Seek First the Kingdom - Part 3: What We Seek

Seeking First the Kingdom as a Corporate Responsibility

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.

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.

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.

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. 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. 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?

So pen, not even pencil. Sometimes I've had to take notes with kids crayons, but you do what you have to do. 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.

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. 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 Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon on the Mount as a Unified Call to Kingdom Righteousness

Now how is that going to be a bridge to two weeks out when we get to Matthew chapter 7? 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.

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 at the expense of ignoring our planks and actually gouging each other's eyes out.

That's all actually part of how we corporately seek and actually embody the kingdom of God and his righteousness on the earth. 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, 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.

This is all one sermon that the Lord Jesus taught on the mount. 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, verse 33, be holy.

We need our Father's care, we've said, for our King's mission. 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. Righteousness must be held together with seeking the kingdom, and we cannot seek the kingdom of God unless we're seeking 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 his kingdom and his righteousness.

Righteousness, we've said, is the ethical dimension of our faith. Very important that we understand that. There is no faith to speak of if it's not a righteous faith. Everything that Jesus lays down in Matthew chapter 5, beginning with the very Beatitudes, He's laying down kingdom values.

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 Holy Spirit.

This is a righteousness that belongs to the kingdom. This is what we seek first. 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.

It brings a contrast to our lives, and it makes us a people of contrast. That great insight from Michael Goheen. We become a contrast people. He said, as we looked at last week, mission is, first of all, the life of a contrast people.

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. Mission is not a compartmentalized activity of the church that exists on a line item within our budget.

Mission is not something that I send $25 to Ligonier, and I get R .C. Sproul's latest publication. If I'm reducing mission to something in that way, I've missed the entirety of what the 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. That's mission. It's everything that comprises your life. 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 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 Lord.

I want to so badly get to Matthew 7, where we can understand, again, being a Christian is not just what you stand against, but it's who you stand for. Very, very important. Now, as we've established, the life of a contrast people is a buildup of hundreds of seemingly insignificant efforts and decisions week by week, dozens of perhaps subconscious decisions and reactions that take place throughout each day.

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. The thing that's always struck me about funerals, like being at the most recent funeral service 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.

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.

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.

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.

So it's the election and the ethics and the mission that hold together. 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.

And that is a truth that we find throughout not only church history, but even in our lives. 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.

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.

Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. So that's something that we've been seeing from the very beginning of the Sermon on the 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 Father in heaven to be glorified.

That's why he called you calling, ethics, mission. But now we're asking, well, how do we seek first the kingdom and that righteousness? It's what we must seek. We saw this corporate language in 1 Peter.

You is not singular in 1 Peter 2. You are a chosen generation. That's a plural you. You together. 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.

All y 'all are a chosen generation. A royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people. What kind of language is this? Generation, priesthood, nation, people. What is that? That's corporate language.

Peter's recognizing there's some aspect of mission that cannot be reducible to the individual. 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.

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. 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.

Why the Church Must Be Missional

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. But this was a buzzword when I began seminary studies. It was just starting to die out, and I wonder how many of us are familiar with it.

Just by a quick kind of show of hands, how many of you have heard the phrase missional church? Missional church. 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.

We need to become missional again. The church has been sitting on its hands. We've lost our influence in society. We need to renew this idea of the importance of mission and evangelism. 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. 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.

And this is what he says in relation to that phrase. What other kind of church is there? Missional church. You should come to our church. We're a missional church. And Goheen's saying, is there a different kind of church?

What do you mean by missional church? He says, to talk about a missional church sounds to me like saying a female woman. It's a tautology. You're saying the same thing. Church is mission. Mission is church.

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. 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.

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.

All of that is actually held together under the contour of mission. But what is mission? Well, it's not primarily, it's not at the first place, the activity that Christians do. It's not primarily the activity of the church.

Mission is the activity of God. We're going to come back to this at the very end, because it's absolutely definitive. But if you don't begin here, you've missed the train entirely. You'll miss the whole flow of scripture.

What is mission? 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. 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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

So therefore, if we define mission as evangelism, we're reductionistic. Mission is so much broader than evangelism. Is evangelism a part of mission? Yeah. So is homemaking. 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 first fruits of a new humanity, actually overcome the effects of the fall that corrupt 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 with the new. The mission of God is broader than evangelism. We cannot reduce the mission of God to the 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. 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.

That's a horizon that you will not find the edges of. It's as wide as life itself. It's as wide as creation and new creation. It connects through the logic of scripture creation, fall, kingdom, redemption, new creation.

It holds all of that together. It's as wide as Genesis is to Revelation. 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. 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, God's activity.

The whole story is what he has made and who he is, the one that has made all that is. And what happens to what he made, and what he's doing in light of what happened to what he has made, and why he's doing that.

It's all part of the story. Whatever granularity, whatever aspect of your life, in whatever microcosmic detail it may exist, is simply a part of that greater story. 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. 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.

That his glory would saturate this cosmos as waters cover the sea. And as a theologian said, how does water cover the sea? Water is the sea. Exactly right. 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 Lord.

That's the vision. That's the vision. This story is the story of our lives. It's the story of your daily life. This mission is the activity of everything that exists around you. The blades of grass between your toes, the bird song that you hear that reminds you not only does your 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.

Christ at the Center of the Mission of God

For Christians, the end of the story has been revealed. This will be embarrassing to her, maybe, I don't know. My wife has this bad habit of whenever she gets a magazine or she always just begins at the end.

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. A kid's books just starts at the end. Magazine just starts at the end.

Well, here's where that's most appropriate. The end is actually revealed to us. You go to a bookstore and you pull a little cheap novel off at the end. The one thing you shouldn't do is to say, I just get to the point.

I don't have time to read these 400 pages. 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.

The end of it all, the fullness of Revelation 22, it's not so much that we drag Genesis 1 and 2 into Revelation 21 and 22 and go, oh, isn't this nice? A kind of return to paradise. No, we actually understand Revelation 21 and 22 was in the pregnancy of Genesis 1 and 2.

The end was always there in the beginning. And so Christians peak. They have a glimpse of how this story ends. 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.

It's comprehended the entirety of what is and what's at the very center of it all. What holds it all together? And if you know where I'm going, it's not the what, it's the who. 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. The one who, as Revelation itself says, is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega. It's the fullness of the 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 Adam, pristine, obedient even unto death, that the righteousness of God might be secured for God's people through him.

Which means the entirety of mission actually corresponds to who Christ is. 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.

Isn't that amazing? Which means, as Leslie Neubengen, who I've mentioned now for several weeks, as Leslie Neubengen states, we have to understand Jesus Christ, the 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.

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 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 spirit that he sends, and that helps us understand how this biblical story that comprises all of life and history, how that actually holds together.

But on the other hand, we begin to articulate the biblical story and the context of all of life in terms of rightly understanding 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.

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? We believe in God the Father, the Almighty. We believe in God the Son, the Lord, and we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and we believe in the resurrection of the dead.

You see, every aspect of this story, in all of its 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.

That was God's activity. That was God's work. That continues to be his mission in and for the world. So where does that cohere for the church? That's the church's mission. That's a church's activity. That's how all things hold together and consist in the life of the church.

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 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. 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.

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. What is creation and world history moving toward? The redemption and consummation of God himself.

That's the mission of God. Now this church, we could say, is a capital C church. In fact, when Newbigin writes, the church is set by God in the world in this way, it's a capital C church. It's the church of the Nicene Creed, the holy apostolic church, the holy catholic church, lowercase c, capital C church.

It's that church. And so we ask, well, okay, if that's true of the capital 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?

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. The one church, one baptism, one spirit, one word, the one church, holy catholic and apostolic versus a local congregation.

Well, the local congregation is the new humanity in a particular place. The church universal is the new humanity at large. It's global. It's generational. It's cosmic to that extent. 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 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.

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. 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.

The Local Church as the Primary Unit of Christian Existence

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.

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.

So Newbigin says this, the local church is the fundamental unit of the Christian church. It's the fundamental unit. Or you can put it this way, it's the primary unit of the church. Or you can put it this way, it's the basic unit of Christian existence.

Now, where is he getting this idea from? Why is this the first, the primary, the basic unit? Well, he learned this while he was in India as a missionary. There, of course, were all sorts of witness that arose out of that ministry, out of that mission's work.

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. Christianity, by the way, is an engine for literacy throughout world history.

Very important that we understand that. Schools are built, hospitals are built. Hospitals were actually invented by Christians. There wasn't such thing as a hospital. I mean, the idea of hospitality, that's essentially the same denotation.

It's a Christian insight. Schools, hospitals, street preachers, literature, all of these things made an impact in Indian society in Nubian's time, but what he saw the effect of was this. It moved those people to want to come to the place where it was centered.

Schools being cropped up, hospitals being built, people being helped, jobs being offered, widows being cared for. 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?

We actually want to come out and find it. Where's this all flowing from? How is this actually tricking down to us? 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.

It was witness mothership, so to speak. Everything else was satellite. 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.

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. It is the only possible hermeneutic of the gospel.

This is why I say it's good for note takers. That's a fancy word, hermeneutic. Hermeneutic is a method of interpretation. That's what a hermeneutic is. A certain method or approach to interpretation. An instrument of interpretation.

That's a hermeneutic. And what 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.

This is where the gospel is wrought. So just pause and hold that. 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 God want for me?

What kind of calling does God have for me? And it rather becomes, what kind of me does God want for his mission? What kind of me does God desire for his calling? Well, pause there and think through this.

What kind of us? What kind of we? What kind of church? What kind of congregation would God desire us to be for his mission? That's all we're doing. We're going from the me to the we. From the I to the us.

What kind of us does God want for the activity he's already been engaged in even before the foundation of the world? What kind of us does he want for that? Well, we'll not fully delve into that. 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. 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. But here's a way to actually think about the way our local mission, our local witness coheres. And this is a really important distinction that I want everyone to grasp.

I might say it in a few different ways. It's the distinction between dimension and intention. Dimension and intention. I remember years ago speaking to this. This to me is an insight that is so profound.

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 Sermon on the Mount. The difference or the distinction between dimension and intention.

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.

Newbingen believed that both of these things, dimension and intention, are essential. 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.

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 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 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.

Whatever that intention is, unless there is a point of concentration for that kind of intention, the missionary dimension. I'm going to define in a moment. The missionary dimension, which is proper to the whole life of the church, will be lost.

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. 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. 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.

In other words, it thinks that there's only a few narrow times that intentional missionary effort takes place and everything else is actually Christianity proper, Christianity in its fullness. Mission, missional intention are just a few little things in the pockets of Christianity.

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. We're saying no, the whole outfit is mission. It's all mission. The whole thing is gospel.

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. It removes the full context in which witness takes place.

What's the full context? It's the whole dimension of mission. 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 Adam and new humanity.

The things that the spirit is illuminating and convicting and prodding us in so we don't grieve him but we keep in step with him. We don't quench his presence but we keep our conscience clean in repentance and faith.

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 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.

If we're reducing mission to only a few efforts and activities then we're not understanding all of life is missional. 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.

So all of Christian life has a missional dimension. Mission is the big story. Mission is the activity of God. What does Jesus say? My father's always working. Always. Every hair on the head is numbered.

Not one sparrow falls. Every providence perfectly authored to conform the one he calls into the image of his son who learned obedience through suffering and was faithful even to the death of the cross.

My father's always working. The grand orchestrator, the grand conductor and composer so that the endless vicissitudes of life all correspond to his overarching redemptive purpose to glorify himself through his son by his spirit.

All of Christian life has that dimension. 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, its whole existence will be words and deeds that allow that concentrated point, the whole purpose of life, the whole purpose of why I am who I am in this place, in this time, with these relationships and this work, everything is now concentrated toward this mission.

The whole dimension is actually something that allows you to aim intentional efforts. 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.