“A True Melting Pot!” – FBC Morning Light (12/8/2023)

What a good Friday morning to you. Here we are coming up on another weekend. First, well,

I guess it is the second weekend in December, isn't it? But it's the second Sunday of Advent, and this

Sunday in our morning service, be preaching in the book of Galatians again.

We're in our adult Sunday school class, we're focusing on the book of Acts, and this Sunday evening is our church's annual

Christmas dinner, so we'll be having a good time of fellowship together on the

Christmas theme. So if you're in the area and can attend our services on Sunday morning, we'd be glad for you to do so, and we would enjoy having you with us.

Well, today in our Bible reading plan, we're reading in Amos chapters 5 and 6 and Revelation chapter 7.

I want to focus on a scene in Revelation 7 here in just a moment, but when

I read this passage, and particularly the couple verses I want to read in a moment, I was reminded of a book

I read several years ago, probably back in the late 80s or early 90s.

It was at the height of what's been known as the church growth movement. There were all kinds of church growth gurus who had all these wonderful ideas about what you needed to do to grow your church.

I never put a whole lot of stock in those things, because in the first place, I'm not the one that grows the church, the

Lord grows the church. But nevertheless, there were these gurus, and I remember this one book that said, if you want your church to grow, then you need to do some strategizing ahead of time, and figure out who are the people that you want to reach.

Look at the demographics of your community, and what's the dominant demographic in your community, and your church will want to reach that people, that group.

Really, what they were calling for was churches that are comprised of homogeneous groups.

So you might have a church of Mexicans, you might have a church of people from Honduras, you might have a church of Koreans, you might have another church of Japanese, you might have yet another church of people from South Africa, another church that's

Irish, and it wasn't quite narrowed that sharply, but still there was the mentality.

You want to find the homogeneous group that you want to reach, and go after that group.

I rejected that out of hand, and I did so because of what you read in Revelation chapter 7 and verses 9 and 10.

Here's this vision of a scene in heaven, where it says, John writes, after these things

I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, all together, standing before the throne and before the

Lamb, uniformly clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a unified voice, crying out with a loud voice, saying, here's what they're all saying, people from every nation, tribe, people, tongue, they're saying, salvation belongs to our

God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb. What's going on here is not a bunch of separated people in their unique homogeneous groups, each saying their thing.

This is a grand choir made up of people from all over the planet, from all times and ages too, for that matter, who are worshipping the

Lamb, worshipping the God that sits on the throne. There's a unified voice here.

Clearly, what unites us is not our homogeneity, not our individual uniquenesses.

We're white Europeans, we are Latinos from Mexico, we are

Argentines, we are Japanese, we are South Korean, and so on and so forth.

No, that's not what unites us. We don't build a church around such things. What unites us is our common

Lord Jesus Christ, our redemption by his blood, our imputed righteousness, and our worship of our

God and of the Lamb. That's what unites us. In reality, as much as God gives the church the people that comprise that church, it should not look like everybody is the same.

I'm not saying that to say that there should be a kind of a wokeness that says we need to have a certain percentage of this kind, a certain percentage, as if we can do that.

That's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is that when you look at your church and you look at your community, you don't say, we only want people like us in our church.

There are people in our community that are not like us. We don't want them. We want people that are just like I am.

That's it. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what the church is to be like. The church is to be comprised of people from all stratas of society, of all nationalities, as God brings those nationalities to a community and brings them to faith in Christ, and they are to be welcomed as brothers and sisters in Christ who are worshiping the same

God and the Lamb who redeemed them. We don't marginalize people, we don't keep people away because they're not like us.

No, not at all. We're all going to be in heaven together. We're all going to be worshiping the Lamb together, the

Lamb who's redeemed us. The church on earth is just really kind of like practicing, getting ready for that glorious eternity.

Let's have that kind of mentality today, and even this Lord's Day, as we gather together to be with God's people.

Our Father in heaven, we do thank you that you reach people all over the planet, from all nationalities, and we thank you that we are united together in Christ Jesus, the

Lamb who was slain for us, who shed his blood for us, who ransomed us from this world and made us a people of his own.

And we look forward, Father, for this glorious, eternal choir singing his praises together, made up of people from all over the place, all kinds of languages.

We look forward to that blessing. May we enjoy it to some extent, even in this world, we pray.

We ask it in Jesus' name. All right, well, listen, have a great weekend.