The Mission of the Spheres - Part I

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Psalm 105:23-45

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Well, last week, we finished up our time in the book of Genesis and we're approaching now the beginning of a series in the book of Exodus, and we'll not be going through the entire book of Exodus all in one sweep.
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We'll have an opportunity after Exodus 20 to take a little detour for a while and head across the divide into the
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New Testament, and then we'll perhaps come back to finish the book of Exodus. So, that's where we'll be at least through 2023, probably parts of 2024, so we're in it for the long haul as far as the book of Exodus is concerned.
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That means we want to take every opportunity to prepare wisely, build a foundation, or maybe find some stepping stones as we begin to chart our course through the book of Exodus.
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We were thinking about simply reading the first 12 chapters or so as a congregation and then launching right into it, but maybe cooler heads prevailed and we thought maybe we can take a little time and consider topics or themes that would help us bridge the gap between Genesis and Exodus, and part of that is thinking, what is the focus?
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What is the big theme that we can chase one way or another? It's never as simple as one big theme, one focal point, but we want to have something that's driving our consideration through Exodus.
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We don't want to lose sight of the forest as we spend the time examining tree by tree, chapter by chapter, and so that really led me to think about what we might do this morning and perhaps the next two if not three weeks.
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You'll notice I've kind of titled this little topical intercourse,
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The Mission of the Spheres. The Mission of the Spheres. I think thinking about the spheres, and we'll get to that later this morning, family, church, and state, when we think about the spheres, we'll find there's something to say about mission and the way mission relates to the family, the way that mission relates to the church, and the way that mission relates to the state, and that comprises the totality of our lives, of our social relationships.
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So family, church, and state, and how does the mission relate to these spheres?
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That's what we want to begin this morning, and this morning it's really going to be a triumph for note takers.
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If you have your little notepads and golf pencils in front of you, you'll do well because this is going to be more descriptive.
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This is going to lay the foundation not only for the next two weeks, but also for our time in Exodus, and so you'll want to very carefully take notes of the things that we're going to lay down together this morning.
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This is going to be descriptive. It's going to think in big picture terms about what mission is, and we'll even have some previews, some glimpses of the book of Exodus to kind of whet our appetite.
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We're going to take some more practical steps over the next two weeks. We're going to think about why is there mission?
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Why are we in the place that we are, and what are we up against? That's going to be more next week, and then the third week it's really going to be how?
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How do we carry out mission in the spheres? What does this look like practically for where we are at this time, and who we are as this individual body, or as families, or living in the
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Commonwealth of Massachusetts? So, you'll see it's going to be more descriptive and technical this morning, and then we'll begin to make steps towards something a little more practical over the next two weeks.
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So, that's why I say it's a triumph for note takers. You'll do well to take notes. Three parts this morning, first, the mission of God, secondly, the mission in Exodus, we want to preview a little bit about Exodus, and then third, beginning to lay down and develop this idea of the mission of the spheres.
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So, the mission of God, the mission of God in Exodus, and the mission of God in the spheres.
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Mission of God, first. The early church needed to be formed.
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Jesus was born in the little town of Bethlehem. We sang, O come, O come,
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Emmanuel, Emmanuel came. And he ransomed captive Israel, and he called 12 men to follow.
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And with 12 foundations, one of course was the betrayer, was replaced by Matthias, but with the 12 foundation stones, he established the foundation of the church on the apostles and the prophets, as Ephesians 2 would say.
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The early church needed to be formed. He laid the foundation on the apostles and the prophets, and it was formed, and then it needed to be built up.
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As the church was being built, because of error, sin, the world, and heresy, the church needed to be reformed.
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We are reformed Christians, and we recognize the great phrase, semper reformanda, the church is always in need of being reformed.
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So the early church needed formation, that's been done. Ever since then, the church has needed continually reformation, re -formation.
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The question that often poses us in our day is, does the church need reformation, or does the church need revival?
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And what's the difference between reformation and revival? Reformation would be pulling the church back from certain errors, or sad neglect, a crustacean of abuse, a sort of thick blindness that overcomes the church doctrinally.
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That's where the church needs reform, it needs to be reformed. Revival is when the church is not necessarily in error, or in neglect, or somehow covered in doctrinal blindness, but rather, the church is just weak.
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The church is overwhelmed, the church is surrounded, the church is in some ways vulnerable.
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That's when God often moves with revival. We have to ask ourselves here in this place, does the church need reformation or revival?
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I think the answer is yes. I think we need reformation and revival.
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What needs to be reformed? One of the things that I think we'll find as we begin the book of Exodus relates directly to what
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I think we need to reform here in our little neck of the woods, here at GRBC. I think what we need is mission, mission.
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Mission leads to reformation and revival, and reformation and revival lead to mission.
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We need mission. We don't sit on our hands and passively wait for reformation and revival.
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Praise God, the Reformers didn't sit on their hands and passively wait for reformation or revival.
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They had mission. We need mission. Now, what do we mean by mission?
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Well, the word mission doesn't appear in the Bible, it's like Trinity. Go look up mission. I think there's maybe two references depending on what translation you look up, but it's not an organic or natural word to the
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Bible, and yet the word is thrown about everywhere by Christians. We talk about missionaries, we give to missions, we think that and almost instinctively know that to be a
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Christian is in some sense to be missional. What do we mean by mission? It's interesting.
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I was doing a lot of reading this week on this subject, an area I haven't explored much, which means this is really going to be more of a shotgun blast than anything concentrated and distilled, but the missiologists that reflect on the term mission, they note that it really doesn't come to the fore until the
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Jesuits begin to use it, the Jesuit missions, and in the mind of the Jesuits, even
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Protestants need to receive their mission. They need to be reached. But they have the
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Latin term missio, and it was describing the spread of the Christian faith among people who were not part of the
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Roman Catholic Church, and that's really the way that it becomes vernacular to Christianity.
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Now, of course, Protestants take that over and we have our own view of missio, and we have a whole missions movement that erupts really in the 18th century.
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In the last century, and this is an important development, a certain missiologist named
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Karl Hartenstein coined the phrase missio Dei, mission of God, missio
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Dei, mission of God, and what he meant by that was what had been sort of germinating among Christian theologians is the idea of mission doesn't begin with the church, but it actually begins with the
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Godhead, with the triune God. Mission begins when God the Father sends
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God the Son into the world, and God the Son sends God the Spirit into the church who is in the world.
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Mission is the Father sending the Son who sends the Spirit so that the church may be sent.
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There was a very famous conference in 1952 called the Willingen Missionary Conference, and this is one of the great statements that came out from it.
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There is no participation in Christ without participation in His mission to the world.
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Let me say that again. There is no participation in Christ without participation in His mission to the world.
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That by which the church receives its existence is that by which it is also given its mission.
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That by which the church receives its existence, the sending God, the missionary activity of the sending
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God, that's how the church receives its very being. It's also that by which the church receives its very mission.
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What kind of mission are we talking about? There's different ways to conceive of mission.
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When I say mission to you, what's the first image or idea that comes to your mind?
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Do you think of a rescue mission? Is the church, are
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Christians primarily engaged in a rescue mission of one sort or another? Think of the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 and all the
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SAS troops with their gas masks and MP5 kicking in the windows to go rescue the hostages. Is that essentially what the church is doing?
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Is it a big rescue mission for those that are under the domain and tyranny of the devil? Is that what
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Jesus gets at with the binding of the strong man that we may plunder the house, as it were, take back plundered goods?
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Well, there's some biblical warrant to that, the idea of rescue mission. Is it a mission of retaining?
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Some of us some years ago went out to Northern England and entering into the borders of Scotland and we saw some of the remains of Hadrian's Wall.
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The Emperor Hadrian basically saying there's nothing to be gained beyond the north. Essentially, it was probably more economic than anything.
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I like to think it was the ferocity of the Scots where they said, build a wall, don't go up there. More likely it was economic.
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The whole mission of the garrisons along the wall were simply retain. Don't advance, simply retain.
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Retain what you've gained. Maintain where you are. Do your best not to lose what's been given to you.
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That's the mission. Well, isn't that what God says to the pilgrims in Jeremiah 29, here you are at this time.
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Your exiles, your pilgrims, marry and plant and sow and buy and try to retain what's been given to you.
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Know that the glorious return is coming. Is that what the church's mission is, to retain?
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Is it to conquer? You think of the short little Frenchman.
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I don't know why Napoleon's always picked on. He was probably average height for his day, but we consider him the rather short, ill -tempered general who at one point had all of Europe trembling.
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We think of Joshua entering the land and the Canaanites trembling. What does
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Rahab say? Our hearts melt with this basically. Everyone knows what God's done through you.
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Is that the mission of the church, to conquer? Well, can't you see there's some biblical element to each idea here?
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There's something to say about the rescue mission, something to say about the retaining, the sort of maintaining.
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There's also something to say about the conquering advance. And what I want to say is however we conceive of the mission of the church, the way that we conceive of the mission of the church will shape the atmosphere, the ethos, the character of the church.
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What you think the mission is and how you expect the mission to be done is going to indefinitely stain the way that we are as a church, who we are as a church.
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Things that we will or will not do. The question that we have to ask is what is the mission of our church?
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Now again, everything I've found really relates all of mission towards simply the local church or the church as a institution.
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And I'm saying we need to have a view of mission that's much broader than that, broader than the church.
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God's kingdom is not relative only to the church, it's relative to all of life. That includes all spheres of which he is
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Lord. Institution of the family, the church, and the state. So that's why we're talking about the mission of the spheres.
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But still, the pressing question is what is the mission of the church? A book
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Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert co -wrote a number of years ago had that very title, What is the Mission of the
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Church? And their definition, which came about 60 pages in, was this, the mission of the church is to go into the world and make disciples by declaring the gospel of Jesus Christ and the power of the
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Spirit and gathering these disciples in churches so that they might worship the Lord and obey his commands now and in eternity to the glory of God the
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Father. Amen. That certainly is the mission of the church.
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That's the great commission that Jesus gives to the church, so there's no quarrel here with that.
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But notice that they define the task of God's mission broadly as the church being sent in the world to make disciples by proclaiming the gospel.
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So the church sent into the world to make disciples by proclaiming the gospel. Amen, right?
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Amen. That's the commission that is good and that is true. But we get a much broader view of mission as far as the
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Bible is concerned, a much broader view of mission when we begin where we've begun.
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We began in the book of Genesis. We began with creation. And when you begin with the broadest possible biblical framework, and within that framework there's the capacity to include all of God's work in the world, and how not only he's doing his work through his people, through the church, but how he's always working, as Jesus said, my
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Father's always working, then it means that Scripture leads us to conceive of mission not only narrowly in terms of the church making disciples by the power of the gospel, but also broadly in terms of God's larger work with his kingdom and creation and redemption and the promise of a new creation.
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In other words, there's a way of narrowing God's missions that we're only concerned with individuals as individuals, generic individuals making disciples.
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I would argue that that's a way of conceiving of mission that is bound up with the idea of rescue, but does not have a lot of thought for the idea of conquering and maintaining.
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So I'm not disagreeing with it, I'm simply saying it's truncated. There's something more to be said about the dynamics of creation, redemption, and new creation,
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God's intention for humanity at the beginning, before the fall, and therefore
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God's intention for redeemed humanity in a new heavens and in a new earth.
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Christopher Wright, who wrote a massive study called The Mission of God, and an
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Old Testament scholar, and so it has certainly that finesse and emphasis, but it's a whole Bible, biblical theology thinking in terms of how does the narrative of Scripture unfold to reveal the mission of God.
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And this is essentially what he says. So we gave the sort of what is the mission of the church by Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert and say amen, but there's more, and here's what
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Christopher Wright would say, and I agree with this. I put this forward as a statement for us to keep in plain view.
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You'll hear it several times this morning. Fundamentally, he says, our mission, if it is biblically informed and validated, means our committed participation as God's people at God's invitation and command in God's own mission.
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That's the key. Within the history of God's world for the redemption of God's creation.
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Let me say that again. Fundamentally, our mission, if it is biblically informed and validated, means our committed participation as God's people at God's invitation and command in God's own mission within the history of God's world for the redemption of God's creation.
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That is mission writ large. So the buzzword that comes out of that has often been missional.
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I don't do this very often, but I'll do it this morning. Show of hands. How many of you have heard the missional blank, you know, the missional church, the missional way of life?
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Anyone? Okay, a few. That's disappointing. I thought there'd be more. It's a buzzword in the seminary classrooms.
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We just want to be a missional church. We want to be incarnational and missional. Those are our two guiding pathways.
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It's very much in vogue. And the funny thing about that is it almost presumes that there's a way of being the church that is not missional.
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You know, there's churches out there, we're a missional church. And it's like, as Michael Goheen said, it's like saying,
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I'm a female woman. It's like, yeah, that's saying the same thing. To be a church is to be missional.
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There's no such thing as a missional church. It's just the church is missional. That's what a church is. If it's not missional, it's not a church.
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Daryl Guter, he develops this a little bit. Very helpful article. He says the term missional is like scaffolding.
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We have some blue -collar construction workers, you know what it is to build a scaffolding and climb up and begin to reckon with the drywall.
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He says the term missional is like scaffolding and it holds up our ecclesiology, that's doctrine of the church, our theology, how we approach
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Scripture, even how we learn about theology. So missional is sort of the scaffolding that holds together everything else.
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And he says we would not need that scaffolding if those things were all shaped as they should be by the mission of God and by a robust understanding of the church's missional nature.
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The church has a missional nature. We wouldn't need the scaffolding if we understood that.
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So he says, speaking of theology in particular, if mission were truly the mother of our theology, what a phrase, if mission were the mother of our theology, if our theological disciplines were intentionally conceived and developed as components of the formation of the church for this calling, we would never need to use the term missional.
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We would know that all of theology, Scripture itself, the church as an organism is given to us in missional terms.
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Our use of the word missional, Guterreichs, points us to something biblically significant that has been, if not lost completely, certainly long misplaced.
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Has GRBC misplaced the missional nature of the church?
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If not, what is our mission? Do we read the Bible missionally?
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A missional approach to reading Scripture is reading Scripture with God's work in the world with His ultimate desire to reveal
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Himself and make Himself known to His people and through them to the whole world, to all of creation, so that He might be glorified.
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Soli Deo Gloria is a missional phrase. Do we read the
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Bible missionally? In a very real sense, everything that we've been tracking along in Genesis has been
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God's mission in the world. In many ways, the Gospel promise there in Genesis 3 .15
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is begun to be chased, as it were, up through chapter 10 and the sort of destruction through Noah's flood and then this new covenant, the
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Noahic covenant that establishes common grace and God is going to continue this great Gospel promise in Genesis 11 forward.
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And Genesis 11, really, with the scattering of the nations, is the next major plot development in terms of the mission of God.
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You cannot read Exodus rightly if you don't understand the significance of Genesis 11. And Genesis 11, after cataclysmic judgment, man, of course, reunites and in their foolish pride, in their fallen, twisted, mutated imaginations, they seek to build a tower up to God.
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And they're able to get relatively far with mud and slime, not too bad, because they all have a common tongue, but of course,
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God divides their tongues. And from that, that sort of lingual division, there becomes gradual ethnic division.
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And so, He scatters the nations so that by the time we get to the calling of Abram and Isaac and Jacob, that warning that He would take the seed of Abram out of a nation that did not belong to them and bring them into the land, that they would be called to be a nation unto
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God, distinct from, separate from the rest. But remember, the promise to Abraham was for the nations.
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So Genesis 11 is one of the great developments of the missional work of God. And Genesis 11 connects us not only to the plot of Exodus, but beyond that, it really brings us all the way to Revelation 22 where we have the trees, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations, all tribes and tongues gathered in worship around the throne of the
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Lamb. Genesis 11 to Revelation 22 is this many -tribed, many -tongued vision of the mission of God.
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So the story of Abraham, beginning in Genesis 12, gives us, as it were, this great promise, the families of the earth will be blessed through you.
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That phrase is repeated six times through Genesis, as we saw. Paul takes it up in Galatians 3, he says, this was the gospel being preached in advance.
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And of course, the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise is shown when, as we said, the people from every nation, tribe, language are gathered to the
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Lamb in Revelation chapter 7. So the mission of God we perceive in Genesis and it takes its next major step in the book of Exodus, which means, brothers and sisters, one of the major things that we need to trace in our time in Exodus is this idea of the mission of God and what that means for us at every sphere of life.
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Put bluntly, if God alone is God, if Jesus alone is Lord, and if it's
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God's will that this declaration of His Lordship be known throughout the whole world, then there is a mission.
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Michael Nose said the mission is to make known the gospel of the kingdom and it is broader than evangelism.
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Did you note that? The mission is broader than evangelism. We said about rescue mission is a truncation of the idea of God's mission.
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Mission is very broad in the Bible. It's creational. It's cosmic. So certainly evangelism is the bright burning core of God's desire for the nations, but it's so much broader than that and it takes into its orbit the spheres, every level of human society, every aspect and arena of life.
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So we don't reduce it to evangelism. The mission is to follow
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Jesus in His mission, right? What was the phrase Wright gave us? Committed participation in God's mission.
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That means we witness what God has done to bring about salvation, to establish His kingdom.
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We witness it and we proclaim it by word and in deed as individuals and in our shared communal life.
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We live out a new identity as companions and also co -laborers with our
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Lord, the Messiah, witnesses of His in -breaking reign into this fallen world, following His ways, watching, receiving, all that He has given to us to do.
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This is Michael Knowles, this is how he says, you know, read the Gospels in this way, read the whole
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Bible in this way, but notice. The Gospels are not bare, neutral, historical narratives.
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That's often how scholars treat them. They quibble about this or that detail within the narrative.
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They read it as if it was just meant to be biographical. The Gospels are not bare, neutral, historical narratives.
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They are rather crafted to equip the church years after Jesus' life and work so that the church can carry out its missional calling.
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They are products of the church's mission and they aim at missional faithfulness.
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You ought to read the Bible in 2023 with eyes that see Scripture in that way.
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Scripture has come to you as a product of the mission of the church and it's been crafted in a way that you will absorb and continue the work of God's mission.
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So, let's narrow that down a little bit and see how God's mission brings us into the plot of Exodus.
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Okay, so secondly, the mission of God in Exodus. The book of Exodus is the primary model of redemption.
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That's true chronologically. This is the first major picture of redemption that we get in the
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Bible. We have, of course, glimpses and glances in Genesis, but we don't have anything fully orbed quite like this.
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This is the primary model of redemption given to us in the Old Testament. The very language of redemption comes out of the book of Exodus.
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I have redeemed you from slavery in Egypt that you might serve me. It's the event from which all of the atonement metaphors begin to make sense in terms of God's larger purpose for His people.
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The central issue is simply this. The Hebrews are under slavery to Pharaoh.
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Remember, Pharaoh is the self -asserting God of Egypt, and therefore, they are not free to worship their
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Lord. They are serving Pharaoh, which is preventing them from serving the
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Lord. And there's a sort of double entendre in the Hebrew there. The Hebrew verb abodah, which is simply translated work, it can also be translated worship.
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And so, that's intentional there in the text. Israel's problem in Egypt is not simply that they're in slavery and they need to be liberated.
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That's how a liberation theologian would look at it, almost in a Marxist direction. No, no, that's not the whole issue.
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The issue is that they're serving the wrong master. This is what God, this is what Yahweh insists.
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Let my people go so that they may serve me. That's the issue.
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It's to bring Israel out of that place so that he can make himself known to them by way of covenantal relationship.
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And therefore, it's deficient for us. If we approach the book of Exodus and we simply want to ignore all of the spiritual fulfillments, the types and the shadows that we'll be spending time looking at, that speak of Christ's fulfillment and Christ's redemption, are being bought out of slavery to a fallen bondage, but being redeemed unto the
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Lord that we might live by the obedience of faith. And we almost are being accused of sort of spiritualizing it.
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Well, no, it's all of life. These are families, real work, real slavery, a real state, real oppression.
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We don't want to simply gloss over that and spiritualize it, but neither do we want to de -spiritualize it and remove all the redemptive typology and simply say this is just about family and work and being liberated and resisting the state like good neocons.
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That's not how to read Exodus either. So we don't want to sit on clouds, neither do we want to become carnal in the way we read
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Exodus. We simply want to see it as encompassing all of life because redemption always encompasses all of life.
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What could help us chart a course through the book of Exodus?
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If we're wanting to understand the mission of God and we're wanting to understand how that mission applies to every aspect of our lives in the spheres and we're wanting to assess as individuals, as families, as a local church, as citizens subject in this state.
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If we want to assess that, what might help us understand the emphasis that God puts in Exodus?
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Let me remind you of what Christopher Wright said. Fundamentally, our mission means our committed participation as God's people at God's invitation and command in God's own mission within the history of God's world for the redemption of God's creation.
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You know what can help us chart away missionally through Exodus? Psalm 105.
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In Psalm 105, we have an inspired summary of most of the book of Genesis and most of the book of Exodus.
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In Psalm 105, we have the psalmist giving us a 10 ,000 -foot view of how
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Genesis and Exodus connect to the mission of God. Israel came into Egypt, Jacob dwelt in the land of Ham.
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God increased his people greatly. He made them stronger than their enemies. He turned their heart to hate his people, to deal craftily with his servants.
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He made them the objects of scorn and derision. He made the peoples hate them. He sent
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Moses his servant and Aaron whom he had chosen. They performed his signs among them, wonders in the land of Ham.
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He sent darkness and made it dark and they did not rebel against his word. He turned their waters into blood and killed their fish.
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Their land abounded with frogs, even in the chambers of their kings. He spoke and there came swarms of flies, lice in all their territory.
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He gave them hail for rain and flaming fire in their land. He struck their vines also and their fig trees and splintered the trees of their territory.
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He spoke and locusts came, young locusts without number, eating up all the vegetation of their land, devouring the fruit of their ground.
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He also destroyed the firstborn in their land, the first of all their strength. He also brought them out with silver and gold and there was none feeble among his tribes.
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Egypt was glad when they departed for fear of them had fallen upon them. He spread a cloud for a covering and fire to give light in the night.
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The people asked and he brought quail and satisfied them with the bread of heaven. He opened the rock and water gushed out.
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It ran in dry places like a river for he remembered his holy promise and Abraham his servant.
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He brought out his people with joy, his chosen ones with great gladness. He gave them the lands of the
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Gentiles. They inherited the labor of the nations so that they might observe his statutes and keep his laws.
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Praise the Lord. Do you notice something about Psalm 105? Our mission means committed participation as God's people at God's invitation and command in God's own mission.
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What's the subject? What's the acting subject of Psalm 105? What's the acting subject of the book of Genesis?
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What's the acting subject of the book of Exodus? He increased, he turned, he sent, he turned, he spoke, he gave, he struck, he destroyed, he brought, he spread, he opened, he remembered.
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God is at mission. We simply participate in God's mission.
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As we approach Exodus, we ask the questions, in what ways is the story of Exodus informed by the wider story of Scripture?
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How does Scripture draw itself into Exodus? You ask the obverse.
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How does Exodus begin to pour out into other parts of Scripture? How does it inform the wider story of Scripture?
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What does it contribute to our understanding of who God is and how God has made himself known?
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And what God's purposes are for all of creation, for states and church and family and the redemption of creation and all that it means to be image bearers, made in his image for his glory.
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That's how we want to approach the book of Exodus, which brings us really to the last point here, the last focus, the mission of the spheres.
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Some of the men on Saturdays have been reading a little bit or maybe you've heard bits and pieces of the name
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Abraham Kuyper. I've mentioned him before, the great systematic theologian from the Netherlands who became a prime minister in the
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Netherlands as well. And a term that I think is unique to him that he developed called sphere sovereignty.
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The concepts aren't original to him, but he really furthered it. The idea that the Lord is sovereign over every sphere or institution of human life, and primarily the spheres that we have in view are the family that binds the individual in marriage and children.
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So that basic unit of human society, the family, the church, and then also the state.
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You can think of that as concentric circles. I would want to say there is something unique about the church when it's considered locally and when it's considered, as it were, triumphantly or universally.
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So in some sense, the church ends up being the biggest concentric circle of all. The state never gets the final say in God's drama.
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But these are the spheres. Notice that it embraces all of life. One of the questions that we have to ask, and it's not something we can even answer this morning.
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It's not something we can answer in three weeks' time. I hope it's something that prayerfully and intentionally we can begin to answer as we work our way through the book of Exodus.
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The question is simply this, does our church have a missional dimension?
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And does that missional dimension lead to missional intention?
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I'm going to explain that, but let me just lay it down. Not something we can answer today. If you're simply like, yeah, then you haven't been listening.
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Does our church have a missional dimension? And does that dimension lead us to a missional intention?
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Here I'm borrowing a very famous distinction that was made by Leslie Newbingen, a very important missionary, wrote tremendous books as he saw
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Western secularism and post -modernism creeping into his mission field in India, as an
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Anglican missionary in India, and the books that he wrote are tremendously helpful when it comes to dealing with pluralism or moral relativity or what have you.
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But he made this distinction, Leslie Newbingen. He wants to be careful to not take away from the truth that mission embraces all of life, right?
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Every sphere, every aspect of life. As Kuyper famously said, there's not one square inch in the cosmos over which
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Jesus doesn't stamp and say, mine, right? I am the Lord of the cosmos.
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But Newbingen as a missionary recognized when you say everything's missional, sometimes you then nothing is missional.
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Everything's missional, then yeah, you know, I go to Dunkin' Donuts and that's missional and I go do this and I change my flat tire and that's missional.
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All of life's missional. And he's saying you've lost something about intent. You've lost what Wright calls committed participation.
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And so this is Newbingen's concern. To recognize all of life as mission would undermine the intentional task of missionary labor.
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There has to be an intent, there has to be a purposeful work. The whole life of the church is the visible means through which the
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Holy Spirit is carrying out his mission into the world. And that life of the church being governed by the
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Spirit takes into its orbit the family and the state, right? So we're not truncating it to the church.
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And therefore the whole of the church's life in one way or another partakes of mission.
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In other words, there's this dimension of mission because God is at mission. Because he sent the
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Spirit to be at mission and if we are being governed by the Spirit and we are being invited and gathered as his people, then we cannot but be at mission, right?
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But then he says we want to make a distinction between that dimension of mission and the intention.
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This is what he says. The whole life of the church has a missionary dimension. The whole life of the church has a missionary dimension.
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But not all of it has mission as its primary intention. We recognize that not all are going to be called to go.
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Not all are going to be gifted as evangelists. And the great burgeoning of missions mobilization some centuries ago recognizes you need those that will hold the rope, as William Carey could say.
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Not everyone's meant to go down into the well. You need some that are going to hold the rope. And who bought the rope?
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And who's praying for the one that's going down the well? But to say that, well, not everyone's called to be an evangelist.
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Not everyone's called to go, whether that going is across the street or across the Atlantic. Not everyone's called to have that missionary intention, living and saying, yeah, amen.
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But the whole life of the church has a missional dimension. The whole life of the church has a missional dimension.
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If God alone is God and if Jesus alone is Lord and if it's God's will that his lordship be known throughout all of creation, then there is a missional dimension in every sphere of life.
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So where are we between dimension and intention?
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Is mission an afterthought to us at GRBC? The businesses meeting come up, you know, make sure we cut a check to heart cry.
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Yeah, we did that twice a year. We're missional. So, as we think through what it would look like for us to have a missional dimension, we need to put that on the book of Exodus.
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And we need to walk through Exodus as a church and see God's mission and then relate the mission of God as he's carrying it out in Exodus to us.
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Because remember, what God is seeking, what God has invited us to, called us to as Christians, is committed participation in his mission.
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It's not an optional add -on. It's not some buffet where we come and gather on Sunday and we say, oh, you know, this will be helpful for me in my life, this is something
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I've been struggling with, I'll hide this in my heart, I want this practically, you know, in my family life, and a little buffet.
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There's ways that we can do that and we're completely devoid of God's mission. There's ways that we are not participating in God's mission, in the widest contours of that mission that will involve our family, not just the local church and not just the checks that the church can cut, but it involves our families as much as it involves the church and families and the church in relationship to the state.
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It's a missional dimension to every sphere. As we plot our way through Exodus, you'll see the state flexing its might, seeking to stomp out the seed of the
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Hebrews. You'll recognize the importance of family therein. The serpent knows better than we know how powerful arrows are in the quiver.
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It wasn't the first time and it wouldn't be the last time that innocents were massacred. It's the dragon in Revelation 9 with his mouth gaping open, seeking to devour the seed of the woman.
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And that, I think, is enigmatic not only of Christ, the promised Messiah, but truly all of God's people, as it were, a generational view of God's people and how the serpent hates it and seeks to stomp it out.
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We'll see that in Exodus. We'll understand the significance of family for God's missional work in the renewal and redemption of creation, the church.
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One thing I'll highlight here in relation to the church is simply the fact that God had already said the seed of Abraham, that is the nation of Israel, this picture of the church of God, had been chosen so that they would obey the will of God.
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Remember the great statement of Genesis 18, verse 19, I have chosen him, that is
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I have chosen Abraham, so that he will direct his children, there's the sort of family dynamic, right, direct his children in his household after him to keep the way of the
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Lord by doing what is right and just so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.
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Now, here, that's the church in seed form, the household of Abraham. And when
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God calls the seed of Abraham out of Egypt, that household, that church has become a nation.
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And he calls them out of Egypt in the book of Exodus and he gives them his law so that he can direct them according to what's right so that they will be a holy people unto him.
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And therefore, the missionary work of God that was always promised to Abraham in you and in your seed, the families of the earth will be blessed.
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And this will be by your seed being holy, a nation of priests unto me, and there'll be a light to the
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Gentiles. This is how they will bless the earth. This is how I redeem fallen man.
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So in Exodus chapter 19, that's when he calls them out and that's where we get the glorious language where they're called to be a priestly and holy people in the midst of the nations and they're governed by Yahweh's laws so that they're ritually distinct and ethically separated from the defilement of the nations around them.
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They have a priestly role. And all of that is so that the rule of God upon them would be evident to the world, that the mission of God would be conducted through them as a people.
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Now, of course, Israel stumbled at that stumbling stone. They failed in that task. Rather than bring glory to God as nations streamed to Zion, God became a byword, a name to be mocked and laughed at because of their great failure.
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But knowing that failure, God promised a servant that would come, the true Israel, the servant who would fulfill what
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Adam failed, the servant that would fulfill what Israel failed to do vocationally, Matthew's Gospel traces this out, a light to the
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Gentiles, one who perfectly fulfills the law and therefore demonstrates the light of God's law and the perfections of God's character through the law to the nations so that in their failure and in their stumbling they would see the mercy of God and run to Him for compassion and forgiveness.
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And, of course, the Messiah then gathers to himself a church of his own body to continue the work that Israel had been called to do, a new
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Israel with a new covenant, a covenant in his blood, the true Israel of God, Abraham's true children, and this church, this assembly of Israelites, Peter says, is a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people to proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, who were once not a people but now are the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy.
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And Peter says, I beg you, as sojourners and pilgrims abstain from fleshly lusts at war against your soul, have your conduct honorable among the
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Gentiles. Why? So when they speak against you as evildoers in the day of visitation, they might glorify
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God. It's missional. You'll have that vocation now.
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You have the mantle now. You are the Israel of God. And so abstain from the lusts that wage war against your soul.
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Don't forget your mission. There is no mission without holiness.
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What does this mean for us? What does this mean for GRBC? What does this mean for us as individual believers?
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What does it mean that my life is comprised of the spheres of family and church and state and that I'm called to participate in a committed, intentional way into God's mission to redeem fallen humanity and bless the nations, bless the families of the earth?
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What does that mean for me as a believer? Let's start with John Owen. We're coming to a close here.
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John Owen said, and I love this, God has a work to do. God has a work to do and not to help him is to oppose him.
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God has a work to do and to not help him is to oppose him.
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This means if I'm called to participate in God's mission, then my life must conform to God's activity, to God's desire, and not the other way around.
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God's mission does not conform to my desires. God's missionary work does not need to bend and flex to fit my life and my comforts.
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I have been called and I have been delivered. I have been ransomed and I have been redeemed so that I might fit his agenda, his work, his labor in the world.
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That is what he has called me to do. Joshua and I went to see
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Celestial City yesterday. I took Elsie and he took Elmerinda. And that was something that struck me because they do a wonderful job with the story of Pilgrim's Progress where they begin and end it just with the history of Bunyan and why he was in prison, what led to the writing of Pilgrim's Progress, and what happened after he was released.
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And, of course, they captured something of the duress of his soul. It's there. He couldn't see his family.
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He was wasting away in this dungeon. And when you're reading Pilgrim's Progress and it all seems, you know, it has those punches of Bunyan's humor which are so vivacious and wonderful, then there's also these really poignant moments like when he's in Doubting Castle trapped by Giant Despair.
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And Giant Despair is saying, end it. Just end it.
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And you know that that's Bunyan writing out of his heart. Should I just end it all?
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Like, end the misery of it all? And all he had to do was just sign the piece of paper, get the license, get back to his family, get back to preaching.
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Hundreds of ministers that he counted as brethren, they had already done that. I'm here for God's mission.
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He recognized. God's mission doesn't conform to fit my needs, my comforts, my ambitions. My life has to fit his mission.
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That means that I can't try to fit God's work into my own goals and my own life. I actually need to try to fit my own life and my own goals into God's grand story, into God's purposeful mission.
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And so the greatest need for the gospel is not, I'm over here. This is what
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I'm comfortable with. How can my gifts and my talents fit to serve the gospel and the mission work over there?
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It's no, no, no, no. God's already on mission. He's called you to commit and participate.
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He has made you a co -worker, a co -laborer with him. Next week we'll spend some time in Philippians 1, 4, and 5 again, just to get at that idea, begin to address the practical needs.
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It's not about the gospel somehow being made relevant, the mission somehow being made relevant to where I am and what
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I'm doing. It's where I am and what I'm doing being made relevant to God's work.
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That's the missional dimension of the church. That's how you get a shoekeeper weeping over a map of the world in the back of the cobbler's shop,
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William Carey. That doesn't float down from heaven. There was a missional dimension in his church.
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The Baptist Society of Friends, these men that threw their whole lives away to go rot in jungles so they could begin to translate the scriptures into a tongue it hadn't been heard in before.
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It doesn't just fall down from heaven. There's a missional dimension to the church. Would that God would bless this church to have this missional dimension that would infiltrate and saturate every sphere of life, mothers and fathers recognizing the rearing of children as part of this missionary work of God, the family sphere, the state sphere, us recognizing we have a voice and churches have done far more with far less in church history.
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Would it be that God would raise from our ranks from the generation to come those that would go out from us?
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We ought to pray. We need reformation. We need revival. For that reason, we need mission.
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Once I begin, I'll close with this, and I'll leave you with this to ponder.
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Once I begin to understand that I am part of the grand story of the mission of God, this is
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Christopher Wright. I'm going to say it again. Once I begin to understand that I am part of the grand story of the mission of God, my life ceases to be about what kind of mission
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God has for me, and it begins to be what kind of me does
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God want for His mission? Let's pray.
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Father, thank You for Your Word. Thank You that You are doing this work.
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You've saved us by this work, and because You've saved us by this work, You've called us into this work.
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Show us in our own hearts as individuals here where we have lack of a missional dimension.
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Show us as families where there's not something in the air about what sets us apart from other families, what sets apart our work and our resources and our time and our entertainment, how we're plugged into the work that God is doing, and we see ways that God is using us, that God is working through us.
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We're praying and laboring and desiring for more of that. Let us not be a local church where the members gather like cars at a
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Tesla charging station just to sit and be boosted for the next several days. Lord, we long as a church to truly commit and participate in Your mission, to understand it in the broadest terms and all that it includes and all that it touches upon.
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Every sphere of life. Help us,