The Mission of the Spheres - Part II

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Philippians 1

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Nothing like a dog -eared Bible, brother. It's good to see. Well, this morning we continue on this second stage of our detour between the book of Genesis and the book of Exodus.
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Of course, I hope we'll see naturally that not only does
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Exodus follow Genesis chronologically, but also it follows Exodus theologically.
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And I think by focusing on mission in this way that we're developing over the past several weeks, we'll have a good compass as we work our way through the book of Exodus, which will be some time, perhaps a year and a half.
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We'll see when we get there, but it may well bring us not only into 2023, but 2024.
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Of course, this topical focus has been on mission and mission writ large, mission as it pertains to the spheres.
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And we've talked about a little bit about sphere sovereignty. Some in this room are more familiar than others, perhaps.
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Really a way of understanding human relationships, human obligations, essentially institutions of God that pertain to human beings by virtue of their created order.
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And so the spheres that are in reference here are family, church, and state.
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We want to talk about mission in light of the spheres. Now, unfortunately, this morning, we're still sort of in the detail level or in the descriptive mode.
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We're not quite yet to the practical application. That'll be next week, maybe even two weeks on that.
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And this morning, really, we're not going to spend any time at all talking about family and state. This morning, we're going to be focusing almost exclusively on the church.
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And I don't mean to marginalize the family or the state. In fact, some of the problems of where we are as a church is because the state and the family have been marginalized.
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And it's all too easy to let theology come and go in the church and never reach, never touch, or make an impact in the family or in the state.
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That's a big problem. We want to correct that in the weeks to come, in the months to come. But I do want to say there is something unique about the church.
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Every sphere is unique. The only overlap they share is that Jesus is Lord over every sphere, over every square inch.
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But within each sphere, God has set up different dynamics, different ways that that institution is meant to function for his larger purpose.
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And therefore, when you throw that sphere into the fall, the distortion is different.
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And therefore, when God redeems those distortions, each sphere is going to be redeemed in a slightly different way, toward a slightly different end.
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Family, as it is in our frame of existence, doesn't make it into eternity.
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The state, as it is in our frame of existence, doesn't make it into eternity.
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But the church certainly does. There's something unique about the church.
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The church triumphant. And so this is going to bridge us a little bit this morning toward Exodus, and we are grappling with mission.
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Let me just give a 10 ,000 foot overview of some of the ground we covered last week. The first thing we established was we need a mission.
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There's a lot of buzz talk about a missional church or missional Christianity.
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And of course, we're meant to laugh at that, deep within our bellies, laugh at that, because what other kind of church is there?
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If you are a church, you are missional by definition. You can't opt out of that identity.
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To be Christian is to be missional. This is not something that's marginal to the Christian life.
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This is something that's central to the Christian life. And so as a church, as believers, and arguably as households as well, we need to grapple with mission.
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And again, the warning here, the caution is this is not something to be solved overnight.
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This is not something that in three weeks we can go, oh, yes, now we know what mission is and now we know what our mission should be and we check the box and just carry on.
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If we're thinking about this deeply, we know it's going to be a wrestling match and it's going to be a lot of patient, intentional pursuing of mission for us as individuals, households and as a local church.
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This is something that I hope will be fruit while we're in Exodus and will begin to reverberate in our ethos as a church.
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I don't want this to be a band -aid or a quick fix. I want this to be a turn of the battleship.
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We need mission. We ask the question, what kind of mission do we need? When I say mission, what pops into your mind?
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Is it a rescue mission? We talked about Jesus binding the strongman so his followers can go in and plunder all the strongman's possessions.
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A picture of, as it were, our mortal enemy finally being bound, the kingdom now triumphant and he cannot resist it.
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And we go and win back all the things that he had usurped and stolen. Is it a rescue mission?
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Is it a mission of retaining? We talked about Hadrian's wall. Is it just here you are in Babylon, marry, sell, buy, settle?
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Just retain. Retain your tradition. Retain your faith. Retain your identity. But all of this is going to crumble around you.
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So is it rescue? Is it retain? Or is it conquer? Is it Joshua storming into the land and the people's hearts melting because of the fear of the
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Israelites? And arguably the answer is yes. There's something about God's mission in the world that is rescue.
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There's something that is retain. There is something that is conquer. How we perceive
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God's mission is going to shape our lives, shape the air that we breathe as Christians and as a church.
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And that's really the diagnostic here as we begin a new year and as we begin a new series in Exodus.
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Do we have this missional dimension? That was the question.
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And is that missional dimension not everything that we do as a church or as Christians?
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Because there's something intentional that flows out of that dimension. That's the big question.
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How we conceive of mission will directly play into that. The mission of God we said was and is broader than evangelism.
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We can't reduce missions to conversions. God's mission,
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God's work is much larger than that. We said that when we begin framing things in with the biblical story and see the logic of how the
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Bible is unfolding, then God's redemption can't be reduced to individuals making commitments of faith to Jesus.
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But actually God's redemption takes up not only individuals but all of the spheres.
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The cosmos itself. Redemption is creational as far as the curse is found.
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That is where God redeems. And so the mission of God is broader than evangelism.
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We cannot say the mission of God is simply the Great Commission. That's true.
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It's actually the vital core. But that's not everything. So the mission of God is broader and we begin with this framework that Scripture provides.
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Everything is rooted in creation and this question of the kingdom of God. Because of sin entering in the world, because of man falling, what is of the kingdom of God?
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What happens to the dominion of God and the purpose of God that all of creation would resound with His glory?
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Is there any hope for the kingdom? And then of course in the fullness of time, Jesus comes. Remember Mark 1.
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And what does He come preaching? The gospel of the kingdom. And so we cannot disconnect the gospel from the kingdom, neither can we disconnect the gospel from creation.
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If redemption fails to meet either creation or kingdom, then we have a truncated gospel.
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To understand the mission of God, we must draw upon creation, kingdom, redemption, all the way to new creation.
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The mission of God is nothing less than the entirety of Genesis 1 to Revelation 22.
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That's the mission of God. And so we have this great definition provided by Christopher Wright.
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I know many of you were scribbling to try to get it and maybe you have a few phrases that are missing. You'll have ample time in the months to come to get it all written down, but I'll say it once more.
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This is from Christopher Wright's book, The Mission of God. Fundamentally, our mission, if it is biblically informed and validated, means our committed participation, key phrase, 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 the mission of God. Notice that it is
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God's own mission. If there was anything I would have you cling to from last week, it's that it's not our mission.
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It's not something that we start up. It's not us sitting in a circle around some mugs of coffee and a dry erase board and making up blueprints.
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What are we going to do for mission? What are we going to do for mission? This is God's mission. It's always been God's mission.
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We're simply brought into that mission by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So how does that pertain to the church?
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Well, we're going to look at three parts this morning. We're going to consider the church in three different ways.
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So the first is considering the church local and universal. The church local,
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GRBC, the church universal, everywhere the name of Jesus is confessed. And then secondly, we're going to consider building on last week.
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I mentioned that great distinction by Leslie Newbigin, a very important missionary and scholar.
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He made a distinction between the missionary dimension and missionary intention. We're going to return to that a little bit this morning.
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So that's secondly. And then third, the church gathered and the church scattered.
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And there we'll talk a little bit about election and how election pertains to mission. So the church local and universal, the church in its missionary dimension, and the church in its missionary intention, and then the church gathered and the church scattered.
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So first, the church local and universal. The story of the
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Bible shows God leading all of human history to its appointed end.
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And the end of history is the restoration of what God has made, which was effaced by sin and now is redeemed along with the whole life of humanity in the context of all that God had made, the entire cosmos.
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That is the fullness of history, and that is the story of the Bible. Nothing is left out.
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There's nothing that the Hubble Deep Space Telescope can discover that isn't touched on by the psalmists.
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Leslie Newbigin, you're going to hear his name at several points this morning. If we take the
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Bible in its canonical wholeness as we must, then it is best understood as history.
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But it is universal cosmic history. It interprets the entire story of all things from their inception at creation to their consummation, and the story of the human race within creation.
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And within the human race, the story of people called by God to be bearers of the meaning of the whole, and at the very center, the story of the one in whom
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God's purpose was decisively revealed by being decisively effected.
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So the whole story of Scripture ultimately culminates in the one upon whom history itself culminates, the
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Lord Jesus Christ. He alone is the yes and the amen of all that God had promised.
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We would say all that God had purposed. The end, therefore, the end, oh, you're facing this way, the end of universal history, cosmic history, can only be understood if Jesus Christ is central to the definition.
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The end of all of history is revealed in the accomplishment of the work of the
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Lord Jesus. Let me say that again, because that's a very profound point in how it relates to missions.
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The end of universal history, not the history you can find on the bookshelves at Barnes &
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Noble, but we're talking about objective reality, universal cosmic history, the end of that, the unfolding of that, the denouement of that, however you term it, the end of universal history has been revealed in the accomplished work of the
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Lord Jesus. So even though the end of history has yet to arrive, the meaning of it has been already revealed to us.
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It has broken into the present. We now understand the purpose from beginning to end in the fullness of what
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Jesus Christ has done. In other words, we have to understand
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Jesus in light of the entire story of Scripture, which is the entire story of human history.
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But also, we have to understand the entire story of history and creation in light of Jesus.
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You cannot have one without the other. On the one hand, we begin with Jesus and His life,
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His death, His resurrection, His ascension, His sending of the Spirit.
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This, for us, is the beginning of a faithful and right understanding of the entirety of what
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God was doing in history. But on the other hand, we have to articulate this biblical story so that we can understand
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Jesus. We have to situate His life, His death, His resurrection, ascension, and sending of the
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Spirit. And so you'll see it's this sort of feedback loop where the whole story of Scripture draws you to the
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Lord Jesus, and the Lord Jesus draws you to the whole story of Scripture. And what flows from that is, essentially, the mission of the church.
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Now, we're making fine points here. The mission of God is bigger than evangelism. The mission of the church is not the mission of God in its entirety.
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The church has a unique mission in the same way that marriages and families and the state has a certain
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God -given mission, God -given orientation that may fail, that may rebel.
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But nevertheless, it's something given by and ordained by God. So because Jesus and all of the meaning of history is bound up with Him, and the end is actually revealed in His work and in His Word, therefore, the church has mission.
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Therefore, we have a mission. There is no mission unless Jesus Christ has come.
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Even in the Old Testament, the mission of the people of God was a mission toward Him. And now, in the
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New Covenant, mission exists because of Him. It's the outflow of what He's done.
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And the outflow is simply this. What had been constrained to Israel to be a light to the nations, to fulfill
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God's great promise to Abraham, which was a further step of fulfilling His great promise to the woman in the garden, that a people would be saved, and we find out in Abraham, it will be a people that will be made up of every tribe and every tongue, that all of the families of the earth will be blessed in this seed, and we find out the meaning of that in Abraham through Israel in Jesus Christ Himself, Jesus as the true
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Israel of God, fulfilling what Israel as a nation failed to do. He, choosing the twelve, as it were, reconstituting that nation, then sends them out into the world.
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That's the great commission. And so we begin to have this sense of the mission of the church.
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Jesus Christ, through the apostles, lays the foundation of the church, and the church is placed in the midst of the entire world as a sign to which all of creation in history is moving.
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It's all hurtling toward the Edenic presence of God with His people, but the presence there is not one of theophany.
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The presence in this new heavens and new earth is God with holes in His hands and His feet and wombs on His side.
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And that's how He dwells with His people. That's how the last Adam has secured a paradise where no serpent may enter and no sin may foul.
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The movement, therefore, of the church in its mission to the ends of the earth really has two central components.
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The mission of God to the ends of the earth requires first the
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Spirit of God, and then secondly, the church. The mission of God, redemption of the cosmos, through the church, requires the
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Spirit of God working in and through the church. This is perhaps leaning a little bit toward next week, but in case
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I don't remember it next week, let me just say it here. If the whole design of this era
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A .D., after the death of our
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Lord Jesus and all that redemptive event, if the whole design of that was to fulfill
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God's redemptive promise to the very ends of the earth, and that He sent
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His own Spirit to reside within the church as a temple, and within every believer thereunto, to be built up as living stones unto this great mission that Zion would be built in every place, and that every tribe and tongue would stream to the glory of the
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Lord until a new heavens and new earth secures them forever. If He sent His own Spirit to do that mission, then there's nothing that even comes close to writing
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Ichabod over a local church than having a local church devoid of mission.
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Where is the glory of the Lord in a church that is not missional? This is why
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He sent His Spirit. He didn't send His Spirit so that primarily we would get the fringe benefits of feeling warmth and community.
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You know, I have my sports and I have my hobbies and I have my church, and these are all the things that make my life complete and happy.
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That's not why He sent His Holy Spirit into the body. He sent
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His Spirit into the body to fulfill the mission of God. The Spirit, therefore, must be understood in terms of His relation to Christ.
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He is the Spirit of Christ. A key Pauline phrase. Christ is to be understood in His relationship to the
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Father and the Spirit, so also the Spirit is to be understood in His relationship to the Father and the
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Christ. We never want to keep at arm's length the Godhead, the members of the
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Godhead. And so we understand this role of the Spirit giving witness to Christ.
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He does that in a believer's life, doesn't He? How did you become a Christian? It was the
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Spirit of God pulling scales off your eyes and presenting to you the risen Christ, so that you could hear, though you had been dead in sin and trespass, you could hear
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His voice calling you. You could exercise faith because your heart of stone had been cast out.
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You'd been given a heart of flesh. That's how you became a Christian. It was the internal witness of the Holy Spirit.
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And the Spirit's all about witness, not only internally in the life of the individual believer, but externally, publicly, internationally, through the visible body of the local church.
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The Spirit's all about witness, manifest glory to the Lord Jesus Christ. So mission first is a work of the
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Spirit. But how does the Spirit work? He works inwardly, witnessing in the life of the believer, and that believer is then gathered into a community of others who've received that witness of the
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Spirit, and then they become the outward witness of the Spirit. Their own spirit -wrought lives and spirit -wrought testimony become the means through which the
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Spirit witnesses to the world, through the church. So the mission of God is a mission of the
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Spirit of God, and the mission of the Spirit of God is a mission of the church of God.
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But we're talking about local and universal. Is this big church or little church? Is this capital
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C church or is this lowercase c church? And the answer is yes.
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The fact that there's this distinction between local churches and the one true body of Christ, the church universal, is from the very beginning a matter of mission.
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It's a matter of mission. How did you do church for the thousands of years before the apostles and the prophets laid the foundation of the
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New Testament churches? How did you do church? You packed your suitcases.
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You got Ziploc bags of goldfish and Cheez -Its. You loaded up the Toyota Sienna and you made way for Jerusalem.
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There you gathered with all the faithful in the place of God's presence.
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There you gathered in worship and you met with the priests and you watched as the sacrificial rituals gave you atonement and pledged forgiveness for your sin and reaffirmed your place in the covenant with your
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God. Church was a pinpoint on a geographical map.
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But then after the fulfillment of Christ, if anything, there was a universal church. It was centered in the temple, in the cult of the temple in Jerusalem, outwardly, horizontally speaking.
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But the logic of the New Testament is there's no temple.
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Christ is the temple. There's no geographic locale. The ends of the earth receive His Spirit and the witness of the
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Spirit. And therefore, it's a missionary concern. The local congregation is the express outworking of God's redemptive activity.
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It's the dawning of humans that have been redeemed by the blood of Christ. And like Christ, they are being conformed into His glory.
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They're the dawning of new humanity. Humanity as it was intended to be at the beginning. Humanity as it will be confirmed at the consummation.
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Little outposts, little groups of ex -slaves and a few spatterings of elite in places like Corinth and Philippi and Ephesus.
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Outposts of a new humanity. Proof positive that the promise of God had been fulfilled in the work of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. But when you take all of these local congregations and aggregate, you have a global body of Christ.
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The global church that collectively brings forth witness to the ends of the earth as a unified whole.
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Now to be clear, Leslie Newbingen, I did a lot of reading this week on Leslie Newbingen. I'm very thankful that I did.
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So helpful. I'll mention a book in particular. I read a few. Newbingen makes it clear, this is interesting coming from his
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Anglican perspective, Newbingen makes it clear that the local church is, I'll give you a few quotes here, the fundamental unit of the
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Christian church. So you have the global universal church, the local church is the fundamental unit.
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The primary unit. The basic unit of Christian existence. In other words, the local church is the priority for the logic, the missionary logic of God's redemptive activity.
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And he learned this. Remember, he was a missionary in India. He learned this, because what happens?
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You have all different ways of evangelizing and seeking to do God's work and caring for the poor and the widows and maybe you have certain places where you're doing open air preaching.
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You have schools where you're training up young children and orphans. You have hospitals where you're caring for the sick and the needy.
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You have literature and tracts that are being published, Bibles that are being translated. What happens?
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What's the effect of that seed being sown? When people are being converted through those means, they naturally, instinctively say, where can
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I gather with other people that believe these things too? Where can I gather with people that want to worship the
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God that I now want to worship? Where can I pray? Where can I sing? Where can I hear God's word preached?
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People want to be gathered together into local bodies. And that's what happened in every little
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Indian village. And he saw it was because they had been reached through the missionary efforts of the local church that then they were gathered to the local church and that only amplified more missionary efforts through the local church.
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That's the missionary logic of the local church. And so, he said this, the local church is the primary reality and therefore the only possible hermeneutic of the gospel.
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Now, hermeneutic is a fancy word. Hermeneutic means a way of interpreting, a way of interpretation.
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So let me say that again. The local church is the primary reality and the only possible way of interpreting the gospel.
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Now, this didn't denigrate at all the importance of the universal body of Christ.
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Not at all. Not for his concern. Not for Jesus' concern. But it certainly elevated the significance of a local church.
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So that's the church, local and universal. Secondly, let's unpack a little bit more with this missional dimension, right?
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Missional dimension versus missional intention. You remember there, this was
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New Begin's attempt to say if everything is missional and the whole church is missional and everything people do is missional, if you're a
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Christian, every aspect of your life is missional, then at some point, the fear is, nothing becomes missional.
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Everything becomes watered down and sort of drowned out and it's all painted over. There has to be something intentional, even sacrificial about mission.
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There has to be sometimes a calling to specific missions. And that was what New Begin wanted to preserve, that the whole church has this missional dimension.
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A dimension in which everything is missional. But they also, and the outflow of that is a missional intention.
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That there's specific prayers and objectives and tasks and resources and sacrifices that are made by a local church.
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Remember this question that we left with last week. When you frame everything in light of God's mission, the question is not, based on where I am, based on what
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I'm doing, based on whom I'm with, based on my gifts and my talents and my desires, what does
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God have as a mission for me? What can fit into this narrow little compartment
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I have left after all these other things have been settled? And we said, with the help of Christopher Wright, the question's not, what mission does
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God want for me, where I am, but rather what me does
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God want for His mission? What does He want me to grow in, to leave behind?
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What does He want me to sacrifice? What does He want me to give for His mission?
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How does He want me to change so that I can be used in His mission? Well, let's extend that a little bit to the us, since we're talking about the church this morning.
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Let's ask the question, what kind of us does God want for His mission? What kind of us, as a church, does
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God want to use in His mission? And here's where I think it's so helpful to return to Philippians 1.
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Remember in Philippians 1, this is a throwback to our sort of initial
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COVID days in the magazine basement when we were launching into Philippians, but Philippians 1, you remember,
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Paul's writing to the saints at Philippi. A church maybe this size, maybe a little bit smaller, colorful personalities, issues, euodia and syntyche, need we say more?
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A lot of good things going on there. Paul is just so grateful and thankful for them.
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He's so excited that they're so mission forward. And just looking at the letter, there's several things
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I'd like to see. I'm not going to read the whole thing in full. In fact, I'm just going to zoom in on a few key phrases. But remember that Paul is writing to the saints in Philippi.
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They're living totally among the pagans, the equivalent of Abraham in a tent. They're surrounded by godless
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Gentiles running in that flood of dissipation, a little outpost of redeemed humanity.
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They've got their own issues and needs and trials to deal with. And Paul's writing a letter to them.
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We said this last week, it bears repeating. Philippians, just like the gospels, just like any writing of the
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New Testament, is crafted, is inspired to equip the church years after Jesus' life and work to carry out
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His missional calling. So Philippians, like all of the New Testament writings, is a product of the church's mission.
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And it aims at missional faithfulness.
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You don't have Philippians unless there's already a mission at work. So Philippians comes because of a mission, and it's written so that the mission may continue and become more effective.
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That's how you have to read it. Philippians 1, beginning in verse 3. Paul writes,
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I thank my God upon every remembrance of you always and every prayer of mine, making a request for you all with joy for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now.
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You remember that key word, fellowship, there, which is not crockpot lunches.
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That's what we call fellowship, lunch fellowship. But as we said, D .A. Carson has a great explanation of this.
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Fellowship is much more intentional than that. It's more transactional than that. Fellowship would be a word, koinonia, a word used for two businessmen entering into an agreement.
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This will be good for us, and we'll both have to put our shoulders into the work, but this will be a benefit.
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Therefore, we'll have a koinonia. We'll have a co -working, co -laboring toward a common goal.
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So the idea is you have people that are at different walks of life, different levels, different capabilities, but they join in a common vision toward a common end.
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That is fellowship. And Paul says to this church at Philippi, I pray for you constantly.
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Whenever I think of you, I pray with you. I pray for you, and I pray for you with joy. I think of your bright, smiling, sunshiny faces.
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And I'm overjoyed. And I'm overjoyed because you partnered with me in this mission of the gospel from day one.
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It's a phrase that the hip -hop community uses. Who are your day ones? The church at Philippi, those are
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Paul's day ones. From day one, you joined in this mission of the gospel.
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The fellowship of the gospel. Verse 12, But I want you to know, brethren, the things which happen to me have actually turned out for the furtherance of the gospel.
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It's become evident to the whole palace guard and to all the rest. My chains are in Christ. If we read this letter as something that's the product of mission, and it's intended to shape and make the mission more faithful, how should we understand verse 12?
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Paul's essentially saying to them, look at this calamity that's happened in my life. I know that you're really sad about it.
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I've been getting your stacks of postcards in the prison. But I want you to know, this has actually been used to further the gospel.
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So you should actually rejoice with me about this. Don't be sad. You should only be sad if you're thinking in a worldly way.
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Your thoughts aren't fixed in heaven where Christ is. But that's where my thoughts are. In fact, it's almost better if I could go there.
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I know you need me, though. You'll only be sad if you don't understand that everything about my life has been furthering the gospel.
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And you have been, in your own fellowship with me, all about furthering the gospel since day one.
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So let this be your joy. Even these awful, difficult things in my life have actually turned out for good.
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The gospel is being advanced. The mission is continuing.
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Philippians 1 .27 Let your conduct be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent,
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I may hear of your affairs, that you stand fast in one spirit, one mind, striving together for the faith of the gospel, not in any way terrified by your adversaries.
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So conduct worthy of the gospel, striving in the unity of that gospel fellowship, seeking to be purposeful about the furtherance of the gospel, striving together in the faith of the gospel.
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Do you notice these three phrases? Fellowship in the gospel, furtherance of the gospel, faith of the gospel?
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There's something about these. Each one points to a different reality of a local church.
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First is fellowship in the gospel. That's what we'll call a stative reality. S -T -A -T -I -V -E, stative.
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That's the living condition. That's the way of being. It's the status, the stative.
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Fellowship in the gospel. We have been drawn together, called together, gathered together by this common calling, by this common mission, toward this common end.
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If you're a believer, you have this fellowship in the gospel. That's stative.
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It's present. It's fixed. Then you have the furtherance of the gospel. That's something progressive.
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The furtherance of the gospel. That implies movement. It had reached here and it's been furthered.
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It's been furthered. Next year it'll be furthered some more. There's something progressive. So you begin with that stative fellowship, the condition, the way of being, and that leads to something progressive.
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Now there's movement. And then there's the faith of the gospel. That underlies it all.
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That's what we'll call substantive. That's the substance, the bedrock. So the faith of the gospel is something objective.
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It's the faith once for all passed down. It's the faith of the gospel, the content of the gospel, the
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I saw the risen Christ, 1 Corinthians 15 gospel. So something substantive, the faith, forms the fellowship, what is stative, the condition, the way of being, and that leads to what is progressive, the furtherance.
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Do you see? Faith to fellowship to progressive, to furtherance.
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All of this is really what Neubengen is getting at when he distinguishes between dimension and intention.
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And he said you must have both, and here's what he said about it. I should mention the book.
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Michael Goheen, very, very, very good writer. I've read three or four. This book particularly is called
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The Church and Its Vocation, Leslie Neubengen's Missionary Ecclesiology. It's all about how mission affects the doctrine of the church.
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This is what Neubengen held. You need both dimension and intention.
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Dimension is fellowship. Intention is furtherance. Dimension is stative.
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Intention is progressive. He says you need both. One without the other will cripple the mission of the church.
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Unless there is in the life of the church a pointed concentration for missionary intention, furtherance, a pointed concentration to further the gospel, the missionary dimension, the fellowship, will be lost.
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A church that reduces mission to only intentional, concentrated activity will narrow the scope of the gospel and remove that full context in which all of life is witnessed to.
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Do you see? If it's just about transactional conversions, then we have a truncated gospel.
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We're short -circuiting God's redemptive activity. We're okay to throw marriage to the government.
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Let Caesar define marriage. Let children be mutated. Let children be torn apart in their mothers' wombs. As long as we have our circles held together and we have a few converts coming in.
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That's a problem. A church that reduces mission to only intentional activity narrows the scope of the gospel.
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Why? Because it's not just about the furtherance, it's also about the stative. It's about the salt and the light.
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It's about the witness of the fellowship. Remember, the local church is an outpost of redeemed humanity.
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And so you must have both dimension and intention. You must have the fellowship and the furtherance.
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You cannot have furtherance without fellowship. Neither can you have fellowship without furtherance.
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All of Christian life has this dimension. There's certain activities, there's certain needs, certain resources, certain callings.
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All of that flows out of the fellowship of the church. And if the fellowship at this local church is lacking, then we have a lot to examine and a lot to pray about.
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Flowing out of a fellowship that is aware of this mission of God, that understands it is by virtue of being called into a relationship with God, is called into the mission of God, it will have a conscious goal, a committed participation, a conscious goal of furthering the gospel.
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The call of Scripture, we want to establish this, the call of Scripture, of course, is an invitation to a personal relationship with the
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Lord Jesus Christ. You can't get in by proxy. You can't be smuggled into the kingdom of God.
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You can't do the three persons in a big trench coat and walk through the pearly gates. It doesn't work that way.
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It is a personal response to conviction of sin and exercising of faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ.
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That is the gospel. But it's more than just this personal invitation.
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It's not enough to know Jesus as Savior. Jesus must be known as Lord. And if Jesus is
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Lord, then the church's mission cannot just be to individuals, but to every domain of Jesus' lordship.
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Is He just Lord over the redeemed, or is He Lord over the earth, over the cosmos, over things that are under the earth, on the earth, and up to the third heaven?
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Is He Lord? Then the church's mission has to be as broad as Jesus' lordship.
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There's a problem, as we said, when Jesus is disconnected from kingdom, when the gospel is disconnected from kingdom.
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What happens is, we can emphasize the person of Jesus and emphasize having a personal relationship with Jesus, but then we lose the kingdom contours of the gospel.
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And therefore, this whole project of God renewing creation becomes very narrow.
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On the flip side, we can elevate this kingdom mission, redeeming creation, and we can actually neglect the person of Jesus.
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That's like social gospel. It's all soup kitchens and blood drives. The fact that Jesus is king must be held together with the gospel of the kingdom.
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And the mission of the church is as wide as His kingship. That is the mission of the church. So the call of Scripture is indeed an invitation to a personal relationship.
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It's more than an invitation, it's a command to a personal relationship. Repent and believe.
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But it's also a conscious goal, a committed participation, a costly labor for God's redemptive mission in the world.
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So let's lastly talk about the church gathered and scattered. This is really going to be a key as we go into Exodus.
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The church is essentially gathered by God in order to be scattered by God.
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We began with the local and the universal church. The local church is
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God's people gathered. The universal church is God's people scattered. Both the local church and the universal church have their very definition in the mission of God.
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Why are they gathered in the first place for the mission? Why are they scattered for the mission? They're gathered and called by God so that they may be scattered at the widest scopes.
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And why are they gathered? They're gathered in order to witness and to embody and to enact
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God's redemption. And why are they scattered? In order to witness, in order to embody, in order to enact
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God's redemption. So the church is the light of the world.
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It's scattered for that very reason. And in all the specific parts of the world it is gathered for that very reason.
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How does this tie in with election? We as Calvinists of course believe that God must call.
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It's not something that you can pull up from your bootstraps. Perhaps there's someone here who's wrestling with well
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I don't think I've been called and until I feel that I'm called I'm not going to respond. That would be a fatal mistake to make.
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Because as we said it's not an invitation you can take or leave it's a command. Are you hearing me saying repent and believe?
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You're hearing God saying repent and believe. That's as much as you need, as much warrant as you need to repent and believe.
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But the logic of election is simply this that from the very beginning we've seen it in Genesis, we'll only see it more in Exodus we'll see it come to fruition in the
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New Testament God has gathered His elect His called out ones and He's gathered
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His elect for the sake of scattering His elect so that they may harvest even more of the elect.
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Now that's true in terms of the very narrow mission of the church but it's more than that. Indeed their voice must go out to the very ends of the earth.
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God is doing more with our witness than simply harvesting the elect. Our witness is also sealing unto judgment those who reject our witness.
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And that's also part of the mission of God. God says that His word never returns to Him void.
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We have a hard time believing that to be true. Sometimes we only think that God's work is being done when people are responding to His word in a saving way.
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We need to understand God's mission in this world much broader than that. God's mission is being worked out whenever we're on mission, whenever we're witnessing.
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In times that they respond savingly and in times that they reject it unto destruction. That is
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God's mission being worked out in the world. So God is gathering His people and scattering
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His people and also in many ways He is using His people to gather the witness to all ears and eyes and scatter those who do not believe like tares from the wheat or goats from the sheep.
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A missionary view of election means that God's choice of His gathered people is not simply for their own sake.
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I've said this probably five times. There is no answer to why was I made to hear thy voice?
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Enter while there's room. Well, it's true in terms of the sovereign choice upon my life.
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There's no answer to that. It's the mystery of God's grace. Why I was made to hear
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His voice. And enter while there's room. And thousands make a wretched choice and rather starve than come.
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But I have to be more careful than that because certainly there is an answer to that. Why were you made to hear
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His voice? Why were you called? Why were you chosen? Why were you gathered? It was so that you could be scattered.
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So that wherever you are, you will witness and embody and enact the redemption of God.
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Why were you chosen? Why was Israel chosen? Was it for their own sake? Or were they to be a light to the nations?
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Why were you chosen as a believer here this morning? Was it for your own sake? Or was it so that you could be used as salt and light in the mission of God?
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To be a Christian is to be missional. To be a church is to be missional. To be elect in Christ means we are brought into Christ's mission for the world.
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We are now ambassadors of reconciliation. And we plead with men, be reconciled to God.
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The church, therefore, has two postures. Two ways that we have to stand.
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First, we have that stative way of being, right? We have our fellowship.
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Within that fellowship, there's worship and there's ordinance. I was about to say sacrament.
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We'll follow the confession here. Ordinance. There's word and there's ordinance.
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There's worship and there's fellowship. That's the inner dynamic of a local church.
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That's the inward posture of a local church. But what is the outward posture? Sure.
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Mission. Mission is broad as Jesus is
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Lord. So the inner life of the church is worship, fellowship, word, ordinance.
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The outer life of the church is mission. Mission in your life, mission in your home, mission to your wife, mission to your kids, mission to your coworkers, mission to the governors, mission to the mayor, mission to the councilmen.
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It's a mission. It's why you were chosen. It's why you were called. It's why you've been gathered. The problem is it's very hard to be in two postures at the same time.
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And that's what you must be if you're a Christian in a local church. It's very easy to only do one and neglect the other.
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And then everything sort of falls apart in its own way. It's very easy to pad and reinforce the fellowship, the stative, the worship, the ministry of the word.
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And just neglect and put off and be unconcerned with the outward mission. In other words, it's easy to be gathered, not so easy to be scattered.
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And so the result is an inward focus. It's all about self -maintenance, basically.
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Maintaining the local assembly, maintaining the status quo. We've got enough to deal with.
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And people have different seasons, different responsibilities. There's missions in relationships, in homes, hard missions.
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That may be all you can do, young mothers. But you've been called and gathered into a local fellowship so that in whatever season, with whatever gifts and resources you have, because you recognize that you've been called into this mission of God, you will be furthering the gospel.
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Furthering the gospel. Like we said, it can go wrong in either direction.
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A church that is inward, that is only interested in being gathered, may have rich worship, may have depth in the
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Word, depth in relationships, but it is neglecting its very constitution as a church.
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It is meant to be missional. But a church that is more interested in programs of evangelization and sort of activity in that way, may neglect worship.
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May neglect the ministry of the Word. May lose discernment and doctrine. May fail to disciple the people within her because they're so concerned to reach the people without her.
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The church needs to have both. But never forget, never forget, you are not scattered as churches.
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You are not scattered as Christians in our week -to -week lives for the purpose of being gathered again.
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It's always been the other way around. You have been called. You have been chosen.
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You have been made a holy nation and a royal priesthood for this singular purpose. You have been gathered so that you may be sent out.
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You have been gathered so that you may join in God's mission. It is precisely for the sake of God's mission to the world that we maintain our inward fellowship and worship and we go to our knees in prayer and fasting for our outward witness.
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I think I know which side of the divide we're failing in, brothers and sisters. Psalm 67.
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Maybe you could turn there just to fold the page over and have it on your heart. As I said, these are not things that we solve overnight, not in a few weeks, not in a few months.
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To change the air that we breathe, to change our posture and flex our spiritual muscles in ways that they've atrophied is painful and it takes time and it takes effort.
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It's sort of like therapy. And we need it as a local church. And I think
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Psalm 67 to me captures the heart of this gathered in order to be scattered, called, elect in Christ for the sake of the families of the earth.
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Psalm 67. Notice how it begins. God, be merciful to us and bless us and cause
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His face to shine upon us. The richness of worship, ministry of the
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Word, this inward fellowship. We're gathered and here we are in v. 1 and it's just all basking in.
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Yes, here we are together, Lord. Be this for us. It's all inward. Be merciful to us.
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Bless us. Cause Your face to shine on us. But why?
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That Your way may be known on earth. Your salvation among all nations.
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Why bless us? Why enrich our worship? Why give depth to our word? For the sake of the nations.
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For the sake of the earth, Lord. Let the peoples praise You, O God. Not just us.
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That's not enough. We want every tribe and tongue to sing praises to the slain
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Lamb. Let the peoples praise You, O God. Let all the peoples praise You. Do you see?
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Do you know how many centuries of the Christian church read right past verses like Psalm 67, verse 3b?
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All peoples. We've got enough in our village, in our town, in our country.
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Do we really need to let all the peoples praise Him? We're going to talk about that next week.
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Missionaries don't fall from trees. The fellowship of the gospel.
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For the furtherance of the gospel. I'll talk. I'm totally stealing my thunder.
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But I can't hold back. We'll talk about the Moravians next week.
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And Count Zinzendorf. And what he created in Hernhut. Which led, which fueled, in the sort of late 18th century, fueled modern missions.
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William Carey was the outflow of the Moravians. Moravian brethren. What he established first was a recognition that it hadn't been taught in the word.
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And it hadn't stirred people's hearts. And it hadn't pressed their imaginations. They didn't have something to yearn for.
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And when they finally got something to yearn for, they turned to prayer. They didn't have the means. They didn't even know where to go. They had one map between them.
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But they could pray. And they had a hut where they established prayer. Not like the
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Baptist Missionary Society, the friends, John Olney, John Sutcliffe, William Carey, who established the first Monday evening of every month to pray specifically for missions.
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Do you know what the Moravians did? They began a prayer meeting that didn't end for decades. 24 hours of prayer for missions.
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It never ended. Someone always showed up to continue praying. God, be merciful to us.
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And bless us. And cause Your face to shine on us so that You may be known in the earth.
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Your salvation among all nations. Let the peoples praise You, O God. Let all peoples praise
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You. Oh, let the nations be glad and sing for joy. For You shall judge the people righteously, govern the nations on earth.
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It's not just about transactional conversion. Nations are going to be judged. You're Lord over all of the earth, over the nations of the earth.
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Let the peoples praise You, O God. Let all the peoples praise You. Then the earth shall yield her increase.
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God, our own God, shall bless us. That's almost eschatological. Then the fullness of God's intention for the earth will come.
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It's like new heavens, new earth. God shall bless us. All the ends of the earth shall fear
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Him. God's chosen people do not exist for their own sake.
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They have not been called for their own sake. They're not chosen for their own sake. We're not gathered here this morning for our own sake or our own immediate benefit.
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It's not about our comforts. It's not about the things that we enjoy. The things that we find stabilizing influences in our lives.
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We've been gathered here as the missional body of Christ because His Father is always working and as the
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Father sent Him, so He sends us. 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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Father, we thank You for Your Word. Stir us and give us hearts of yearning.
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Saturate our affections and move our granite wills and saturate our prayers.