. There is admittedly some overlap, but belonging is more fundamental than community.
Community, as we saw last Sunday, is about participation and sharing and doing things together. Working together. Eating together. Learning together. Laughing together. Taking communion together. Building and achieving something together.
But belonging comes before all that. Belonging is being able to say, “I am truly welcome. I’m in. I fit here. I am loved. King’s is my home. I belong.”
According to sociologists, there is an instinctive human yearning to be part of something, to belong. It is hardwired into us in creation. God has made us this way.
In fact, research shows that knowing you belong is a far greater factor in sustained personal happiness than job satisfaction, level of income or marital status.
The popular consensus, until recently, was that the most fully satisfied people in the world were those who have high self-esteem.
But lately several large university studies have all come to a surprising conclusion: even good self-esteem, (having a positive self-image), has little effect on individuals’ overall sense satisfaction and wellbeing in life compared to knowing you fit in and are accepted.
Instead, the healthiest and most personally-fulfilled individuals, according to the research, were found to be those who are most aware of having a place to belong.
Who do you belong to?
Do you feel that you belong? What - or who - do you feel you belong to?
If you’re married, there is a sense that you belong to your spouse. Like many others here, Kathie and I vowed on our wedding day; “all that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you.” We belong to one another.
But, whether you are married or single, I want to say today that, according to the Bible, negatively there are three senses in which you do not belong, or should not belong.
And positively, there are two senses in which you do belong, or should belong if you are a Christian.
So let’s delve into God’s word and hear what the Lord has to say to us about the ways in which we do and do not belong.
Prayer…
1) We no longer belong to ourselves
Firstly, if we are Christians, we no longer belong to ourselves. 1 Corinthians 6 says this:
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honour God with your bodies.”
This is highly counter-cultural. It is not popular.
Our generation worships at the altar of personal freedom and says, “No one tells me what to do.” “My private life is none of your business.” “It’s my life, I can do whatever I feel like.” “My body, my rights.”
But being a Christian has always meant radical resistance to the spirit of the age.
The old Salvation Army evangelist Gipsy Smith once said, apparently in the presence of the Royal Family, “Only dead fish always go with the flow. It’s only a live fish that can swim against the current.”
But that’s what we do. We are not our own. We no longer belong to ourselves. My body is not mine to do as I like with. I belong to Christ.
Is that part of your thinking? Is that how you see yourself?
2) We no longer belong to the world
Secondly, we no longer belong to the world either.
In John 15.19, Jesus says to his closest followers: “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”
Here, ‘the world’ means all the values and ideas and ways of thinking of our surrounding non-Christian culture.
We no longer fit naturally into the thinking and beliefs of the worldview around us. Our instincts begin to change at conversion.
Things we used to do we don’t feel comfortable about anymore. Things that used to make us laugh we don’t find funny anymore. Our vocabulary changes. We no longer believe some of the things we used to. Some of the places we used to go we don’t find so appealing these days.
We’re peculiar people. That doesn’t mean we have to be weird and otherworldly. But in 1 Peter 2, Peter calls us “foreigners and exiles in the world.”
We don’t fit in. We frequently feel misunderstood. The prevailing worldview is not home for us. We’re misfits.
I remember when we lived in France, the Minister for Health became a Christian and started going to one of the larger churches in the city.
Her testimony, having been a militant campaigner for the most liberal abortion laws, was that, as soon as she was baptized in the Holy Spirit, her eyes were opened and she became pro-life. It was political suicide. It cost her her job.
Christians in every generation find themselves clashing with the prevailing culture. And usually there’s a price to pay.
In the first century, the clash was whether to refer to Caesar as lord or refuse. If you were caught refusing to join in, however respectfully, they threw you to wild beasts in the Coliseum.
600 years ago, in this country, if you were caught owning or giving away a Bible in English you would be burned at the stake.
In our day, and in our culture, the punishments are less severe, they are rarely life-threatening, but they can be life-changing.
You can be sacked on the spot and become virtually unemployable if you dare to state any kind of biblical point of view, even privately, on matters of human sexuality, gender identity, or the uniqueness of Christ as Saviour.
“If you belonged to the world,” Jesus says, “it would love you.” If you’re a non-binary vicar, or a transgender nun, or a bishop who identifies as a gay ostrich, or a priest who celebrates Diwali and Ramadan, you’re almost guaranteed to be a celebrity. You'll be a shoe-in for Thought for the Day or The One Show. You’d be so well-liked.
But “as it is," says Jesus, "you do not belong to the world… that is why it hates you.”
3. We no longer belong to the devil
Thirdly, we no longer belong to the devil.
In one of those uplifting and inclusive statements Jesus often made (!), he said that people who reject him belong to the devil (John 8.44).
Here’s what he said (to those who did not believe in him): “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him.”
In John’s Gospel and letters, it’s always black and white. It’s either love or hatred, light or darkness, night and day, believing or not believing, truth or lies, Christ or Antichrist.
There’s no fancy dimmer switch with John. It’s either on or off. That’s what he most remembered about Jesus' teaching.
And at the end of the day, when it all boils down to basics, in Jesus' way of thinking, you’re either a child of God or a child of the devil.
Every time the devil tries to drag you into going back to the things you repented of when you came to Christ, you can smile and tell him to go to hell.
You don’t belong to him anymore. He has no hold on you.
So, put negatively, those are the three senses in which the Bible says we do not belong.
We are not our own, we are not of this world and we no longer belong to the devil.
So, who do we belong to?
The Bible has two answers to that question; firstly we belong to God and also we belong to one another.
4. We belong to God
It says in Romans 14.8; “If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.”
If you belong to God, says Jesus, you hear and obey his voice (John 8.47).
The reason Christ died is so that we would no longer belong to ourselves but to him so we bear fruit for God (Romans 7.4).
The most profound sense of belonging comes from knowing that God, our good, good, Father, chose us from before creation, adopted us and lavished us with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
Some of us, perhaps because of bad experiences with our earthly fathers, find it hard to relate to the idea of belonging to a loving heavenly Father.
For 11 years at boarding school, a lonely young Winston Churchill repeatedly wrote letters to his dad asking him to reply and to come and visit him, as other fathers did.
But his father did not even once either write or visit in all that time.
After leaving school, Churchill went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Only passing the entrance exam at the third attempt, he failed to get into the infantry. So he had to settle for the less prestigious cavalry instead.
At which point Randolph Churchill, his father, finally wrote a letter to his young son. Imagine Winston's excitement as he opened the letter, no doubt sent to give him some comfort and encouragement. Here are some extracts:
The first extremely discreditable failure of your performance was missing the infantry, for in that failure is demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly happy-go-lucky, style of work for which you have been distinguished at your different schools.
Never have I received a really good report of your conduct in your work from any master or tutor … You are always behind, never advancing in your class. Incessant complaints of total want of application come from your masters …
With all the advantages you had, with all the abilities which you foolishly think yourself to possess … this is the grand result that you come up among the second rate and third rate…
Do not think that I am going to take the trouble of writing you long letters after every failure and folly you commit and undergo … because I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say about your own accomplishments and exploits.
Make this position indelibly impressed on your mind, that if your conduct and action is similar to what it has been in the other establishments … then … my responsibility for you is over...
I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life that you have had during your schooldays and latter months, you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public-school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence.
If that is so you will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes yourself.
Your affectionate father, Randolph Churchill.
Decades later, Churchill would still quote this letter in search, surely, of some kind of healing for his broken heart.
Soon after his father’s death, Churchill wrote a two-volume biography of him as if trying to somehow connect to this man he never really knew and from whom he experienced only coldness and indifference.
Even into his late seventies, Churchill was found painting a portrait of his dad. You just get the feeling that he never recovered from the sting of rejection and not belonging.
If you are a Christian and that even faintly resembles how you feel God sees you, you’re like a billionaire living in filth and eating out of a bin.
Your status as his princely son or princess daughter is assured, not by how well you do, but by the innumerable perfections of Christ, who has established you and rooted you as a fully adopted, eternally loved and totally secure child of God.
Jesus says in John 8.35 that the children of God belong in his family forever.
God’s grip on you will never weaken and his love for you will never cool because you belong to him.
5. We belong to each other
And fifthly, before I conclude, we belong to each other.
Groucho Marx used to joke that he wouldn’t want to join any organisation that would accept him as a member.
But Nicky Gumbel from the Alpha Course says, “Church is not an organisation you join; it is a family where you belong.”
Church is a family where everyone belongs.
Old and young. Black and white. Male and female. Introvert and extrovert. Saint and sinner. Serious and quirky. Left-leaning and right-leaning. Rich and poor. Able bodied and disabled. Married and single. Educated and illiterate. There’s a place for you.
Here’s Paul, talking about the church in Romans 12.5:
“For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”
The New Testament, here and in several other places, compares the local church to a healthy human body; one body with many parts.
A diversity of limbs, various bones, different sorts of organs that do distinctive things but all functioning harmoniously at the same time to make the body work.
A liver or a heart or a brain are useless on their own, no body will survive long without them.
I am less complete without you in my life. She is less complete without him. He is less complete without her.Everyone in this room is enriched in some way by everyone else.
Some of us maybe struggle to feel like we fit in, but Psalm 68.6 says; “God sets the lonely in families.”
One of the questions I get asked most frequently about my faith is, “can you be a Christian and not belong to a church?”
A friend of mine says that’s like asking can I be a naturist but always keep my clothes on?!
“I’m a Christian but I don’t do church” is one of the saddest things I ever hear. Church isn’t a thing you have to do, it’s dear friends you enjoy life with.
And there's safety in numbers. I read a book once about the lion’s hunting behaviour. They stalk their prey for ages, observing the pack, waiting to see if a young one or a weak one will get distracted and get separated from the rest.
Once a lion selects its victim it approaches silently, patiently, inch by inch, until suddenly it springs, chases, jumps, severs the jugular artery and feasts on the still-warm flesh.
Let’s not be soft about spiritual warfare. That ferocious, bloodthirsty, man-eating hunter is what God says your enemy, the devil, is like.
And there’s a tragic picture right there of a zebra who doesn’t do church.
I’ve never known a strong Christian who wasn’t committed to belonging in a local church. We belong to each other.
Ending
What does belonging look like at King’s? How do we get to belong and how do we show that we belong?
First of all, it’s important to say that the church itself belongs to a larger network called ChristCentral; about 300 like-minded churches working in a couple of dozen countries.
And ChristCentral is just one sphere in a larger partnership of apostolic networks called NewFrontiers.
It’s very light on organisational structure and very strong on relational connectedness
We don’t want to be an independent church just doing our own thing in our own small corner. We value belonging to a bigger movement where we are on a mission together.
What if you’re quite new here, and you’ve been enjoying coming on a Sunday, and you feel that you want to join King’s?
One of the elders, usually Michael, will have a chat with you and will suggest that you come along to a Foundations Course.
That’s two sessions which outline firstly what we believe, because different Christians take different views on different things, and secondly how we function, and because every church has its own way of doing things.
If after that you still think you want to be part of King’s, we’ll find a morning when we’ll informally interview you up here so everyone can get to know who you are, and we’ll ‘pray you in’.
So you’ll commit to being part of us and we’ll commit to welcoming you into this family.
If you’re a new Christian, that is brilliant! We strongly encourage you to get baptized. And we baptize by full immersion here. “Immersion” is in fact literally what the word “baptism” means. So “baptism by immersion” is a bit like saying “walking by putting one foot in front of the other.”
In the Bible, baptism is the normal, expected expression of belonging to Christ and belonging to his body the church. Jesus said to do it.
We don’t baptize babies here, by the way, in case you were wondering. We love babies very much, we like their noise and we don’t mind their mess.
But no baby leaves the womb as a believer in Jesus. The Bible says “believe and be baptized.” So that’s the way round we do it. Show evidence that you believe first, then be baptized.
But young children do belong. And we do publicly welcome them into the family here by dedicating them with their parents and praying for them.
A good way of belonging is to be a member of a midweek group. It’s not mandatory, it’s not a rule, but we strongly recommend you do that. You can go so much deeper than it’s possible to do on a Sunday.
As Paul said last week, in midweek groups we get to care for one another, pray for one another, grow together, laugh together, share communion together.
So that’s it. That’s who we don’t belong to, that’s who we do belong to, and that’s practically what belonging at King’s looks like.
Let’s stand to pray…
Sermon preached at King's Church Darlington, 12 February 2023
