When I was a junior in high school I was privileged to participate in a program of the American Legion called Boy’s State. A group of boys was selected from each high school in the whole state and we came together for a week of learning about the American system of representative democracy. I was elected Lieutenant Governor and then also elected as a Senator to attend Boy’s Nation in Washington. One of our counselors at Boy’s Nation taught us a little phrase that he said to himself every morning when he woke up. It went like this: “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” It was his way of beginning the day with a positive thought.

That phrase kept popping into my mind as I prepared for this sermon, so I Googled it just to see if there was any history to the phrase itself, and sure enough, Google didn’t let me down. It seems someone asked Google about the origin of that phrase, and it is attributed to a French psychologist named Emile Coue who apparently taught it to all of his patients. He became known as the father of autosuggestion, and he claimed to be able to help people with their emotional problems through the use of this phrase. His method came to be called Coueism.

Every day in every way I am getting better and better. Do you think that is true of yourself? Are you working at it? Do you need to? It seems to me that long before Coue arrived on the scene, there were many other methods introduced into human culture that attempted to do the same thing. And without taking anything away from Coue, I’d like to take us back to a philosophy and system of “getting better and better” that is grounded in the Christian faith. You see, the faith that you and I profess is not just about believing there is a God and trusting that God loves us enough to take us to heaven when we die. We also believe that God loves us enough to teach us about how to have a great life here on earth before we die! Every day in every way God wants us and is willing to help us to become better people.

In his masterpiece of theological thought written as a letter to the church in Rome, Paul first presents a detailed case for the Christian gospel, how humanity is hopelessly lost from ever finding God and ever having the life we were meant to have, and how God has acted decisively in the person and work of Jesus to rescue us from ourselves and to set us on the right path toward spiritual well being. With the truth firmly established that God loves us and God welcomes us into a right relationship with him, Paul goes on to discuss the implications of our newfound status with God. “I appeal to you therefore…to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” As living sacrifices that are acceptable to God, it is logical and right that we who have entrusted our souls to God would begin to live in a new way. If you have accepted God’s forgiveness and God’s offer of eternal life through the sacrifice of his Son, then you have also committed yourself to a life of getting better and better every day in every way. You have committed yourself to being Christian, to becoming like Jesus Christ. In this way, you and I begin to fulfill God’s will for us, which has the added benefit of leading us to become good people.

Last week we heard about God’s master plan for creation and for us. We heard about the fact that God’s plan was to bless Abraham and through Abraham to bless the world. We learned that God’s plan is to bless all of us and for all of us in turn to become a blessing to others. I believe that the fundamental way we experience God’s blessing is as we grow into full maturity as Christian people. God blesses us by shaping and molding and encouraging us to become the kind of person that he meant us to be from the beginning. God did not finish his creation after only six days of work. God is still about the business of creation in us. He is still building his universe, still perfecting his kingdom. And his kingdom is primarily about people. So God is in the business of building people.

In case you haven’t heard, we are in the midst of a major capital stewardship campaign here at the Village Church! We have a vision that we believe is from God that we are to build a new sanctuary, a new education building, and a new administrative and music complex. If all goes well and if we truly are hearing God rightly, then about a year from now we will be breaking ground to build some wonderful new buildings. But raising money and building buildings is not really our primary concern. They are a necessary part of our larger concern, and that is to build people.

How do you build people? If your name is Frankenstein, what you do is take various body parts from spare bodies that you have lying around your laboratory in the basement of your castle and you sew them together and shock the whole mess with electricity and boom, all of a sudden you have a person, of sorts. The more orthodox route is to find a mate, have a baby, feed it and clothe it and send it to school, buy it braces and a cell phone and a car and boom, after 18 or 25 or 30 years or so, you have a person, who then turns around and starts the whole process all over again. And then there’s the updated Frankenstein method, but now with modern science you use Petri dishes and pipettes and cell nuclei and DNA and you create a clone. Whether you still use a jolt of electricity, I don’t know.

From God’s perspective, how do you build people? And what kind of people does God want to build? I suppose the full set of blueprints and specifications for a person exists only in God’s mind, but we have a pretty good idea of the overall plan. A person built by God is a person who hates evil, who shows honor to other people, who does not grow weary in their faith, who rejoices in hope, who is patient in suffering, who prays constantly, who gives generously, who takes care of even strangers, who shares both the joys and the burdens of life with other people, who is not proud, who associates with all kinds of people, who seeks to live in peace with all people, who genuinely loves other people. Interesting, isn’t it, that the technical specifications for a person have nothing to do with hair color, proportions, straight teeth, height, weight, or anything whatsoever having to do with physical characteristics? When God looks at what he is building, he looks at character, virtue, and personality.

When God goes about the business of making a person, he starts with the mind. You begin to become who you tell yourself that you are. What you think begins to dictate what you do. But what we think and what God thinks are often two different things. What we think has been conditioned and twisted and corrupted by forces and ideologies and faiths other than what God designed. And so our minds need renewed with different information. Our thoughts need renewed with different inspiration. We need to learn God’s will, which so often is so different from what we learn from the rest of the world.

When you and I think of learning, when we think of matters of the mind, we so often think of school, of textbooks, of information that must be memorized and mastered. And there certainly is a place for that kind of learning in the process of building Christian people. But when I think of how God does his best work in building people, I realize that he uses other people to do the building. The best way to learn how to hate evil and rejoice in hope and contribute to the needs of the saints is to see it done in other people. God builds people in order that they might build even more people. We are blessed to be a blessing. We are built to be builders. And so maybe the best way I can tell you about how God builds people is to tell you about the people who helped build me.

Paul tells us that well-built people are “patient in suffering.” He was talking about Jack McKee. Jack was an elder in the church where I grew up. He was a professor of English at our local college. He was a brilliant man who could write better than anyone I’ve ever known and he always had a huge smile and a firm handshake and he always paid attention to little boys, even to me. Jack McKee had polio. He could walk only with crutches and braces on his legs and back. His whole body was twisted around, even his mouth. We built a ramp beside the steps leading up to our church so Jack could get in the door. We put in an elevator so Jack could come down to the Fellowship Hall in the basement. Every day of Jack McKee’s life was a physical challenge. But he always smiled. He never gave up. He never whined. He may have been twisted and bent, but he was a pillar of our church. He taught me what it meant for one man to be patient in suffering.

Paul tells us that well-built people “rejoice in hope.” He was talking about Cliff and Ruth Keizer. Cliff was the organist and choirmaster in our church, and Ruth was my Junior High Sunday School teacher. Cliff was dean of the local college and Ruth taught chemistry and physics at our high school. They loved growing plants of all kinds, and they had exotic friends who visited them from all the exotic places they had lived, places like Indonesia and Michigan. Cliff and Ruth could not have children of their own, so they adopted a girl and then later, a boy. Their son, Rick, was driving a Jeep one day down in Mexico, and he was killed in an accident. He was 28 years old. Our church was devastated. But Cliff and Ruth weren’t. They kept going, kept talking about how one day they would see Rick again, and now they are both rejoicing with him in heaven. Over two decades ago, when my first wife died, Cliff and Ruth hugged me and told me that the pain would become less hurtful even though it would never go away. They were right. And they taught me what it meant to rejoice in hope, even when you don’t feel so joyful.

Paul tells us that well-built people “do not lag in zeal” but are “ardent in spirit.” He was talking about Jim Connors and Wayne Hardin. Jim and Wayne started college the same year that I started high school. They were both from exotic places: Wayne from Phoenix, Jim from Bakersfield. When they came to my home town and my home church they saw a bunch of high school kids who needed a youth group, and so they started one. And they started talking about Jesus to us high school kids in ways that we could understand. They made faith cool. Every Thursday evening for four years Jim and Wayne gave up their time to spend with me and Melissa and Ronnie and Margie and Ted and Regina and a handful of other squirrelly teenagers and they helped get us through those years. They left me with an unmistakable and indelible image of what it meant to follow Christ. They taught me what it meant to be ardent in spirit and never lag in zeal.

Paul tells us that well-built people “contribute to the needs of the saints.” He was talking about Juanita Green. Juanita Green was the treasurer of our little church. She kept all the books and wrote all the checks. For her efforts, she was paid a whopping $300 a year. During my first year of seminary, when I was going through the typical trials and tribulations of trying to make ends meet, studying and working at the same time, Juanita sent me a little note. The note said, “Jack, I am so proud that you are studying for the ministry, and I want to help you this year, so I am sending you a little check and I want you to buy some books with it.” In the video about our capital campaign that we saw last week, you saw me standing in front of bookshelves in my office, and on those shelves is a set of commentaries that I bought with the money Juanita Green sent me. The other thing her note said was this: “I am sending you my whole salary for this year.” She had sent me $300. She taught me what it meant to contribute to the needs of the saints.

I could talk for hours about the people in all the churches of which I have been so blessed and honored to be a part who have taught me what it means to be well-built people. But I don’t really need to say any more about them, because you can come up with your own list, I’m sure. And I hope you do, because I am going to challenge you today to remember those people and then to do something else. I want you to remember the people who have taught you something about being a mature and well-rounded Christian. But remembering them is not enough. You and I have to go on to emulate them. If you have been inspired by someone else, then who are you going to inspire? If you have been encouraged by someone else, then who are you going to encourage? If you have been corrected or comforted or challenged by someone else, then who are you going to correct, or comfort, or challenge? God has used the people of his church to help build you into what you are today, and God is not finished building you yet. But God doesn’t just do one thing at one time. While you are being built, you are to be building someone else. That is why God gives us the church. You cannot build yourself all by yourself.

God is always building his church so that people will have a home where he can build on them. And the church is the only place that is dedicated exclusively to building people in God’s way. Schools and offices and factories and clubs and teams and all the other groups of which we are a part are designed to do many good things, but they are not designed to do what the church does. God’s church is a workshop where he uses us to build each other. For fifty years God has been using The Village Church to build people into mature Christians. We are continuing the process of building this church so that God can continue the process of building us. “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” That’s a worthy goal. But it has a twin. “Every day in every way I am helping someone else get better and better, too.”

Amen.

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