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Iron That Sharpens Iron

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Iron That Sharpens Iron

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Iron That Sharpens Iron

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How can we sharpen each other? It is a delicate process that will produce a greater product at the end of the process.

Transcript

[Victor] Good afternoon, everyone.

[All] Good afternoon.

[Victor] What a tremendous day. What a tremendous sound. What beauty of unity we have here at the General Conference of Elders. Welcome to everyone assembled here, and also welcome to everyone who is connected to us, whether it be video or audio, around the world, listening in or watching on webcast. The theme of this year’s conference is “Iron That Sharpens Iron.” It’s taken from Proverbs 27:17, which is, “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.” This has been a catchy theme that has been used over the years and one that we probably have been very familiar with or have seen it come as it’s come to us in various forms. It was a column at one time in our former church newspaper in times past. It was a discussion item at our GCE, whether it was last year or the year before, as we had roundtable discussions called, “Iron Sharpens Iron.” And now it’s been chosen to be the theme for the 2018 General Conference of Elders meeting. It’s a very practical and very relevant subject.

What can we learn from and how can we apply the wisdom of Proverbs 27:17? Now, yesterday, at the beginning of the GCE, where we held our international meetings, I felt like we had a manifestation of iron sharpening iron. I feel it was masterful that what was decided to do was to have the various international people, whether they were directors or senior pastors or chairmans of councils, whatever, give a report about what they’re doing in their area. And we were noting what they said. We had our secretary, Kathe Myers, who was taking down... I asked her to please put a big star after anything that’s an action item. And there was one after another of different ideas and different things that people do in international areas that could become a model or could become a practice for other areas. It really was, I felt, a very, very good start for the theme of this year’s conference of, “Iron Sharpens Iron” as we had various international people speak. They were tremendous reports from various international areas. Let’s take a look at Proverbs 27:17 in various translations, just very briefly.

The New King James is what I’ve already read, “As a man sharpens, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend,” which is a person’s face or a facial expression. In the New Living Translation, “As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens his friend.” In the NIV, “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” In the Complete Jewish Bible, “Just as iron sharpens iron, a person sharpens the character of his friend.” In God’s Word, “As iron sharpens iron...” God’s Word is a particular translation, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens the wits of another.” New Century translation, “As iron sharpens iron, so people can improve one another.” The action word here is sharpens. And as we see, it suggests improving, perfecting, polishing. And, hopefully, this is the outcome of this weekend’s meetings, through the sermons, seminars, plenary sessions that will more fully expound on Proverbs 27:17.

I have two stories that I would like to relate today to demonstrate this application of iron sharpening iron and its relevance to us. These are stories in my life of things that I’ve experienced. The subject of sharpening has taken on a very special meaning. When I was growing up, when I was a teenager, and throughout my high school years, I worked in my father’s custom cabinet shop. I never inherited any of his great gifts. I have trouble with putting doorknobs on and that type of thing, and yet I worked in his shop for three years. He was an artisan. He was a sculptor, a woodworker, who produced very, very high-quality creations for very wealthy people in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area, mostly in some of the most exclusive neighborhoods. One was a Jewish neighborhood where we got to know quite a few Jewish people in an area called Highland Park in St. Paul, Minnesota. My father has been dead for 51 years today, Cinco de Mayo. He died 51 years ago. But I worked for Igor Kubik Construction for three summers and did everything from framing to making cabinets.

My dad worked with the highest quality saws, planers, drills, chisels, routers, wood lathes, sanders. He had commercial-grade equipment, and he was very, very good. He was very well-known in the Twin Cities as one who could do anything. He could make beautiful custom cabinets. He could turn an old house into a new one and remodel it and do it beautifully. But vital among his tools were those that sharpened the woodworking tools. That was very, very important. And these were the various shaped hones, and files, and grinders. And each day began with a sharpening of blades, and bits, and drills. I remember every day we’d start, and we’d hear the scraping of metal. He would give me a file to sharpen the circular saw, for example. That’s all he trusted me with. He did all the other fancier things, because we had things to crosscut, rip, drill, chisel, and router. And precision sharpening is a skill. It’s not just banging metal against metal. To sharpen something in a way that will make it a very workable instrument is a very special skill.

My dad especially sharpened the router bits, the carbide router bits that cut through very, very hard woods. And we worked with oak, maple, birch, walnut. And when we had maple, that was really hard. It was like a rock. And to buzz through it with a saw was very, very difficult. And the saw had to be extremely sharp in order to do a proper routering job. I had worked with all these woods. My favorite wood was birch and working with it because it was kind of the middle... It wasn’t as hard as the others. But maple was very, very hard. I’d never really got to look at wood like this for many, many years until I visited with John Miller and his wife up in North East Ohio. He took me to an Amish lumberyard where they had wood from all over the world, not just little samples, but whole boards of exotic woods from South America, from Indonesia, from Africa, and so forth. My dad would have just absolutely loved the types of woods that were there. But the process of sharpening a carbide bit began first with a cleaning. You took the dirty bit, which had grime and dirt infested inside of it, and it had to be cleaned first before you could sharpen it. You can’t sharpen something that is full of dirt and that had to be cleansed.

And so, he soaked it in a solvent and made sure that the metal surface was cleaned before the sharpening took place. And such is true also in our spiritual usefulness. In order to be sharpened, in order to learn, in order to go forward with the way that we should as a Christian, we must start from a clean position. God cannot work with dirty people. He can’t work with dirt. And David’s prayer of repentance, when he came to himself and saw his sins, he saw the horror of what he had done, adultery, murder, deceit, every commandment broken, when it finally came to him, the thing that he prayed for first in Psalm 51 was what? What did he pray for? Psalm 51, “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.” This is before David began the process of restoration, and transformation, and repentance. This is the beginning place of repentance. “Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Sharpening growth begins with cleansing.

The next step in the sharpening process, with my dad, I saw him do it, was to take a hone of about 600 grit with diamond speckles in it, that would be rubbed against the blade surfaces. It was a very delicate job. The first thing he did was applied a lubricant on the hone before the rubbing started. So, before he rubbed this blade that was cleansed now, he put oil on the hone. And it was not a harsh rubbing. It was carefully sharpening the blade with the right amount of manual pressure. And gently the blade would be run across the hone 10 times. And, of course, there were two blades, as the spinning carbide bit, and the other one had to be exactly like the first one in order to work. It had to be properly balanced. When I think of the application of this, I’ve learned that the most effective and directed sharpening of people comes when we teach and mentor in a thoughtful and gentle way with a lovely result in mind. And it’s accompanied with lubrication of the Holy Spirit. And I think of the process of what we’re doing now and training ministerial trainees for the field, or training anybody, for that matter.

The most lovely and the most beautiful results come from a sharpening that is done in that manner with gentleness, with thoughtfulness, with lubrication, with the Holy Spirit to produce the sharpness that we want to achieve beautiful results. It’s not like it was maybe in the days of old. I think that we have stories about how we may have been treated harshly, but we don’t do that anymore. We do it in a way that is very, very wonderful and good. We train trainees at the home office here, two at a time here, the last year. And now we’re having two more coming to the home office. I really appreciate the way that the training is done holistically. Steve Myers handles that particular job, as he is the pastor of the church here in Cincinnati, both the East, morning and afternoon church. And he especially trains these people in a very kind way.

I always have a sense of joy when I pass by Steve Myers’s office. Oftentimes, he has both trainees there in his office, and he’s just talking with them. He’s just leveling with them. He’s treating them with the deepest respect. And I truly appreciate the fruit that we’ve had from the program and the way that it has been done, giving them various jobs responsibilities and treating them in a very, very skillful way, in a very kind manner, but they are being sharpened. They’re being sharpened. They’ve been made to go out and do jobs. We need to learn to rub people the right way. You’ve heard about the expression, “He rubs me the wrong way.” But rubbing people the wrong way does not produce sharpness. It produces irritation. We want the proper kind of rubbing to produce the right results. Proper abrasion brings out the sharpness in a person.

We probably have had people that we have worked with, one against another, so to speak, in a constructive way. I’ve worked with a couple of different ministers, this is in an unofficial way over the years. And one was a person who was exceptional in the way his ideas came together, in the ideas that he had. He had tremendous, tremendous thought processes of spiritual concepts in the way he put things together. I thought they were just absolutely beautiful.

I could not think in those terms. I can take somebody who gives me an outline, and this step, this step, next step, I can write it up. I can create a sermon from it, but I can’t do as good a job as, like, for example, this person did. And we used to do all kinds of things together. We used to go bike riding together. We used to talk, and we just really enjoyed being able to discuss subjects in great detail, particularly the last one that we did where we did a big study of Psalm 119, and “How I love Thy law,” and the various permutations of it, and how it represented various aspects of life. And he was so good at that. I said, “If you can put this down, I can speak it. I can write it. I can do an article on it.”

But he wasn’t very good when he actually spoke. He rambled. You know, he had great thoughts, great ideas, but they weren’t put together. And one time when I was working at church administration before, at the very last minute just before the Feast of Tabernacles, our main speaker to an international area was not able to go... he was a prominent speaker... because of health. And we needed to fill his spot with somebody else. And I thought, “Should I have this person go or not?” I said, “I’ll take a chance.” And I said, “You know, I’d like you to go and take this person’s spot.” It was Gerald Waterhouse. I said, “He is an icon in the church. People are expecting him. Now they’re going to get you.” I said, “I know you have fantastic ideas.” I said, “I really want you to put a sermon together, where it’s really cohesive. I really want it to be delivered well, because you have fantastic ideas. Make sure that it’s organized and doesn’t sound like it was slapped together at the last minute, even though it’s a fantastic story.” And he did. He came through.

He thanked me afterwards for the discussion that we had. He says, “You know, it’s an idea I’ve been thinking about.” It was a particular subject that was very, very special. And, you know, it was very well received. I feel it was a big boost to him. But we worked one against the other, sort of working together, where I appreciated his thinking, I appreciated his abilities to have great ideas, and he benefited from me prodding him to put it together in a way that was useful to the congregations.

Illustration number two regarding sharpening. Several years ago, a very good friend, even to this day, went to visit his very good friend by the name of John Cooke. They both used to live in Paducah, Kentucky. Paducah is close to my heart. That was my first pastorate in the church. Who was John Cooke? John Cooke was McDonald’s restaurants, McDonald’s Corporation’s former vice president and ombudsman. And we were his guests, he was retired, in Galena, Illinois, where he and his wife Marge retired. I had just... This is 1997. We visited him a number of times. We visited him in ‘97 and, again, we went out there to see him in 2002. And I was just... The United Church of God was just getting started. I was a new board member, a new member of the Council of Elders, and I have served on the council for 15 straight years at that time, from that time forward. And we spent the entire day with him. These people were very close because this individual who I was with, used to babysit his kids in Paducah, Kentucky before John Cooke went on to Chicago, and to the corporate headquarters of McDonald’s.

There are several things that came out in conversation because we talked about board business. We talked about what made McDonald’s great. We talked about the growth of McDonald’s to where it’s become now, a corporation that feeds 1% of the people in this world. Seventy million people go to McDonald’s every day. They said that McDonald’s was built up great because of the founder, Ray Kroc, and also because of a board of directors that worked very well with him. And the both of them worked together extremely well to produce the very best for that corporation. And here’s some advice that John Cooke gave us. He said that the strongest, most successful corporations are those that have a strong CEO, working with a strong board where there’s a lot of interaction. And he said that was always the story of McDonald’s.

Then we said, “What’s the most important thing for a board member to know?” He was very quick to respond. He responded and just immediately. He said, “It’s very important for every board member to know the company’s bylaws forward and backward.” He said that to us a couple of different times. He was a vice president, ombudsman. He said, “You must know who you are, what your rules are, and what governs the way that you do things.” I took careful note of what he said. I was only on the Council of Elders for two years at that time. I said, “I better pay attention to our constitution and bylaws.” And, you know, it was like reading a book. And I was involved with the writing of those things. I didn’t write them. There were several of us that worked together in compiling them, those who were part of the things at the very beginning days of the United Church of God. But they are not documents just to be set aside. They’re documents to look at because that’s what we decided how we would govern. That is what decided what we would do. Article 2 of the Constitution is the fundamental of beliefs, the fundamental beliefs, the core of our teachings. We have to know that forwards and backwards.

Interestingly enough that John Cooke... and we talked to him very openly about the United Church of God... said that a new organization like the United Church of God, we focused on the following. You know, and I had not seen this until this last week, I looked it over in my notes at my meeting with him. “The United Church of God,” he said, this was in 1997, “needs to be focused on educating future ministers and make that a priority.” I almost fell out of my seat this last week, when I read that. This is what he advised. He said that in working with McDonald’s, he said, what was primary in of those who worked for McDonald’s and in the board, is that everyone uphold the identity and the image of McDonald’s of whether it be in the United States, Asia, Europe, whatever. Very, very important to uphold the image of the church, what we stand for. He also said it was very important for board members to develop proper alliances among themselves to get business accomplished. They need to talk to one another. They need to form alliances for the good of the corporation, for the good of the church.

He talked about the various things that they talked about in the boardroom. And I thought, “We talk about things that are far more lofty than that.” You know one of the biggest discussions was, should they have three flavors of milkshakes or two? This is a big row between, do we have chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, or should we just have chocolate and vanilla? Because these decisions are replicated thousands of times. And will it take 20 seconds to make a malt or take a minute to make a malt? What substance or what type of content should we use? And they worked together to do something that would produce billions and billions sold. That was the bottom-line for them.

I know that after those meetings, especially the first one, it made me far more respectful of what we stand for, of our bylaws. As I was reelected, you know, continued on, paid attention to those bylaws because that’s what needs to govern my thinking. But I’m not just talking here to the board of directors or to the council of elders. That’s not my purpose here. What makes for a great Christian? Knowing our bylaws, constitution, knowing the Bible. That’s the only document that God has given to us to live by. We have no other writings. We have the inspired Word of God, the Word of God. We’re trying to bring our ministry and our members back to... That’s our focus and that’s what we should study and look at. And that’s what should direct and guide our lives and the things that we do.

Various times, in one of the projects that we’ve had with the Council of Elders was a “Labor in the Word” project. The purpose of that was to get our nose back in the Bible to study it, to understand it, to divide the Word of truth, and to preach it. That is the bylaws so to speak. That is our Constitution. That is the inspired Word of God. Hebrews 4:12, “The Word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow. And it’s a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” You know, everything that you need to know about the Bible or anything you need to know about life, comes from the Word of God.

As I say, and I have said before to ABC graduation, you may not know everything about the Bible, but the Bible knows everything about you. And we need to get our nose there to find out what it is that we need to be sharpened with. The Word of God is powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. Sharpen ourselves with that sword. The armor of God. The famous chapter 6 of the book of Ephesians, chapter 6 of the book of Ephesians, the armor of God is basically a defensive, helmet, you know, pads, you know, things to protect our feet. But there is one offensive part of that armor and the only offensive aspect of it. Ephesians 6:17, “Take the helmet of salvation and the sword, the sharp sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.”

One thing that makes us what we are at the United Church of God is because we study the Bible. It’s important. You wouldn’t think of coming here to services without a Bible or with at least something with the ability to look at the Word of God. We don’t just talk, and we don’t just say things, and we don’t just read poetry. We look at the Word of God to guide and direct and sharpen us. Proverbs 17, the chapter that contains the scripture that is our theme, “Iron That Sharpens Iron,” contains two more passages of interest on the subject of sharpening. Proverbs 27:9, “Ointment and perfume delight the heart and the sweetness of a man’s friend to give delight by hardy council.” This is in connection with relationships and working with one another and encouraging. And then also there’s a more abrasive passage in that same chapter as Proverbs 27:6, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” you know, that have... Sometimes, you hear things that prick you, that cut you. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, not an enemy. Enemy wants to hurt you. A friend wants to help you. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.”

Well, I’m sure that this coming week, there’ll be various applications and differing applications about sharpening, as iron sharpens iron. I think it’s a fantastic theme, actually, for us as a church to apply one-on-one, whether we apply ourselves in the governance style or even as an entire church body of sharpening one another.

The apostle Paul said this, this is what he said in Hebrews 10:24. And this passage is oftentimes linked right with proverbs 27:17. And this is a very important passage dealing with the importance of being with one another. You know, one thing that is so beautiful about our assembling here is a ministry, and a big percentage of the ministry in the whole world is assembled here, is that we are together face-to-face. We’re not online. There’s benefits to online. There’s necessity for online. There’s economics of online, but there’s nothing like being together one with another. I appreciate all the kisses and hugs when I came in here just before the sermon. It’s nice to see everybody. It’s like your whole life is coming together with people that you’ve known for decades. It’s wonderful. And the warmth and the feeling that kind of goes back and forth is certainly very wonderful. I look forward to talking to you afterwards, talking to you tonight, and tomorrow, and Monday all day. I really look forward to all the activities of this coming week.

But the apostle Paul underscores the importance of assembly for the purpose of this sharpening. Hebrews 10:24, “Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, sharpening one another,” as it’s said in the various translations that I read, improving one another, improving the character of another person, sharpening somebody’s wits, “and so much the more, as you see the day approaching.” Here we are meeting, rubbing shoulders, so to speak, or rubbing ourselves one against another for the purpose of inspiring, motivating, stirring one another up, and encouraging one another. That is so very, very important as we see the day approaching. We have a great work to do. We really do. We’re staring up a cliff of a great challenge of God using us as His church, as people of God. We like to call ourselves that. And I hope to say that I am of God, you know, that God has called me. There’s a purpose in my life and purpose in this church, the United Church of God, to do His will, as His instrument.

And while the catchphrase of McDonald’s is “Billions and billions sold,” our catchphrase may be billions and billions souls. You know, people that we have to reach, that is our objective. That is our goal. That is the mission that God has for us in preaching the Gospel to the world, caring for those whom are called. I think it’s important for us to take a look to see what we’re doing. Do we have the tools, and are they sharp, or are they dull? I look forward to learn in the coming conference, not only in what is taught, but what is practiced as we live Proverbs 27:18, as I like it in the New Century version, “As iron sharpens iron, so people can improve one another.”