Seek First the Kingdom - Part 3: What We Seek

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Matthew 6:33

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Well, this morning we are completing our time with verse 33, which we began two weeks back as now we come to part three, and of course, part one of verse 33 was how to seek the kingdom of God first and His righteousness, and then last week we talked about the individual responsibility, how you seek the kingdom first, and now this morning we'll look at the corporate responsibility, how we seek the kingdom of God first.
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Next week will be verse 34, which is the last verse of chapter 6, and that really returns to this larger theme that had begun in verse 25 of the father who knows our needs and knows how to provide for our needs in such a way that our pathway is clear and our backs are unburdened so we can actually both individually and corporately seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.
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So that's going to be next week, this return to the larger theme of God who provides daily for our needs, and we're going to emphasize especially that idea of the daily walk of faith or strength for today.
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Then we're going to get to chapter 7, which in my mind actually is a very important bridge to what we're going to be talking about this morning.
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This morning is a little more broad, a little more detailed. This would be a very good sermon for note -takers, and if you're not a note -taker, you should become a note -taker.
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As I've said in years past, I think I picked it up from D .A. Carson, the strongest memory is weaker than the weakest ink, all right?
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So pen, not even pencil. Sometimes I've had to take notes with kids crayons, but you do what you have to do.
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The point is if you write something down, it has a lot better chance of making it to Monday than if you're just trying to cling to it for the rest of the day today.
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I say that because there is going to be some detail, there's going to be some layers, some concepts we've actually spoken about in past years.
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I hope for that reason that these things will be not foreign, but perhaps now carrying some momentum and weight into what we've been seeing in the
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Sermon on the Mount. Now how is that going to be a bridge to two weeks out when we get to Matthew chapter 7?
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Well, if we understand this morning what corporately seeking the kingdom involves, what this larger idea that we've been after for two weeks now of calling or election, ethics or righteousness, and mission or seeking the kingdom, how these things actually correspond to the church, not only the outward face of the church, but the inward dynamics of the church.
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If we grasp that, we're going to be needing to understand what Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 7, because the reality is what it means to have his righteousness, what it looks like to become salt and light, involves all of the things that correspond to not walking in a judgmental way, understanding why splinters need to be removed, but the difference between seeking to remove a splinter at the expense of ignoring our planks, and actually gouging each other's eyes out.
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That's all actually part of how we corporately seek and actually embody the kingdom of God and his righteousness on the earth.
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So you'll have to tuck away this morning, which is a little more abstract and not practical in that way, but when we get to the practicality of it,
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I'll be reminding us that this is all holding together, as indeed everything we've seen for several months now is all part of the same sermon.
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This is all one sermon that the Lord Jesus taught on the mount.
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So we've been looking from verses 25 through 32. Don't worry, we'll get there again with verse 34 for the past two weeks, and now again this morning.
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Verse 33, be holy. We need our Father's care, we've said, for our King's mission.
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What are we to seek? Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and we've understood we need to hold these things together.
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Righteousness must be held together with seeking the kingdom, and we cannot seek the kingdom of God unless we're seeking
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His righteousness. We established that we are to seek that individually as something that makes up this continual building and turning, every aspect and every experience of our lives coming from His providential hand as an opportunity to actually seek
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His kingdom and His righteousness. Righteousness, we've said, is the ethical dimension of our faith.
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Very important that we understand that. There is no faith to speak of if it's not a righteous faith.
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Everything that Jesus lays down in Matthew chapter 5, beginning with the very Beatitudes, He's laying down kingdom values.
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He's showing us the righteousness that has now appeared and been revealed to us, that is granted to us freely through the finished work of Christ, applied to us and empowered within us by the presence of the
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Holy Spirit. This is a righteousness that belongs to the kingdom. This is what we seek first.
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Now if we're seeking this righteousness first, it brings about a contrast in our lives. It brings a contrast in the way we think, in the way we regard others, in the way we encounter things, in the way we respond to things that we encounter.
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It brings a contrast to our lives and it makes us a people of contrast. That great insight from Michael Goheen.
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We become a contrast people. He said, as we looked at last week, mission is first of all the life of a contrast people.
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Mission is not something you write a check to. I hope if you don't understand that fully now that by the end of our time together this morning you'll fully understand that.
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Mission is not a compartmentalized activity of the church that exists on a line item within our budget.
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Mission is not something that I send $25 to Ligonier and I get R .C. Sproul's latest publication.
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If I'm reducing mission to something in that way, I've missed the entirety of what the
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Bible holds out to be mission, as we'll see. Mission, as Goheen rightly says, is first of all the life of a contrast people.
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That's mission. It's everything that comprises your life.
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If you're seeking first the kingdom and the righteousness of the kingdom, if you're living in the way of Jesus with the values that Jesus taught us to have and to hold, the ones that He died for to grant us and clothe us, mission is first of all that life, the entirety of life, every aspect of our lives that makes us a people of contrast to those that are not part of the kingdom, for those who are still dwelling in darkness, still dead in trespasses and sin, that have not entered into the light of the
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Lord, that are not living in righteousness, walking as salt in light. So mission is first of all the life of a contrast people, the radiant demonstration of God's creational design for human life and therefore the goal of God's redemptive purpose as His people stand against cultural idolatry and for one another in the
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Lord. I want to so badly get to Matthew 7 where we can understand again, being a
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Christian is not just what you stand against, but it's who you stand for. Very, very important.
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Now as we've established, the life of a contrast people is a build -up of hundreds of seemingly insignificant efforts and decisions week by week, dozens of perhaps subconscious decisions and reactions that take place throughout each day.
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The life of a contrast people can be as wide as the contours of a life, we're thinking of a funeral service yesterday and perhaps people are sharing their thoughts and impressions of the life.
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The thing that's always struck me about funerals, like being at the most recent funeral service
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I was at, was our dearly departed brother David Farrar and you have people that have known this man for decades, for eight decades, for five decades, week by week.
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I could sit down and even though my memory would fail, I could write probably a whole book of my impressions and memories and perceptions of this man, but in a funeral service you condense that to just a few minutes each in the confines of an hour.
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Is that the sum of life? Is that the entirety of the life? No. You can summarize a life in that kind of way, you can summarize a life in a paragraph, but then you can zoom in to the days if not the hours of someone's life and the entirety of that life, whether in paragraph or day to day, that life is contrasted because of the presence and call of Jesus.
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Calling, ethics, what arises out of that conjunction? Mission. As we said last week, the intersection of your call and the righteousness that God calls you to as you encounter life in your flesh in a fallen world, that intersection causes mission.
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So it's the election and the ethics and the mission that hold together.
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It's the, as we said, the constant trickle of water day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, decade by decade, century by century, millennium by millennium, as we've been seeing on Sunday nights, that actually carves out the deep canyon of God's redemption in the stubborn and dry bedrock of a fallen world.
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And that is a truth that we find throughout not only church history, but even in our lives.
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It's the drip, drip, drip of your life at work, your life in the home, your life around your neighbors, drip, drip, drip into the purpose of God's creation and redemption.
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You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to everyone who's in the house.
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Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your
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Father in heaven. So that's something that we've been seeing from the very beginning of the Sermon on the
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Mount. We compounded it last week. How are you seeking first the kingdom in that way, that your calling and the ethics of the kingdom gives way to this kind of mission, that your light in contrast to that darkness causes the
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Father in heaven to be glorified? That's why He called you calling, ethics, mission.
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But now we're asking, well how do we seek first the kingdom and that righteousness? It's what we must seek.
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We saw this corporate language in 1st Peter. You is not singular in 1st
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Peter 2. You are a chosen generation. That's a plural you. You together.
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What in the South they'd say y 'all. Maybe our brother from North Carolina could verify. Well they say all y 'all if it's plural actually.
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All y 'all are a chosen generation. A royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people.
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What kind of language is this? Generation, priesthood, nation, people. What is that?
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That's corporate language. Peter's recognizing there's some aspect of mission that cannot be reducible to the individual.
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There's some larger aspect of salt and light that actually means being a city on a hill, not a lone ranger on a hill.
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It's vital that we grasp this. Now that city is made up of individual grains of salt, individual lumens of light if that's how lumens work.
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But the idea is there's actually something corporate about God's mission and the vehicle of the church in relation to God's mission.
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So we have to understand mission. I don't do this very often and whenever I do I say that. I don't do this very often.
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But this was a buzzword when I began seminary studies. It was just starting to die out and I wonder how many of how many of us are familiar with it.
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Just by a quick kind of show of hands. How many of you have heard the phrase missional church? Missional church.
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All right a few quick, I feel like I'm an auctioneer, a few quick flips. Missional church was this idea of the church has lost its way.
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We need to become missional again. You know the church has been sitting on its hands.
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We've lost our influence in society. We need to renew this idea of the importance of mission and evangelism.
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The church needs to become missional again. And Michael Goheen, who again, his writings as a missiologist have been so helpful to me, even just reading through some things this past week.
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And of course he's reacting to this phrase as one who has studied mission throughout church history and even all of the backwaters and eddies of contemporary missions and contemporary theology of mission.
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And this is what he says in relation to that phrase. What other kind of church is there? Missional church.
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You should come to our church. We're a missional church. And Goheen's saying, is there a different kind of church?
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What do you mean by missional church? He says, to talk about a missional church sounds to me like saying a female woman.
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It's a tautology. You're saying the same thing. Church is mission. Mission is church.
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And so we start there. If it's not missional, Goheen says, if it's not missional, it's not church. Whatever else it might be, if it's not missional, it's not church.
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But what did I say toward the beginning? If we've already defined mission as some compartmentalized activity that exists as a line item on a budget, something you write a check to, we've lost entirely why mission and church are not something that are antithetical or antonymical.
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If it's not missional, it's not church. But why is that true? Because mission, rightly understood in its widest contours, is actually that which holds together theology, ecclesiology, in other words, your understanding of the church, the revelation of Scripture, theology or theological education.
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All of that is actually held together under the contour of mission. But what is mission?
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Well, it's not primarily, it's not at the first place the activity that Christians do.
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It's not primarily the activity of the church. Mission is the activity of God.
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We're going to come back to this at the very end, because it's absolutely definitive.
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But if you don't begin here, you've missed the train entirely. You'll miss the whole flow of Scripture. What is mission?
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Mission is the work of God in what He has made. It is the activity of God in His work of redemption to overcome the effects of the fall upon His creation.
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That is the mission to which our lives as believers, to which the kingdom of God, to which the missionary efforts and activity of the church and the missionary identity of the church exist.
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So this is Daryl Gooder. If mission were truly the mother of our theology, if our disciplines were intentionally conceived and nurtured as components of this biblical call, we would never need to use the term missional ever again.
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That's exactly right. In other words, he's saying if we actually understood the widest contour of God's activity in and for the world, we would never need to have a term like missional to label every little discipline as something separate.
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If it's not missional, it's not church. If it's not missional, it's not Christian. The trouble is, of course, that this is not so,
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Gooder says. We've lost so much of the connection between mission and theology that our use of the word missional points us to something biblically significant, but it shows us that it's, if not entirely lost, that for a long time it's been misplaced.
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So therefore, if we define mission as evangelism, we're reductionistic. Mission is so much broader than evangelism.
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Is evangelism a part of mission? Yeah. So is homemaking.
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So is working well and doing a good job. So is every aspect of God's created order as He intends it to be, and we, being in Christ who is the firstfruits of a new humanity, actually overcome the effects of the fall that corrupt
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God's good design? There's no aspect of life that God has designated for His purpose that doesn't have some aspect of mission ingrained within it.
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The mission of God is broader than evangelism. We cannot reduce the mission of God to the
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Great Commission. Rather, we understand the Great Commission is a certain springboard and platform to understand the widest contours of mission from a biblical framework.
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Again, when we get a broader view of this biblical framework, we recognize that mission involves all that God has done, is doing, and seeks to do in and for the world.
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That's a horizon that you will not find the edges of. It's as wide as life itself.
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It's as wide as creation and new creation. It connects through the logic of Scripture creation, fall, kingdom, redemption, new creation.
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It holds all of that together. It's as wide as Genesis is to Revelation.
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So if we take the Bible seriously, if we take the Bible as a whole in this way, if we understand mission in its widest contours, we recognize that mission relates to cosmic history, the widest contours of mission actually relate all things, as wide as creation is to consummation.
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And we understand that the biblical Revelation gives us this in the form of a story. And so all of life is part of this story of God's work,
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God's activity. The whole story is what He has made and who He is, the one that has made all that is.
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And what happens to what He made and what He's doing in light of what happened to what He has made and why
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He's doing that. It's all part of the story. Whatever granularity, whatever aspect of your life and whatever microcosmic detail it may exist is simply a part of that greater story.
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What is that story? It's the mission of God. It's the purpose of God. A purpose, mind you, that didn't begin in Genesis 3.
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It began even before Genesis 1 could have been written. It was His purpose in creation that He would be glorified in and through His Son by His Spirit.
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That His glory would saturate this cosmos as waters cover the sea.
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And as a theologian said, how does water cover the sea? Water is the sea. Exactly right.
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That a day would be fixed upon which the most meaningless aspect of life, the bell on a horse, would have inscribed upon it holiness to the
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Lord. That's the vision. That's the vision. This story is the story of our lives.
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It's the story of your daily life. This mission is the activity of everything that exists around you.
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The blades of grass between your toes, the bird song that you hear that reminds you not only does your
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Father know your need, not only is He able to provide, but your Father is at work for this story of life itself that corresponds to His mission and purpose.
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For Christians, the end of the story has been revealed. This will be embarrassing to her, maybe,
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I don't know. My wife has this bad habit of whenever she gets a magazine or she always just begins at the end.
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She goes to the back cover and she just starts there and goes forward. It drives me nuts. You should never go ahead, you know, start here, move forward.
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A kid's book just starts at the end, magazine just starts at the end. Well, here's where that's most appropriate.
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The end is actually revealed to us. You go to a bookstore and you pull a little cheap novel off at the end.
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The one thing you shouldn't do is to say, just get to the point. I don't have time to read these 400 pages.
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What's the last 15 pages? Get to the point. You're kind of missing the point. But when it comes to scripture, it's actually very important that we recognize the end of it all is right there in the beginning.
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The end of it all, the fullness of Revelation 22, it's not so much that we drag
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Genesis 1 and 2 into Revelation 21 and 22 and go, oh, isn't this nice, a kind of return to paradise.
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No, we actually understand Revelation 21 and 22 was in the pregnancy of Genesis 1 and 2.
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The end was always there in the beginning. And so Christians peak, they have a glimpse of how this story ends.
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God lets us know this is where this story is going. You start to connect every aspect of your life to this larger activity and purpose, to this mission of God.
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It's comprehended the entirety of what is and what's at the very center of it all.
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What holds it all together? And if you know where I'm going, it's not the what, it's the who.
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It's the who in all things consists. It's the who that's the very center, the very center of the stage of cosmic history.
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The one who, as Revelation itself says, is the beginning and the end, the
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Alpha and the Omega. It's the fullness of the
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Godhead dwelling in Him bodily, who entered into time into space, who revealed what the humanity that God created was meant to be, not as the first Adam in his fallishness, but as the second
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Adam, pristine, obedient even unto death, that the righteousness of God might be secured for God's people through him.
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Which means the entirety of mission actually corresponds to who Christ is.
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This advent of humanity as it was meant to be, the yes and amen of all that God intends, the mission of God is fully elaborated in the person and work of Jesus Christ, His Son.
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Isn't that amazing? Which means, as Leslie Neubengen, who
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I've mentioned now for several weeks, as Leslie Neubengen states, we have to understand Jesus Christ, the
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Son of God, in the context of the whole story, the whole story of life, the whole story of humanity, creation, fall, redemption, new creation, from A to Z without anything lingering in the margins.
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We have to understand Jesus, the Son of God, in the context of the whole story, but very significantly we have to understand the whole story in light of Jesus Christ, the
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Son of God. On the one hand, we begin with Jesus Christ and his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, his coming, the gift of the
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Spirit that he sends, and that helps us understand how this biblical story that comprises all of life in history, how that actually holds together.
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But on the other hand, we begin to articulate the biblical story in the context of all of life, in terms of rightly understanding
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Jesus and all that he said and did, all of his person and work. Now I hope that's ringing some bells for you that have come out on Sunday evenings to look at this study of church history.
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Now you can see why this rule of faith is the apostolic teaching. What are they doing, generation to generation, for all of these early centuries?
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We believe in God the Father, the Almighty, we believe in God the Son, the Lord, and we believe in the
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Holy Spirit, the Lord, and we believe in the resurrection of the dead. You see, every aspect of this story, in all of its
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Christological significance, bringing glory to the Godhead through him. Now what inevitably flows out of that, as we can see, plainly it was for the early church, what inevitably flows out of that is the mission of the church.
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That was God's activity, that was God's work, that continues to be his mission in and for the world.
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So where does that cohere for the church? That's the church's mission, that's the church's activity, that's how all things hold together and consist in the life of the church.
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So the life of the church and the witness of the church and the mission of the church are actually the life and the witness and the mission of what
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God is doing in and through the finished work of his Son, by his Spirit. And that means this good news, this great work, this redemption, this life -altering, life -comprehensive story must be made known to all peoples throughout the earth.
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The church, as Leslie Newbigin says, is set by God in the midst of the world as a signpost to which all creation and all world history moves, the lampstand for the great light that has dawned in pitch -black darkness, the lampstand of the light that the angels longed to look into, waiting for century after century for the fullness of the promise given to the woman to come.
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The church is set by God in the midst of the world as the sign of that to which all creation and all world history moves.
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What is creation and world history moving toward? The redemption and consummation of God himself.
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That's the mission of God. Now this church, we could say, is a capital
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C church. In fact, when Newbigin writes, the church is set by God in the world in this way, it's a capital
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C church. It's the church of the Nicene Creed, the holy apostolic church, the holy catholic church, lowercase c, capital
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C church. It's that church. And so we ask, well, okay, if that's true of the capital
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C church, well, what about the lowercase c church? What about a little church like this here in Berry, Massachusetts, a little church like GRBC?
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How does that grand story, that grand theology of mission actually apply here? Well, of course, we have to understand there is a distinction between a local congregation and the church universal.
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The one church, one baptism, one spirit, one word, the one church, holy catholic and apostolic, versus a local congregation.
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Well, the local congregation is the new humanity in a particular place.
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The church universal is the new humanity at large. It's global, it's generational, it's cosmic to that extent.
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The local congregation is the new humanity, but it's in a particular place, in a particular place, in a particular time, comprised of a particular people for a particular purpose, and we are particular
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Baptists, if you didn't know. And of course, in that place and in that time, as this lampstand of the new humanity in Christ, we not only offer, indeed, we command all men in that place to repent and have faith in Christ and to be baptized and to receive the forgiveness of sins that He alone can offer, to be reconciled to God through Him.
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And in that way, whether that's happening locally or globally, this is the worship and witness of the church to humanity as a whole.
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But of course, we can't think of that in the abstract. If we think of mission as something that somehow the global church or other churches do, and we don't actually look at what mission means for us as a local congregation, then we'll miss entirely what seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness looks like together.
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Leslie Newbigin, of course, he's very helpful in this, as I mentioned. He's a missiologist, but he spent much time in India as a missionary and as a church planter, and that helped form a lot of his thought about understanding mission and the state of evangelicalism.
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And when he's writing in the 60s and 70s, and postmodern secular relativism was beginning to infect and plague the western church, he was in a very different environment, and he could see a contrast in ways that the fish in the water couldn't detect it.
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So Newbigin says this, the local church is the fundamental unit of the
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Christian church. It's the fundamental unit. Or you can put it this way, it's the primary unit of the church.
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Or you can put it this way, it's the basic unit of Christian existence. Now where is he getting this idea from?
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Why is this the first, the primary, the basic unit? Well, he learned this while he was in India as a missionary.
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There, of course, were all sorts of witness that arose out of that ministry, out of that mission's work.
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Schools were built so that locals could become literate, so that professions and vocations could be secured, so that scriptures could be read and understood.
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Christianity, by the way, is an engine for literacy throughout world history. Very important that we understand that.
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Schools are built, hospitals are built. Hospitals were actually invented by Christians. There wasn't such thing as a hospital.
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I mean, the idea of hospitality, that's essentially the same denotation. It's a Christian insight.
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Schools, hospitals, street preachers, literature, all of these things made an impact in Indian society in Nubingan's time.
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But what he saw the effect of was this. It moved those people to want to come to the place where it was centered.
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Schools being cropped up, hospitals being built, people being helped, jobs being offered, widows being cared for.
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All these things like tentacles are going out into the society, into the remote villages. And the effect of that was the people say, can we follow the tentacle to the source?
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We actually want to come out and find it. Where's this all flowing from? How is this actually tricking down to us?
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We want to be there. We want to be a part of that. And so these village congregations were actually the foundation and center for every other aspect of witness.
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It was witness mothership, so to speak. Everything else was satellite.
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Everything else flowed out of that. So it was not witness and mission at the expense of the congregation, nor was it the congregation at the expense of witness and mission.
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And so he expressed this conviction, and he did it quite regularly. He said the primary reality of Christian existence is the local congregation for this reason.
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It is the only possible hermeneutic of the gospel. This is why
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I say it's good for note -takers. That's a fancy word, hermeneutic. Hermeneutic is a method of interpretation.
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That's what a hermeneutic is. A certain method or approach to interpretation.
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An instrument of interpretation. That's a hermeneutic. And what
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Newbegin is saying there is, if you understand rightly how the local congregation is the primary reality, the basic unit of the church at large, you'll know it's the only possible way the gospel can be translated, can be elaborated, can be excavated and explicated and applied.
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This is where the gospel is wrought. So just pause and hold that.
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Think through what we've said now for the past week or two weeks. We've said once I begin to see myself as called into the mission of God, my life ceases to be about what kind of mission does
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God want for me? What kind of calling does God have for me? And it rather becomes what kind of me does
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God want for His mission? What kind of me does God desire for His calling? Well, pause there and think through this.
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What kind of us? What kind of we? What kind of church?
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What kind of congregation would God desire us to be for His mission? That's all we're doing.
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We're going from the me to the we. From the I to the us. What kind of us does
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God want for the activity He's already been engaged in even before the foundation of the world? What kind of us does
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He want for that? Well, we'll not fully delve into that.
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We'll get there when we start in Matthew 7. But if you've been recounting what we memorized at the church retreat from Colossians 3, that's another really great example of the kind of us that God wants for His mission.
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The kind of us that looks like salt and light. The kind of life of a contrast people when they meet and gather together in witness and worship.
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But here's a way to actually think about the way our local mission, our local witness coheres.
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And this is a really important distinction that I want everyone to grasp. I might say it in a few different ways.
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It's the distinction between dimension and intention. Dimension and intention.
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I remember years ago speaking to this. This to me is an insight that is so profound.
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And maybe it didn't fully click or maybe it's still fuzzy, but I really want it to become clear for the sake of where we are here in the
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Sermon on the Mount. The difference or the distinction between dimension and intention.
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This is something from Leslie Newbingen. He says there's a difference between thinking of mission as a dimension and versus thinking of missionary intentions, intentional acts or efforts that are missionary or missional.
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Newbingen believed that both of these things, dimension and intention, are essential.
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You have to have them both. They both must be held together. They both exist together. And if you lose one, you will lose the other.
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All right. Well, what are we getting at? What does this mean? Well, he says this. Unless there is in the life of the church a point of concentration for that missionary intention, the acts, the effort, the we're going to go do this, or I've been witnessing to so -and -so, or I think
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I should go and say this to my co -worker, that kind of intentional act or effort, however structured and formal, however basic and informal, a passing
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God bless you to a sneeze that you actually mean, as we've said, or something as formal as we actually have a team and let's pray because we're going to be going to do this.
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Whatever that intention is, unless there is a point of concentration for that kind of intention, the missionary dimension,
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I'm going to define in a moment, the missionary dimension which is proper to the whole life of the church will be lost.
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Here's Newbingen. We're going to talk about this in a few ways until it clicks. A church that reduces mission to only intentional activities narrows the scope of the gospel.
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That is chef's kiss. That is dead on. That is in a nutshell the explanation of how mission got separated from church and why 15 or 20 years ago you had buzzwords like a missional church.
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A church that reduces mission to only intentional activities and efforts narrows the scope of the gospel because it removes the full context in which witness and intentional activity takes place.
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In other words, it thinks that there's only a few narrow times that intentional missionary effort takes place and everything else is actually
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Christianity proper, Christianity in its fullness. Mission, missional intention are just a few little things in the pockets of Christianity.
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The church is like a weird pair of cargo pants and it has about 80 pockets and somewhere in there there's mission, missionary effort.
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We're saying no, the whole outfit is mission. It's all mission. The whole thing is gospel.
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The whole thing is witness. The whole thing is contrast. All of life is a contrast. A church that reduces mission to only intentional activities narrows the scope of the gospel.
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It removes the full context in which witness takes place. What's the full context? It's the whole dimension of mission,
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God's activity, His purpose for humanity, what life is supposed to be like that we didn't know until Christ appeared as the second
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Adam and new humanity. The things that the Spirit is illuminating and convicting and prodding us in so we don't grieve
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Him but we keep in step with Him. We don't quench His presence but we keep our conscience clean in repentance and faith.
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It's that kind of dimension that gives the intersection of our calling, our election in Christ with the ethics of the kingdom, the righteousness
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He calls us to. And in that there's a contrast to everything that we feel in our flesh and the way of a darkened world around us.
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If we're reducing mission to only a few efforts and activities then we're not understanding all of life is missional.
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All of life is the activity and purpose of God. All of life in every aspect is hurtling toward that appointed end of the revelation of Christ.
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So all of Christian life has a missional dimension. Mission is the big story.
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Mission is the activity of God. What does Jesus say? My Father's always working. Always.
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Every hair on the head is numbered. Not one sparrow falls. Every providence perfectly authored to conform the one
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He calls into the image of His Son who learned obedience through suffering and was faithful even to the death of the cross.
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My Father's always working. The grand orchestrator. The grand conductor and composer.
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So that the endless vicissitudes of life all correspond to His overarching redemptive purpose to glorify
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Himself through His Son by His Spirit. All of Christian life has that dimension.
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Within that dimension there are intentional activities. Flowing out of a church that is aware that everything in life and everything in church life has a missional dimension to it.
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Its whole existence will be words and deeds that allow that concentrated point, the whole purpose of life, the whole purpose of why
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I am who I am in this place, in this time, with these relationships, and this work.
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Everything is now concentrated toward this mission. The whole dimension is actually something that allows you to aim intentional efforts.
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I'm saying it a few different ways. I hope it's becoming clear. Flowing out of a church that is aware of the missionary dimension of its whole existence and reason for being will be words and deeds, good works, daily decisions, thoughts and regards, putting on the armor of God, every aspect of your life that has a conscious goal, a conscious intentional effort to participate in that mission, to bear witness to that gospel.
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If God is the author and giver of life, then the whole of our lives have this missional dimension to what
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He's doing in time and in the world. And therefore every aspect of our life can have at any moment in any way some sort of missional intention.
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The whole canvas is the missional dimension. Every brushstroke of your decisions and reactions, your efforts, your conversations, the things that you don't react to, the things you won't say, every brushstroke can become more and more conscious of how this intention fits in the larger dimension.
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And if you don't hold these two things together, if you think the brushstroke is the canvas or the canvas is the brushstroke, you'll miss them both entirely.
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You'll lose them both entirely. Think of Jesus' life on earth.
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How can we conceive of Jesus' earthly life if we somehow separate it from mission?
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What was Jesus' life? Why? Why did Jesus come to this world?
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Why did Jesus take on human nature, be born of the Virgin Mary? Why?
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Why did that happen? It was because of the mission of God, the purpose of His redemption. It was to fulfill all that God had sought before He even created the foundations of the world.
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This whole dimension of His life was mission. Why did He come?
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He tells us, I have come to do the will of Him who sent me. It's why I'm here. It's why I exist.
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I'm here for mission. My life is mission. This whole life is mission. And yet what comprised
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His life? Was it an endless barrage of teaching and miracles and traveling and just non -stop missional efforts, the kind of things that we think missionaries do?
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No, the Gospels recount a lot of that, but how much do the Gospels not contain? And even it does contain aspects of work.
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It was a lot of decades before He entered into the ministry proper. He worked,
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He worked, and He rested, and He worked, and He rested, and He worked, and He needed clothing, and He needed food, and He had to work through relationships, and He had half -siblings, relatives.
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He journeyed to Jerusalem. He was under the tutelage of people in His village.
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He grew in wisdom and stature. It's a whole life, just like our lives. So there's the daily needs.
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There's those daily things that He was growing in unto the will of the Father, toward the
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Father, and then there was those intentional acts, those intentional efforts that belonged to this larger mission.
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Teaching, miracles, traveling. My point is this. Because the whole dimension of Jesus' life was mission, there was never any contrast or nothing at odd between His daily needs,
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His daily rhythms of work and rest, of seeking food and clothing, of maintaining relationships and working in certain ways.
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That was never at odds with doing signs and wonders, or revealing great oracles of God, or clarifying what
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God had taught. These things all held together, and it was because Jesus had intentional activities that were missional within the whole dimension of God's mission.
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Every part of His life was God's mission, but that doesn't mean every effort and toil had that kind of intentionality and purpose in it.
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Now why is this important? If Jesus' labors and needs and even enjoyments, when
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Jesus was a boy, and He drew near to the holy city, and He smelled all the festival smells, and all the nostalgia came pouring into His memory banks, do you know what
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He was like? He was like every other little Israelite boy, grinning ear to ear. This is great.
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This is amazing. Yet without the fleshly selfishness of a little 12 -year -old boy, in a way that He was glorifying
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His Father, recognizing the goodness of these things, and everything, His labors, His needs, His toils,
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His enjoyments, all of these things were shaped and governed by the fact that His whole life had a missional dimension to it.
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He understood all of life has a missional dimension, and yet all of His teaching, all of His miracles, all of His travels, all the things that were direct aspects of God's purpose for Him flowed out of that dimension toward intention.
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My whole life and all of life is God's mission, but there comes a time in Jesus' ministry where He says, it's time to set my face like a flint toward Jerusalem.
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All of life is lived in this dimension of who we are meant to be as humans, and what
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God's purpose and calling is, but there comes a time where now there's an intentional effort, there's an intentional activity.
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Why is this important for us to grasp? If you understand that every aspect of your life is part of this missional dimension, you will be far more intentional about your activities and efforts.
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You won't separate them, and that's the problem, is we compartmentalize everything.
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I have my life, the vast majority of my week, working, eating, sleeping, paying bills, doing chores, cleaning.
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Then I have my Christian activity, reading my Bible, praying, seeking fellowship, going to church on Sunday, and texting so -and -so, thinking of so -and -so, praying for so -and -so, and then
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I have my really intentional effort. I'm going to go talk to that co -worker. I'm going to make a point to try to say something to that neighbor, and we compartmentalize and separate these things.
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Here's sort of my secular, mundane existence like all other humans, and then here's my
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Christian light activities that I do generically, and then here's my missionary activity. You know,
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I'm really bad, I want to be more missional. Do you see? No. It's all part of this dimension of mission, and then you can be far more intentional.
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I'm intentional about how I'm making this meal, and maybe who's at the table, of how
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I'm thinking of so -and -so, and what I'll do in light of that. This is the logic that begins to turn in a society, an empire, inside out.
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It's all part of what this new humanity has donned in Christ. It's all part of what He's doing in the world.
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We're just participating in it. It doesn't mean there's not all the basic rhythms of life as God made it.
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Work, rest, toil, food, clothing. He knows you need all these things, but He calls you to a kingdom.
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That kingdom has a purpose. Everything you do can be pointed toward that purpose. To the degree you recognize the fullness of the dimension, you will be far more intentional.
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That's where we're going. That's my point. How you speak to your spouse in the living room.
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The dozens of opportunities mothers have throughout every day to sow seeds of the gospel in the way that children are treating each other, or speaking to each other, or handling toys between each other.
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When you recognize this, too, is part of this missional dimension of how God made human beings, and the effects of the fall on us, and where this whole story is going, you're going to be far more intentional to take that time and take that opportunity.
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A church that recognizes there's this missional dimension to every aspect of life will be far more intentional to do what
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Colossians 3 says we ought to be doing toward one another. Of how we think about one another at the first place.
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Of how we think, and therefore how we speak of, and maybe even how we speak to, and how we speak for.
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What did Goheen say? It's not just what we stand against, it's who we're standing for. That defines
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Christian mission, Christian existence. When you understand all of life has this dimension, you will see that there's far more intentional activity to be done.
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God every day gives you so many opportunities to be salt and light. Gives you far more intersections than you could ever realize where your calling and kingdom righteousness gives rise to mission.
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If you recognize mission is the dimension of all of life, it's behind and beyond all of it.
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Is there a missionary dimension to changing diapers or stirring formula? Yes, there can be.
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Is there a missionary dimension between putting in an honest 40 hours? That's as missional in the widest dimension as the intentional activity of sitting down in the break room and trying to sow seeds of the gospel with a co -worker.
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You haven't left mission, you've just been more intentional in the effort or activity. When you grasp this, it will be transformative.
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When a church grasps this, it will be transformative. This is what Leslie Newbigin was seeing. There was something centrifugal and centripetal about that mission in India.
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There was something that the church was doing that was causing things to be spread out, but also something the church was doing that was causing things to be pulled in.
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There was a gathering element and a scattering element, and the church is probably not understanding rightly mission in this dimension and the intention that flows out of that dimension if we don't have this sense of being gathered to be scattered and being scattered to be gathered.
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That is a... I mean, read Acts when you turn the corner on Acts 8 into 9. This is what God does with His church all the time.
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We gather here and in a few hours we'll be scattered from here. And as a result of the scattering, we'll be gathered.
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And the whole logic of missionary dimension is that as we scatter, we scatter as salt and lights.
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As we scatter, we scatter as those who have kingdom values in contrast to the ways of the world.
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That contrast gives mission. We scatter. And what does the scattering salt and light do?
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It so contrasts and changes and provokes things that as a result there's those who actually want to gather.
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They want to gather as we want to gather. And then as they're gathered, they want to scatter as well as they're transformed by the light and the power of the
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Spirit. That's just missionary dimension becoming missionary intention. It's absolutely vital we grasp this.
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Do we recognize that we gather here in order to scatter and we scatter in order to gather? Well, what happens if we don't?
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I was thinking of this analogy some months ago. I think I shared it with someone in the church.
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I was just thinking about it. When I think of spreading or scattering,
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I think of water. Water just flows. Water gets into every crack and crevice.
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Water is the water of life. So many positive scriptural metaphors. Water when you need it, where it's supposed to be is the best thing.
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You can't live without it. Water when it's not where it's supposed to be is the worst thing.
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You can die as a result of it. You love water when it's coming from the faucet and you're thirsty. You don't like water when it's seeping into your boiler room and it's bringing mold everywhere.
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When we think of the scattering or the spreading, the church of course has this well of life and this water is meant to be trudged out and spill over and spread.
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And to the degree that that water is moving and we have living water, this living water that's constantly flowing down.
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The rains of the heavens send this water and it pools, it gathers, and then it spreads and it flows.
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And the more that gathers, the more it's able to spread. And eventually if you have so much, it will even change a certain coherence of the landscape.
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But if you don't have that fresh water running, that living water, and you have water that just stays in a sort of pool, it becomes stagnant, becomes a cesspool, has all this growth and this odor.
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That's a really good way to think about church life. One of the ways you prevent a church from becoming foul and moldy in a sort of cesspool for flesh and egoism and sin and snipes and backbiting and dissension, one of the ways you do that is you actually get that gathering to scatter and spread.
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You understand this is not how it's supposed to be. This is not just human politics in a group. There's a purpose, there's a missional dimension to life.
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This is actually the lampstand of that kind of light. This is the wellspring of that kind of water. This is the fountain for it.
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And we spread and we stay clear and we stay pure as we do so, but we do so in order to collect and pool and gather again.
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That only allows us to even spread further as a result. That kind of flow, that kind of logic, that gathering and scattering comes out of recognizing what the dimension is and the intentions that flow out of that dimension.
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In other words, all I'm saying, all I'm saying is do not compartmentalize what
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God has given you to hold together. Look at all aspects of your life through the lens of God as creator and redeemer and consummator.
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That's what Jesus is asking us to do. Do not separate what
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God has brought together. These postures we must hold together.
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The church has two postures, and I'm going to close with this. The two postures that the church holds together are the inner life of worship and fellowship in gathering.
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The inner life of worship and fellowship. Very important we understand what fellowship is and what fellowship isn't.
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Fellowship is a relationship or a partnership toward a common vision or toward a common goal.
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Inner life of worship and fellowship in gathering so that there's an outer life of witness and presence that scatters, and those things must be the left and the right leg of a church.
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Those things must be held together simultaneously. Listen to what Leslie Newbigin says.
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The danger is that it's always relatively easy for the church to do one of these things and neglect the other. We can either focus on worship and fellowship in gathering or focus on witness and presence in scattering, but it's far too easy to only allow one or the other rather than hold them together.
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We far too often allow these two things which belong together to fall apart, and the consequences are fatal for the witness and identity of the church.
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On the one hand, the church that isolates its worship from the task of caring for its place, caring for its neighbors, or that only focuses on its inner life without an equal concern for its outer life, ends up distorting its witness to the gospel.
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He's simply saying that's what a holy huddle is. The result is an inward focused self -serving maintenance.
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Inward focused self -serving maintenance. On the other hand, when being scattered or when mission is separated from the worship and life from the inner dynamics of a church, it becomes another human program that loses all of its power and character as a witness and presence of the kingdom.
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It's for this reason, for the sake of God's mission in and for the world, that these two things must never fall apart from each other.
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Here's my closing thought. Grasping how we are to seek the kingdom first in this way does not make us a seeker -sensitive church, lowercase s.
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If you're a note taker, you might need to visualize this. Seeker -sensitive, seeker with a lowercase s. This understanding of corporately seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness in light of all of life being a missional dimension and all of the intentional acts and activities and efforts flowing out of that dimension and an inner life and dynamic of worship and witness and fellowship going out to the outer life of scattering and spreading and living as a life of contrast toward those in darkness.
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That does not make us a seeker -sensitive church, lowercase s, but it does make us a seeker -sensitive church, capital
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S. Seeker, capital S. Jesus is the one who said the
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Son of Man did not come to basically triumph, serve
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Himself, lord it over like the Gentiles do. He says the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which is lost.
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Thinking of the kingdom rightly will not make us a seeker -sensitive church in the carnal consumeristic way of meaning.
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Celebrity, pastor, circuit, spectators rather than worshipers, consumers rather than salt and light.
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It won't make us a seeker -sensitive church in that way, but it will make us very sensitive to the mission of the one who seeks and saves that which is lost, the capital
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S Seeker. It'll make us sensitive to what His kingdom is and the values of the kingdom that are meant to be embodied in and through our lives.
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It will make us sensitive to whether we're allowing all the intersections He gives us of where our election and high and holy calling intersect with those values in a dark and fallen world so that there's mission, a whole dimension of life that actually corresponds to this intentional activity of being the very witness in presence, the very signpost of the kingdom of God that must advance and the gates of hell cannot withstand it.
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This is the effect of understanding the mission rightly, individually and corporately.
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So much more I want to say, but I know I have to break away. I don't know that we grasp it.
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I don't know that I grasp it. I don't. When I read
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Paul's letters, I love Christ and when I read Paul's letters, it reminds me of how little
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I love Christ. Because Paul's whole understanding of the church is if you read
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Romans 15, 20 carefully, he says, I'm very careful, very, very careful that when
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I come to a place where Christ is already named, I don't plant a church there. I'm not going to build on someone else's foundation, but I'll go to a place where he's not named and I'll plant something there.
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In other words, he's saying, I recognize that the church, this primary unit of Christian life and existence, the mothership of this whole missional dimension that corresponds to creation and new creation, all of global history, all of that is centered on this little ragtag group of believers saved and blood -bought by God.
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And when I find a place where my savior is not named, that's where I implant something like that so that there will be a witness and a sign and a presence for the kingdom, so that the mission will continue where my savior's name will be lifted above the earth.
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When I read Samuel Rutherford's letters, I don't feel that I love Christ as much as he did when he says, my greatest sorrow is
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I can't take Christ's name off the dusty floors of Scotland and put it up into the skies where it belongs.
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I barely want to go where Christ is named. What is it like to have a heart and a love for Christ that wants to drive forward in a place where he's not named?
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It presses every aspect of how we think about our lives. Don't you want to be a church?
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Don't you want to be a church that understands every aspect of our life is hurtling toward this revelation of the one who will say to us, either depart from me,
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I never knew you, or well done good and faithful servant.
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And sometimes the thing that scares me most is I'm not even as fearful as I used to be about that prospect.
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We were at the elder retreat and we were driving down 495 one night and three super bikes screamed past us.
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They must have been going 90, 100 miles an hour. And I remembered a comment that I had come across some years earlier where it said, you know, if you own a super bike and you lose the fear of driving at that speed, it's time to get rid of the bike.
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You're about to crash and destroy your life. And I thought that night there's something about the prospect of giving an account to my
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Lord and my Savior that I've lost the fear of. I want to be the kind of church that understands every aspect of our corporate and individual lives are moving toward this end.
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Not that we're terrorized with any fear, but that in reverence and humility, as the great hymn of old says, when we see
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Him by and by, when I look at His face, His lovely face, His merciful face, by and by when
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I see His face, I'll wish I would have done more. I don't fear that He doesn't love me.
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I fear that in tragic ways I am less and less worthy of His love.
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What will it mean for us to be a people that understand the fullness of seeking His kingdom and His righteousness first to such a degree and intensity that we recognize there's no aspect of our lives that goes in any other pocket.
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The whole garment is His. Everything we do is for Him. Whether we eat or we drink, we glorify
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Him. What does that mean for us as a corporate body? Let's pray.
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Father, we thank You for Your Word. We thank
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You, Lord, that Your mission hasn't ended with us, Lord. In many ways, it's just begun.
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For, Lord, Your work, Your activity, Your labor of love in our lives is a work that You have begun, and it's a work
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You promise to continue. It's a work You'll see through to the end. That's true in each believer's life here this morning,
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Lord, and that's true of Your church as well. Despite her many wrinkles and blemishes, despite her faltering heart, her waffling mindset,
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You will be faithful to wash her and to keep her and to present her to Yourself in splendor, pure, radiant, white, without spot or blemish, without sin or sorrow.
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What a Savior You are. What a Lord and King. What a gracious Master. What a faithful Shepherd. Lord, show us where we've made compartments out of what is a hole, where we've not been faithful to connect all of our activities to this larger dimension so that our activities can become sharpened and focused and more intentional and more consistent.
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Teach us as a church, Lord, what this means and how to do this. As You've been doing in this sermon, Lord, challenge us and convict us.
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Let us not be like the foolish motorcycle rider who has no fear. Who thinks he's invincible.
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Help us to take Your Word to heart. Help us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, to work out your mission with reverence and humility, to ever be those who seek
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Your face. But even having immersed and poured ourselves out like Paul poured himself out as a drink offering on the altar, that at the end of all of every fiber and molecule of our being, of our bodily existence, being deprived of strength for Your glory, that we would only be able to say we've done simply what
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You asked, simply what You've expected, nothing more. We thank
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You, Lord, that the wages of the laborer that has worked their whole life is the same as the one who comes in at the last hour.
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Such is Your mercy. Have we been a church that is more like the last hour laborer,
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Lord? Convict us and help us. By Your Spirit, constrain us and compel us.