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Sunday Morning, January 6, 2019 AM "The Purpose of Sunnyside" Isaiah 9:7
Gather and gather around your word and hear your word read and taught and preached where we sing these hymns. God thank you for these hymns which we sing your truth so carefully laid out. These expositions that we may sing together of your truth.
Thank you for the privilege and the gift of prayer that our petitions are offered up to you by the ministry of the Holy Spirit brought to your right hand where our Savior and King intercedes for us. As your children and your creatures we live amidst the wonders of grace.
I pray that you would increasingly awaken our hearts to the myriad of blessings that we enjoy that you would make us a thankful people. We would praise you in the morning, praise you at noon, praise you in the evening and should you wake us in the night praise would come forth from our lips.
Lord as we turn our attention to your word, as we think about what it is that you have called us to do, why you have made us and why you have gathered us, Lord grant to us repentance and faith that we would believe what you say and lean away from everything that would distract us from it towards you.
Grab hold of your offering with both hands and that we would not turn our attention or hand back from the plow, from the furrow that you have called us to work in this place and in this time. We pray these things for the sake of Jesus Christ the one with whom you are well pleased.
Amen. I have not forgotten that once upon a time we started going to the book of Jeremiah. I'm eager to go back to Jeremiah. I will not ask if you are eager but for now it is the Lord's will that we put our attention to a vital subject the purpose of Sunnyside Baptist Church.
In some fashion we may all have a way of describing why God has brought us together as a church. I think we'd all be fairly close to the mark. We could all turn over to the front of our bulletin and see a threefold statement that would give us an idea but something that the elders, as we've been discussing, clarifying and bringing home in a practical way what it is that we're all supposed to be doing and that's what we're going to be looking at beginning this morning.
We'll be in Matthew 16 in a moment so if you want to turn over there to verses 13 to 27 we'll read that together. But what we want to do is to think carefully from the Scriptures about who we are in Christ as a local church and what it is that our Lord and Savior wants us to do.
Not simply when we gather together in the function of the Sunday school or the function or the pattern of what we have in the corporate worship service but what is it that we are to do as members of this church as believers in Christ, yes, and then particularly members of Sunnyside Baptist Church.
To help us with that this morning we're going to be looking at three different passages and then moving on next week, Lord willing, more specifically at another passage in Colossians. So this is our aim, this is our goal, Lord help us to do that.
If you'd please stand with me as I read from Matthew 16 our Savior, our King, Jesus Christ has this to say from Matthew 16 beginning in verse 13. Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi he was asking his disciples, who do people say that the Son of Man is?
And they said some say John the Baptist and others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. He said to them, but who do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
And Jesus said to him, blessed are you Simon Barjona because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you but my Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter. Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.
I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. And then he warned the disciples that they should tell no one that he was the Christ.
From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer the many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and be raised up on the third day. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him saying, God forbid it Lord, this shall never happen to you.
But he turned and said to Peter, get behind me Satan, you are a stumbling block to me for you are not setting your mind on God's interest but man's. Then Jesus said to his disciples, if anyone wishes to come after me he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of his Father and with his angels and will then repay every man according to his deeds. This is the word of the Lord, you may be seated. Mentos were not designed to explode Diet Coke, that was not why they were designed.
WD -40 was not manufactured to polish stainless steel but it does really well. Toothpaste was not invented to make our battered and treasured DVDs whole once again. Now any of these inventions when repurposed give us a little joy inside when we discover and see that this thing meant for that thing can be used for something else.
How clever! And we have not transgressed upon any sacred ground but when it comes to the church, as clever as man can be, if we repurpose the church for something other than its intended design, we indeed have transgressed on holy ground and when we put our interest, when we set our mind on our interest, on man's interest, we are a stumbling block to the King of Kings.
And he told Peter, get behind me Satan. It is important that we understand the design and the purpose of the church, that we not put our interests ahead of the interest of King Jesus, our Savior. The church was not founded as a monastery or a seminary or a circus.
The church is not a convention center for self-help seminars. The church is not a concert hall for the promotion of Christian arts. The church is not a communal therapy group. The church is not a dating service.
The church is not a crisis response center. The church is not a social aid station. The church is not a political action committee. And the church is not a mystical shrine. As the pillar and the ground of the truth, the church has something to say about all of those arenas.
As the echo chamber of the Word of Christ, we can't help but speak to all of those things in one way or another. The church has something to say to the self. The church has something to say about the arts.
The church has something to say about those who need to be made whole from the inside out. The church has something to say about godly courtship in the purpose of marriage. The comes to those who are in need.
The church has something to say about politics and what it ought to be. And the church does have something to say about the mystery of our union with Christ. But we need to understand the purpose and the design of the church.
As we come from this introduction is simply saying what it is not. We're going to try to say what it is and what our purpose is. What does Christ say our purpose is? What do the scriptures say that our purpose is as the local church?
And what the scriptures say is what Christ says. So let's pay attention to our Lord. This is the scepter of his lordship in our life. He gets to say who we are. This is the purpose of our church and we will look at the scriptures to understand this is nothing original and this is nothing inventive.
We must proclaim Christ from all the scriptures until his spirit renews all God's people into his image. That's what the church does. That's not new. That's not inventive. That's not found in some obscure out-of-the-way back alley text in the Bible.
That's the main thrust of the whole idea for the church. That we must proclaim Christ from all the scriptures until his spirit renews all God's people into his image. To begin I hope that you've grabbed one of the handouts that says the purpose of Sunnyside Baptist Church.
You see that statement written there at the top and the bottom in bold. We're going to get to those details as we move along in this small series. But I realize looking at that statement there are a lot of assumptions that are being made.
We use words like church and Christians and belief and things like that that I think need to be defined. We need to talk about what that means. So this morning we're going to be working through the underlying assumptions to this proposition.
The underlying assumptions to this statement. The essential underlying thoughts. Before we get to the design of the church we must begin with the designer of the church. We have to begin with the designer of the church before we get to our design.
And what we notice from Matthew 16 verses 13 to 27 is that Christ constructs his church. Verse 18, I will build my church, Jesus Christ says. So he's the one who constructs the church. He's the designer of the church.
It's no surprise that the son of David is the one who builds the temple. It should be no surprise to us that the son of David is the one who builds the temple. That's what the Old Testament said and that's what Christ came to do.
In Ephesians 2 verse 21 says that exactly, having been built on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord.
The son of David builds the temple, builds us, builds the church. There are three things in this passage I want us to see in Matthew 16 and then we'll move on to Matthew 28. The first is his revelation.
His revelation. He reveals who he is as the cornerstone, the very beginning point of building his church. You can't have a church if you don't know who Jesus Christ is. If there's some place, some group of people who says they're a church but they don't know who Jesus is, they don't have a church.
You have to begin with Christ who is the cornerstone and he addresses his disciples in verse 13, verses 13 through 17. He says, who do people say the Son of Man is? I like this approach because he's already telling them who he is.
He doesn't just say, you know, who do people say that I am? Of course he's asked that question too but he's actually informing them. He's leading the witnesses. Who do people say that the Son of Man is?
And of course here he's referring to the world-ruling figure in the favor of God from Daniel, the one who's given an eternal dominion. I said, who is the Son of Man? Who do people say that the Son of Man is?
And people have these different ideas. Someone very important like John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. People are guessing at that. And then Jesus says a very important question. This is the one of those vital questions that we can ask.
You want an evangelistic method, here it is. Who do you say that Jesus Christ is? It's kind of a hard right, but it's effective. Who do you say that Jesus Christ is? Be very surprised at some of the answers.
Jesus says that, and Peter of course, he speaks up, says you are the Christ, you are the Messiah, the Anointed One. You are the one, the Anointed One, the Christ, the Messiah who fulfills all the other Anointed Ones.
Whatever it meant to be a king according to God's plan, whatever it meant to be a prophet or a priest or a wise man, whatever that meant in all the history of redemption, that's you all in one. You're the Messiah, you're the Anointed One, you're the Christ.
And you are the Son of the Living God, Son of Man, Son of God. Peter is confessing the incarnation, that Jesus Christ is God, the very God in human flesh. We also find that Jesus, in clarifying who he is, talks about his suffering, his death, and his resurrection.
Because we can say that Christ is the Son of Man and the Son of God, that he is indeed the Messiah, but unless he died as the Lamb of God and was raised from the dead, we don't have the gospel. Yes, the person of work and the person of Christ and the work of Christ, we have to have the person who he is, and what did he do?
He died in our place for our sake upon the cross. He rose from the dead three days later and he is soon to return from his ascended position at the right hand. In other words, when Jesus reveals who he is, when Jesus puts the attention of his disciples upon who he is, and Matthew records this so that all his readers will think about who Jesus is, we discover he is the most important person who has ever lived.
And that's not even close. I mean, you can get a top-ten list of all the most important people who have ever lived, and you're gonna have to make a separate list for Christ because nobody can even get close.
He's the central figure of all of history, of God's creation. This is an exceptionally important question that he asks, who do you say that Christ is? Now that is a vital question in every age, and ours as well, because the term Christ, the person of Christ, the idea of Christ has become soft clay fashioned in the interests of man.
It is fashionable to carve Christ in our own image, someone who would be pleased with us and we'd be pleased with him, as a default. If we didn't have to change very much, this is who Christ would be, and Christ would be okay with us.
We kind of invent that. Christ is on the leading edge of fashion. He has been formed and proposed as a social justice warrior killed by white privilege. He's being preached in that way. He's being preached as a gay activist killed for his alternative lifestyle.
He is preached as a tolerant ecumenical killed by the established order who couldn't get along. And Christ is refashioned into whoever you want him to be. It's idolatry. When Christ says, who do you say that I am?
This is the most critical question that we have in front of us. Who do you say Jesus Christ is? And if you don't know, it might be that you don't care, and you're in a world of trouble. You're in a world of trouble.
He's the most important person doing the most important work. Do you believe who he is? This revelation that Peter confesses comes not from man but from God. That's how we know it's the right one. It was revealed to Peter by God the Father through the Spirit about who the Son was.
This is good news that Peter says out of his mouth. But this is not something that man invented. It's something that God revealed. Now notice Christ's resolve as he constructs his church verses 18 through 23.
He says to Peter, I also said to you, you are Peter, which means stone. It's the idea of a little rock. And then he says, upon this rock, he uses a word for a large rock or even bedrock. So he says, you are a little rock but on this rock, on this bedrock, I will build my church.
What is he talking about? He's saying, you know, Peter gets it right. Okay, who do you say that I am? Peter gets it right by the divine revelation of the Lord. He basically declares the person and work of Christ.
This is who Christ is. This is who you are, Jesus. And then Jesus says, yeah, and man, you're a little stone but upon this bedrock, what you have declared, the revelation from God himself, I will build my church on this rock.
And the rock he builds it on is his own identity. The church is built upon the person and work of Jesus Christ. Who Jesus is and what he came to do. If our church isn't built upon that foundation, we don't have one.
That's it. So you have to have the gospel if you're gonna have a church. And Jesus says, I'm gonna build my church. He's not gonna subcontract out the church. He's hands-on. Every detail. Oh, he has his workers but he's not absent.
He's not the absent foreman. He's there on site building his church. There's no substitute gospel. It's not Jesus is awesome, don't you all love him, period. It's Jesus Christ is the Son of the Living God.
He is the one who has died upon the cross for our sins, shedding his blood in our place. And he was raised from the dead the third day. He's coming again soon. This is the gospel. He will not allow any substitute gospel to succeed.
Peter doesn't like what he hears in verse 21. Jesus says he's going to suffer many things. He's going to be killed and raised in the third day. Peter didn't like the sound of that. But that's what's gonna happen.
Jesus says that's absolutely essential. This, in fact, is God's interests, he says in verse 23. It is God's interest. It is God's plan. It is his passion that the Christ, his own Son, suffer and die and be raised.
And Peter, if you disagree with that, you're against the interests of God. You are standing in the way. Why does Jesus call Peter Satan? Why does he do that? That's odd. Get behind me, Satan. That's very strong language.
It's because Satan had already tempted Jesus in this way. Satan knows who Jesus is and trembles. And Satan tempted Christ in the wilderness in this very same way. He knew Jesus is the Christ, the Son of Man, the Son of the Living God, with all royal status.
He knows who Jesus Christ is and what he's worth. And he offered to Jesus the rule of the world as long as Jesus would just bow down and worship Satan. What's the temptation? The temptation is, Jesus, you don't have to go to the cross.
You don't have to suffer. You don't have to be scorned and humiliated. You don't have to drink the cup of the wrath of your Father upon the cross for the sake of those who will believe in you and take hell on earth for them.
You don't have to do that. All you gotta do is just bow down and worship me. You can have the whole world now. You can short-circuit the cross. Jesus resisted Satan in the wilderness and he resisted the same satanic idea that Peter spewed forth from his mouth.
Get behind me, Satan. Not taking that path. His resolve to build the church is clear. Here is the most important person doing the most important work. How involved are we in that work? How involved are you in the work that the most important person in all of history is doing, even now?
How involved are we, are you and I, how involved are we in this work? If you want to be involved, there's a requirement. Verses 24 through 27. Then Jesus said to his disciples, if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. There are two projects going on in the world today. There is the project of self and there is a project of Christ.
Which one are you involved with? Jesus says, if you want to come after me, if you want to follow me, you'll be part of my kingdom, be part of this church that I am building on the basis of my own name and the basis of my own redemptive work.
If you want to follow me, you have to take up your cross and deny yourself to follow me. If you're going to be involved with the most important work that is ever to be done in all of the history of the world, if you want to follow the most important person in all the history of the world, you have to give up the project of self and go with the project of Christ.
Take up the cross is our equivalent of lethal injection, the gas chamber, the chair. It is execution. And Jesus is saying, execute all of the expectations and desires and plans of the self, lay it aside and get busy with my work.
This is, in essence, what is called repentance. Do you believe who Jesus says he is? That he is the Christ, the Son of the Living God? Do you believe that he died upon the cross and was raised the third day and will soon come again?
Do you believe in him? Then repent of the project of self and the all-encompassing self and leave that to follow Christ. Faith and repentance. This is essentially what Christ preached, what the Apostles preached, the essential response to the gospel, the grace of God to repent and believe.
So have you repented? Have you denied self? Have you surrendered? Have you owned Christ as the Lord? There are two kingdoms in this world. The one rebelling against the one that's going to win and has already established the victory and is in motion of the mopping up action.
Are you against Christ or for Christ? This is the essential dilemma of every single person who has ever lived. And so Jesus counsels those who are listening, what will it profit a man if it gains the whole world?
What will it profit a man to succeed really, really well in the project of self? He's got his list of what he wants to get done for the self. She has her list of things she wants to get done for herself.
This will make me happy, this is what is significant to me. What will it profit a man or a woman if you get the whole list done? Success! Not just your stamp of success but everybody else you know has stamped success on your ledger and your project of self.
That is counterfeit money and it's worthless when it comes to your soul. We must lose our lives for the sake of Christ to find what real life is. There's nothing we can give in exchange for our soul. Christ is the only one who satisfies the Father.
So Christ constructs his church, he does it on the revelation of who he is, and he's the one who builds it and nobody else. And if you want to be involved in a part of the church, part of the temple the son of David builds, then you must repent of your sins and trust in Christ alone.
That's the basic construction of the church and not only does Jesus construct the church but he also directs the church. He's showing the church where to go and what to do, what to be about. For that we go over to Matthew 28, very end of the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew 28 verses 18 to 20.
The disciples have gathered where they were supposed to be with the resurrected Christ. Verse 18, Jesus came up and spoke to them saying, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.
And lo, I am with you always even to the end of the age. You see, Christ laid down his life for the sheep. He purchased the bride by his broken flesh and shed blood. So no one but Christ gets to direct the church.
No one. There are no other controlling investors. It's Christ. He's the only one who gets to decide what the church is and what the church does. He's the only one. And that's good news. I'd rather be the servant of the perfect master than a slave to a thousand tyrants.
Notice his authority. He says, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Well, I thought he was the Son of God. I thought he was God, a very God in human flesh. Didn't he already have all authority?
What was all that stuff that he did with the diseases and the demons and the disasters, that he stopped it all? Well, one, he was filled with the Holy Spirit and doing his miracles by the Spirit, but also he had laid aside his prerogatives.
He didn't deserve to be treated that way. He didn't deserve to live that way, but he did. He humbled himself in ways that will astonish us for all of eternity. He humbled himself. Be a million ways in every single human moment in which he was humbling himself as the Son of God in human flesh that are gonna amaze us for eternity.
But what's special in this is he's announcing what's going, he's describing what's about to happen. He's about to ascend to heaven to the right hand of God, and he's saying because he is, because the Son of God has taken upon human flesh, because he is Jesus Christ, God of very God, but also man of very man, the new Adam, having done all that was required of him to do in our place and for our sake.
All authority has been given to him. You realize that when Adam was made, he was king of the world? He was the only man. He was king of the world, and he needed a helper, so God made him Eve, and she was queen of the world.
You realize when Noah came out of the ark as the patriarch of his family, he was king of the earth. Christ, risen from the dead, is king of kings, Lord of lords, and he says I'm gonna build something, and at the end of the book, at the end of the Bible, it says that we reign with him, royal priests.
It's astonishing, but all authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth. He bears all authority as the God-man. He is Adam exemplar, Yahweh magnanimous. Listen, if you don't reckon with Christ's authority here on earth, you're gonna have to reckon with him after you die.
His authority is unavoidable. His authority is unavoidable. Now notice, he says all authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth. There's not a square inch in creation that doesn't belong to Christ.
We're always on his turf, always. If we are in the secular university, we are on Christ's turf. If we are downtown Oklahoma City or downtown New York City, we are on Christ's turf. If we go to the moon, it's still his.
It's all his. Therefore, therefore make disciples of all the nations. This is the audacious claim of Christ, because he has all authority, all nations, and everybody in those nations, no matter who they are or their backstory, are accountable to him.
And they must repent of their sins and put their faith in Christ. That is the audacious claim of Christianity. To lose that is to lose the authority of Christ, to lose the significance of his message.
He says go and make disciples of all the nations. Now this is his aim in verses 19 through 20. His aim. We see his authority, but what about his aim? Notice, go and make disciples. Not just converts, but disciples.
Learners. Those who learn who Jesus is, learn his ways, and follow after him. Jesus was often called rabbi. In the cultural setting, the rabbi would have followers who would learn from him, and they would learn everything from him.
Not just what he said, but how he lived. Not just how he lived, but how he acted in every single situation. So if you were the disciple of a rabbi, you would listen to what he said, memorize it, so that you could repeat it to others, and repeat it back to him when he questioned you.
You would also learn how he behaved in a variety of situations. If he got angry in this situation, you'd get angry. If he was calm, you'd be calm. And then you would watch how he would walk, because he would take you here and there.
And if he ducked under the branch this way, you ducked under the branch this way. And if he did this after he washed his hands, you did this after you washed your hands. And that's what it meant to be a disciple, a learner of a rabbi.
And that's what it means to make disciples of Jesus Christ, is that what he thought that we think, what he did, we do. This is what we are called to do in making disciples. Now, where do we make disciples?
He says, go. Now, if you say anything to someone other than yourself, you're going, okay? But the idea is go, not hang around. The early church kind of hung around. They liked Jews, because they were Jews, and everybody could kind of get along somewhat.
But they had to go to places like Samaria. They had to go to places like Ethiopia. They had to go to places where all the Gentiles lived. They had to go. We've got to go. And surprisingly, the go, the where, is also the who, because it's all nations.
All nations. There's no nation that's exempt. Italians aren't exempt, right? They're all Catholic. They're not exempt. Go! You know, France is two secular. Go! Mongolia is too weird. Go! Thailand's too lost.
Go! Right? There's a reason why we support Mission Aviation Fellowship, and the guy who's trying to, you know, repair planes and get people flying. Because we've got to go, so we need airplanes. It's part of the Great Commission.
To all nations, to be. What kind of disciples? Not just any kind of disciple. Trinitarian subjects of Christ. That's the kind of disciples that we're supposed to make. Trinitarian subjects of Christ. Those who know who Jesus Christ is as God of every God, man of every man, and what he did to save them, that they are submitted to him as their Lord and their King, and that he is the second person of the Trinity, the God who made all of this, and the God who will bring it all to a close.
Trinitarian subjects of Christ. That's the kind of disciples we're supposed to make. That's what Jesus says. Go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.
Trinitarian subjects of Christ. This is the kind of disciple that we're supposed to make. How? Notice the language is teaching. See this? We got to make disciples, yes, but how do we do that? Verse 20, teaching.
That's how it happens. Instruction. Exhortation. Explanation. Encouragement. Preaching. Rebuke. Correction. Training. Teaching them to observe all that I commanded you. That's how you make disciples. We make learners through the local church.
Why the local church? Because he's talking about baptism. Those who are a part of the local church are those who have publicly professed their faith in Jesus Christ, in the name of the triune God, that they are, therefore, fit to be a part of the visible church.
Baptism is the front door of the church. So by saying you're to baptize them, he's saying through the means of the local church, the membership of the local church, make disciples of all the nations. His plan is very clear.
His aim is very clear. Teach Christ's commands. Teach him to follow you. Now, Jesus says this to his apostles, the eleven who were still alive, the one who had betrayed him was dead. He says it to them, but you know, it's not just them.
You know the poster of which I speak? The old man in the weird hat pointing, Uncle Sam wants you? That poster was designed because recruiters did not want young men walking around thinking, or others who would help the war effort, walking around thinking that other people would do it.
Other people will fight. Other people will sacrifice. Other people will go through the whole program and do something to help the war effort. No, Uncle Sam wants you. Everybody involved in the war effort.
And this Great Commission is Jesus Christ saying, I want you to do this, to make disciples, to go and make disciples of all the nations, through the ministry of the local church. Uncle Sam wants you. Now, we have a very important part of Jesus' high priestly prayer in John 17.
Look over there with me, John 17. I want you to notice a couple of verses as he's praying. And of course, you should read the whole thing this afternoon. Let's begin in verse 13. Now, I come to you, but now I come to you.
This is Christ interceding before his Father. I come to you, and these things I speak in the world, so that they may have my joy made full in themselves. I have given them your word. Oh, he's equipped us, folks.
I've given them your word, and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world even as I am not of the world. Listen, this is very important, verse 15. I do not ask you to take them out of the world.
No bunkers, no rescue squad, right? We're not supposed to be taken out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one, you know, in the in the middle of those who need to hear the message, kept safe by the hand of God himself, like Jeremiah, a bronze city with walls that will not be overthrown.
They are not of the world even as I am not of the world, verse 17. Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth. This is how it's supposed to happen. So, every one of us is to be equipped and to go and to proclaim the Word of God to others.
This means our brothers and sisters in Christ, encouraging them to follow Christ. It's to those who don't know Christ, but he's their Lord. He's in charge of their eternal soul. So, talk to them about Christ, because they're gonna meet him one day.
It's unavoidable. So, it's everybody involved. Now, how long do we do this, you know? At some point, you know, has it already been, you know, done? We've indeed come and gone. Christ died on the cross and he rose from the dead.
D-Day. And the writing's on the wall, the enemy's gonna fall. We're just waiting for V-Day, Victory Day. So, what are we about? In the meantime, Matthew 24, verse 14 says, this gospel of the kingdom, message of Christ, this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.
So, this is our job until further notice. And the further notice is Christ coming wherever I'll see him. The trumpets will tell us when the job is done. In the meantime, we are to be about this work. This is the purpose of the church, to make disciples, to proclaim Christ from all the scriptures, teaching, exhorting, declaring, explaining Christ from all the scriptures, depending on the power of the Holy Spirit to renew all of God's people into his image.
This is what Christ is directing us to do, and he has not left us to do it on our own. Notice his assurance in verse 20 of the Great Commission, at the very end, he says, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
You can translate it, now look, I am with you all the days until the completion of the world. So, you know the difference if you've ever worked for somebody else, you know the difference of doing the job with no supervision and doing your job with supervision.
Don't you know the difference? When the one in charge is right there with you, there's two things that happen. One, you're way more diligent, and two, you get all the help and explanation that you need if he's a good master, if he's a good boss, to do what you're supposed to do, right?
I don't have to guess and wonder and fudge. He's right with me, showing me what I should do. He's, lo, I'm with you even to the end of the age. How is he with us? Well, he reigns over us in his Word, he indwells us by his Spirit, he intercedes for us in prayer, we are seated with him in the heavenly places, he communes with us in the Lord's Supper, he is present with us in our fellowship.
He's with us. Thirdly, Christ supplies his church, Ephesians 4, 7 through 16. We spent ten weeks on this passage, so I'm not going to spend very long. Back in Ascension Sunday through on past Father's Day, we looked at this passage, but Ephesians 4, 7 through 16 tells us that Christ supplies his church.
Not only does he construct his church and direct us, he also supplies all that we need to do, what he's asked us to do, what he's commanded us to do. He gives us everything we need to do, what he's called us to do.
We don't lack a thing. Why? Because Christ is ascended on high, he's at the right hand of the Father, and he has sent us his Spirit, his Holy Spirit. In the Ascension, Christ gives the Holy Spirit, that's what verses 7 and 8 in Ephesians 4 is all about.
John 7 is equally impressive, John 7 verses 37 through 39. Now on the last day of the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, if anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture said, from his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.
He said, I want to turn thirsty people into people that have rivers flowing out of them. What does that mean? Verse 39, but this he spoke of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, whom those who believed in him were yet to receive.
For the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified, but when he was, and he was ascended, he sent us the Holy Spirit. We have all that we need, more than we need, to do what Christ tells us to do, because he has given us his Holy Spirit.
He's given us also his servants through the Spirit, that's what verses 11 through 13 are all about in Ephesians 4. The Holy Spirit gives us ministers of the Word, the apostles and the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and the teachers, all these ministers of the Word, so that by the scriptures we are equipped and built, so that we may understand and we are brought to maturity.
I hope you're reading your Bibles, I hope that you're tuning in to your Sunday school classes and making every effort to take every advantage you can to feast on the Word, because those who are made in the image of God do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
If you're feeling kind of dead and dull as a Christian, it's because you're not eating well. We got to eat, folks. If you're concerned about your diet in the new year, you ought to be concerned about what you're feasting on, the scriptures, we ought to be reading the Word of God.
So Christ supplies the church with his Spirit and his servants, who are ministers of the Word, and he supplies the church with himself, and verses 15 through 16 can be summed up this way, that we are brought into Christ and we are from Christ, we are into Christ and from Christ, by speaking the truth from Christ in love from Christ.
The whole body, we discover in Ephesians 4, 15 through 16, the whole body causes the growth of the whole body into the fullness of Christ. The truth and love from Christ, the whole body uses to build up the whole body into the fullness of Christ.
He's the measure and the stature of who we're being built up into. In other words, the Spirit is renewing all God's people into his image, who is Christ. The sum of all this is this, Jesus decides. Jesus decides.
In the little paper that you hope you have, there's an audacious claim that should be probably offensive to a whole lot of people, and I don't mean it to be, but this is what all churches ought to do.
Now that's strong language, okay? That's strong language. But the claim, what all churches ought to do, that's Christ's claim to make and he's made it. He's made it really clear in his Word. It's not a mystery.
It's his to make and it's ours to follow. And so whatever designs, intents, purposes, and plans that you and I have that don't coincide, we need to let go of. We just need to let go of them. There are things we think about when we think about Sunnyside Baptist Church that are not true about the purpose of Sunnyside Baptist Church, and we need to let go of those things.
All right, this is not a safe space, all right? Free of all microaggression, this is not a safe space. This is Christ's space to form us into his own image through the preaching and teaching, singing and praying, and observing of the Word.
This is not child care, though we do care about children and Jesus cared about them more than we did. This isn't child care. You know, if all failed and we were down to 20 people and we had no nursery, all the babies come in, I'm fine.
This isn't child care where people are to drop off their children. If parents aren't bringing their children, thank God their children are here, but let's go get the parents. We're not a substitute for the family.
This is not an insurance agency where you participate and get your name on a roster so that you don't go to hell. This is not a think tank where we only think about the things of God and think about the things of Christ and have really magnificent ideas about the Bible, but then do nothing.
This is not a lobbyist's lobby or whatever they do when they get together. We're not, you know, getting God's ear and to do what we want them to do. This is not a corrections facility where we're simply taking in, you know, bad cases and turning them out, rehabilitated.
This is not an airport terminal where the place you got to come before you get to go to heaven. This is not your family weekend home, though we do feel like family. This is not an ATM to withdraw needed cash.
It's not a fashion show to wear your best and catch people's eyes. This is not a rumor mill to feed your need for new news. This is in a community center where we all get to use the space for our various needs.
We are ecclesia. We are the called-out ones. We are the church. We are the embassy of Christ's kingdom. We must proclaim Christ from all the scripture until his spirit renews all God's people into his image.
So you've been here this week, you've got to come back next week, and if you know someone who wasn't here this week, you've got to make them come next week because we're going to move away from the negative, this is what we're not, to this is what we are.
So come back next week. Let me pray for us. Father, I thank you for the time you've given us in your Word. Thank you for making things so clear, clear enough for a child to get it. Jesus is in charge.
He tells us what we're supposed to do. Let's follow him. Lord, I thank you for bearing with us and blessing us. Lord, you have given a series of decades of blessings to this church. You've been so good, so kind.
I pray that you would just help us as we reaffirm our intent and our purpose to follow your design for us. We pray these things for the sake of Christ.
