The Altogether Lovely One II: He is not the Problem. We Are.

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snider and with me again is Jordan Thomas, our special guest, and the author of a study that was completed last year,

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Christ Our Treasure, Enjoying the Preeminence of Jesus in the Local Church. And it's one of the many studies that's a combination of video preaching and then workbook where you go back to Scripture to search for yourselves.

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And so, designed for small groups and churches, you can do it with Christian schools, homeschools, or in your family.

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Jordan, last time we talked, we dealt a lot with the issue that Christ is enough.

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And he is, you know, that really, even saying that, I feel like we should apologize to say about the

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God -man that he, well, he's enough. Yes, he's enough. Well, he's infinitely more than enough. And when we say to people, you know, a healthy church is made up of an entire group, not just the preacher tells us, and we accept it,

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Christ is enough, but moms and dads and young people, every believer in the church, really in unison saying he is infinitely more than enough.

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And he is all we have to offer from our youngest classes to our, you know, fellowships and, you know, our baby showers and our worship services.

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And we make no apology for that. Well, two questions might come to people's minds.

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One is, is he really enough? And the second is one that's probably asked by serious church members sometimes.

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Are we limiting Christianity if we say, well, we're going to focus on this primarily.

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He is enough. He's the object of our focus. He's the object of our ministry. He is the prime recipient of our efforts, our love, our devotion.

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And he's the fuel that begins, then fuels other things. Are we limiting church?

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Have we become kind of an insular group of self -indulged people that say,

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Christ is so beautiful, me and my four, we're going to gather together and focus on that and let the world, you know, go to hell.

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But we're enjoying Jesus Christ together. I know that your church does not reflect that abuse of the treasuring

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Christ approach. So we want to get to that. But first, you know, is

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Christ really worth it? And what passages make you think as an individual, as a husband, a dad, a pastor, what passages come to mind that make you think, you know, treasuring

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Christ with other believers is the heart of Christianity? Yeah, well, I could answer that by saying

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I'm probably just always prisoner to the moment anytime I'm asked a question like that, because I can't think of a passage that doesn't stimulate my heart and mind that direction.

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But there's a few that are just so explicit that it seems like they have to drive our approach to all the others.

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But maybe first, just a statement from a brother who's now in glory,

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Leonard Ravenhill, when he was in his 80s, he was preaching one of his two hour sermons and he said, with a trembling voice and a broken heart and tears on his cheeks, he said, if I could crack the door of heaven one inch and let you look inside, you'd never turn around.

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If you could see right now what the regenerate soul will see in glory, then you would be so captivated, so allured that you couldn't imagine having any other focus or gaze.

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And there are many, many passages in my estimation that explicitly hold out that vision of Christ for his people now.

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So you said, what are some of them? Let me just give you one that's in my mind now.

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The apostle Paul writes to the church at Corinth a couple of times, maybe a couple of additional times, letters we don't have, the aggressive letter and the sorrowful letter.

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But the two that we have, under inspiration of the Spirit, right here in our

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New Testament, first and second Corinthians, obviously the church wasn't doing very well. Paul was quite troubled about them.

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And there's a lot of specific situations that he addresses. Apparently an entourage had come to Paul and they reported to him about how the church was doing.

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So he writes back to him and he addresses those issues. But he himself had served as their founding pastor for about a year and a half.

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If you go back and put the chronology together, for maybe 18 months, Paul was in Corinth, seeing people come to faith and serving as the pastor of this little nucleus of believers, this local church in Corinth.

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But when he writes to him in second Corinthians, here's an imminent apostle. Now, before I tell you what he said,

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I got to give a little bio of this man who said it. This imminent apostle who we know had been beaten multiple times and flogged and whipped and lowered in a basket out of a wall and chased out of a city and call us him a raging mad people.

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He had been stoned so badly that they thought he was dead. They drug his seemingly lifeless corpse outside the city, threw his body in a ditch and he got back up and went right back in and started talking about Jesus again.

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So I'm just trying to enumerate that this is a man who had suffered much for Jesus and kept going and talking about him.

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What he said to the church at Corinth, these are people he knew. He knew about their wayward kids.

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He knew about their broken marriages. He knew about death of loved ones. He knew these people.

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He said, I'm afraid. What would make an apostle like that have fear?

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He said, I'm afraid that like the serpent deceived Eve, this is 2 Corinthians 11, your mind will be led astray from simple, pure devotion to Jesus.

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2 Corinthians 11, 1 -3, he said, the biggest fear I have, the thing that gives me most trepidation about any of Christ's churches, and you in particular, precious church at Corinth with all your problems, here's the one thing that I'm most fear.

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The simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ is going to get taken from your heart, from your mind.

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And so I'm already thinking of a bunch of other passages, but I'll just stop there and say, has that happened to us?

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Has that happened to our churches? If the apostle Paul were writing an epistle to our congregations, what'd he say?

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I mean, he got a lot of warts and wrinkles and cracks in the armor.

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But the thing I'm most concerned about is you're distracted away from Christ.

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So I think the New Testament consistently holds out a radical gaze on Jesus as God's great incentive for the way our lives should look now.

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Yeah, so there's a number of passages that you've mentioned to us before the podcast,

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Ephesians 3 and 4, Hebrews 12, 2 Corinthians 11, Galatians 4, you know, all showing that unto you which believe, he is precious, and that is not just noble, that is the heart of Christianity, and it is the most eminently practical heart of Christianity.

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As you've mentioned in the previous podcast, it's not just that this... We're not talking pragmatism. This works better than focusing on something else.

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This is the heart of the Father. He eternally, timelessly, measurelessly delights in the

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Son and all who are united to the Son. And we cannot be more godly, if we think of godliness and we think of very practical ways that that looks in a home or at school or at work, we could not be more godly than starting there to timelessly, continually cultivate a delight in Christ above every other option.

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Amen. Yeah, the entire book of Hebrews is about the all superiority of Jesus over any and every conceivable rival.

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He doesn't list all of them. He just lists the main ones. Yeah, the most attractive ones.

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Yeah, he's better than this and that and this and that and this and that. And so depending on how you count, you know, seven, eight, nine different,

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Jesus is better, better, better, better. But even in that letter, when he's enumerating the all superiority of Christ over every conceivable rival, he's saying, so therefore, fix your eyes on him, look at him, gaze at him.

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So there's another passage, Hebrews 12, but you mentioned Ephesians 3 and 4, Paul says to him, grace was given.

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This is another church that he pastored, by the way, for a long time, the longest, three years maybe he was the pastor of the church at Ephesus.

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And when he writes to them, he says, you remember the grace that was given me so that when

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I preach to you, this is what I said, the unfathomable riches of Christ.

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That was sermon number one, sermon number two, sermon number 10, sermon number 50, you know, if you can fathom him, we're not finished because there's another sermon coming.

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But that's why grace was given to me. So if God gives grace to a preacher, what would his preaching sound like?

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It would sound like more than you can fathom, although God has accommodated us in his graciousness, you can truly know him, but you cannot exhaust him.

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And so in that same chapter, Paul says, this is Ephesians 3, it's God's wisdom to, it is

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God's purpose to make known his manifold wisdom through the church. And you flip the page to chapter four, and he says, this is what that looks like.

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He'll give you leaders by his grace, he'll give you people that will serve your souls and equip you for ministry. But the point is, so that we may be unified in Christ.

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So he's the magnetic power, right? He's the sun in the center of the solar system of our church.

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Everything revolves around him. He is the singular source of our unity so that we may know him, it's

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Ephesians 4 .13, unity in Christ, so that we may know Christ. And then he says, so that all of us, like the kids in the classes and the senior adults that are struggling to make their way to their pew, so that all of us,

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Ephesians 4 .13, may attain to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

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That's what God's up to in the church. So whether we go to 2 Corinthians 11 or Hebrews 12 or Ephesians 3 and 4, or you reference

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Peter saying, to you who believe he's precious. Now here's a ragged, leather -skinned, sun -baked fisherman who says in that same letter, he says, though you have not seen him.

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Now Peter saw him. Peter saw him for three and a half years in ministry. Peter saw him in the Lord's ministry.

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He saw him risen from the dead. And then he says to all these Gentile churches, though you haven't seen him, you love him.

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You love him. Like, that's the distinguishing mark. It's him. And then you mentioned to you who believe he's precious.

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So it's just, I think literally every book, chapter, paragraph of Scripture, old and new covenant, is the

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Holy Spirit holding out to us the person and gospel labors of Jesus as the great attraction for our churches.

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If you think about Paul, so he's on the road to Damascus to continue to try to crush the, you know, the fledgling churches and to put all their leaders and adults and husbands and wives into prison and to deal with what he thought was, you know, the most horrific heresy.

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He is confronted by the risen Savior. And we know that Paul is never the same.

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And it's not just conversion. It's not just the gate that he walks through. It's the path for the rest of his life.

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You know, he's just never, he never recovers from seeing

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Christ for who he is. And it wasn't just the fact that it was a, you know, well, Paul had a vision, therefore, you know, well, many men saw

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Jesus Christ, you know, that you read the gospels. They saw the miracles of Christ, the astonishing miracles, and they heard the teaching.

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And I was reading just this week, the people at Nazareth becoming so offended, it says, offended at him because he was such an extraordinary teacher with miraculous gifts.

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And they're offended. What a fearful guy. Yeah. Like, who does he think he is? Why is everybody saying all these things about him?

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He's just Mary and Joseph's kid that grew up down the street, you know, of course. To see those things with their human eyes, and they do not value him.

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You know, he is of, they do not esteem him, Isaiah says. And yet, Peter does talk, as you mentioned, about people who didn't get to see with the human eye.

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Seeing Christ in a vision is not what changed Paul. It was the opening of the eyes of the soul, you know, the new birth, the spiritual ability to finally value things that have value and to turn his back on what doesn't.

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And from that point forward, there is such a revolution in Paul. He doesn't become just a better Jew, a more complete

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Jew. He doesn't go around from town to town as you read the book of Acts from that point forward.

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And you don't find him saying, look, I want to explain to you more fully the law. I want to explain to you more fully the people of God.

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He does, in his letters, deal with specific things that every church needs to know.

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But it's like Paul, from that point forward, everything has been reorchestrated around, as you mentioned, a person.

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So he's not excited to explain the law a little more clearly than the

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Pharisees understood. He's excited to tell them, Jesus, we preach him as Lord.

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And it's so, it's such an infinite privilege that we forget our own personal rights and we preach ourselves as your bond slaves.

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For Christ's sake. That's it. Yeah. And that which sounds so wrong. You know, like, oh no, no, I'm Christ's bond slave, not your bond slave.

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You know, the preacher says, well, that's true. You're Christ's bond slave. But when

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Christ tells you to make yourself the bond slave of the people that he has purchased and you're to love, then you gladly become the bond slave of them for Christ.

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Yeah. I mean, the Paul example is just so easy to spend the rest of our life trying to delve into.

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But you said his initial vision of the glory of Christ and the understanding of his saving love.

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He is the Messiah, the Savior King, that that Old Testament that Paul thought he knew so well is actually all about, but his life is just this constant flood of pull you by your shirt collar to the face of Jesus example that that he won't let go.

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So it wasn't just Jesus is the way in. Now let me talk about something else awesome. Or he also didn't go to all these places and say, you need a vision as well.

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Right. He gave them the biblical Jesus, at which time he only had the

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Old Testament. But but just two kind of biographical points from his life that may serve our hearts well to think about here for just a minute.

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What did he do after he met that risen Jesus and was converted? Galatians seems to tell us he went away for about three years and met with the risen

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Jesus, desert of Arabia, relearning the Bible he thought he knew so well. What did he do after that?

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Well, for the rest of his life, till he got his head lopped off for preaching Jesus, he said, I count everything is lost so that I may know him.

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He wanted to know him more. He said he describes it in this superlative language, like the surpassing value of knowing

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Christ Jesus, my Lord, is the reason for which

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I gladly count everything else is loss. I'll suffer the loss of everything.

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It's not even a loss because he uses another word so that I may gain Christ and have his righteousness.

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And then he talks about knowing him in this threefold way, fellowship of his sufferings and conformity to his death and power of his resurrection.

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It's just I just want to know him. And that is not super spiritual, elite, second tier

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Christianity. That is when Jesus takes your heart with him to heaven, your testimony, you want to know him.

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So I think Paul's life saved by Jesus, that vision you described, so what does he do?

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He devotes himself to getting to know that Jesus. And then for the rest of his life, he pursues knowing that Jesus and helping others do the same.

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Yeah. And even in the writings of Paul, not just the book of Acts, it's not just that he says a lot about Christ that is so necessary for us.

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It's that as Paul, the logician, the careful thinker who carefully unfolds his thoughts so that you can, so the word therefore becomes one of your favorite words in the whole, you know, in the dictionary, the therefores.

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Do you understand this? Okay. I see it. I see it, Paul. Therefore. Okay. So do you understand?

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And it's almost like, you know, you're tracking with Paul when you could almost write the verse that follows.

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So Paul, that means this, right? And Paul's saying, yes, absolutely. Let me explain that next.

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But when you think of Paul, he's so logical, but there are times where he interrupts himself and he doesn't go back to the editor and say, wait, now

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I jumped around a lot here. He cannot help as he's mentioning different aspects of the

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Christian life to just stop and say, I mentioned Christ just now. Oh, the love and the loveliness, the majesty and the condescension, the indescribable -ness of this

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Christ. And then he just goes, you know, to the atmospheres with Christ and then comes back down and says, now let's pick back up with how we live in light of that love and loveliness.

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Yeah. He'd fail every grammar class, right? Because he's caught up in worship and it's true worship.

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Worship's not just some, you know, sentimental fuzzy feeling. It's a fixation on the biblical

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Jesus. It's a love for him. It's being so captivated with him that it's as if everything else fades away for a moment.

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That happens to him, as you said, when he's writing theology. Does that happen to us? You know, when our favorite preacher is giving us three points of good theology, it should.

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If it's faithful, it should. It should capture us, captivate us with Christ. So two examples of that happening to Paul.

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You may have been thinking of one or both or more of these. Romans 11 and 12 and Ephesians 1.

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Romans 12 is the big therefore. And yes, it does become one of your favorite words in the dictionary because for 11 chapters, he's given this diatribe.

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It's the most watertight logician, theology, logic. It's one to three, all are dead.

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There's no hope. Every contribution you try to make to help God like you more worsens your damnable predicament.

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You're a sinner. You've fallen short of his glory. And the only just response from God is to condemn you forever.

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He cannot violate his holiness to make you his friend. You would think the book ends, right?

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Romans 1 to 3, period, no more. And then you get this unfolding in that diatribe, that logical way.

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He's answering every question of the opponent before they ask it. And he's lining up this biblical understanding of justification.

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When he gets to the end of that, it's what you said. He doesn't send it to the editor for approval.

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He explodes into worship. Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments?

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How unfathomable are his ways? Who has known the mind of the Lord or who has first given to him that he should be paid back again for from him and through him and to him are all things.

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To him be the glory forever. Therefore, therefore, what do we do? You give your whole life as an act of worship in response of the bloody mutilation of Jesus for you to be justified in God's presence.

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That's Romans 8, 1 and 2. No condemnation for you. Why? Because Jesus drank it all.

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God can't condemn you if you trust in Christ, because Jesus literally took it all.

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There's your doctrine of justification. And then the end of that chapter, nothing can separate you from his love, zero, zilch, nothing.

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Therefore, your whole life, one grand act of worship. So that's the Romans one.

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And I won't say as much about Ephesians, but I have to mention it. When I say he would fail the grammar class, he only writes two verses before he explodes in this 11 verse worship experience where there's no commas or periods or paragraphs.

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It's just this one long Ephesians 1, 3 to 1, 14 run on sentence of what you said.

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He's caught up in worship. He stupefied that God would give grace to sinners in this way.

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He lavished his grace on us in the Redeemer. The father has planned this.

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The son has accomplished this. The spirit has applied this. And so three times he smashes the symbol.

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I wasn't a big concert goer, but I'm from the era where, you know, the heavy metal drummer would do his, his long riff.

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And it's like, he's doing that. He's just drum roll, drum roll, drum roll. And then three times symbol and the symbol smashes to the praise of the glory of his grace, to the praise of the glory of his grace.

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And he's just worshiping. And that's native to the heart of every Christian.

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Right. Right. When you read Romans one through 11, you know, you could, you wouldn't write it just like Paul.

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You don't have the spirit of God guiding your pen and your thoughts. But you could, you could almost write those last verses of chapter 11.

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And then if someone said that would be a good place to end the letter, it's on a high point.

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It's a crescendo. You would say, but wait, there is something I want to say one more thing. You could, you could almost summarize

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Paul's, you know, letters in this way. He is, and he just lays him before us, you know, he spreads this market of Christ before us.

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And then what he says in Romans, now to him, he is, do you see him?

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And we say, yes, Paul, we see him now to him. So now we live to him.

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What would that look like? Well, who he is guides how we live to him and why we live to him, you know, and the fuel as well as the path is him.

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Well, Jordan, that brings us to that question, you know, is Christ enough again? But let's think of it from the

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Christian's perspective, from the pastor's perspective. But I think that all that we've been saying in particular really applies well to every parent.

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You know, our children are growing and the problems are not the problems of the two -year -old and the three -year -old so much, but now that the problems of the 17 -year -old and the 19 -year -old and the 25 -year -old, the problems that, you know, can endure a lifetime and the heartbreaks and the sleepless nights and the concern and you pour out your heart in prayer for them, but then you pour out your heart to them and you tell them of Christ's beauty and is that going to be enough?

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And you look at your church and maybe it's not growing and is Christ really enough or is that just a noble sounding thing?

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You think of, you know, again, the Apostle Paul. So he writes to the Corinthians and in chapter three, he talks about the superlative privileges that every believer has over the greatest of the

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Old Testament believers because we are part of a greater covenant, the fullness, the enduring fullness of the new covenant,

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Christ having come and we're not just looking forward to what He will do, He has done and has sent

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His Spirit. So there is a fullness that the new covenant believer has that the old covenant believer could not have and having that,

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Paul says, personally, personally being saved by that new covenant and then being entrusted with carrying those great truths to other people.

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Paul said, I don't lose heart. But right after that in chapter four, he then mentions really how many people are turning their back on my gospel and disinterested,

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Jews are disinterested, Gentiles are disinterested. They are bored with Christ.

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And how do you answer that, Paul? Is Jesus not all you say He is? And Paul's answer is no, the problem is not

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Christ. The problem is, there is an enemy who has brought a blindness to us and we prefer that blindness to the beauty of Christ.

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And so that's why we're not seeing it or, you know, again in Romans after those eight chapters, those first eight chapters, but the

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Jews seem so disinterested in their own Messiah. Paul, how can you be sure that Jesus is everything you're saying

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He is? Is He really worth giving up our life for? The Jews don't seem to think so. Yes, Paul says, and he explains, there's no lack in Christ.

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He is the treasure I've told you. The problem is with their hearts. And you know, we cannot allow ourselves in the present day to measure the value of Jesus by what the world says, but really we can't measure the value of Jesus by what our local church says or what biographies say.

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It is only God that knows the measure of His Son's worth. So we go to the scripture, and as you said,

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God has stooped to give us, I think of it as like, you know, you know those books you read to toddlers, babies that are bored books, you know, they only have like four pages per book.

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We like those, four words on each page and about five pages for the whole book. It's like our best theological grasp is like the bored book, but it's true and it's worth it.

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So Jordan, I know that you pastor and have pastored for 18 years in a very difficult area, a difficult area because of sin's long, you know, impact on families and the violence and the drugs and the darkness, and your church is not 3 ,000 on Sunday.

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So how do you deal with the enemy's accusation? And it may come to you as a whisper in the night or when you're preparing the sermon or it may come to you through a church member who means well, but they're repeating, you know, like Peter, the really things that Satan would say.

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And that is, look, Jordan, this, we know you love Jesus, but let's be honest, we need

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Jesus plus. Oh no, I've said many times that a lot of well -intentioned

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Christians allow Satan to take the day off. You know, he's the, he's the accuser of the brethren, but sometimes he gets to sleep in because the brethren do the accusing.

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So we do his work for him. And you know, I've been guilty in that same way of, of entertaining and God forbid, repeating some of the devil's lies, but about Paul's emphasis, second

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Corinthians three and four that you touched on so well. We have a little mantra, at least it's repeated enough at our church that it's familiar verbiage.

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But I say it to my heart 10 ,000 times more than I say it out of my mouth. And the mantra goes something like this.

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I can assure you that if Jesus is boring, the problem is not with him. And so we want to be as fascinated with the reflection of the glory of God in the face of Christ as God is.

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We believe that's what heaven's going to be. I could easily list lots of passages. I'll limit myself just to a few references with no comment.

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John 17, especially the last paragraph, Jesus tells us why he wants us to be in eternity with him.

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It's his glory. First John three, when we see him, we'll be like him.

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Revelation 22 four, they will see his face. In John 14, when

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Jesus talked to his closest friends, all he offered them was greater apprehensions of himself.

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And he didn't think that that was underselling them. And they didn't complain. So he is not boring.

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The whole Bible is one great expose of that reality. Jesus even picks up on so many

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Old Testament passages to emphasize this same theme that not only is he not boring, he's absolutely exhilarating and enchanting and awe -inspiring and dazzling.

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Like when he talks about an obscure passage in Kings about an

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African queen coming to see Solomon and having her breath taken away. Sheba's queen comes to see

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Solomon and she had heard a lot about him. But she says to Solomon, Oh, the half wasn't told to me, you're better.

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You're two times better than everything I ever heard. And then it says she was speechless.

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Her breath was taken away. And Jesus says, hello, something greater than Solomon is here.

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And so I admit personal conviction, but I also admit corporate concern when our heart doesn't skip a beat, when our breath isn't taken away, when we're not stupefied and staggered by the brilliance of Jesus.

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Hebrews 1 says all of the glory of God radiates from him. John, who was maybe a teenager, a lot think he was a teenager during his times of walking around with Jesus in first century

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Palestine, three decades later when he writes his gospel, he picks one word.

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This is the beloved disciple, you know, most intimate friend of Jesus on planet earth. He said, we saw his glory.

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That's the one where John picks decades after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

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And we saw his glory during the incarnation. Most people didn't. And I think that's happening today.

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You know, our churches are, let's admit it, bored with Jesus. And sometimes, let's admit it, so are her pastors.

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And the reason we're not impressed with him, I'll say again, is not because the problem's with him.

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If he's boring to us, the problem's not with him. And so you connected it to ministry, mission.

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I'd love to talk more about that in this conversation. Let me just open the door a little bit.

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Everybody talks about what they love. Everybody's an evangelist. That's true of pagans, true of all religious people, true of Christians.

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You talk about what you love. And the reason our mission is so deficient is not because we are too focused on Jesus in our churches.

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If we would actually be focused on him and truly love him, 1

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Peter 1, 8 and 9, though you haven't seen him, you love him, then

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I assure you our communities would hear more about him. Yeah.

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I was thinking when you mentioned John, it's one thing for John to, you know, when he first meets

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Christ and walks with Christ and sees Christ, you think, well, of course he had those extraordinary opportunities.

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And then Christ, you know, dies, is raised. He sees Christ after that, he sits and listens.

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And then Christ ascends. And decades later, John is still captivated with Christ.

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And it's not because life has been easy. How many people by the time he writes 1 John and he says, we saw him, we handled, we touched.

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Well, who did you touch? And he doesn't say, well, you know, well, the union of God and man. And he explains it theologically.

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He just calls him the word of life. The life was manifested. We touched him.

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And then he writes to those people, knowing the cost that will come to them to love

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Jesus Christ in that day, knowing the list of names he must have been able to call to mind people who have died for this

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Jesus, people that he loved and they are no longer here. And the cost that he's paid to love

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Christ. And even at that point, he writes and says, I'm writing this letter so that you might have this fellowship with us and with him and have this joy that comes from knowing the one in whom there is no darkness at all.

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And it just astonishes me that we find no abating of love for Christ in any of the

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New Testament writers. And yet we know the horrific cost they're paying and they don't view themselves the way we view them as the great

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Paul. Second Timothy, his last book, amazes us by saying everyone and there's a there's some exception there.

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But generally speaking, everyone, all my co -pastors have abandoned me because I am under the wrath of Rome and they don't want to be under the wrath of Rome.

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And so they have they have crawled into the shadows and left me alone. And he has to say to Timothy, if you would come to me, bring the parchments, bring the books and bring me a coat.

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It's going to be cold in the winter here. That's Paul. Yes, the off scouring of the earth.

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And yet he does not dim his statements about Christ, even in that moment.

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Yeah, no doubt. You mentioned John's epistles and how he's talking about fellowship with God and with his son,

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Jesus Christ. And I want to invite you into that these many, many years after so much, you know, dangerous toils and snares.

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But then in that same epistle, 1 John chapter five, he it's like he smushes all of his theology down, all of his

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Christology down into these little phrases. He does it over and over. But 1 John 5, 12, he who has the son has the life.

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If you don't have him, you don't have life. Just it like he's everything.

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He literally is life. He doesn't just provide it for us. He is that same way Jesus talks about himself.

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And so these New Testament believers who met the risen Jesus offered nothing other than the fullness of Jesus to anybody that wanted life.

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So yes. Yes. So that brings us to that second question, and that is, as church members who might be concerned when they say, well, my children who grew up in this church and, you know, they've not professed

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Christ perhaps, and they've reached an age where, you know, they're moving out of the house, making their own decisions.

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They're not interested in coming back here. Did we do something wrong? Our neighbors visited the church when we invited them, and then they never showed up again.

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Are we doing something wrong? And I'm glad that that's not the only result, but that sometimes is the result, and it can be heartbreaking if we care about people.

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If we don't care about people, pragmatism is no temptation. You know, hey, I got what I want. I don't care about being successful.

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Pragmatism does tempt the true believer who looks at the person down the street and cares about their soul.

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But the answer to pragmatism is what we've been talking about. But let me ask you, in practical ways, in the work where you're serving alongside other men, how is it that this preoccupation with Christ is moving you and fueling you into every area of service and not just remaining kind of an isolated group that's enjoying the doctrines of Jesus?

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Well, concerning our kids who've not yet professed faith, some who, as you described, may have moved out of the home and are now adulting and not so interested in this

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Jesus, or we invite our friends, like you described, and doesn't seem to touch a chord in their heart and they're not interested, or, as you described, all the lost people down the street that we would love to reach and see become true, fully devoted followers of Christ.

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And you said, did we do something wrong? And my first response is probably, yeah, we probably did.

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We did some wrong things. But by God's grace, one thing we will continue to pray is do not let us deviate one click off of true north.

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The compass of our soul, of our life, of our church, of our ministry, Lord, nobody else in the universe is going to offer

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Christ. What other institution, what other entity, who else is going to offer the biblical

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Jesus only and always? And so our prayer is, Lord, don't let us deviate. Don't let us get one click off of true north.

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And you mentioned, I think, in the earlier conversation, sometimes we're the stumbling block. So we offer the true

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Jesus in a crotchety way or read the verse about anathemas in a way that's just mean and off -putting.

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Lord, temper us, protect us from that. And so we probably have done maybe even good and biblical things in a less than best way.

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And I would say that that's really the best we have to offer.

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We all lament what some other people may think is our best sermon.

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We haven't even touched the hem of the garment of Christ. You get alone with him.

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He feeds your soul. He gives you a true sighting of himself by the Spirit in his word.

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Your heart is raptured to see something of the glory of God in Christ. And then you stand up and try to explain that to anybody.

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And when you're done, you're just embarrassed and sometimes regretting how poorly you did.

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But I would say concerning all those people we care about so deeply in our homes, our families that are still in our churches that have yet to announce their allegiance to the

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King and all these communities around us that desperately, I mean, one day soon they're going to agree.

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They desperately need the Jesus we've been trying to present. There's no avoiding the coming day when everyone will absolutely agree that the

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Jesus we're trying to faithfully present is the one they wish they would have known. So as we break for them now, we long for them to know him before it's everlastingly too late.

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You mentioned pragmatism. Yes, we are tempted to say, well, let's focus on Jesus some, but let's really be about something helpful.

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Well, there's nothing more practical than God, but we're convinced that the

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Bible teaches that congregations essentially gather for worship and scatter for evangelism.

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So rather than try to orient all the church's programs to all the multifaceted dimensions of the peoples all around us, if we focus on him, what we found is that on the inside, everything about all the little entities or ministries or efforts of the church are saturated with him, 2

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Corinthians, and his aroma. It's just Christ only and always, but then also outside.

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Instead of orienting the whole church around one specific niche of our lost context, the people who prefer this or that or whatever tribal group in our area, if we just focus on him on the inside, then our people who are connected to those different circles and tribes of our area, then there they go.

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They're out there trying to reach them for Christ, and then there she goes. We have a senior adult lady doing a

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Bible study through the Gospel of Matthew, which followed a Bible study through the Psalms, which followed another

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Bible study through a book, which I forget, at a senior adult living quarters. Well, praise God. Our church is pretty terrible at having an awesome senior adult ministry, but that sister is anointed by the

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Lord and really good at reaching them. But then also homeless people in our community that are getting reached by others in our church.

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Our church is pretty terrible at having an awesome homeless ministry, but here's this little cluster of people that are over there reaching them, or some who have been rescued from sex trafficking work or getting reached by others, and some who are working with actually athletes and some influential people in our city and community.

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Well, our church has no specific ministry to any of those entities. Preach Christ, love him, see him capture people's hearts, and wherever he sends them, they're offering,

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Lord willing, nothing other than him. Yeah, you mentioned 2

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Corinthians, referring to chapter 2, where Paul says at that low point in his ministry, he mentions that God has united us to this triumphant Christ, Christ's great triumph will train.

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We are part of that, but we are an aroma to God of his

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Son. So our ministries please him. They smell like his

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Son. And we are an aroma of the knowledge of God in every place we go, as you're mentioning.

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And to some, it's a smell like homemade bread, and they want to follow you off the porch into the home and say, hey,

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Mrs. So -and -so, could I join supper tonight? I know, I mean, I live next door, but could

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I get a piece of bread? And then to some people, they smell and they think, man, that's horrible.

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And they run away from us. But the tragedy that's greater than people turning away from the aroma of Christ in us, in our lives, in our message, would be no aroma.

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We just smell like American conservativism, or we smell like reform doctrine, or whatever.

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And it's not an everlastingly pleasing aroma, like the smell of the sacrifice rising up, which

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Paul uses that word later when talking about how the Christian smells to the Father. So the primary focus being

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God himself, and that is such a practical thing. It fuels and impacts everything we do.

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And really, it is the only thing that keeps us from becoming self -indulgent in our

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Christianity. And even churches, perhaps, I've been guilty of doing a lot of good things in a church setting long before I met

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Christ. I remember joining an evangelism class at First Baptist Church, where you and I both had attended at one time, different times because of our age difference.

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And I joined the evangelism class before I loved Christ, and I repeated,

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I memorized everything, I got the certificate, and I went through it more than once, and I was so disinterested in Christ.

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But I was interested in being viewed as a person that might be interested in Christ. Now, before we close down this session,

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I want to say that all that we've been saying about the beauty of Christ and the way that impacts church and how he is more than sufficient, it does also, this same light that shines light on the right path and gives joy to the heart like a sunrise on people that have lived in a gloomy place, it is also a light that exposes the nature of sin.

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What is so ugly about sin? It's not hell or what happens to me because I made that bad choice, you know,

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I've lost a marriage, I've lost my family, I've lost a job, I've lost... No, the nature of sin, it's the sinfulness of sin, the heinousness, the ugliness of sin at its heart is that we can look at God come to us in unbelievable mercy and humble himself, so to speak, and embrace our true humanity and command us to come to him for life and forgiveness, and we are so bored that we prefer every one of sin's empty promises to the living

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God's realities, even when they come to us in kindness. I mean,

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I don't blame humans for running from God if it's God in his absoluteness, an angry

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God, I know he deserves me, but as soon as I get near to him, he'll destroy me, and I deserve it, so I'm going to stay as far from him as long as possible.

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But if he comes to me in the work of the Redeemer, and he offers me what is custom -designed to meet every one of my needs, and I deserve none of it, how can

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I be so disinterested, you know, indifferent? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the 2 ,000 -year track record of church history shows that the great motive for evangelism and missions is not man's lostness, it's

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Christ's worth. It's not right that Jesus not receive the worship that he's due, but that's actually the best news for our fellow man.

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The one thing that's going to satisfy you, yes, there are incredible benefits. What you're saved from, our minds can't conceive of the enormity of the benefit, but who we're saved for, that's the motivation.

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So, because Christ deserves the worship that he does not yet receive from our neighbor down the street or the tribe across the planet is the motivation for prizing him in our churches and commending him to the world.

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Yeah. One thought I had convicting for myself, the beauty of Christ, the fullness of Christ also does expose not just the sin of unbelief and the true nature of sin, but it exposes our hypocrisy when, as a true believer, perhaps we've grown a bit cool toward him.

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He's not become cool toward us, but we've become cool toward him and we've slidden, we've begun to fill the life up with the old things, not the bad things, maybe nice things, but they're things that are crowding

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Christ to the peripheral edge of everything. And I noticed that one of the evidences of that is that I go from being a person who, when someone wants to talk about Christ and they ask me,

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I mean, because I'm a Christian, I'm also a pastor. And they say, what about this about Jesus?

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And you find yourself struggling when things are right, struggling to find words to adequately, in any way, present who he is to these people.

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Every word falls short, but when you drift and the heart is cold, the ugliness of the hypocrisy is exposed.

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When someone says, tell me about Christ. And you find yourself struggling to find words to make your love for Jesus look more than it presently is.

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And that used to not be your problem. It used to be the other. Well, the

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Lord has begun the rescue and carries on the rescue. So if we find ourselves in that situation, the infinite value of Jesus, whether we are bored by him or cool toward him, the cure is to run straight to him and cry out and lay the ugliness of that before him and to be rescued from that.

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As you mentioned for him next week, we're going to look at how the entirety of scripture just gives us fuel for fresh looks at Christ.