Re:Member Core Practices II
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Spencer. I am one of the pastors here. We are continuing to go through our Remember series, which is an opportunity for us as a church to revisit our membership commitments and remember the things we're committing to. The first half of it was going through the first seven commitments of our membership commitment, which is the gospel. And these last seven that we're going through week by week are the practices that flow out of the gospel, the things that we commit to do as a church because Jesus Christ rose from the grave. So we're going to be in number nine this week, which reads, I will pursue deep, genuine relationships with others in the Mill City family through committing to regular participation in Sunday gatherings and a community group where I can love and serve others and ensure I am surrounded by people who love Jesus and love me.
So last week we saw the importance of what it means to cultivate a personal relationship with Christ. And this week we get to see what it means to as Christians who've cultivated this relationship with Christ, where God has placed us in the context of community. We are made as image bearers in humanity. Like we're made in the image of a communal God who eternally exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who, when he made humanity, made him, made us in the image of our triune God. And he saw that it was not good that man would be alone. That's who we are. We're made to be in community in the same way that a fish is made for water in the context of what it is placed. Humanity is made to be in community.
So that if you have a child who gets really excited about taking their pet fish to show and tell, and they don't do what every child or what every person who thinks about this has done is putting a fish in the bag, sealing the bag, and then taking it to school. If they just simply put the fish in their pocket and went to school, it's going to be a super tragic moment at show and tell when that fish is pulled out. Because fish are made for water. That's the context for which they are created. And we as Christians are made to be in community. And there are some folks who will say, yes, I think we're supposed to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I get that. But I don't love the church. I've got baggage, I got church hurt, or I decided. I don't really love organized religion. I think I can have a personal relationship with Christ. What I would say is that the scriptures don't bear that to Be true. That's a fish out of water. Like we're made to be in community. When you read the rest of the New Testament, it bears this out over and over again. So yes, we want to have a personal relationship with Christ, but the idea that you can do that disconnected from God's people is a very recent Western idea. It is foreign to the Scriptures. And I want us to see that today as we walk through this commitment to. I want us to see how we're called to live this out and what's at stake as we seek to commit to this.
So let me pray for us and then we'll walk through this together. Heavenly Father, I pray that you might help us see the importance of what it means to have life together. God, I pray that you would speak to our hearts. I pray that you would help us be compelled to believe the Gospel and then live out the implications of it. Community. As a church, we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.
All right. So why should we commit to deep, genuine relationships with one another in a local church? As I already said, part of that's how we're. How we're made. We're made to be in community, made in the image of a communal God. And the church has been doing this since day one. Our scripture reading that we had earlier is Acts 2, 42, 47. So we were in the previous verses leading up to that last week, coming into verse 42 or picking back up in 42 today. But it's it. This is what the church has done that after the church begins, it says in verse 42,
> And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
So that when we look at our commitment, you can really put it side by side with this passage and really the pattern that flows out of this passage that when we say I will pursue deep genuine relationships with others in the Mill city family, we can see in verse 42 they devoted themselves the apostles teaching and the fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayers, they were devoted to one another. They deeply valued fellowship together. That when we say through committing to regular participation in Sunday gatherings and a community group. We see that's what the church was doing. It says, day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes. They received their food with glad and generous hearts that they were as the church gathering together to go worship in the temple. Now later on, they're not invited. They end up having to. They're not invited to the temple anymore. They start to be persecuted. And then this forms into worshiping on the Lord's day, which is guided the church, as the church has come together to worship on Sunday, the day the resurrection happened for the last 2000 years. And also they gather together in homes, which is why we have community groups. We come together on Sunday and then we live in the. In the context of our community groups living out the implications of the gospel. We find it right here.
And what flows out of this passage when we say, where I can love and serve others and ensure I'm surrounded by people who love Jesus and love me, we can see very clearly in verse 44, it says, and all who believe were together and had all things in common, and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need that they so radically loved one another and served one another. They were selling off property, they were putting in money just so others could. Their needs could be met. So we look at this passage as foundational for how we live out the implication of the Gospel as a church and the rest of the Book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament. When you read the letters that make up the rest of the New Testament, continue to teach this over and over again. That's why we have this commitment for our church.
So what I want to do is I want to slow down. I want to walk through each part of our commitment and help us see how the rest of the New Testament helps us understand how we're called to live this out as a church. So let's deal with the first part. I will pursue deep, genuine relationships with others in the mill city family. Okay? That's very specific language for a reason. When you look at the New Testament, there's a lot of metaphors for the the church. So if you look at Ephesians chapter three, you see, the church is called a temple in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
> In him the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
This picture of the church is all different building blocks of the temple that the Spirit has come to live and dwell inside of the church is also called a body. It says in Romans chapter 12.
> so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.
That we're all collectively the body flowing into Christ, who's the head of the body. And all of us are just different members of that body. We get. In Ephesians 5, the church is called the bride.
> Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
The idea of two becoming one flesh together, the bride, the church and Jesus Christ the bridegroom. It's called a holy nation.
> But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession...
1 Peter 2. There are all types of metaphors that we could choose to build off of with this language. We chose the language of family. There are passages like first Timothy, chapter three that says,
> if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.
That's the household family of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and a buttress of the truth. One of the most common words that shows up in the New Testament is the Greek word for brothers and sisters. Adelphoi over and over again referred to brothers and sisters in Christ. You'd be the passages that talk about fathers and mothers in the faith. So we went with the metaphor family that we are devoted. We want to be. Have deep, genuine, loving, Christ exalting relationships with others in the mill city family. And that's what you see in the early church. They were a family. So much so they believed that they were selling off possessions because you take care of your family, you make sure they don't have needs. They, they believe this and they lived like it was true. Because listen, you, you don't sell your stuff and give it away to someone if you don't believe it. Like you're not doing that with any other person. No, they, they, they believed the gospel and they lived as if it was true. Because they understood if Jesus rose from the grave, if the God man took sin upon the cross and judgment on our behalf and he actually walked out of the tomb and he ascended to the right hand of God the Father, that if that's true, then I'm all in that you live a radically different life. If you believe that is true. If you go into the casino and you are guaranteed, as the roulette table goes, that it is going to be on red and you got all your cash, that's a win. Put it on red. I'm all in on that. So they believe if Christ, he's alive. Well, I'm all in on this. So we're going to have all things in common. We're going to be a family together. They believe this and they live like it was true.
So I don't want us to be a church that just throws around the word church family and then doesn't live like it is true. A couple of months ago, I saw a video compilation of a bunch of churches like ours doing their opening announcements. And they just took the same kind of clip over and over again from a bunch of churches. And it was the same thing. It was, hey, church family. Hey, church fam. Hey, church family. Good to see you, church family. And I heard it over and over again, and a part of me died because I hate. I don't ever want to seem cliche. And they just, in a rude clip, they just, absolutely, just belittled the use of that phrase over and over and over again. So part of me looked at that and was like, oh, goodness, should we, I don't know, should we? Do we ever use that? Should we not say that anymore? I said, oh. And then I thought more about it and I was like, no, no, that's only trite and played out and cliche. If we say it over and over again but don't actually believe it, if we use it over and over again but don't live like that is true. But if we say it and don't back it up, then, yeah, it's super cringe. But if we actually believe this and own this, then, yeah, we're going to keep using it over and over again. Because being a church family takes investment. Being a family is investing. It's this Acts 2 devotion devoted to one another, which you see in these relationships that they have as they go deeper with one another throughout the book of acts. So we want to be a church that pursues deep, genuine relationships with others and the Mill City family.
And the next part says, through committing to regular participation in Sunday gatherings and a community group. Okay, let's tackle that one at a time. Tackle groups first. Committing to community groups, y', all, groups are not just an event that you put into your calendar. We say this quite a bit. It's not just a thing, a programmatic thing that you go to. No, your group is the people that you journey through life with. It's the localized expression of family in the church. So you walk side by side with and sure, we do. We have a time that is helpful for all the family. For us in our groups to come together. We have a group meeting time that we come to once a week, and that's good for us to do. To practice the rhythms that the early church practiced. Says they devote themselves to the apostles teaching, to studying God's Word. They devoted themselves to prayer. They devoted themselves to a fellowship meal. We want to do that. And that's what our groups do. They come together once a week and they eat a meal together, which is incredibly valuable. It is good for us to come together and eat a meal together. There's something that God has designed in eating a meal with someone else that brings depth and connection, that builds relationship that is valuable.
If you bring your dishes, you're bringing a bit of your personality. So if you volunteer boldly to take the Mac and cheese for the week and you don't bring this wonderful creamy casserole esque, but not over the top, like just simplistically wonderful, tasteful Mac and cheese, and you, like, throw a bunch of lobster in it and stuff, that just doesn't belong there, then we know some things about you. We've gathered some things that honestly probably should change with sanctification over time in the context of community. So there's a little your personality that comes, but also you just in conversation over a meal. This is universal. Have you ever traveled the world? People sit down together, even more so than Western culture, because sometimes we treat it like it's a substance to be consumed and not an opportunity to enjoy someone else across the table. But it's a universal experience to come to sit down and to talk and tell jokes and to laugh and to hug and to even cry like that. There's something that God has built in that. So we have that, that built into our groups. We're gonna eat a meal, and we're also gonna study the Word together.
We're gonna open up the Bible. And one of the things that I so deeply appreciate is that I can spend all week in a text studying it, getting to know it, putting together a sermon, and I can preach that text and I can show up to group. And then all of a sudden, when we have our time together and we're studying the Word, I'll hear someone say something that I didn't catch after hours and hours and hours and hours of being in it. And I love that that happens to all of us. When you study the Word. We should study the Word, as we said last week, privately. But we also. We're meant to do this corporately so that when you open up the scriptures together you're going to hear how the Spirit worked through this person to grab that insight, and you're going to go, oh, that's a wonderful. That's a wonderful interpretation. I hadn't heard that. I didn't see that. So we study the word together and it sharpens us and it grows us together. And then we pray together. Though our groups, we should pray and grow in praying together.
My wife and I, we led groups for a decade, and a couple years ago, we transitioned out of group leading and I got to be a part of a group. And our last group leaders did this so well that at any given time, they just stop and pray. Not just someone share something difficult and then move on from it. Not even just share something difficult and do what is actually good too, which is to give good news before you give good advice, but actually to just stop and pray. And they stopped and prayed multiple times. And I've so appreciated that as an aspect of life, to just stop and actually pray. Not to just say, I'm gonna pray for that, but to pause and just say, let's pray right now. So we pray together and we practice these practices as a group. But again, it's not just something that we do at a meeting time. It flows out of that, that we're texting each other, that we're getting together, hang out afterwards, that we're living life together. Groups of the people that you belong to. And it's essential, so essential that we, as a church, run our membership through groups like, you cannot become a member of this church unless you belong to a group.
And what happens over time is that as you have your people in your group and it is your people, like this is your people that you rock through the most difficult times, that they come alongside you, and then you get the opportunity to do the same thing with them that as you live with them over time, eventually, God willing, in the next, you know, a couple of years, like, your group's going to multiply. And that's always bittersweet. It's exciting because it creates more opportunity for space for new people, but also it's sad because you're not going to be seeing them every week, but you do that a couple of times as you belong to this church for a few years, and all of a sudden you've built genuine depth with a variety of people in different parts of the church. So that when you come here on Sundays, you see each other, and it's just wonderful. But our groups are essential. And if you have been coming around for a little bit and you are not plugged into a group, please, like we say this every week and we, we want you to stop by our connect table. We want to talk to you about our groups because this is where you get to see the goodness of the gospel lived outside by side in life together.
So we commit to groups that's valuable and important for us to live out the implications of the gospel and also committing to Sundays. Let's talk about that for a moment.
Hebrews chapter 10 says,
> And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
So our church is a collection of community groups, but those aren't individual house churches. That's not how we practice. The other churches that do that, that's fine. We don't. Those aren't individual house churches. There are community groups. So in order for us to Collectively Obey Hebrews 10, we do what the church has done for 2000 years. And all of our community groups come together here for a few hours on Sunday morning where we come and we fellowship and we remember and celebrate like we just did about how good Jesus Christ is. So that's what we do. We come together on Sundays in the tradition of the church for the last 2000 years. And we also live out the teachings of the New Testament on what the church is supposed to do when we come together.
Colossians chapter three says,
> Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
So that's the command, Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly. And then the unpacking of how the Word of Christ dwells in us richly is teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. Which means that when we come together in order for the word of Christ to dwell in us richly, someone stands up here after spending time in the text and prayerfully discerning how this is going to apply to our people. And they teach and we sing songs together like we just did. Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs. And what I appreciate about this is that the understanding here is that yes, that's all primarily to God in worship, but there's a one anothering aspect of that. It says admonishing one another in all wisdom with singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. I appreciate the horizontal nature of worship so that sometimes when I'm singing and if you sit in front of me, sometimes you hear that I'm a loud Singer. And I'm sorry, because there's a reason I'm not doing that. Okay. But sometimes I just, I stop and I just listen. And in a morning like this morning, I just so clearly hear the saints collectively singing joyfully, worshipfully. And that blesses my soul. It's wonderful to hear one another sing to the Lord.
But this is what we come to do on Sundays as we continue, as we also have prayers and we fellowship, we spend time together. And so one of the things I love doing is getting here and seeing other people. I love my group, but also seeing people that aren't in my group and seeing people that I love and having times to hug and to laugh and to cut jokes and to also maybe get away and to talk and to cry and to do the things that Christians are called to do. But here's the deal. You can't accomplish any of that if you aren't here on Sundays. You can. There's a reason why I don't look at the camera back there and say, hey, online campus, that's never going to be a thing, ever. We were at times debated, like, should we just, like, not even film this? Like, just. And it's like, no, like, we think this is valuable for those who can't be here. Literally can't be here. You can watch this when you're on vacation. That's. Yeah, it's fine. But we prioritize here, being here together as the church, because it's not just the songs, it's not just the teaching. It's being here and being here early enough to fellowship, which you should do is get here early enough to see one another, not do the express version of just running through this, but actually embracing one another, serving one another. This is valuable. And we want to continue to live this out together as the church.
So in groups and on Sundays, that's how we assemble as our church. So I want to focus on this last part that says where I can love and serve others and ensure I am surrounded by people who love Jesus and love me. Okay? So the church gets to do this, Love and serve one another. Now those are a few of the one another commands that we see throughout the New Testament. And there are a lot of them. And because we have to be concise with our commitment, otherwise you just say all the things some of the people that we had, even in this process, people make really helpful, like, what about this and what about that? It's like, yeah, no, that's great. We're trying to make this as concise as Possible, but yes, absolutely. So I could throw in a bunch of one another commands in here. We chose Love and service as kind of the header for all of that. But when you read the rest of the New Testament, you see all of these one another commands. I just want to go through a few of them. Let's start with what we got on the page, which is love one another. Should love one another, which means knowing how people are loved and truly loving them.
There are folks in this church who know that I love baked goods. They know I love sweets because they know I love a sweet tooth. And they love me because they bring things that are baked and wonderful. And that's some version of that with so many other people. This happens over and over and over again. What I love is that as a pastor, I get to see all of that. Not all of it, but a lot of it, at a bigger view. And I get to see all these examples of how people love each other in profound ways. And part of it is like, I want other people to know this. I want to be able to tell them. But then there's a little bit of like, yeah, I know, but we're called to do all of this. Not the left know what the right hand is doing. And we need to do things in a way that's for the glory of God, not for ourselves. I get all that, which is why we don't publish all of that. But boy, oh, boy, to sit in my seat and to see all the ways that people love one another is amazing.
Love one another. And that command goes from the Gospel of John all the way to the end. First John's loaded with it, and they keep going. Serve one another. Galatians 5, 13.
> For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.
Serving one another. This is you using your gift and your abilities for the service of others. And again, I get to see this all the time. I get to see mechanics who turn a wrench 40 hours a week and would rather not do that once they clock out. Go and fix cars for other people in our church. I see people who build houses and work a trade, go and serve others with their time and their talents. I see people that are gifted in math, sit down with someone who's a kid that's not good at math, which I so would have appreciated growing up, and teach them homework. And that's what we're called to do, is to use how God has gifted you in service and to serve one another. That's not just in the regular Things that happen on Sunday, though, you should do that as well. Specifically Kid City. But also, that happens. And the one another service opportunities that happen regularly, week in, week out, serving one another.
It says, live in harmony with one another. Romans 12:16, which is living at peace with one another, which means surrendering sometimes your preferences, because it's not all about you surrendering your preferences for the sake of others to live at peace with one another. Y'. All, I have opinions. If you know me, you know that I have preferences, which, again, if you know me, unfortunately, you probably know that. But I don't get all of my preferences, and I appreciate them. I do. I don't get my preferences on Sunday morning. I get a say in what gets sung. And I don't even get my preferences with all the songs. Every now and then I'm like, you know what? Not my favorite. This is not. But then I hear y' all sing it, and I'm like, boy, oh, boy, praise God. It's not all about me. We shouldn't get our preferences. We should live in harmony with one another. We should live at peace with one another in a way that's consistently yielding in preference for and to one another.
We should bear with one another. Ephesians 4:2.
> with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.
That means being patient with one another even when that person is difficult, which is so valuable. And that's one of the things I appreciate about our church and our groups, is that if you've been in groups long enough, you know, this is that there are some people in your group that if you didn't have Jesus Christ in common, you would never hang out with them, ever. It just. It's just true. You can be in group. I can be in group with someone who's like, I don't really love football. I don't love sports. I don't love music. You know, I'm just like, what? What? What's wrong with you? I mean, I can just go down the list of, like, what are we even going to talk about? And then I have more depth with them than I do with someone who loves football and loves sports and loves hunting and loves all the things that I love, because the most important thing about me is the most important thing about them, and that's Christ. And when you build that kind of depth on him, you realize, oh, like this. This is what's most important. You can be in group with someone who is just difficult. Like, your personality and their personality. It's just. No, it's just like, I don't. You are so different than me. And what I appreciate is that in groups you get to die to your own sin, die to your own selfish desires, and bear with them in patience and love them, even though they are so much different than you.
Bear with one another. Be kind to one another. Ephesians 4:32.
> Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
To grow in kindness towards one another. Which means that when somebody on the group chat says, hey, will somebody watch my dog while I'm on vacation next week? And you know, their dog is the worst, is the kind of dog that absolutely will cause financial damage to your home and emotional damage to you and your family. You say, yeah, I'll do it absolutely. Because my life is more than my things and my comforts. And I want to be kind to you. Be kind to one another. Forgiving one another. Ephesians 4. 32. To practice forgiveness. Because we say this quite a bit, if you are in groups, if you're a part of our church, at some point sometime you're gonna get your feelings hurt. I have to say that to people I'm in group with that as your pastor, I'm also now side by side in group with you. And at some point I'm going to sin against you. Please do not be shocked. I am a sinner and you're a sinner. It's going to happen because that's what we do outside of the work of Christ in us and the Holy Spirit changing us, we. We are wretched. That's just the truth. So knowing that when it happens, and it will happen, we get to practice what Jesus commands us to do in forgiving one another. So important and so vital that in Matthew 18, that the parable that's given is, if you don't do this, you don't really know. You don't know God, you don't know his forgiveness. So that's what I love in seeing in our church, is people. I can see it. All of a sudden this person and this person have had friction, and then all of a sudden God moves in their heart and they go to a different part of the building and they just talk and they pray and they cry and they hug and they practice what it means to be a Christian and forgiving one another.
Do a few more. Encourage one another. First, Thessalonians 4, 18, which, as I saw this week, and thinking about that, how that's directly used there in the verses that lead up to it, in verse 18, is talking about the work of Christ and the return of Christ, which is the gospel, out of the gospel, encourage one another, which that's good news before good advice. You guys, we're doing it. Encourage one another to look at people who are struggling to remind them of who Christ is and how he works, what he has done, and who they are in him. And going out of your way to bring encouragement to those who need it.
Bear one another's burdens. Galatians 6:2.
> Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
This is something that shows up in our care night content for groups that we should, as Christians, bear one another's burdens. That means y'. All. That means when someone is sharing something that is difficult to listen intently, do not, do not feel like you're being robbed because you don't have the opportunity to speak. Do not feel like you're just biding the time until they get done. Don't be thinking about other things. Don't be trying to move past them, to really sit in front of them and say, yeah, absolutely, I'm so sorry you're struggling with this sin. I'm so thankful that Jesus Christ died for that and he's empowered you to put that to death and I want to help you put that to death. To hear someone who's burying their sufferings and their trials and to just sit with them and to weep with them and to love them.
Bear one another's burdens. The church is called to do. And I'll do one more. Outdo one another in honor. Romans 12:10,
> Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.
which for me, the way I think about this is almost competitive honor. And I see this, I see this in people in our church where they're showing deference here and deference here. And it's. Sometimes a part of me is like, oh, that's nauseating. Just someone just, just take someone, get in line and get the food. And I just like, no, but this is it. We're just showing honor and showing deference and caring about others more than ourselves. But this is what we're called to do as the church, to love and serve one another, growing in these practices together.
And it's good for us to be knit like that together with this. When I was in high school, I got to do a trip with my stepdad, went out to California for a two week road trip. We started in Sacramento, we drove to San Francisco, we went down the one to la, but we stopped in a town called Big Sur south of San Francisco and we spent a night there. And there is the edge of the redwood forest. So if you've ever seen redwood trees, they're massive. We don't have these on the east coast, but I mean, any tree like this on the east coast, okay, these things are massive. They're like 300ft tall. They're huge. You look at them just like, whoa. And there's so many of them. And it may surprise you to know that redwood trees actually have a pretty shallow root structure. Like, that's a pretty shallow Beneath the surface root structure. It's not a deep tap root. It's a gigantic, massive tree that just has its roots just below the surface, spread out across the ground. You may wonder, how in the world is something that big, that tall, that massive, how in the world does it stay and stand when wind and rains and floods hit? And the reason is, is that they. They're. They're part of a redwood grove, and beneath the surface is a bunch of redwood roots interconnected, locked together in a system of support that they're tied together in a way that helps them as the. As. As they're growing taller and the seasons are getting harsher, that they're able to bear through storms together because. But no, beneath the surface, they're so deeply locked and interconnected and strengthening one another.
And I cannot think of a more beautiful metaphor of what we're called to be as the church, as we serve one another, as we love one another, as we live out the implications of the gospel, to be so deeply knitted together and interlocked together in a way that when life is difficult and when suffering knocks us down and when sin is crouching at the door, that we're so deeply locked together as the church that when it hits, we stand. That when it hits, we might be moved for a moment, but we are built upon the rock that is Christ together in a way that we can get through anything. That's what the church is called to be as we live this out together. And that's why we have this ninth commitment written in the way that we do, that we are about one another, which means we need to be present. Like, it's bad when you're not here. It's bad when you're gone. It's bad when you. It's not just that. At group, if you volunteered to bring the meat for the meal, and then all of a sudden you just like, 10 minutes out say, God, I can't make it today. Busy. It's not just now we have to eat cheese tacos, which is the word, is that. No, like you, the Spirit works in you in a beautiful way that when you're not present, that's missing. It's not just that your seat is empty on Sunday. It's that the spirit works in you in a unique way, that when you're missing, it's lacking. We're called to be this together, and that takes devotion and commitment.
So let me read number nine. Altogether, I will pursue deep, genuine relationships with others in the Mill City family through committing to regular participation in Sunday gatherings and a community group where I can love and serve others and ensure I am surrounded by people who love Jesus and love me.
So as we as a church are considering in this recommitment process, as we're looking through all of this again, I want you to ask yourself, I want us to ask, am I committed to pursuing deep, genuine relationships? Am I committed to this? Am I hiding things from my life? Am I hiding the real me? Am I actually committed to pursuing deep, genuine relationships even when it is hard and sometimes it's hard? Am I committed to being here on Sundays? Am I committed to being here and worshiping y'? All? We have older saints that literally break bones and are just hobbling in here on Sunday because they see the value in this. They see how important it is. And at times when it's raining outside and it's cold, I just know I'm like, we're gonna have less numbers today. And it sometimes bears to be true. And I'm like, no, it's the rain. Am I committed to being here even though it's difficult? And we have the caveat, y', all, for those that are homebound and cannot be here, they literally cannot be here. We have the caveat for those who work jobs, they just literally cannot get out of the trying or they have an essential job. We have the caveat for those that are. That are ministering elsewhere on a Sunday morning, but that is a small, small minority. The rest of us should be committed. Let's commit at times for some of us, course correct. And being here on Sundays, am I committed to being to the people in my group? Am I committed to my people? Do I see the value in driving across town for our group meeting time, to actually showing up to the hangout times that we schedule at different times? Am I committed to actually reading the messages that come through on my phone and praying for that person? Am I committed to being a part of my group?
And I'll tell you, one of the things I tell folks that are going through difficult periods of time, they're struggling with Suffering or sin or brokenness, anxiety, depression, lust, et cetera, is that at some point you've got to, as you are fighting sin, pick your head up and not just look at yourself, but look at the people that are around you. Because part of our spiritual health is developed through one another in and that happens mostly through groups. Am I committed to groups? Am I committed to loving and serving one another? Am I committed to the practices that God has called me to practice? About a year ago at a family meeting, Chet printed out all the one another commands. And then our group leaders at the time, I think they made a magnet of all of that and gave it to us and putting it on the fridge and seeing these over and over again was just so helpful and so encouraging to see this is what Jesus calls us to be. And I get to, by the power of the Holy Spirit, live these out even when it is difficult.
So all of this, all of this is difficult and it cuts against the grain of culture, a culture that's so drunk on itself and the betterment of self. This is difficult. But if the gospel is true and if Jesus is alive and he is, it's worth it. It's worth the effort. It's worth from the hope of the gospel leveraging our lives for the sake of him and one another.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that you might help us live out the implications of the good news that you came to save sinners and call them into a church that belongs to you to declare the excellencies of you who called us out of darkness into marvelous light and God. I pray that that you would help us see the value of that. I pray that there are folks here that do not belong to a church. I pray they would see the importance of trusting in you as their Savior and belonging to a church. I pray that there's anyone here that is hurting and suffering from bad experiences in the past. They would not grow in cynicism or fear, but they would take a leap of faith and belong. And that in all of us. You would grow in us a radical belief in the hope of the resurrection that empowers us to. To be not about ourselves, but about one another. In Jesus name, Amen.
We're going to come and we're going to close and sing and one final song. As I said earlier, may we be a people that as we worship, we worship joyfully. That may our souls be ministered to as we sing and as we listen and as we worship.
Re:Member Core Practices I
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning, My name is Spencer, I'm one of the pastors here. We're going to be mostly in Acts chapter two today. So you have a Bible. You can turn there now we're going to be in verses 36 through 42. We are in our series called Remember. This is an opportunity for our church to remember and rediscover our membership, commitment and the 14 statements that we commit to as a church. The first seven of those that we've walked through in the last month are the essential elements of the gospel. It's what we believe. Over the last month, as we walked through the seven commandments, we saw that because the triune God of the Bible saw humanity in sin and on a path to hell. God the Father sent Jesus Christ the Son to die on the cross and to rise from the grave to give us faith through grace, sealing us with the Holy Spirit to advance the kingdom until Christ comes to make all things new. So that's the summary of the seven statements and that's the summary of the gospel. That's our hope. And every commitment that we're going to walk through, we're going to take these week by week now, one by one. Every commitment that we're about to walk through, the things that we commit to doing as the church flow out of that hope, meaning that the gospel remains central to the works that God is called to walk in. And that's what we're gonna see over the next seven weeks as we walk through these.
So my son got a birthday gift. I want to grab it and show it to you. He got a birthday gift a couple about two months ago. It's a circuit board. You ever seen these? So he's 8 and he got a circuit board at 8. I was not getting stuff like this because I do not have the mind of my son. He has a mathematical mind in ways that I do not. So he's been taking this. It's got a power source here. And then basically it teaches electricity. So you do a bunch of different designs, a bunch of different circuits. It powers a bunch of different things. And he's been playing with this. And the other day he came downstairs and he was messing with it. He said, hey, it's not working. You can tell he'd spent a lot of time messing with the different circuits and the different designs, getting to do different things and just it's not working. And then he finally, he figured it out. He said, I think the batteries are dead. I was like, oh, but he's eight and he doesn't have the dexterity to pull these out. So I, being the hero father that I was, pried out the old batteries and put the new ones in and then, boom, flipped it on and it was working again. But it's neat. He's been playing with this, and it's been engaging his mind in a lot of different ways. But one of the things that I thought of as I was thinking through the remainder of this sermon series is that if you put all the coolest, neatest designs on this board, it's a fan that attaches to it. It has something that spins off the top. There's all types of neat designs. If you put all the different designs on here, but the batteries aren't working, this is pointless. This is powerless. And the reality is that as we walk through the rest of these commitments, we can have all the neatest and nicest language to talk about the church that we think we're called to be. But if the Gospel isn't central to what we're doing and what we're seeking to live out, it is as dead as a circuit board that doesn't work. It is pointless. It is powerless that all the things that we seek to be as a gospel center and community on mission, if they're not empowered by the Gospel, it is all meaningless and pointless. So what I want us to consider as we walk through each of these commitments is that though these are things that God has called us to be, the Gospel has to still be central. And God empowers us by the power of the Holy Spirit and belief in the Gospel to live out the implications of what it means to be a Christian belonging to a church.
So I'm going to read this 8th commitment with that in mind. And then each week as we read these, the hope is we will continue to remember this as we walk through it. Let me read this eighth commitment. Having placed faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord and been baptized as a believer, I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him, allowing the Gospel to saturate every aspect of my life. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that you would help us as we seek to understand what it means to live out the calling that you've called us as Christians and this church. God, I pray that you would help us as we seek to understand this from the understanding that all this is empowered by you and faith in you. So God help us understand this as we walk through your scriptures in Jesus name. Amen.
All right, so we're going to weave in and out of Acts 2 as we look at this commitment. I'm going to start off in verse 36, but before I do, let me give some context for we're jumping straight into the second chapter of Acts before this. The book of Acts is the early Acts of the Church. Jesus completes his work after the resurrection. He ascends to the right hand of God the Father. And then the Holy Spirit descends, the third member of the Trinity upon the church. And the church begins in Acts 2. And one of the first things that happens is that Peter preaches the Gospel. There's a crowd of thousands of people that he preaches to. I'm preaching from the book of Joel, connecting it to the work of Christ. And this is how he ends his sermon.
> Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. (Acts 2:36, ESV)
Peter highlights the reality that though we and those people, some of them there, were not at the cross, they were not the ones shouting for Jesus to be crucified. We, because of our sin, are the ones who put Jesus on the cross. Someone had to pay the penalty for sin. Jesus Christ stands in the way for us. That's what he's highlighting here. And then he says in verse 37,
> Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, "Brothers, what shall we do?" (Acts 2:37, ESV)
So that's the work of the gospel. That message cut their heart. That's the work of belief. They heard the Gospel. They heard about Christ whom they had crucified, and it cut them to the heart. And they're responding in faith. This is what happens when you hear the gospel message, when the Holy Spirit works in our heart to remove the heart of stone and create a heart of flesh to bring us to new life in Christ to be born again. This is the work of what's happening here. Everything we walked through the last month as we looked at the seven commitments, the gospel at work in us changes us. And that's what happens to this crowd of people. And then they respond. Verse 38.
> And Peter said to them, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself." (Acts 2:38–39, ESV)
> And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, "Save yourselves from this crooked generation." (Acts 2:40, ESV)
> So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. (Acts 2:41, ESV)
So what we see here is they hear the Gospel, God works in their heart, they believe. And then he says, repent and be baptized. And that right there is the clear pattern that is established in the New Testament. Believe the Gospel, repent and be baptized. So our commitment says, having placed faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord, and been baptized as a believer, we want to believe the Gospel and in response to that belief, enter into baptism. This is what we believe as believers.
Baptism. Baptism for us is a holy sign. Holy meaning set apart. Set apart in a unique way. It's a sign. It means it points to something else, a symbol that points to something else. The baptism is a holy sign that points to the inward change of belief when someone places their faith fully in Christ and they are changed by Him. It is the symbol that says that we are brought from death to life, from old to. Some of the language we use when we do baptisms regularly is it's an outward sign of an inward reality. The baptism doesn't save us. The act doesn't save us, but it declares we already are saved because of what Christ has done in our hearts, that we have trusted in him for our forgiveness of sins and he's covered us. And baptism gets to point to that. And the people hear this. And 3,000 plus people respond to faith in Jesus Christ and are baptized. And what happens here is really the installation. This is the installation of baptism as the ordained practice of just demonstrating that you believe in Jesus Christ. Sometimes we'll call it an ordinance. This is something God has commanded us to do as a holy sign that points to the Gospel and other traditions. It's also called a sacrament. And I'm actually fine with that language as long as we don't take it to the Roman Catholic understanding of sacrament that this is a holy symbol and sign that points to the inward change that has happened in our hearts. And that's the order of what happens in the rest of the Book of Acts. You believe the Gospel and then you respond in.
This goes back to the Great Commission. When Jesus commissions his disciples, he says,
> Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:19–20, ESV)
So Peter does this. He preaches the gospel, he makes disciples, and then they enter into the waters and are baptized. And that is the process for the rest of the Book of Acts. Let me hit just a few passages in the rest of the Book of Acts. As you see the Acts of the early church In Acts chapter 8 it says,
> But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women. (Acts 8:12, ESV)
Philip is evangelizing to the Ethiopian eunuch. It says,
> Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they went along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, "See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?" And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him. (Acts 8:35–38, ESV)
He hears the gospel, he believes, and he enters into the waters and he's baptized. The apostle Paul, formerly known as Saul, when he trusts in Christ, after Christ blinds him on the road to Damascus. It says in Acts 9,
> And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized. (Acts 9:18, ESV)
Scales fell from Saul's eyes, which is his physical regaining sight. But also it points to the inward reality, what's happened in him, that he has eyes to see and believe. And it says he got up and was baptized. Belief, then baptism. This is what Paul inspired by the Holy Spirit in Romans chapter six is getting at when he says in verses three and four,
> Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:3–4, ESV)
That as we come to faith in Christ and we enter into the waters, it's this picture of we were once dead in sin. That's all we baptized literally just means. The Greek word baptizo just means washing immerse in water. And the picture is that you are dead in sin, you come alive in Christ, picturing what has happened in our lives when we trust in him. So that's what we do. We practice. We reference this Romans 6 passage. Even when we are doing baptisms. And it's fun and it's awesome, we love baptism. That's why it's a celebration when we do baptism. If you haven't been here for baptism Sunday, it's serious. We take it seriously. We don't make light of it, but it is not somber, it's celebratory. It isn't toned down. We celebrate what God has done and we clap and we sing and we celebrate. We listen to testimonies. We're moved to tears because baptism is a wonderful, beautiful declaration of how Jesus saves sinners. So that's how we practice baptism in our church. And if you've been a part of our, if you're a member of this church, we've talked about this as making this addition to our membership commitment to clarify our beliefs on this, that we believe in believer's baptism. Now that is different than infant baptism. And if you have questions about that, because we believe in believers baptism, that you place your faith in Christ and then are baptized. But if you have a background like I did, I was sprinkled as a child, you might have questions about what does that mean? How do Presbyterians and Lutherans and, and Episcopalians and other people understand this? We did a whole YouTube podcast called Overtime. It's on our YouTube page for stuff that we don't have time for in the sermon. We'll spend some time in our recording studio downstairs. So Chet and I this week spent some time talking about this and went deep into the subject of baptism. So if you want to know more about that and how that differs from infant baptism and our beliefs on this and really some of the history of how this came about, I would encourage you to listen to that. It will be posted today alongside the sermon.
But this is what we believe that having placed faith in Jesus Christ, we are baptized, declaring the work that Christ has done in us. And the next part of this commitment is I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him, allowing the gospel to saturate every aspect of my life. Let me focus on this one part. I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him because Christ has saved us. We get to be in a personal relationship with him. We get to actually know our God, our God. Hear this. He is not a distant deity that from afar demands, works to appease him. Our God is imminent. He's near, he's with us. And he wants us to know him in relationship. And it's good to know someone in relationship and to have the intimacy that's bound up in that, to actually have depth in relationship with someone. Like if you've ever been, have you ever had a really good friendship with someone where all of a sudden you and your friend are in a situation and you both hear a Phrase, just a phrase. And both of you look at each other because that points back to like an inside joke from years ago. And then all of a sudden, like it's a serious situation, so you're trying to keep it together, but you're like both looking at each other. And then you can't look at each other because if you look at each other too long, you're both going to crack up laughing. Listen, those type of friendships are wonderful, but they come through depth. They come through time and investment. Like the type of depth that you see in a relationship between a child and their mother. Some children, they just know their parents so well, they know their mother so well that they know the right phrase they can use just to make them smile. That's depth and that's wonderful. You see it in marriages sometimes that there's. In marriage, sometimes you can have a whole conversation with your spouse without saying a word. I mean, I've been there where all of a sudden the kids are acting crazy and she sees my face and I'm getting stirred up, like I'm about to take one of these out back. I'm about to handle this right now. And then she looks at me and she's like, no, don't. And I'm like, mm, this is about to happen. And then it turns to like a pleading look, like, please don't. We're at my parents house, like they're tired. Like, just, we're about to leave. Can you just like wait until we get out of the house? Like you can have a whole conversation with just looks, but you don't get there without the depth that you've created within that relationship. And it takes time and that takes investment. That takes knowing the other person. If you decided to date someone tomorrow, and then as a part of, you know, the first couple weeks of dating, you just said, hey, look, I've only got about 15, 20 minutes a week for you. We can do that all in one day, like on a Friday, or I can space that out throughout the week. You know, five minutes here, five minutes here, five minutes here. But you kind of choose your own adventure in this. You will be single indefinitely. Because that's not how relationships work. But the reality is that we often will treat our relationship with God like that, where it's just, let me carve out some time. I give you five minutes here, five minutes there. And that's not how we create the depth that God wants from us. God desires us to be in relationship with him. And the more we get to know him, the More wonderful, we see how the goodness of his glory and his attributes and all types of things. Jesus Christ in his ministry in the Gospels makes this appeal over and over again. I'll just give you a few examples.
> Abide in me, and I in you. (John 15:4, ESV)
He looks at his followers and says, abide in me. Live in me and I will abide in you. I will live. I'll remain in you like a branch that flows out of the vine. He says, let's have this together. Then in the Gospel of Matthew, he looks at people who are struggling. He says,
> Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28, ESV)
Then In John chapter 10, he says,
> I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me. (John 10:14, ESV)
and that's a wonderful picture as a shepherd knows his sheep, and the sheep know the voice of their shepherd. We've been in stressful situations with your child and all of a sudden they're in a crowd and they can't find you and you can't find them. But you hear their cry and then your child hears your voice. It's distinct because you know each other. And that's what Christ is saying, like, I know my sheep, my sheep know me. And that's a wonderful invitation that Christ gives over and over again. Our God wants to know for us to know Him. Our God desires us to have an intimate knowledge of Him. But the reality is that we will fill our days with lesser things. When the invitation is there for us to know God, we will pour ourselves into things that do not matter. And the reality is that God wants to be the central moving force in our lives. He wants to be the power source for all the different circuits that flow out of Him. He wants us to know Him. And that's a wonderful invitation. And that's precisely why when the people who hear the sermon at Pentecost from Peter and they place their faith in him and they're baptized, the very next act that we see that they do picks up in verse 42. Here's the response.
> And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2:42, ESV)
They sought to know their God. The word is devotion. Devotion. They devoted themselves. They wanted to know God. And there are a few different ways to get listed here. The apostles teaching. This would have been the teachings of Christ that eventually come to be the Gospels. So this is the scriptures that's being pictured here. The breaking of bread and fellowship. This is the fellowship meals they had together would have included the Lord's Supper and prayer. The humbling of ourselves to be dependent upon the Lord through constant communication for him, to him and with him, for every need in our lives. So next week we'll look more at the one anothering that kind of shows up in this breaking of bread and the community that's bound up in that. And that's a wonderful way to know God together. But I want to focus on two of devotion to the apostles teaching, that's devotion to the Word of God and devotion to prayer. Constant communication with God. I want to spend the most of our time left on those two things.
Listen, there are other ways to know God. There are other disciplines. The means of knowing God, worship and singing, fasting, evangelism, silence and solitude, serving the other means of knowing God. But the Word of God and prayer become foundational in the pursuit of actually knowing who our God is. So in fostering a personal relationship, let's focus on that first one, knowing him and His Word. J.I. packer, a theologian, he once wrote a book called Knowing God, which is an excellent book. And in this book he starts off by saying this. He says, for knowing God is a relationship calculated to thrill a person's heart. That the design of relationship with God is to thrill us to provide maximum enjoyment. He goes on to say, what happens is that the almighty Creator, the Lord of hosts, the great God before whom the nations are as a drop in the bucket, comes to you and begins to talk to you through the words and truths of Holy Scripture. Perhaps you've been acquainted with the Bible and Christian truth for many years and it has meant little to you. But one day you wake up to the fact that God is actually speaking to you you through the biblical message that many of us may be familiar with the Bible may have touch points with it here and there, but what he's pushing on is that God has designed the relationship with him to thrill our soul. And when you begin to understand that fully and how God has revealed Himself in His Word, that these don't just become verses or lessons or life stories or morals or anything. They just become. They're not just disconnected lessons to help us learn facts, but they're actually an opportunity, an opportunity and a medium to know him, to know the God who made all things out of nothing. It is an opportunity to know our God, which when we think about that, I want us to reflectively consider how we spend our days, how we spend each day in light of the opportunity to know God through His Word that many of us will wake up and in the early morning moments, we have the opportunity to look to the Lord, to spend time with him, to meet him in His Word, but how quickly we've trained ourselves to jump to our phones and jump to Instagram or sports scores or anything else. But we have this opportunity to meet with him in His Word. And that's one thing we teach in our church, is that you should set aside time daily to meet with God, to read His Scriptures, to think deeply upon the Scriptures in the morning. And there are some people that's literally just not possible. They cannot wake up early enough, they cannot carve out the time, and they make time in the day later on. But the overwhelming majority of us can make the time in the morning to meet with him, to know him in His Word. And then what we like to push on as well, is not just to take a few minutes in the morning and then we've segmented that off and we've moved on to the rest of our day. But what we teach is also meditation upon His Word. Christian meditation is thinking deeply upon God as He's revealed in His Word. And the invitation is not just to have 10 minutes in the morning, but to think deeply upon God throughout the day, to enjoy him as the day goes on. As Psalm 34 says,
> Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! (Psalm 34:8, ESV)
The Word of God is not meant to be. Hear this. It's not meant to be a granola bar that you quickly unwrap and that you devour and that you discard and you move on from. The Word of God is meant to be like one of those giant jawbreakers, remember those from childhood, like the size of a baseball. The Word of God is meant to be like one of those. Got one of those as a kid, and it was a good time for weeks. You could just sit and savor every layer of it slowly and slowly and slowly. And that's what the Word of God is supposed to be to us, something that we slowly savor throughout the day, all our days. Psalm 1 gives a picture of this. The very first Psalm begins,
> But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. (Psalm 1:2, ESV)
that we should consider the invitation that we have to delight in the law. The law is just another way of saying the word of God, to delight in His Word day and night, throughout the day, from morning to evening, to delight in God through thinking deeply about His Word. And we cannot do that if we apportion 15 minutes of segmented off, just different set aside. But it doesn't actually build depth in a way that builds throughout our days.
Now this means regularly coming to the Lord. What I fear is, and I felt this, I felt this, that the easy distractions of entertaining ourselves to death on things that do not matter, the empty, vapid, worthless pursuits of spending hours of our week on things that do not matter on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Netflix and podcasts and sports and all types of things, when we have the living God who wants us to know him, that we should take an accounting of this, we should consider what has become our primary hope, where our primary energy is gone. And then we should look at our God and how wonderful he is and then repent and to change and to turn back to him and recommit. Yes, I want to end this season, recommit to personal relationship with Christ. And as we take the Lord's Supper in a moment, you'll have the opportunity to be thankful that we have a Savior who continually calls us into that.
And we should be a people of word and a people of prayer as we seek to foster a personal relationship with him. Because God is wonderful and he's worthy of our time and our attention, and we just. We have to see these as means to knowing the God, the infinitely wonderful, amazing God. Like, if you could get 30 minutes with your favorite person in history, your favorite celebrity, how excited would you be? How thrilled would you be? Like, as a kid, if you told me I could have 30 minutes with Peyton Manning, I'd have been stoked, because I loved Peyton Manning. He was my hero. I watch him playing football games. I'm like, he's the best. And then he'd be in commercials. I'm like, he's the funniest. And then he'd be in the game again. He's the best. If I could just have 30 minutes to just hear about his greatness. What I've been thrilled and the reality is, is that we have that regular opportunity that is given to us to meet with God, who is infinitely better than Peyton Manning, who's infinitely better than any being we could meet with. May we be thrilled to meet with our God like this. This is what our God calls us into. I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him. Him allowing the gospel to saturate every aspect of my life.
That's what I want to end with, allowing the gospel to saturate every aspect of my life. One of the ways that we talk about this regularly is the language of gospel fluency. If you've been a part of our church for any given period of time, you've probably heard it. It's like the greatest hits of Mill City. We use gospel fluency a lot because it's wonderful. And the idea is like, my two youngest children are in a Spanish immersion program, which means that all their math and science is taught exclusively in Spanish. When I say exclusively in Spanish, I mean that's it. I go to parent teacher conferences and they don't speak English. And I'm like, uh huh, yeah, sure, sounds great. I've seen my son approach his teacher outside at the doctor's office and she did not break character. She knows English, she just spoke Spanish. Because they're trying to help them be fluent in Spanish. And the goal is by middle school they'll begin to start to think in Spanish, start to process in Spanish. In fact, I've heard that it's hard for them once they get to middle school to learn math from an English speaking teacher because they've just so thought of numbers in Spanish. And the idea of fluency is that you think in a language, you process in a language, you understand reality in that language, you can even dream in that language. And the picture of gospel fluency is that we be so fluent in the gospel, we so know it deeply in our soul. The way that we process our very days, the way we understand every given situation in life, is through the lens of the gospel. And the reason why it's important to be saturated every aspect of us by the good news of a Savior who came and rescued us. The reason why that's so unbelievably important is because it becomes so vital and necessary for every aspect of life, including all of the difficult ones. So that when you suffer, you're not caught off guard. That when you enter a time of suffering that you just are so fluid. In the Gospel, you know, I know that this isn't. This is painful and this stinks. But God is good. And he's purposed suffering in ways I can't fully understand. But I know that. That he has done this in a way that is for my good. That when you enter into temptation, when sin makes itself enticing and appealing to your flesh, that you have this personal relationship with Christ that's so saturated your soul that you just as soon as it begins, you're just like, I know that my flesh wants this, it desires this. But I also know that Christ is better. And I believe that Jesus is better. And not only did I believe Jesus is better than this sin, I also know that Jesus knows what this feels like because he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. And Hebrews 4 teaches me that he was tempted as I am, and he can sympathize with this. And I will choose him over my sin. That when death comes and hits us square in the face in ways we did not imagine, we're so fluent in the gospel that we just have this eternal mindset that says, I know this is painful, but I also know this is not the way it will be. That when we enter into conflict and we're dealing with conflict in life, that we're fluent in the Gospel in a way that knows that I am going to act like a Christian and I'm not going to just win to get my way here. I'm not just going to try to defeat the other person in the room. That I'm going to do the work of taking out the plank of my own eye so I can see the speck in theirs. And I'm going to reconcile with them. Because that's what Christ calls me to. That when we go through seasons where we experience betrayal, when we experience betrayal or get stabbed in the back or get abandoned or hurt by those we love, we're so fluent that we know that Christ knows what this feels like because he knows what it feels like to have one of his followers who be cared for for three years, sell him out for 20 pieces of silver. That he knows what it's like to have 10 of his friends abandon him and have only one of them stand at the cross. When we're fluent in the gospel and this becomes how we think and how we live, we can handle every aspect of life. We should consider this as individuals. Next Week, we'll spend more time on what it means to consider this as a community. Because it's not just a private journey, it's a corporate journey. It's together. The picture of all of us seeking to be gospel fluent, seeking us to know God individually, but collectively together, leaning on one another as the church as we leave lean on Christ, who is our rock.
But as we close out, let me make this final appeal. I want to talk to the members of our church as we do this remembering as we do our recommitment. I want us to look at this. I want us to consider what it means to place that having placed faith in Jesus, Savior and Lord, and been baptized as a believer, I will seek hear this commitment. I will seek to foster my personal relationship with him, allowing the gospel to saturate every aspect of life, my life. To do that, to really consider and take an accounting of our own souls and consider, are we doing this? I felt this. I felt this. That the easy distractions of entertaining ourselves to death on things that do not matter, the empty, vapid, worthless pursuits of spending hours of our week on things that do not matter on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Netflix and podcasts and sports and all types of things, when we have the living God who wants us to know him, that we should take an accounting of this, we should consider what has become our primary hope, where our primary energy is gone. And then we should look at our God and how wonderful he is and then repent and to change and to turn back to him and recommit. Yes, I want to end this season, recommit to personal relationship with Christ. And as we take the Lord's Supper in a moment, you'll have the opportunity to be thankful that we have a Savior who continually calls us into that.
But if. Let me make this last appeal. If you do not have a personal relationship with Christ, if Christianity, if church, if Jesus has always been a mere part of your life, someone you can pick up at some point certain seasons and put away, pick up at certain parts of the week and put away. But you've never actually had this personal relationship I want you to hear so clearly this morning. You are missing out on what it means to have a personal relationship with the God of all joy and beauty and wonder and goodness and glory. And he desires you. He desires you to know Him. And as we take the Lord's Supper in a moment, do not come to the table, but come to start a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that you might help us remember what it means to have you in our lives in a way that would compel us back to seeing you as worthy of devotion, so that you might saturate every aspect of our being. For some in this room, that's going to come through faith for the first time. Faith and surrendering to you. For others of us, it's gonna be the joy of repentance, the joy of going to our groups this week and being honest about where we've spent our best energy, where we spend our best moments in the day and our best thoughts and returning to you. But God, we pray you go to work in our hearts in Jesus name. Amen.
We're gonna take the Lord's Supper. I wanna read from Mark 14:22, 25 to prepare our hearts to read receive the Lord's Supper.
> And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body." And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." (Mark 14:22–25, ESV)
If you're a Christian, you get to come to the table remembering this sign that points to the gospel that Jesus Christ's body was broken and his blood was shed so that we could have joy and delight and satisfaction through relationship with him. So as you remember your sin and you remember the ways we need to repent joyfully, come to the table remembering our Savior. But if you have not trusted in Christ right now where you sit, I want you to bow your head and I want you to pray and I want you to humble yourself before the Lord and ask to start a relationship with him by trusting that he died on the cross for your sins, by trusting that he conquered death for you at the resurrection and starting anew with him. But when you're ready, come to the table.
Re:Member Core Doctrines IV
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
eah, I did that two weeks in a row. It's not a good start. All right. We are, as Matt said, we're working through our membership commitment, which is kind of uncommon for us normally. We're working through books of the Bible. We just finished First Samuel. We're going to pick up and go through Second Samuel next year. Don't cheer too loudly. I know you're super excited. You're like, I want to know what happens. Well, we're going to get there. But right now we're working through our membership commitment and we're trying to say, where do these truths come from if we're going to commit to these as a church, if this is going to guide us as how we're going to make disciples and how we're going to have life together? Where did we get that? And we are walking through each of these points and then looking at the Scriptures. If you want to grab a Bible and go to Matthew chapter 28, that's where we'll begin. But we are going to move all over the place this morning.
During World War II in 1941, the Ford Motor Company built the Willow Run plant right near Detroit, Michigan. It was about a mile long. And they were building B24 Liberator heavy bombers. That's an actual picture of the plant and where they were assembling them. They were assembling those one every 63 minutes was coming off the line. That's like a squadron of bombers a day just in that one plant. Now, in order for them to do that, they needed to have the right equipment. They needed to have the right people. The right people with the right equipment needed to be doing the right job. And in order for them to go as long as they did and as quickly as they did and as well as they did, they needed to know the purpose. They needed to know why it was worth the energy, the effort, the time, the focus in order to do this. And in some ways, I feel like that's what we're looking at when we look at commitment six and seven for us today, which we're going to look at those two, is that we, as a church, God has designed his church to function where they are equipped and working together for a purpose. And that's what we're going to look at this morning.
So commitment number six for us is I have been sealed by the Holy Spirit for salvation and empowered by him for mission and service. Now, we looked at sealing by the Holy Spirit for salvation last week. So we're going to start with and empowered by him for mission and service. That the Spirit has empowered us, has equipped us for what we need to do what God has called us to do. So Matthew 28. Look at verse 18. It says.
> And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
So that the church is commissioned. This is the Great Commission, where Jesus says, this is what you're supposed to do. This is the purpose. This is what I'm sending you out. That you would go and make disciples, that you would bring people into what it looks like to follow me, just as I've brought you into it. And then he says, teaching them to observe all that I've commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age, that Jesus is going to be with them, to empower them to accomplish what he sent them out to do. And the way that he does that is through the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God or the Spirit of Christ. It's referred to Jesus says that he's going to send the Spirit. It says that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, that we've got the Holy spirit, Spirit.
Acts 1:8. This is what he says to the same group, same disciples. He says,
> But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
So they're going to be empowered. That's why we use that word. We're empowered by the Spirit. They're going to be empowered. They're going to receive power, and they're going to receive power for a purpose. He says, you're going to receive power from the Spirit. And he doesn't just stop. He says, and you'll be my witnesses that this Spirit is going to empower what he's called them to do. If you showed up for your first day at work, they sat you down in the office and they gave you three pool noodles and a sword, you'd have some real questions about what your job was. But if you come in and they give you the exact equipment that you need for the job that you're going to do, it makes sense. And so when the Spirit empowers us, he's empowering us for what God has called us to do, for what he's equipped us to do, what he's sending us out to do.
So in Acts 2, 8 2, 38. Peter says this while he's preaching, and it's a helpful clarification for us to understand. Says,
> And Peter said to them, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."
so that the Spirit is received upon conversion. That when we place faith in Jesus, when we repent, when we're baptized, when we're following him, that the Spirit then goes to work in us. We're not waiting for some later manifestation of the Spirit or some later filling of the Spirit, but that we are equipped with the Spirit. The Spirit comes in when we're sealed for salvation. We're also empowered for the work that he's called us to. And this is going to be referenced throughout the New Testament letters. We're going to look at Romans 12 together. First Corinthians 12 also speaks of this, and it's Ephesians 4 talks about it, but it says Romans 12 having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them. So if you're a Christian, the Spirit has sealed you for salvation. Spirit's at work in your belief, and the Spirit is at work in empowering you to fulfill the calling placed on the church. But we have gifts that differ. Now they're gifts given to us by grace, meaning we haven't earned them. They've been granted to us through the grace of Christ and through the work of the Spirit, but they're different. So there are some things that you are good at, empowered by the Spirit intentionally for the sake of the work of the church. And there are some things that you're bad at. And that's just how it works. And there's some people around you who are good at something else because we differ in this. But he says, let us use them.
> Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in his serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.
So you are gifted and you should use your gifts for something. And we see this right? You see this in the church. This is actually one of the reasons why we exist in community groups. We're just trying to practice together as a church, what it looks like to be Christians. So in your community group, you're meant to bring the work of the spirit in you for the sake of the good of your group. This is why it matters. If you're consistently not there, that means there's work of the spirit that's consistently not there. This is why it matters. When your group says, hey, we're going to go do this as a mission effort, or we're going to go do this as a serving effort, and you just don't show up, that matters because the spirit empowers you for work, for service, for mission. But you see this in your group, right? There are some people in your group who, when they're like, hey, let's all go do this. Everybody all goes and does that. And they're somehow gifted to get people to lead, to get people to come along with them. And there are other people who are like, we're going to go this way. And they just head off by themselves. And it's like, hey, let's. Maybe that's not the thing that you're the best at. There's some people who, if they throw a party and they invite people, everybody shows up. My brother was like that. He could throw a party. He could get everybody to come. He wouldn't talk to them once they were there. Wasn't his thing. He was bouncing around, doing other stuff. There are other people who. They can't. They're not good relationally, socially getting everybody around. But when you're at a party. I was talking to some group leaders today. They were talking about this. They said, this person in our group, they can get people. And then they said, and I just show up and start talking to those people about Jesus. And that's my job. He said, I'm kind of feel a little socially awkward anyway, so conversation with me is going to be uncomfortable. Might as well be about Jesus. So he's just in there asking questions, talking to people. He said, that's what he feels gifted to. Do you know that there are people in your group, when somebody cries, everybody else just kind of looks at this person like, you gonna make them feel better? There are other people in your group who, when they go to encourage you, it's not encouraging. They're like, that's all right. One day you'll die. It's like, that doesn't. I don't feel better. Were you trying to make me feel better? Like, and we have gifts that differ, and we're meant to use these for the sake of building one another up. We're meant to use them. So if you were to say, well, I don't really have anything. The New Testament's going to say that you're wrong and that you're actually being a poor steward. What God has given you first.
First Peter four says it this way, as each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace. That we are empowered for mission and service.
> As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace.
Now, we're going to talk more about mission in a moment, because that's going to show up again in seven, in our seventh commitment. But we're empowered for service, that there are things that are meant to be used for the edification of the church, for building one another up in love. And if you aren't doing anything and saying, well, I don't really think I'm gifted, I would tell you that the reason you don't think you're gifted is because you aren't doing anything. You all know when Superman found out he was bulletproof is the first time someone shot him. That's how he figured that out. That's how that works. That the Spirit has empowered us for the work that he's called us to. But if we don't ever go and we don't ever serve and we don't ever try and we don't ever know, he's not empowering you to sit at your house by yourself watching tv. That's not the thing that is empowered in us. He's empowering us as we go, while we walk in faith, while we go into missionary efforts, while we go into service effort, while we talk to someone who's struggling, while we pray with somebody. He empowers us as we go, and then we begin to learn what it is that he's gifted us to do. This is why you should try things. This is why you should serve. This is why you should ask the Christians around you, am I any good at that? This is why when someone asks you that, you should tell them the truth. No, I'll tell people. Sometimes I think if you really desire that, you can get better at it. Sometimes we'll say, hey, because we believe the Spirit has gifted you somewhere, we don't mind telling you we don't think this is it, y'. All. I spent one summer serving with children. I just felt called into ministry. I was like, I'm gonna go serve with kids. That was the last summer I ever spent serving with children. I've gotten a little bit better at it now that I have children, but only in, like, select circumstances, like when I'm coaching and I can make you run, but, like, you go Try some things, go have some people witness and tell you and help you along in it. But we are meant to go and we're meant to steward it. And if you were saying, well, I don't really have anything, that's actually an accusation against the work of the Spirit, his goodness and his grace. So let's be good stewards and let's go. Let's begin to serve, let's begin to labor, let's begin to work. When you show up to your group, start asking them, are there things I'm good at? Are there things you've find encouraging or helpful? Or the things that I should be doing? And start intentionally putting forth effort to serve and to build up your group. And it matters if you're there or not there. And it matters if you're pulling weight or not pulling weight. But there's something beautiful that happens as we do that together. I feel like that every once in a while when my group eats a meal together. It's actually like this beautiful picture of what the church is. Because all I brought was taco shells, but someone else brought meat and someone else brought cheese and someone else brought lettuce. And together we've made something beautiful, a taco, something wonderful. But if somebody doesn't show up and they're the meat person, it's like, get them on the phone. What are you talking about? You're not showing up. I'm eating shell with cheese and lettuce. Have you lost your mind? But that's the way it works with the church. That when we aren't participating, we lose something. Okay, I've said enough of that. Here we go.
Number seven. Jesus will return to rescue his church and judge his enemies. Those who have trusted in something or someone other than Jesus will be separated from God for eternity. As a part of God's church, I'm sent to proclaim the gospel so that as many as possible might be saved. And through Jesus. Now it feels like a shift. And it is from. From our commitment number six to commitment number seven. But commitment number six, part of the reason we wanted to carry walk through these together is a number six says, the Spirit's empowered us for what God's called us to do. And then number seven begins to clarify, what is that? What is it we're supposed to be doing? Why are we building one another up in love? Why are we loving one another? Well, why are we caring for one another? It's so that the church might move forward and see people come to know Christ, so that we might see disciples made. So we're going to walk through this piece by piece and try to understand, where does this come from? So it says, Jesus will return to rescue his church and judge his enemies. This is often referred to as Judgment Day. The Bible calls it the Day of the Lord. We'll refer to it as the Day of Wrath, the day of Jesus Christ. Or often just that day, the day or that day that there is coming. A day, a moment in history when Christ returns. And when he does, there is judgment. Jesus will speak about this. Jesus actually says that on that day, people will be held accountable for every word they use. Acts 17, 30 and 31. Paul preaching says,
> The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.
And of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead, so that God in Christ is the righteous judge. That Christ will judge all of humanity down to everything we've ever done that's coming.
First Peter four, five, he says,
> They will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.
Now, this day is distinctly different, depending on whether or not you belong to Christ or you don't. And so I want to, as Christians, point out, that this is a day of joy for us.
Romans 5 says this.
> Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.
So that the Day of Wrath is a day of salvation for those who are in Christ. If we've been justified by his blood, if we've been made right by his blood, if you've trusted in the blood of Christ to cover you where it says that there's a proclamation of forgiveness of sins, if we're trusting in the forgiveness of sins through the work of Jesus, then on the Day of wrath, we are saved from wrath. It's a day of salvation. Second Thessalonians puts it this way in chapter 1, verse 10.
> when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.
So that on that day of salvation, the Church marvels and Christ is glorified. And I always feel like John Piper is very helpful in These kind of passages. So I looked to see. I was like, I'm sure he has something to say about this. So I went to see if he did, and he did. And here's what he said, and I thought it was helpful. He says, what is marveling? Another word for marveling is being amazed. Amazement and marveling are not thoughts, their emotions. If you see something marvelous and you feel nothing, you're not marveling. I don't care what you think. If you see something amazing and you don't feel any amazement, you're not amazed. Marveling is a feeling. Being amazed is a feeling, not a mere thought. And I think that's helpful, and I think it's true. I think he's onto something here, that we feel it. You're either amazed or you're not, but you feel it. You have this moment of. Catches your breath that you lose yourself for a moment, and it's something that happens inside of you. That's why you ever tell a joke. And I mean, I do this. I tell jokes a lot of all the people around me, unfortunately, if you're going to be around me, I'm going to make jokes about things. But I'll be around people sometimes and they'll go, that's funny. And it's like, well, then laugh. You must not have thought it was funny. You just made a comment on the humor of it. And that's what A little bit like, you ever tell somebody really good news and they're like, that's wonderful. And it's like, wrong. You've done this wrong. That's not how you respond to good news. You should feel something. You should respond better. And that's some of what he's saying, is that when this happens, it'll be something we feel. He goes on, he says, well, what kind of feeling is it? It's a good feeling. People pursue amazement, they pursue marveling. That's why we go to the mountains and the canyons. That's why we get out of the city light so that we can see the stars. People pay money to be amazed, to marvel. It's a good feeling. It's a desirable feeling. It's a species of pleasure, joy, gladness, and satisfaction. So he's just looking at this passage and he's saying, when Jesus shows up in the church, marvels, it means they feel something wonderful. And y', all, as Christians, and I feel like Christians understand what I'm talking about. You've had those moments you couldn't describe, but you wouldn't. You couldn't talk, tears just ran down your face. You just had these moments where you were caught by the beauty and the glory and the goodness of Christ. These moments when you were overwhelmed by it. And what it's saying is that when he arrives, all of Christianity, everyone who belongs to Jesus, is just going to go, it's here. He's here. The moment has come and we're going to feel it. John Piper goes on to say that God will get the glory and we will get the joy, and that in our joy he will be glorified. That's what's happening on that day. And this is why Jesus is going to use language like he's the groom coming for his bride. It's going to be these pictures of joy, of love, wonder. And this looking forward to this day offers us comfort in the middle of difficulty, when we're facing trials we can remember. I know where this goes is what we're saying about. I know how this story ends. It comforts us. It also calls us to endurance. This ought to help you say no to sin. There are times when I think, no, I have a Lord. I can't just do what I want. And I'm going to stand before him one day and I'm going to give an account. I can't just chase after the things I desire. I have a king. But it also gives us endurance in the midst of trial and persecution. We know where this is going and that the Lord sets it all right. But throughout the Scriptures, there is clear and compelling and startling language given to this day of judgment. Clear and compelling and startling language. So I want us to consider those who have trusted in something or someone other than Jesus will be separated from God for eternity. Those who have trusted in something or someone other than Jesus will be separated from God for eternity. I'm now going to read two passages. We're just going to try to take them in. The first is Jesus speaking about this day. It's found in Matthew, chapter 25. He says,
> "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?' And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.' Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' Then they also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?' Then he will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."
Jesus says, there's a day when the Son of man will come and the glory of his angels will sit on the throne and he'll separate and everyone will head eternally in one direction or the other. This is the way 2 Thessalonians says it, this is the evidence of the righteous judgment of God that you he's writing to this church in Thessalonica may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering. Since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us. When the Lord Jesus is revealed. So he's saying on the day of Christ, when he's revealed, there will be relief and affliction when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming the fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
> and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.
We're told that no one comes to the Father except through the Son, so that in order to know God, you have to know Christ. Jesus says, if you reject Me, you reject him who sent me. So to know God is to know Christ, to know God through Christ. And he says, do not obey the gospel. I think that's helpful when you consider what we just read in Matthew, that the Gospel is the news that there's forgiveness of sins proclaimed in the name of Christ, that we would submit to and repent in light of what Jesus has done, and then walk in obedience so that all those things that he talks to the righteous about in Matthew 25 show up. Because we're following Jesus in obedience to the Gospel. So it's not a list of ways that you earned it. Jesus has qualified us through his death and resurrection. His blood has covered us. That's what he said. If we made, if we're justified by his blood, how much more will we be saved from the wrath of God? So that it's work of Jesus that saves us. But it shows up in how we live. And there is a moment when people are separated. Those who knows Christ and those who do not, verse 9. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at among all who have believed they will suffer the punishment, eternal destruction. This is what the Scriptures teach. This is what we believe. That there is a day where Jesus Christ, as the King of all things, judges the world, and that the stakes for that day are eternal. But at that moment, there is nothing left to do but to be sorted and evaluated, welcomed and cast out. And as we look forward to this day as Christians, and as we look to it as a day of joy, and as we look to it as a source of comfort and a call to endurance, it also should give rise to such compassion in our hearts that drives us into Willing, delighted obedience to proclaim this message, because we should not want to see any cast out.
So as a part of God's church, I am sent to proclaim the gospel so that as many as possible might be saved through Jesus. What we're saying is we understand this reality and we're supposed to go. It's what we say every Sunday when we're finishing up some version really of this. Our world is broken and marred by sin. The people around us are caught in it, in despair and headed towards destruction. And that Jesus tell us, tells us that judgment is coming. But we know that there's salvation in him and him alone. So empowered by the Spirit, you are sent. The church is plan A for this message. There is no plan B. We talk through this every week. We remember this every week because there are people around us who are going to be sorted with the goats on that day. So Jesus in Luke 24 says,
> and said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem."
But there's a proclamation of the hope of the gospel that is to be sent forward. Acts 10. This is Peter speaking. He says,
> And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.
That we're commanded. Peter says, we were. He's talking about the. The disciples. But all of us that follow after them are commanded to proclaim this news that Jesus is the one who's going to judge and that there's forgiveness and hope in his name. Second Peter 3. He says,
> The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
There are moments when you think, I just wish the Lord would come back. I wish he would end this. I wish he would come get us. And in those moments, I want you to hear the voice of the Spirit say, he's not slow, he's patient. And there are more who need repentance. He's not slow, he's patient. And there are more who need repentance. The message hasn't gone far enough yet. It hasn't reached them yet. He's got some that are going to believe at the message that's proclaimed and are going to marvel and weep and dance for joy on that day, but they don't know yet. And he says, but the day of the Lord will come like a thief. We won't see it coming. Two weeks ago they said the Rapture is coming. I don't know if y' all heard that. No, it wasn't. That's not how it works. Facebook won't know about it. It's going to come like a thief. It's going to catch us off guard. But then the heavens will pass away with a roar and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
Why are we empowered? Why are we equipped? Why did they build a mile long factory? Because they were at war. And y', all. We should not be any less focused than someone who's building a bomber to fight Hitler. We should not be any less focused. We should not have any less ability to understand the purpose of what God has called us for. We should not lose sight of what really matters. Because there is going to be a day, and on that day, there's going to be a lot of things that do not matter. And there's going to be one thing that really, really does. Do you know Christ? Have you surrendered? Have you repented? Have you been saved by his blood? That's going to matter. But there's a whole lot of things that we focus on, spend time on, have energy in that do not matter. And we say things like, I don't know, it's been really busy. I don't know. It's hard for me to read. I don't know. I just feel so awkward. I don't. You know, I just. Bible's always been kind of confusing to me. Somebody's saying, hey. You say, hey, you need to be trying to build with people and share the Gospel. And it's like, well, I just don't know what to say. Then you say, well, read your Bible. Yeah, but it's hard for me to read. Okay. Didn't you quote stats to me about a sports team? Did you make those up or did you read them and memorize them? I don't know. I just kind of. It's hard. I'm busy. I can't. I can't make it consistently to this. I can't be a part of mission stuff. Okay. Do you miss a workout? Do we know what matters? Do we know that there is a day that will be to the glory of Christ, but there will be judgment on that day? Y' all have neighbors that don't know Jesus. Do I care or am I busy?
As I was working on this and considering It I was considering how our groups function. We meet with one another and we have time where we're intentionally. We're just trying to practice what it means to be Christians, trying to practice what it looks like to follow Jesus. So we study the Bible together. We're not just a Bible study, but we study the Bible because Christians study the Bible. We eat a meal. It's not just about eating a meal, but we belong to each other. So we share a meal. We confess sin, we encourage one another, we ask, how's your life going? And we have a section in our normal group rhythm that's called Review the Mission, where we ask, who are you building with? How's that going? Who are you sharing the gospel with? And I've been considering recently that we have care nights. So if you're not in a group, there's a thing called a care night. If you're in a group, you know what I'm talking about. We sit and we say, how are you doing? Where do you need to repent? Where do you need to believe the Gospel? And I know as a group leader that if someone just said consistently was like, nah, oh, I don't do this. This isn't my thing. Or when we went around and we said, how are you doing? They just went, you know, basically some form of pass. We would be telling them, hold on a second. No, you. You need to understand how Christ interacts with your life. You need to know that you have sin, you need to confess, you need to walk in openness, you need to be rescued, you need to be redeemed. Like, we'd be pressing on this, but I started realizing that they're consistently. I feel like our group sometimes when it comes to considering mission, we just kind of. I don't have anything to say because that's not really a thing I do. And we need to have the same understanding. If that's not acceptable for people who know this, you have nobody in your life that you're praying for, that you're going out of your way for that. You care about meeting Christ? Nobody. Then find somebody. Love somebody. We tell people all the time, join a bowling league, but join it. As a missionary. I'll tell people. Sometimes I say, it's so hard to work at my job because I'm the only Christian. And it's like, I want to hug them and praise Jesus because Jesus has already infiltrated a place where there's no Christians, but you're there. Start praying, start pleading with the Lord. Start building friendships. We're supposed to Go.
I was reminded as I was studying this, where Jesus says in Matthew, as he's telling the parable of the sower, he says, as for what was sown among thorns. So he tells a story. Somebody's casting out seed, and some of it lands in a place where crows come and eat it. And he says, that's the enemy. He just steals it away. They didn't understand. He tells about some lands in an area where it's got thin soil and it just burns up as soon as the sun comes out. He tells there's a place where it begins to grow, but thorns grow out. And he says, there's a place where there's good soil and it grows and produces. When he's talking about the thorns, he says this. He says, this is what that picture was. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word. But the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word and it proves unfruitful.
> As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.
And I just wonder how much of when we talk about what it looks like to obey Jesus, what it looks like to share the gospel, do the things that we say are in the way, fit in the category of the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. And if we heard the Word, but it's being choked, there's hope in Christ. There's a day of judgment. And those who don't know Jesus and have not had him rescue them will spend eternity away from them. And on that day, there's a lot of things you're not going to care about on that day. There's a lot of things I'm not going to care about that I've spent time, energy and effort on. And I read this and I say, lord, stay patient. Because there's more people who need repentance and we need to go. Let's pray. Where we ask that your spirit would empower us, that you would burden us with the glorious weight of the good news, that we would carry this message, that we would risk awkwardness, that we would risk difficulty, that we would focus on, that we would see clearly that day so that we might be comforted, so that we might endure, that we might run from sin. And so, Lord, that we might proclaim that you were going to judge the living and the dead, but that you are the living God who died so that there might be forgiveness. May we go to hell in Jesus name. Amen.
The band's gonna come back up. We're gonna sing. But I would ask you at this moment to consider what needs to change? How do you need to organize your life if this is true? What does that mean? Who do you need to tell? Who do you need to tell today? Who do you need to call and say, hey, can we get together? Where do you need to be more intentional with the way that you organize your time so that we might go? This news is too good and that day is too real for us to stay quiet.
Re:Member Core Doctrines III: Salvation
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. We are working our way through our membership commitment. In some ways, it's like if you went and saw a band and they only played their hits, they didn't replace the drummer and he got to write a song about his child and you have to listen to that. None of that, just only hits. That's kind of what we're doing with our membership commitment. It's like these are the straightforward, clear doctrines of the faith and how we're gonna practice them together as a church family. And we're just walking through that together, trying to see where this comes from in the Scriptures, how it applies to us, how we're gonna walk that out here and so glad that you're here this morning and we're getting to do this together. Today we are looking at the doctrine of salvation. So this is commitments five and six, and we are looking at what Christ has done for us in salvation. And I feel a little bit this morning that you get to talking to a grandmother and y'all remember that it doesn't happen like it used to, but they would pull out of their purse this little thing of their grandchildren, and each one of them precious and wonderful and worthy of explanation of who's playing the clarinet and who's pre law and who's just so wonderful and precious. They'd get that gleam in their eye and you're, I'm going to be here a while. Now they can do it on their phone. And it's infinite. I feel that this morning as we look into salvation and we look into this statement that's just each section just packed with beauty and wonder and glory. And so we're going to take this time this morning to study the Scriptures on who Jesus is and what he has done for us in the work of salvation, this act of God on our behalf. My hope is that we would delight in that and respond to that in worship and faith. So take a moment with me as we pray.
As we begin. Lord, we are seeking to, through faith in the work of your spirit, to peer into things that are too wonderful for us. We ask that you would help us to delight in the wonder of salvation and the hope of your glory, and that you would help us to perceive it in our hearts how good and glorious you are and what you have accomplished for us in Christ in Jesus name, Amen.
So commitment number five says Jesus is The Son of God who died in my place for my sin, securing for me God's grace and relationship with him forever. I have been saved by God's grace through faith in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. My salvation is not a result of any of my actions, good works or morals. There's a whole lot in there. We're going to walk through it. Commitment 6. I have been sealed by the Holy Spirit for salvation and empowered by him for mission and service. We're only going to look at the first half of that this morning. So we'll just look at I have been sealed by the Holy Spirit for salvation. We will look at the second half next week.
Let's go to the beginning of this. Says Jesus is the Son of God who died in my place for my sin. Let's consider that first. When Gabriel comes to Joseph in Matthew chapter one, he says she will bear a son. He's declaring to him that Mary is pregnant, she's going to have a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.
> She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. (Matthew 1:21, ESV)
So that's what we looked at last week, that we have sin, that we are a part of the rebellion, that Adam and Eve rebelled against God, they fell into sin, and that we've joined that rebellion, that we've participated in that, and Jesus expressly is coming to save his people from their sins. Or as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15:3.
> For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, (1 Corinthians 15:3, ESV)
Let me tell you, if you have approached Christianity and you have held something up as first importance, and it is not that, then you're confused about the message of Christianity. If you've come in with, well, let me understand this, or you talk to people sometimes and they're like, you're trying to talk to them about Christianity. I got a lot of questions about Noah's Ark. And it's like, hey, can I tell you, that's not the main point of Christianity. We can get there. But this is what Christianity has come to declare, that Christ died in accordance with the Scriptures, that this was prophesied and that he's come to save his people from their sin, that he died for our sins. That sin is a cancer that is killing us, and Christ comes as the physician to heal us. That sin is a prison that we are captured in, and that Christ is the one who opens the doors, lets the sun in, picks us up and carries us out. That he's the hero, the rescuer, the hope. That's the testimony of the scriptures. First John 4 says it this way.
> In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10, ESV)
So he displays his love for us in doing this. And he's the propitiation, which is a theologically dense term that means he absorbs wrath. That, as Paul says in Romans 1, that the wrath of God is put on display, that it's against all of the wickedness and unrighteousness of men. Or as he says in Romans 3, that we're storing up wrath for the day of wrath because of our lack of repentance, and that Christ comes as the propitiation for our sin, that he takes wrath, that he absorbs the wrath on our behalf. Tim Keller puts it in a really tangible way when he says that sin is like, if I come to your house and break a lamp. When you sin, a real thing happens. Something tangible happens in the world. He says that you can say, you owe me a lamp, or you can say, don't worry about it. But you saying don't worry about it doesn't fix the lamp. It just means you're going to pay for it. That's what Christ has done. When people say, well, why is it such a big deal? Why didn't he say don't? Why can't he just say don't worry about it? He gives us a way to say, don't worry about it, where he pays for it, where he comes and says, I'll cover the cost of your sin. I'll absorb the wrath. That's what propitiation is. And it's wonderful that when it says he died for our sins, it means that we really incurred debt that we have, debt that we owe, that we've caused, and he comes and pays for it.
Or in Galatians 2:20, it says,
> I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20, ESV)
This is one of the reasons why it's personal in the way we have written it in our commitment, that he died in my place for my sin. That's the way Paul is saying it here, that he loved me and gave Himself for me. Yes, he loved the church and gave Himself for the church. He loved us and gave Himself for us. That he died for our sins, but he also died for my sin. That he also died for your sin. That he knows you, knows the cost and the debt of your sin, loves you and died for your sin. That if you are in Christ, that that is personal. That it's not something where you get brought into a big group and you just sneak in. I was at a South Carolina game and we were sitting near the little club thing and it started pouring rain. This wasn't yesterday, but it was a couple weeks ago and it just was pouring. We just charged into the covered area and there was no way for them to check everybody. We just snuck in. There's too many people coming, too much rain. You just were like, don't worry about me, I'm coming in. Some of us act like that's how you got into Christ, that you somehow snuck past and that he loves other people dearly and that he paid for their sin and that you somehow have just kind of gone in the back and stood in the corner and he's not really noticing you. But that's not the reality. He knows you personally, loves you dearly and personally and rescues you personally and pays for your sin personally. If you belong to Jesus, you belong to him and he knows you and cares for you. That's a reality of the salvation that we have in Christ. Do not let the enemy lie to you and say that you somehow got in on a technicality and that he loves the Church, but not really you, because that is not true. If you belong to Jesus, he knows and loves you dearly and has died for you, who loved me and gave Himself for me. That's the way Paul says it.
So what happens when he does this? The next part of this is he's securing for me. He died for my sins, securing for me God's grace, relationship with him forever. We're going to consider God's grace that he brought us into it. We're going to consider that in a moment. But first we're going to look at this relationship with him forever. In our sin, we are alienated from God. This is the way Colossians 1:21–22 says it.
> And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, (Colossians 1:21–22, ESV)
Alienated means there's a gap. There's no relationship, it's broken. You don't belong to each other. The tie and the love and the relationship severed. This is where we are in our sin. That if you are standing in Adam, you are alienated from God and you're hostile to him. You're an enemy. That's the way Paul puts it in Romans 5. He says, we're enemies of God, but he says we're doing evil deeds. He says he has now reconciled, which means to bridge the gap and restore the relationship. So it's undoing alienation. He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. The work of the Cross reconciles us to the Father. So you'll hear people say things like, sin separates us from God. And that's true if we exist in our sin. But if we exist in Christ, then we are reconciled and we are holy and blameless and above reproach before him through what he has done in his body of flesh by his death. So that you get moved to Christ, and then your sin does not separate you from God because he has done the work of reconciliation, that he's restored the relationship.
Reading a book recently written by Lee Strobel, he was talking with someone about heaven, and they were discussing the concept of reconciliation between people in heaven, that those that we've had animosity towards, that as we are redeemed in Christ, we are brought back into relationship. Lee Strobel was talking about the fact that he was very rebellious as a teenager. His father was a believer, but that he had contributed so much to the deterioration of that relationship. His father, one time, exasperated in anger, looked at him before his senior prom and said, I don't have enough love for you to fill up my pinky finger. Lee Strobel said we never fixed that. We never reconciled. We never sorted that out. My father's past, and I believe he was a true believer. I think he's gone on to be with the Lord. He said, I've thought over and over again about how much my sin contributed to our relationship. I didn't have a chance to repent. I didn't have the chance to reconcile. They were discussing that when he enters eternity, that relationship will be restored, that there will be peace, that there'll be forgiveness, that there'll be joy, that they'll be brought back together. I was just overwhelmed by the thought of that and this, that we would be reconciled to God, that our hostility between him and us would be restored through the work of Christ, that we would belong, that when we showed up, there would be nothing between us that would make us want to hide or shrink back because of the work of Christ, that we would have all the freedom and all the joy and all the delight to run to him and not feel like that's odd. And that he would have the same relationship with us. It's beautiful that we've been reconciled and we have a relationship with him forever. We should be overwhelmed by that.
It says this. I have been saved by God's grace through faith in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, that we are in Christ, that the gospel, the life, death and resurrection of Christ apply to us, and that we get to be brought into it, that we get to be saved through it. Let's consider the concept of grace. We've been saved by God's grace. Ephesians 2 says,
> But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved, (Ephesians 2:4–5, 8 ESV)
Let's follow the logic here. We're dead in our trespasses. So what did you bring? Trespasses. That's sin. You've crossed the line. You've trespassed. There was a thing that said, no trespassing, don't go here. And then you went there. Do y'all remember that, when y'all did that? Yeah, we've done that. We've trespassed. And what does that bring? Death. You've brought two things, death and trespass. That earned you death. But God loves us and is rich in mercy for those who have trespassed. He's made us alive together with Christ. When Christ rose, we get to be made alive with him. Then it says,
> For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8–9, ESV)
That does not tell us what grace is. It tells us that grace is wonderful. You read that and go, well, I'm so thankful for grace. Grace sounds great. If I told you the flux capacitor lets you time travel, you're like, wow, what's a flux capacitor? That's kind of what this is. Grace saved us. The salvation sounds wonderful, but what is grace? He says in verse eight, for by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing. It is the gift of God. So grace is a gift. Another way of putting this an acronym somebody told me one time, is God's riches at Christ's expense Grace, or God's righteousness at Christ's expense, meaning that he pays for it and then we receive it. But it's a gift. I had someone a week ago say, hey, I have a gift for you. You know what I said, whoa, thanks. Sweet. Sounds good. I love that sentence. It's one of my favorite sentences. You know what? I didn't say, hey, I have a gift for you. I didn't go, okay, tell me what I gotta do. They just said, quit being weird. Open it. I don't take it from my hand when I hand it to you. Do you not know what gifts are like? That's how grace works. We don't come in and go, okay, what do I have to do? How am I going to be saved? All right, no, it's a gift. This is received. This doesn't get better than that. There's something in us that wants to earn something, that wants to achieve something. What has happened is that Christ has gone to work on our behalf, and graciously, as a gift, hands out salvation to those who believe. That's what it says, that we come in by faith. Romans calls it a free gift. It says that we've been saved through faith.
So let's consider faith. What is faith? If faith is what brings me into grace and grace is what gives me salvation, then I need to know what faith is. John 3:16 says,
> For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16, ESV)
That's that relationship forever, that eternal life that we get brought into something that's going to last forever. That we're brought in by belief, that we're trusting in Jesus. Somebody asked Jesus in John chapter six. They said, what do I need to do? In John 6, Jesus answered them,
> Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent." (John 6:29, ESV)
You want to do the work. You trust Jesus. You might be inclined to say, well, that doesn't sound like work. Yes, wonderful. It doesn't. It's surrender. It's anti-work. It's us putting down the tools and saying, I'm trusting in Jesus. My hope is in Him. It's not in me. Romans 4:24 says, he's talking about righteousness, which would be the right standing before God. It says,
> but for us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, (Romans 4:24, ESV)
who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. He goes to the cross for our trespasses, our sin, and then he's raised. Justification means that you stand in God's holy court made right. There is no claim that can be made against you because he's made us righteous. His righteousness is counted to us through the work of Christ, and we approach it through faith that we believe in Him.
Trying to make this tangible. I want to talk to the elementary students in the room. But also at some point, all of us were elementary students, so you should be able to track. If you're in elementary school, you do not know how to drive a car. I know this because you live in South Carolina and most of the adults in South Carolina don't know how to drive a car. If you're in elementary school, you might be confident that you know how to drive a car, that you could do this or you've seen it and it seems pretty, but you don't. So you're dependent on the adults around you to get you places. There are a few simple rules for you. Get in the car, close the door, put a seatbelt on. That's it. Now one of the rules you have is see who's driving the car. Do you know this person? That's actually your biggest rule. Do I trust this person? You don't just get to hop in any car. If your parents haven't told you this, I'm telling you now. Don't just hop in any car. Someone who pulls up, kicks the door open and says, get in here. No, I don't know you. I don't trust you. I don't believe you'll take me where I need to go. Belief when we come to Christ is saying, this is the car and this is the driver that's going to get me where I need to go. One of the things we need to understand is that you have no other way of getting there. You don't know how to get there yourself. You actually can't get yourself there. What we're doing when we place faith in Jesus is saying, my hope is in him, and if he doesn't get me there, I won't get there. If he doesn't save, I won't be saved. If he doesn't have mercy, I won't receive mercy. If he doesn't have righteousness, I won't receive righteousness. If he doesn't give me his righteousness, I won't get it. If he doesn't do the work, I won't be able to participate in this because I have no means on my own. But I am putting all of my faith, all of my trust in him and I have no ability. I'm along for the rush. Faith is going to him and saying, Jesus, it's all on you. I believe that you have done what the Bible says you've done. I believe that you grant by faith to all those who will trust in you salvation and that none of us are put to shame. That's faith.
My salvation is not a result of any of my actions, good works and morals. Faith, I said, is the opposite of a work. It's the undoing of work. It's surrendering. It's stopping. If I tell my kids to stop, they do it, but they do it by stopping, by not doing anything. That's somehow faith. Works is us surrendering our actions, good works and morals. Let me show you this. Ephesians 2 just told us we were dead in our trespasses, says in verse 8,
> For by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8–9, ESV)
If you boast about a gift, you're boasting about the giver of the gift. If I see you with something nice and I say, wow, that's really nice, and you go, yeah, I'm not trying to brag, but I had a birthday. It's like, yeah, you shouldn't be trying to brag. That was terrible bragging. You didn't earn who gave it to you. You could say, but then it would be pointing to the person who gave the gift. There's no boasting for us in salvation because we didn't do anything. We haven't earned this. Romans 3:20 says,
> For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (Romans 3:20, ESV)
This is very important. If you've come into your hope of salvation and you think it's about doing the stuff right, being good enough, following the rules, that's not how this works. We are not justified by the law. We don't have any work that we can do to show to the Lord. Romans 11:6 says,
> But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace. (Romans 11:6, ESV)
If I said, I have a gift for you if you win it, well, it's not a gift, it's a prize. It's a trophy. You can now brag about it. I have a gift for you. Give me $500. We've exchanged something. There's some kind of contract. So if salvation has 10% you in it, well, then you get 10% of the glory. And when we sing, we should sing 10% of our songs to us. Every 10th stanza should be. Also we're great, but that's not how it works. Because work undoes grace, because grace is a gift. This is how it has to work. We can't save ourselves. If he doesn't do it, it doesn't happen. We're not able to earn this, we're not able to achieve it. It's not about you. Galatians 2:16 says,
> Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. (Galatians 2:16, ESV)
So if you say, well, I'm a good person, that'll count. No, God gave us standards to show we won't live up to them, and then to drive us to Christ, who fulfilled the law on our behalf and grants us his righteousness. If it had anything to do with works, then you would be owed credit and he would owe you some sort of something, and it would somehow, to some degree, be about you. That's not how it works. We receive it by grace to the praise of his glorious grace, and not to the praise of anything else.
There's actually a way for you to use your good works to avoid Jesus. I'll be good enough so that he can't have a claim on me, so that he can't tell me what I'm supposed to do. He'll owe me. But that's not how it works. We come in and say, none of my actions, none of my good works, none of my morals have saved this for me. That's wonderful news because of what we see next, which is in Commitment 6. It says, I have been sealed by the Holy Spirit for salvation. If you didn't earn it, we also get to rejoice that we don't keep it. Let me show you where this is in the text. Ephesians 1:13 says,
> In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, (Ephesians 1:13, ESV)
When you entered Christ, when you placed your hope in him, you were locked up in Christ, you were sealed in your sin, and now you're sealed in Christ. You are held captive in sin, and now you're held in Christ. I want to read another place where he mentions that same letter to try to help you understand. What does that look like? Chapter 4, verse 30 says,
> And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. (Ephesians 4:30, ESV)
This sealing tells us two things. One is he's telling him not to sin, and he says, don't grieve the Holy Spirit by whom you were sealed. He doesn't say, if you sin, you'll lose the Holy Spirit. He just says, don't grieve him; he's with you and he'll mourn your sin. He doesn't like it, so don't walk in sin. You grieve the Spirit, but he doesn't say he'll leave you. You don't work your way into salvation, which means you can't sin your way out of it. We are called to continue to follow him in faith. We are called to obey. We're going to be there the whole time. But the Spirit's at work in us and we cannot fall out. We've been sealed for the day of redemption. This is why Hebrews calls Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith. This is why in Philippians it says he who began a good work in you will carry it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ. Christ is going to get you there because it's to the praise of his glorious work and grace on our behalf that he's rich in mercy, as Peter says it, that we're being guarded by God's power. You're not guarded by your power. You're not guarded by your strength. You're not guarded by your focus, love, energy. So often I get to go to the Lord and say, I'm so weak, I'm so distracted. I'm so small and I'm guarded by Him, I'm carried by Him. I'm like a toddler in a car seat in the back of the car. At no point did it suddenly become my responsibility. That's the salvation that we get to have in Christ. We don't have it in anyone or anything else. It's held for us in Christ. Accomplished by Christ, kept by Christ to the glory of Christ.
Let's pray and then I'll tell us how we're going to respond. Father, we are thankful for this salvation. We're thankful for you loving us, for you being rich in mercy, for you bringing us from death to life, for you keeping us, for you qualifying us for you, holding us, for you welcoming us. Lord, may our hearts be able to taste that so that we might rejoice in some measure fitting to the glorious nature of this salvation. Lord, for anyone in this room who still stands in their sin, who still walks alienated and hostile, for anyone in this room who is trying to stand in their own morality, who is trying to, by works of the law, justify themselves. Oh Lord, may your spirit break in. May they hear the word of the gospel and may they believe. May you seal them for the day of redemption to the praise of your glorious grace in Jesus name, Amen.
As a church, we study the Scriptures, we read the Word, and we respond. It's the way that God works on our behalf and then we respond to him. The way we're going to respond this morning is we're going to take communion as a church family. For those of you who are Christians and have placed faith in Christ, this is where we remember that on the night Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and he said, this is my body broken for you. And he took the cup and he said, this is the blood of my covenant poured out for you as a forgiveness of sins. When we take communion, we proclaim his death until he returns. We tangibly, physically remind ourselves that Christ did this for me and I am in him. I'll dip the bread, I'll hold it, juice will run on my fingers and I'll remember that Christ really tangibly actually came and died for me and that I get to partake, that he's in me, that he keeps me, that my hope is in Him. So take this morning and remind yourself that I was dead in my trespasses and sins. But he has grace. He's rich in mercy. My hope is in Him. Tell him once again, Lord, I need you. I need you to redeem me. I need you to keep me. I need you to save me. If you don't do it, it won't happen. But praise Christ that you came and that you died and that you redeemed.
If you're in this room and you have not trusted in Jesus, in a moment when we begin to move around, I want you to get up, place your faith in Jesus. I want you to walk down and get on your knees and ask the Lord to save you. I want you to tangibly lock in that I am going to Christ and I am surrendering to Christ, that it is about him and him alone, that my hope is in him and him alone. If you're in elementary school, grab your parent's hand, walk with them. They'll come pray with you. If you have clarifying questions or you need help, I'll stand down here and talk with you as well. But I want you to move and go. Lord, I need the hope of salvation. I need the work of Christ. I don't want to trust myself. I want to surrender. Don't fight with the Spirit. If he's calling you, come because salvation is a gift to be received. Come and ask the Lord to heal you and to save you and to bring you life.
Daniel's gonna come up, we're gonna play. We're gonna take communion as a church family. If you haven't trusted in Jesus, I invite you to come and to trust in Him. When you're ready, take communion.
Re:Member Core Doctrines II: Fall and Rebellion
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. My headset mic broke this morning, so I get to hold this. The only benefit I know of holding a mic is that at the end of my sermon, I get to drop it dramatically, if you will, grab a Bible and go to Genesis, chapter one. We are, as a church, working through our membership commitment, and we are walking through. Our membership commitment is one sheet of paper. And it's just bullet points. The first eight or so are theological points that we agree to, and then the second half really is how we're going to practice that here. Our hope for this series is that this is edifying, encouraging, helpful, and that we collectively as church can recommit to these things, if you like. I hadn't committed to this stuff. We're walking through what they mean, where they come from in the scriptures. We wrote these down, but we did not make them up. And so what we're doing is reading them and then showing where this comes from in the Bible, where this idea comes from, where it's anchored in. And so that's what we're doing. Last week we looked at the first two. The first one says that the Bible is inerrant and it is the authority over my life. So we're committing to, we believe the Bible. We're going to study the Bible. That's actually primarily what we do on Sundays is just teach through books of the Bible. And so we're going to study it, we're going to apply it to our lives. The second one is that God has existed forever as a trinitarian God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And today we are looking at numbers three and four. So I'm going to read them, then we're going to pray and we're going to get started. So number three is this. Humanity was created to live in perfect relationship with God, joining in the fellowship of the Trinity. However, the first humans rebelled against God and chose to live outside of God's perfect rule. And then number four, number three is really theological in nature. And then number four is taking that and helping see where we show up. It says, as a continuing part of that rebellion, I am in my natural state, sinful and separated from God because of my sin. I have earned God's wrath towards me and an eternity in hell. That is what we're going to walk through this morning. We're really going to take it sentence by sentence. It'll be basically walk through in four parts. If you are new to Christianity, new to the church, this is a Good morning for you. Because we're going to explain a whole lot of why. Why do we exist? What's God's intent for humanity? Why does God respond to us the way that he does? Why is Jesus coming such good news that we would gather consistently to sing about it. That's what we're going to look at this morning. So I'm going to pray and then we got our work cut out for us. Because whenever I have to face off against stuff like this, the whole Bible's at my disposal. And it says this stuff over and over and over and over again. And so I'm always in the tension of like, how much Bible are we going to read? All of it or just some of it? And we're, we're going to read a lot of it this morning as we kind of go through all of these. So let's pray and let's get started.
Lord, we ask for your help. We ask for the work of your spirit in our hearts so that this wouldn't just be something that we think about, but it would be something that we believe. It wouldn't just be something that we consider this morning, but it would go from our head to our heart so that we might see and reckon with the glorious nature of you, of our creation and of our salvation. Help us to see and feel our sin this morning so that we might respond to you in repentance and love. In Jesus name, Amen.
So the first one, we're going to take that first part. Humanity was created to live in perfect relationship with God, joining in the fellowship of the Trinity. I told you to turn to Genesis. We are going Genesis 1:1-2.
> In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
So the Bible opens up with God preexisting and in the act of creation. Then it's going to say that he begins to speak creation into existence. And this is where John the Apostle is going to pick up. He's going to say in the beginning when he starts his gospel and he's going to highlight something for us. He's going to say this in John chapter one.
> In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. The Word is personal.
> All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
> And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
So at the beginning of the Scriptures, we are met with the Trinity working in creation. And then it says this, Genesis 1:26. After he's created everything, he goes and he creates humanity.
> Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
So far we see the Trinity at work, and we see that humanity was created. But in Genesis, if you were to ask, why was humanity created? The best answer you'll get is to have dominion over the earth. And that's true. But God's intent, His purpose for humanity is actually bigger than that and more beautiful than that. But we don't get to see it until we see how he responds to the Fall, until He responds to the rebellion and the sin of humanity. So I want to show you, I'm going to try to help you see that we were intended to be invited into this relationship with God. So once sin enters the world and God begins to respond to humanity's sin, and my page turning is going to be more awkward because I only have one hand. We see in Exodus, chapter 29 as God's bringing the people out of slavery, it says this.
> I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the LORD their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them. I am the LORD their God.
Original intent in the garden was that these people would belong to him and that he would dwell with them. There's this relational nature to God's design. And I want you to know that God did not create humanity because he lacked some sort of relation. He wasn't lonely because he existed forever in a trinitarian nature. We get invited into the love and the joy, the relationship that already existed. He created humanity out of an excess of love and relationship, not out of a need for it. But then he says his intent as he's bringing them out is, I'm going to live with you. You're going to be my people. In Exodus 34, when he displays himself to Moses, he says this.
> The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."
When he says what he's like, he speaks of it in these relational terms. He's merciful, he's gracious, he's abounding in steadfast love. He could say mighty, terrifying, awe inspiring. But when he starts talking, he says, no, he talks about his goodness and his relational nature. Deuteronomy 6, before they're sent into the promised land, they're commanded:
> You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
God's intent for humanity is that he would dwell with them, share his love with them, and that they, us, we might love him, that our response to him is love. That's wonderful. It fits in the same category where, I'll look at my boys sometime and I go, no, you're not gonna talk to your mama like that. You're gonna love your mama. That's your mama. You're gonna treat her. She exists in this. The nature of your relationship is one where you're gonna love her, you're gonna care for her, and for me to demand that is good for them. And when God says, I love you and you need to love me, this is how this is meant to work. That's wonderful news, because it could exist in all these other ways, but the nature of God's purpose in creation was that we would belong to him, they would love them. And he keeps going. This is Jeremiah 31, the prophet, speaking. He says,
> At that time, declares the LORD, I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they shall be my people.
He brings them back. He says, they're going to belong to me. And he says,
> I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
The prophet Hosea, God specifically tells him to marry a prostitute because she's going to keep leaving him. He says, you're going to keep chasing her. And in that way you're going to picture what it's been like between me and Israel. And he says this:
> And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy, and I will betroth you to me in faithfulness.
What was God's purpose in creation? That he might marry his people, that they might have this type of a love relationship that should blow our minds. That God's desire, the Creator of the universe, his desire for humanity, is that they would belong to him, and that there would be this depth of relationship and love. This is what we were built for. When you think, what's my purpose? Why did God create us? Or why does humans exist? Is this all random? No, God created humanity. He created you that you might love him, that you might know him, and that he might love you. And that that might be wonderful. I feel like you all are less enthused than you should be, but okay. This is why Jesus, when he shows up, he uses bride and groom language. This is why John the Baptist says, I'm not the groom. I'm just the friend of the groom. But the groom's coming. This is why the book of Revelation takes us to the wedding supper of the Lamb. And then in Revelation 21 it says,
> Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
As it's picturing this redeemed relationship and this reconnection, his intent is that we would belong to him, that we would relate to him, that we would be invited into this love, that it would be shared and cherished. And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. And death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. That was God's original intent with humanity, was this depth of relationship. Unfortunately, there's a big however that begins the next sentence. We didn't stay in this relationship long. So the next part of this theological statement that we agree to as a church is, however, the first humans rebelled against God and chose to live outside of God's perfect rule. They rebelled against God and chose to live outside of God's perfect rule.
So Genesis 2:15, 17 says,
> The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."
He places them in a wonderful place there's no sin, no brokenness, nothing. And he says, one rule. You can have everything. Everything's yours except for this. Do you all know anything about humans? It doesn't go well for us. Pretty quickly, they were like, what's with that one rule? And Satan comes along. If you read the story, the serpent comes and he tempts Eve. He shows up, begins to lie about God. He says, did he really say, you can't have any of the fruit? And she says, no, we just can't have that one. And he says, this is going to be good for you. He starts working in that God's not trustworthy. So Eve eats, her husband eats. He's with her. And immediately sin and death and rebellion enter the world. And there's more going on than just mere disobedience. It's not just that God had a rule and they broke the rule. There's some fundamental things that happen in this moment. I want to read this quote from a friend of mine named Brandon Clements who wrote a book called For Our Good Always. He's a pastor at Midtown Fellowship in Lexington. It says this. It was an intentional choice because not eating from that tree meant that they were accepting that God was wiser than them, that he got to determine what was good and evil, right and wrong. That he was God and they were not. Eating of the tree meant no, I get to determine what is good and evil. This is why it's rebellion. This is why it's a revolt against God's good rule, that it's humanity saying, no, we want to be in charge of that. We don't want to submit to you. We don't want to follow instructions. We don't want to trust you. We don't want to believe that you're good or for our good. We'll take it from here. Thank you.
So sin enters the world. And it's interesting what happens if you look at Genesis 3, starting in verse 8, after they had done this. It says,
> And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
Which is just a hint of how God intended it to be. He was just going to show up, walk around the garden. His presence was going to be with them. It was going to be delightful. But the LORD God called to the man and said, Where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. They were naked. When God created humanity, it says that they were both naked and they were unashamed. Then when sin enters the world, they notice that they're naked and they hide. And I believe that this has entered into the heart of humanity. We still dream about it. You still have that dream where you all of a sudden realize you are completely and utterly exposed. That was ripped away from us. This ability to have this sort of freedom and lack of self consciousness. Do you know how unselfconscious you have to be to be naked and not notice? It's one thing to forget your belt. It's another to forget all of that entirely and to not even notice and not even care. And the amount of freedom and the amount of peace that there is for that to exist in that way, and it's gone. Because sin brings guilt and shame and separation from the man to the woman and from us and God. So that from then on we want to hide from God. That's what enters the world. This is then the curse happens. The curse falls upon the people and God curses existence from this out of their rebellion. And this is known as the fall, which is where we existed in this state with the Lord that we have now fallen from. And then they are removed from the garden and death enters the world. And now they will die. And we've missed the garden ever since.
You know how you can get used to stuff? Stuff can just become normal. You don't even think about it. This is one of the ways I feel like that the world tells me that this story is true. One of my personal. Where it resonates with me, where I can feel this is because we're able to get used to so much. I remember when my wife and I, we had been married a couple years and we went to my family's like Christmas or Thanksgiving. It was something. We were eating a nice meal together. I don't remember exactly what it was. We went in the house and my mom has like a hutch, but it's like a glass case with stuff in it that you can look at, but you're not supposed to open the case, because inside the glass case is more glass. What protects glass better than glass? So we have one of those. We're there and my dad says, hey, come here, I want to show you something. And he opens the hutch, and inside of it he goes, check this out. And there is a dead hummingbird in there. He's like, isn't that cool? It's not like a stuffed dead hummingbird. Just one he found outside, he brought inside, stuck in the hutch. He says, usually they're beating their wings so fast, you don't ever get to see them. Look at how pretty their wings are. Also, look at how cool his tongue is, because its tongue was hanging out of its mouth. And I said, that's cool. We closed the hutch, we ate our meal. We get in the car, we're two minutes away, and my wife goes, what on earth was that? And I said, what? I had no clue what she was talking about. She said, the bird. I said, what bird? Because it had happened before the meal. And then I was like, oh. She said, the dead hummingbird that we ate next to that was in the display case. That bird. That's the bird. And I was like, oh. And then it dawned on me that that might be weird, but in my house, it's not weird. You find anything cool and dead or bonish, and you just bring it in and you go, look at this. You don't usually get to see what's on the inside of a turtle. Well, now you can. And then we just stick it somewhere in our house. Sometimes you stick it in an ant hill first, and then they get the stuff off of it. Then you bring it in your house. We're not psychos. That bird was in that hutch for several years. My older brother at one point said, it's cool. I cut the tongue out of it so it doesn't look as bad anymore. We're capable. There's so much stuff that you get used to as normal. You just get used to it. This is normal. This is how this works. This is normal food. This is normal dress. This is normal talk. This is what you know a house smells like. This is normal. And you only notice it when it's somebody else's stuff. Then you can see it. But you can get used to everything. But there's something in us that has not once ever gotten used to how broken sin is and how death works. You can bury someone who is 97, and something in you rages that, this should never happen. I should never have to say goodbye to people. This should never happen. And we can tell ourselves, yeah, but it was as good as it could be. And it's like, it's not. Because something in me tells me this is wrong. And there's a reality to eternity and the garden are in us because we were made for them. And we can still feel that we've lost them. This is in us, that something has been lost. And so we say, as we look at this, we say, we see it. We see that God made us for something beautiful. We see that we lost it. We feel it. Humanity was created to live in perfect relationship with God, joining in the fellowship trinity. However, the first humans rebelled against God and chose to live outside of God's perfect rule. And we've been living outside of that rule ever since.
So number four, it gets personal. As a continuing part of that rebellion, I am in my natural state, sinful and separated from God. I have earned God's wrath towards me an eternity in hell. Let's look at the first part of that sentence. As a continuing part of that rebellion, I am in my natural state, sinful and separated from God. That we have participated, we have joined Adam and Eve. This is known as original sin, that we're born with this. Romans 5 says,
> Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.
There's not one of us that has not joined the rebellion. There's not one of us that has not sinned. And you say, well, what is sin? Well, certainly it is disobeying. Certainly it's that God says, this is how the world should work. This is what is good, this is what is right. And we don't do that. So you have things like the Ten Commandments. We're going to set aside the first few because those first few deal with how we relate to God. But let's just look at the ones that tell us how we relate to each other. We'll come back to the first few in a second. Don't steal, don't kill. Jesus shows up and says that anger is the same thing going on in our heart, that when we hate somebody in our heart, we're doing the same thing. Don't commit adultery. Jesus shows up and suggests, lust is the same thing happening in our heart, that it's going on inside of us whether we're acting on it or not. Don't covet, don't want something that someone else has. We can't even walk around without participating in these. And we would all agree the world would be better if those things didn't happen. We're not looking at them going, those are ridiculous. It's like, no, those would be good. It'd be great if I could live in a place like if I told you there's a city you can move to and nobody ever breaks the church Ten commands. You're like, sign me up. That'd be great. You know much money we lose to the fact that people steal constantly. How big of a drain on society that is? How much of your life is spent trying to protect yourself from someone harming you or stealing from you? How much of your thought process goes to that, how much of your energy goes to that, how much anxiety goes to that? We would love for that. But we participate in them. I've stolen things. I don't want people to steal from me, but I've taken stuff from other people. We've done this. We bear false witness. We've whispered about people behind their back. We've said, you know why they do that? You don't even know why they do that. You just got an angry guess. You want to hear my blatant angry guess about this person? You don't say that. You say, I know why they did that. I know why they said that. Would you like for me to share some false witness with you? But it's deeper than that. It's not just that we disobey, but the first ones are that we would love God, that we would have no other gods before him, that it would be him and him alone. And the second one is that we would not make any graven images. And that's exactly what happens. That we would not have any sort of idolatry. That's exactly what happens in the garden, where it's not just that they disobey him, it's that they want something else more than they want Him. And we do that. How often are we going, God, I really don't want you. I just want your stuff. I just want the good parts of life. I don't really care. A whole lot of people who are saying, I'm a Christian is really just, if he's the person who give me the good stuff, then I'll follow him. But I just want the stuff. I'm in it as long as my kids behave. I'm in it as long as my health is here. And if he won't give me those things, then I'll go find something else, because I really just want him to give me the stuff. He's a means to an end. This is what Romans 1 says, that we can see God in creation, but we don't want Him. We swap him out for anything else. We don't give him glory, which is a fundamental fracture of the existence of the world. We're turning it upside down that God is essentially wonderful. And we're going to say I want some other stuff, which is a rebellion against all of creation. It's a rebellion against your very nature. So we do that. The other thing that happens is we exalt self. Boy, you love you some. We do. It's like I can't see past myself sometimes. Even when you're depressed, you still want good things to happen to you. You're like, I'm the worst. Hope I get a raise. We can't. We're self centered. One of the best ways to see this is to take a group photo. Whose face you looking at in that picture? You're not like, oh, look at all my friends. You're going, where am I at? I've taken pictures with my wife and then been like, that's a good picture. And she's been like, my eyes are closed. It's like, I didn't even look at you. Her hair's in her face. It's going through her mouth like this. I'm like, this looks good. Are you on Instagram? Pop that thing on there, just looking at myself. And then we have self righteousness. So not only the self centeredness, the self focus, but then we turn it into, well, I'll be good enough and I'll earn enough, and then God will owe me because how great I am. So even in our righteous acts and our morality, and we'll talk more about that next week, we turn it inward. And then we want sovereignty. We want to be the people who decide what's right and wrong. That's what Adam and Eve were doing. And how much do we do that? How many times have you read the Bible? How many times have you been with your group and even where we're trying and you're going, I don't know, it just doesn't seem right to me. I don't know about that. I just don't feel like God would say that. It's like we just read it and we just react. There's something in me that wants to pick. How many people will go, well, if there's a God like that, then I don't believe in him. And all they're saying is, if I was in the garden, I'd eat that apple because I'm the one who's gonna pick what's good and what's evil, what's right and what's wrong. I'm in charge of that. I can feel it. I can just sense it. You all know how much we do that. I'm just gonna follow my gut on this one. Don't. You're bad at stuff. I'm a grown man, but within the past couple years, I got pink eye. I shouldn't be trusting me with, like, good and evil. We should understand that there's something wrong with us in this rebellion and that we've joined. So that's what we look, we say, okay, we see the rebellion that they committed, and we see that we've joined. Joined. We see that this is deep in us. I want to show you Romans 3, because Romans 3 is not. It's getting after it. Paul says, what then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks are under sin.
> As it is written: "None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one." "Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive." "The venom of asps is under their lips." "Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness." "Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known." "There is no fear of God before their eyes."
If you zoom out, if you're looking down from heaven, if you're in a place where there is no sin and you're looking at the earth, this is a really good description of it. Now we know that whatever the law says, so he's quoting the law, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by the works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
So we look at this and we say, okay, I see it. I see myself in this. Ephesians 2 says that we're dead and children of wrath that we're following Satan. Romans 5, 11 and Philippians 3 say that we're enemies of God. Romans 8 and Colossians 1 say that we're hostile to God. Romans 1 says we hate God. This is what we're like on our own. We don't want his rule, we don't want his instruction. We don't want him. We just want stuff to be good for us, whatever that looks like. Nobody had to teach you how to sin. Nobody has to teach little kids how to sin. I got two little kids. Nobody was coaching them up on sin at my house. I mean, we sinned in front of them every once in a while, but we weren't trying to get them to follow our, you know, we weren't sitting them aside and be like, hey, you hadn't discovered lying yet. Let me explain that to you. They're just doing it. It's crazy. You're talking to a three year old covered in powdered sugar and they're like, I don't know about donuts. What are you talking about? Donut. I don't even know if I've ever heard that word. And it's like, you little. What is this? And then we grow up, we learn these things are bad. They've happened to us. We don't like them. We know they decay society. We know that God tells us not to, and we still do it. There are things that you're actively fighting against that you don't want. You know, they're destructive for you. And you're going, there's something wrong with me. Yeah, there is.
So then it says, this second sentence in number four for us is, because of my sin, I have earned God's wrath towards me an eternity in hell. So I'm going to show you places in the Bible that articulate wrath and hell so that we can see it, because it's God's response to sin. He has two responses to sin. One is, he chases people to redeem them. And two, he has wrath and judgment. Romans 2 says, we know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. He just listed off sins, and he says, we know that God's judgment rightly falls on them. And the reality is we actually do believe it's right. You want them to catch the bad guy. You want there to be some sort of justice. You don't want evil people to get away with it. If you've watched a movie where the bad guy wins, you don't like that, that bothers you. You don't want to watch a movie where the guy you hated the whole time walks off and gets free at the end. You want the good guy to catch him. That we want justice. It's just when it turns on us that we start going, well, hold on a second. It says,
> Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.
So he says, God's gracious to us, that we would turn away from these things, that we would repent. He says, but your heart doesn't repent, and you're storing up wrath for the day of wrath. When his judgment is revealed, there's a temptation for us to go, well, I thought God being wrathful was like an Old Testament thing, but in the New Testament, that doesn't happen. The New Testament articulates that there's a way out of it very clearly, that there's hope in the midst of it, but God's wrath is still coming on sin and sinners. Jesus talks more about hell than anybody else. And you know why he talks about hell more than anybody else? Because it's real and he loves you. When I'm with my boys and we're around something dangerous, I talk about it a lot. Back up. Get away from that. Don't touch it. It will electrocute you. Stop. I will tell them even aggressively at times. Back up. Get away from that. Jesus is doing that. This is what he says in Mark 9.
> If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
That hell in Jesus' description is internal and external eternal torment. There's a worm, it's an internal discomfort. There's fire. That's external comfort. And the worm never dies and the fire never stops. And if that's real, and if Jesus knows it's real so much that he would come to die to save us, isn't it beautiful that he tells us over and over again, you don't want to go there. You don't want that to happen. He talks about it a lot. He says it's a place where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. He calls it outer darkness. He calls it destruction. Second Thessalonians chapter 1 Paul says,
> When the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.
We believe that there are certain things that are wicked and evil to do and that if you don't believe in hell, if you're going, I don't know about that. That seems awful. And we're talking about things we might look at someone and go, if they choose to pursue this type of life, that will lead them towards something awful that'll ruin their life. If they begin to do drugs like that, that'll mess their life up. They should not do that. That will be bad for them where Christians we believe in eternity, so we believe that when we choose a trajectory of rebellion, we just think the stakes are higher than just your life here will be bad. We also believe that sin unrepentance and lack of worship are a complete rejection of God and the fabric of all existence and therefore have eternal consequences. To reject God has massive consequences that go on for eternity. If we don't see our sin, then the fact that Jesus comes to live a perfect life where it says that all have sinned and therefore all have died. Jesus didn't sin, so he didn't deserve death. It was unearned when he died, and therefore he was the only one who had the credit to pay others. If you died on the cross, you'd be paying for your sin. But because Jesus didn't have sin, he's able to pay for ours. We look and say there's this rebellion and there's this people that are running headlong away from God and they're choosing willfully to do it, gleefully, spitefully, continually running from him and that he loves us so much and designed us to exist with him that he pursues to the point of dying. And then he rises so that we might know that his death was effective for sinners. And then there's a proclamation of forgiveness in his name. But the people who line up for forgiveness are the people who know they have debt. If we do not see this rebellion and our place in it, then we will not love Jesus. We will not be overwhelmed by the goodness of the gospel. If we do not see the depravity and the brokenness of our own souls and our inability to save ourselves without somehow exalting ourselves, that that would be the only route we could take would be some sort of moralistic self exaltation to the point that we are still fundamentally rejecting Christ because we just want more of ourselves. If we can't see that we're in a trap of sin that we cannot get ourselves out of because we're already guilty and we deserve death, and that the only way to try to fix it would be to declare our own righteousness which flies in the face of his goodness, and that we need Jesus, then we won't run to Him. But if we understand our sin, oh, the cross is beautiful. And we can feel the love of Jesus when He says he loves us, that he died for us, when John 3:16 says,
> For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
You see that he's not just doing something nice for you, but he's doing what he intended to do all along, which is to have us live with him and know him and love him, that we're invited in. There's going to be tears in our eyes on that day that he's going to wipe away, but he's going to be feeling the same sort of thing as he rejoices in the redemption of his people, because he longs for it too, that that joy will be shared because that's what he's wanted. I have the opportunity today to a young couple in our church is getting married and I get to be the officiant. One of the passages I love to talk about when I do that is Ephesians 5.
> Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
We look at our rebellion and we look at our sin. And then we see Jesus sprinting after the church and giving himself up so that he might have her. It says he washes us and there's no spot or wrinkle or blemish or any such thing. That's the type of love that we're invited into. But in order for us to see it and to love it and to rejoice in it, we have to know the type of sin that we have. Let's pray.
Father, I pray that our experience with sin, with the knowledge of our rebellion, would not be mental, but that you would help us to feel it and to know it, to see the darkness of our own hearts, so that the offer of forgiveness carried out in the cross by Christ would be good news and so that we might trust you. In Jesus name, amen.
The band's going to come back up. I would invite you if you have never really considered your sin. I would invite you to begin to try to understand the nature of your brokenness and the offer to believe in Jesus. To just say, I trust you. I don't trust me to do this. I trust you to reverse in some ways what happened in the garden where we said, I'll be in charge of this. To come and say, I can't be in charge of this. You have to do it. I need you to save me. To go to the cross and say, I don't want my sin. I want you and I need your rescue and I need your redemption. I need your hope. I need you to be the one who does this. And if we believe in our heart and confess with our mouth, we will be saved. And there are none that call on him that would be brought to shame. Nobody trusts in Jesus and is put to shame.
Re:Member Core Doctrines I: Word of God, Trinity
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Spencer. I am one of the pastors here. We started a new series last week. We finished up First Samuel. We'll get back to Second Samuel in the new year. We started a series called Remember where We Are Remembering. We are walking through what it looks like to be a member here as we walk through our membership commitment. So we're taking the next few months to walk through this commitment. Normally, as we study through books of the Bible, we get to look at the text and follow along with what God is doing in his redemptive story in this world. But this is something where we get to walk through 14 membership commitments that we have written that our membership abides by and see where these actually come from, the scriptures, to see why we believe these things and why it is good to be bound by these beliefs together as a church, as we seek to be a gospel centered community on mission. So this commitment actually a lot of ways, when you read it, actually functions a lot like a discipleship game plan. And that's one of the things that we'll see over the next couple of months that this is if you want to figure out who we're called to be and how we're called to make disciples. These 14 statements kind of provide an outline for that. So if you're new and you've been coming around for a bit, this is actually a very good time to walk with us as we walk through this membership commitment to see the things that bind us together in belief and practice. But if you've been here for a few years, my hope is that this would be an encouragement, that this would be a shot in the arm. This would be galvanizing. This would help us remember why we commit to be members of this church and what we hope to do. So what we're going to do is look at two statements this morning. The first two statements that are foundational for really the rest of the statements that flow out of them. So we're going to see these first two foundational statements. But let me tell you first about how 98 people lost their lives a few years ago. So a few years ago in Florida, there was a condo building that collapsed. I mean, it just looked like a demolition. It just completely collapsed. And 98 people instantly lost their lives. And I remember watching the video from that. I remember me kind of echoing the same sentiments that so many people have, which is, how in the world does that happen in America in 2021? Like, how is it possible for an entire building to just collapse? And everyone was like, I mean, you've seen throughout history, this has happened with different buildings, but with all the building codes, all the things we have here, how does a building just fall? And as they started to do the studies on it, it became very clear that what happened with this building is what happens with a lot of buildings over time. But the foundation of this building was not sound. It seemed they had cut corners. It seemed they had neglected things, and the foundation was crumbling, and it was unable to support the weight of everything above it. And when they did this, when they neglected the foundation of this building, catastrophe ensued. It was a disaster. It was awful. And I can think of no better metaphor than to think about what happens if you build your life upon the wrong foundation. That as you think about faith, what it means to build your life on the wrong beliefs. Because if you do not have a solid foundation to build your faith upon, it will crumble under the weight of everything above will not last. It will break and it will fall. And these first two commitments are unbelievably important to us. They're important for us. They are the foundation upon which we build the rest of our faith. So we're going to walk through these two commitments. We're going to see how important they are, because they are how we view the Bible and how we view our God. So let me pray, and then we'll walk through this together.
Heavenly Father, I pray that you might help us either discover or for some of us, rediscover what it means to be a people that build our lives upon you. And may that be so compelling to our hearts that we not just be hearers of the Word, but we would be doers of the Word in responding in faith and in repentance and reorienting our lives in a way that honor you. In Jesus name, Amen.
All right, so we're gonna get this first. Commitment number one. The Bible is God's inerrant revelation of Himself to us. And I accept it as the authority over my life. Life. That's the Bible. The first 60 or the 66 books in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. If there's a blue Bible around you, that's it. That that Bible is God's inerrant, meaning it is truthful, it is trustworthy, the inerrant revelation of Himself to us that God reveals Himself to us in His Word. It's how we know God. And I accept it as the authority over my life, meaning I submit myself to this God through His Word and trusting him and believing him and being obedient. To his will. That's what this commitment says. And some will ask, wait a second, why are you starting with the Bible? Why don't you start with God? Why would you elevate the Bible above God? That seems out of order. And I could understand how it may seem that way. When you read a lot of systematic theologies, which are just theology textbooks that have organized our beliefs in a way that's systematic. That's why it's called systematic theology, you guys. In case you didn't know, they start with the Word. And the reason why is because before we get to who God is, we have to start with a baseline. How do we actually know who this God is to begin with? How can we actually know Him? What is our source? Now, there are two sources for how God reveals Himself to us. The first is what's called general revelation. This is creation revealing who our God is. That when you look at the Milky Way, that when you look at the Grand Canyon, when you feel that there's something bigger than yourself and you feel small and you start to see someone had to have made this. That is how God reveals Himself generally. Romans chapter one captures this in verses 19 and 20.
> because what may be known of God is plain to them, for God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:19–20 ESV)
What we see in that is this reality that the heavens, the stars, the beautiful mountains and valleys and sea and rivers, all of it in its grandness, reveals the. The invisible attributes of God, namely His divine power, that a creator made this, that feeling that everyone feels that's built into us because God has revealed Himself through creation. When you read Psalm 19, which is a psalm that regularly shows up in our call to worship, the first half of that psalm is picturing how God reveals himself to creation, how it shows his glory. So that's one way God reveals himself. The second way is what's called special revelation. This is how God specifically specially reveals Himself to us through His Word, through the Scriptures, through from Genesis to revelation, these 66 books in the Bible. And that's how we get to know God. Specifically the Book of Hebrews, which is a New Testament letter that is capturing how Christ fulfills the old covenant. So it very helpfully ties together the Old Testament and the New Testament.
> Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. (Hebrews 1:1–2 ESV)
Then we get this picture of he talks about our fathers by the prophets. That is the Old Testament, that God spoke through the prophets. That's how we have the Old Testament, the Old Covenant. But in the new covenant of Christ, Jesus speaks. And when you play that out, what that is is the Gospels, the recordings of Jesus teachings. And then the apostles who God used to write Scripture to. We saw this last week to churches in the New Testament, to people of the New Testament. These are the apostles who carried the teachings of Christ with them and God spoke through them to us. The Old, the New Covenant together, the Old and New Testament. This is God's word to us that reveal more of who God is in a way that creation cannot, in a way that is powerful. In 2 Timothy 3, 16, 17, it says all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training and righteousness. That the man of God may be complete equipped for every good work.
> All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16–17 ESV)
That language of breathed out. That's where we get the word inspired. That God inspires through men his eternal wonderful truth. And God uses this to bring us into faith. But he uses this to teach, to reproof, to correct, to train us in righteousness that we may be equipped for every good work that God has called us to do. The Scriptures are powerful and they are true. That God has spoken truthfully. We use the phrase inerrant means devoid of any error. This is something we've taught for years in our church. We've talked over and over again about how God speaks truthfully, that our Bibles are trustworthy. And after teaching this for years, this is something that actually in our membership commitment, we've added this word inerrant. And we'll talk about this at family meeting to help clarify. This is something that we've always believed and it's something we should build our faith upon to trust God that when he has spoken, he has spoken truthfully. That certainly there are times in the Bible where it's hard to figure out what this text means versus this text. But as at the end of the day, when the dust settles, we can trust our Bibles unbelievably trustworthy. There's so many people who've dedicated their lives to helping see some of the nuances of how the Greek and the Hebrew were transcribed over time and how it's completely trustworthy. We spent some time in this in the past to help us see that our Bibles are so unbelievably trustworthy. We've looked at some stuff from like, Wesley Huff. We've done some video work on that in the past to help us see that man. There's so much that we can see that we can build our lives upon this as being true. And the Bible testifies to this. We look at Psalm 19, the second half of Psalm 19. It begins in verse 7.
> The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; 8 the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. (Psalm 19:7–8 ESV)
Law, testimony, precepts, commandment. These are all phrases that mean the word of God. And it is perfect and it is sure and it is right and it is pure. And you'll see this over and over again. The Scriptures are trustworthy. They're reliable. That when God speaks, we can trust him. And not just trust him, but obey him. That we would see him as the authority in our lives. The Scriptures are authoritative. The way God speaks, we respond. So much so that when he says, flee from sexual immorality, we say, yes, my flesh wants this, but I'm going to flee. I'm going to run from this. Because I know ultimately I'm going to trust you over my own desires. That when God says, keep yourself from the love of money and be content with all things, we say, I know that I live in a culture that pushes me to build my life on success, the American dream, but I'm going to run from that. I'm going to keep myself free from that. I'm going to trust you above my own instincts, God. That when God speaks, we respond. This is unbelievably important. This is foundational. Because the Bible has to be part of this foundation that helps us trust who our God is. When he says who he is and it reveals who God is, which is our second commitment that we would know this God commandment number two. The God that scripture reveals has existed forever as a trinity. God the Father, God the Son, Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit.
So the God that scripture, that's the Bible that you have reveals, just talked about, has existed forever, meaning that God is outside of time in a way that breaks our brain. That time is a linear thing that he has created and eternity past, which we don't know how that works. God forever existed. He exists in outside of time. And when time ends after time and eternity future, God forever exists, which again, we don't Know how that works. Our finite minds can't understand that, but has existed forever as a trinity. God the Father, God the Son, Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit. Now, Trinity is not a word you will find in the Bible. It's not a word that you'll see in the Scriptures in the same way that inerrant is not a word you'll find in the Bible. But over time, we've had to. We've had to come up with words and concepts to describe what's happening in the Scripture and also answer false teachings over time. And that's where the doctrine of the Trinity came. In the first few centuries, as the early church fathers were looking at the Scriptures, trying to understand who our God is, we came up with the doctrine of the Trinity, built upon the Scriptures, which just means tri unity, our triune God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, three distinct persons, completely and fully one God. Which, as we try to understand that, again, our brains do not compute. I got three kids, 10, 8, and 6. When we read the Bible together, when we talk through different theological things I'm trying to instill and teach to them, they get to the Trinity and we've had this conversation, and they'll be like, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. Our God is one, but he's three. But three isn't one. And they just go, what? That doesn't make sense. And I say, welcome to the party. Christians for centuries have sat in the mystery of who our God is, that he is one and that he's three. And, yep, what you're feeling right now is very normal. And there have been ways to try to explain who our God is as a triune God. There's a symbol that's been used for years in church history that I find helpful, and it's been very, very, very common for many centuries. And it helps us see that the Father is God, but the Father is not the Son, and is not the Holy Spirit. And Jesus is God, but he's not the Holy Spirit. He's not the Father. The Holy Spirit is God, but he's not the Father, and he's not the Son, Distinct, but all God. And it's like, what I know. It's hard. It's hard for us to understand it. It's paradoxical. It may seem contradictory to us because we operate in finite rules, in finite order of the universe. Our God is infinite and stands outside of the finite order that he created. So we take this in faith to understand who our God is. And the Church did this. Y' all looking at the Scriptures, looking at Genesis 1:26, it says, then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness.
> Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." (Genesis 1:26 ESV)
That is God, us, our in conversation with himself, making humanity in his image. That when Jesus gives the great commission, he says, go therefore, make disciples of all nations baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
> Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, (Matthew 28:19 ESV)
That when we baptize people in the name of our God, it is Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Three in one. In the New Testament, when you get to certain sections that are encouragements, you see 1 in 2nd Corinthians 13:14. It says, the grace of the Lord Jesus and the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
> The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (2 Corinthians 13:14 ESV)
And it's this language of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, that God the Father, in his deep love for us, sends Christ the Son to be crucified for us to conquer the power of death, of the resurrection, to bestow grace upon us. That the work of the Holy Spirit renews and brings to life in our hearts and carries us through to completion until we see God face to face. This is the work of our triune God. And it's something that the Church has grappled with for a very long time. That's one thing I don't think we appreciate in the modern setting. We don't appreciate that the first few centuries of the Church was really trying to understand this, really trying to get this right, really having big debates and trying to understand our God correctly. And I think we take those battles for granted. I do. We'll try to explain God with cheap illustrations that don't, not only don't do justice, but speak wrongly about our God. I've heard this for years. This is a classic illustration. Some will say that, you know, God is like water, and at room temperature it's a liquid, but when you freeze it, it turns into a solid because it's ice. That's the second form of water. But the third form of water is when you heat it up and it turns into a vapor, it's a gas. So it's all one substance. One substance, but three different forms. And people go, oh, yes, that's a great way to understand it. And church history goes, no, no, no, that's a historical heresy called modalism. One God, three forms. That is not what I just put on the screen earlier. No, that's something the Church fought over for a very long time. To not see as one God and three substances. No, one God, three distinct persons, three and one. And it's hard to wrap our minds around this, but we should go with what the Scriptures give us. We should not try to go outside of it. We should not try to oversimplify this for human understanding. No way. And we should acknowledge those false teachings that get the Trinity wrong and realize that there's danger in that it leads to judgment. That Jehovah's Witness, Mormonism, Oneness, Pentecostals, Christian Scientists, Unitarians, all preach a heretical view of the Trinity and that leads to judgment. We should seek to remember our history and to remember our Bibles, because those versions are not true in any real biblical sense or historical sense at all. The Bible reveals our triune God, that we get to know who he is and all of his mystery and all of his wonder without trying to oversimplify this for our finite minds. I heard a lecture in seminary once. We had a guest lecturer who came in and he was lecturing on Trinitarian theology. And I so appreciated. He was quoting a guy named Gregory of Nazi Ansus as a church father. So don't get humbled on his last name. He's like 3rd, 4th century, so has nothing to do with the Nazis, just has an unfortunate last name for history. But he was quoting Gregory who said, I cannot think on the one without quickly being circled by the splendor of the three, nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the One. And the lecturer was making a point that we should be overwhelmed by the threeness of our God, that our God is three. And we were so blown away and captivated by his three ness that we should run back to the oneness of God and see who our God is as the one true God. And we've thought too much of the oneness of our God. We should be driven to the splendor of the three ness of God and be driven back between three and one, three and one. And to keep our minds always there. And I've always found that to be wildly helpful for my soul. To think of our God as the one true God, and also to think about the Father and how loving and how wonderful he is, and how sovereign and wonderful our God is, and think of Christ and His beautiful work that's been given to us that we don't deserve, and to think of the nearness of the Spirit at work in us. We should be thinking about our God in trinitarian language, in our souls, in our speech regularly.
So that's our first two commitments. The Bible is God's revelation of Himself to us. And I accept it as the authority over my life. And the God that revealed the scripture reveals has existed forever as a trinity. God the Father, God the Son, Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit. These two commitments are foundational, foundational to Christian belief. If you reject them, you're in danger of judgment. Listen, they cannot be just nice thought exercises. They can't just be neat ideas that are just floating. That we ascent. We agree. We agree to. It's like, yeah, I get that. And then just mentally agree with it without believing in it, building our life upon it and orienting our reality in line with it. Because if we don't do that, we're in danger. This cannot be just head knowledge. It cannot be. I mean, you can, with head knowledge, agree that gravity exists. In theory. You can have mental agreement that says, you know what? Yeah, it makes sense. It's a decent idea. In theory, that makes sense. But if you don't actually believe in gravity, if you don't actually orient your life as if gravity is a reality, you're in danger. You will find yourself on the Gervais street bridge thinking, I don't know, I mean, maybe it's true. Mentally it makes sense. But I also, I think I can invent my own beliefs here. Maybe I can fly. Maybe I'll float off this bridge. And if you do that, you will crash into the congaree. And if the crash doesn't kill you, one of those gators they've been taking pictures of near the bridge will snatch you up. You can't. This, this cannot be just mental. Yeah, yeah, no, no. Our reality has to be built upon this. And if it does, if that's not what we do, we are in trouble. We're in danger. But life is so much better when we orient ourselves on what is actually true and build our lives upon that.
So I have two challenges as we close up to think through these two commitments as we want to grow in this as Christians. And the first is we become people of the Word. That we should be a people that make the scriptures central in our lives and fight to do this over and over again. I have a few different ways we can do this. The first is we see that our worship is centered in the word of God. That our worship is centered in the word of God. That as we gather here on Sundays to realize and to celebrate that the Word is primary, that we begin with a call to worship that comes from the scriptures. When you hear the call to worship, you should not just be checking out and be thinking of other things, but should be thinking about the words that we are reading. That point to who our God is. That we have scripture readings, liturgy readings that we should not check out from. We should actually clue it and see the importance of reading the Word out loud together. That we should realize that our songs are chosen not haphazardly. There's a team that chooses songs that align with what we're teaching, that align with, that help teach us wonderful theology that we can sing deep into our souls and to sing that joyfully in a way that helps the Word be centered in our heart. This is why we preach sermons from the Bible and honestly why we do this. Most of our sermons are just going through books of the Bible. That's most of our teaching. Over 80% of our teaching is what's called expository preaching. For theology nerds, that'll mean something to you. For others of you, it just means that we're going through books of the Bible verse by verse, expositing the text, helping understand who our God is. And this. Most of our preaching is just going through books of the Bible. And every now and then we'll do a topical series like this. But we do that because a honestly topical series, not our best. Our best stuff is just being honest with you. It's harder for us. It's a lot easier, and it makes a lot more sense just to go through books of the Bible. But the more important reason is we just want to walk through the Bible. And if we're in charge and we get to pick text here, here, here and there, we're going to pick things that we want. I'd rather just pick books of the Bible, walk through them, not skip things, lean into the difficult stuff and get the Word into our hearts. And that's what our teaching is. Our teaching is scriptures centered in the scriptures. But we have to be, as a people, mindful of this and joyfully embracing this. The Word of God should be central in our worship. And when we leave here, every. Every time we leave on Sunday, we say the church is plan A for advancing the kingdom, for advancing the Gospel. There is no plan B. We mean that. Which means that our evangelism needs to be centered in the Word of God. That when we leave here and we take the word that we've been given, our evangelism needs to be centered in the Word of God. Which means that when we talk to people who are not believers, it cannot just be wise and persuasive arguments. Those can be helpful. But if you never get to the gospel that flows from the scriptures, you're not actually preaching the gospel. But if you think that preaching the gospel is just friending someone, befriending someone, which we should do as Christians, we should be the most hospitable, the best of friends, the most reliable. But being a friend to someone isn't the gospel. It's not. There's a phrase that gets thrown around quite a bit that says, use the gospel, preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words. And it gets attributed to somebody who didn't even say that. But that guiding ethos has for the last few decades just made us be, okay, I'll just share the gospel of my life. And it's like, no, you can live out the gospel in a way that makes the gospel compelling, but you have to say words. You got to declare who Jesus is. You should memorize some scriptures. You should know how to break down Romans 6:23 and sit with someone and help them see who God is. Our evangelism should be word centered. As we scatter into community groups. That's the third thing. Our groups are word centered. We come together as groups regularly and we study the Word because there's power in the word of God exposing the thoughts and intentions of our hearts. Hebrews 4:12 that we should see this. And as we are walking with other Christians, we should point each other to the Word. That means an accountability that when someone is sinning, we should lovingly and winsomely compel them from the scriptures to say, hey, here's what obedience looks like. One of the things we say is when we practice is we use the phrase good news before good advice. What that means is that when someone shares a problem, we don't want to jump to, okay, here's a bunch of life advice to be able to fix that. No, we want to start with the Gospel. We want to pause and say, hey, can I remind you of who you are in Christ? That your identity doesn't come from your work. It doesn't come from what you do in the office. Your identity comes from the God who saved you, who redeemed you, who set you apart to love him and delight in him. And one of the ways you do that is you actually glorify him in your work. But step one, like you need to believe that first. Now let's talk about your problem outside of that or flowing out of that. But that comes from the scriptures. Those ideas, the gospel comes from the Scriptures. We should be word centered in how we point one of the two Christ and our groups and our groups needed to continue in being word centered. We should be mindful of if the majority of things that we are saying are absent and detached from the Scriptures and we should course correct if that is the case. Fourth thing, our care is centered in the Word. The way that we care for one another is centered in the Word of God. That goes back to something similar. I just said that when someone has an idea about how to care for someone, we want to be able to take everything, every idea and filter that through the Word of God and see, is that biblical? Does that make sense in light of the teachings of the Scriptures? Because we want to be Bible people in how we care for one another. We want to be able to think scripturally and give Scripture when it's appropriate. Our pastoral counseling, which we do, is that at times it can be complex in the things that we go through, but ultimately at its root core, it's simply walking with other people who are struggling and helping them see. Do you see who God is in His Word? Do you see how knowing him and how delighting in him actually exposes some of the things in our own life? The brokenness, the sin, the struggles, the idolatry? We want to be a people whose care is centered in the Word of God. And lastly, we want to have spiritual disciplines that are centered in the Word of God. We want to be a people who stay disciplined in His Word in a way that truly takes the Scriptures, adores them, and meditates on them day and night. I want to be like that picture that we just read earlier and sang about in Psalm 1. It's planted in the streams of water that flow from our God and the living and abiding Word of God that bear fruit in our lives in wonderful ways. And I know over the years I've heard the popular rebuttal that says, okay, yeah, I mean, I get it, yeah, read your Bible. You know, I've been told that and I've done that and it didn't work. And as I've heard this over the years, I've thought about my own soul in this. What I've realized is I don't think we truly understand what it means to actually be rooted in the Word of God like we're supposed to. I don't think we truly understand what it means to meditate regularly in the Word of God. I think what happens is that, that our souls are so over entertained, so easily distracted, so glued to our phones that we are so now oriented to experience 20 second clips in a way that has made us so distracted, that the idea that we think is that alongside that we can Inject a few minutes of the Word in our day, here or there, every few days. And that. That somehow is supposed to counteract all of the things that we fill our soul with that rob us of joy in Christ. And God sometimes does, in those few moments, supernaturally, just in his wonderful power, work through the Word in that moment and reorient our souls. But often what happens in the lives of ordinary Christians in ordinary days is regularly meditating upon the Word of God in a way that seems saturates our souls so that when we are walking through whatever we're walking through, we're able to see it through the lens of the Gospel. And that's different, y'. All. When you study the faith of the people of old, of centuries ago, it's like they'd wake up and they'd read the Word of God and they wouldn't just leave it there. They'd pick it up and they meditated on it throughout the day. And they continue to think about it, continue to process it and chew on it and enjoy it. And then as the day closes, as their evenings close, they come back to the Word and they'd read it and they'd enjoy it. And even those Christians walked through seasons that were dry, that felt like a spiritual desert. But they persevered knowing that the path to getting to the other side of that is to continue to stay disciplined in beholding who our God is and His Word. So when I hear, yeah, I read my Bible, it didn't do anything for me. I'm just like, I don't know if we actually did. Not in the way the Scriptures outline, not in the way that we're supposed to. Not in the way that God invites us into. No, I don't. We cannot reject the power of God's Word as people under the authority of God's Word and make God the least influential position on our screens and in our souls. That cannot be. And I feel this, y'. All. I feel this personally right now. So as we look at our commitments, I know some of our commitment is going to cover this. We need to come back to being men and women who are disciplined in the Word of God, which means at times you're going to read things that you don't like. You're going to read the Scriptures and go, I don't know if I'd like that. One of the things I've appreciated over the years of walking with people is at times when you come up against something in the Bible that says, I don't like this. It's like that's okay. But in faith, trust the God who wrote it. And in faith what you'll see is that over time you may not like that, but at time you'll grow to believe that is actually ultimately what is good for you. And that God willing, he's going to change our hearts. That we might love the things that we once did not like at all. But that takes discipline and that takes some pursuit and that takes making God central in our lives. We should be people of the Word.
The second and the last is we should become people of God, become Bible people and God centered people. People love God. I don't mean that in a way that says that this is how you make yourself a Christian. That's not what I mean. I mean that if you're in Christ, we should be just of God in a way that Jesus taught when he said, pursue God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul. That we should be a people. That our intellect and our affections, our emotions, our whole being is oriented towards our triune God. We should think about God the Father in a way that says, I love our heavenly, my heavenly Father. That he's a better Father than any earthly Father I could have. He's a better authority figure than any authority figure I could have. That I'm going to trust in my heavenly Father. That I want to behold Christ the Son and think about all the ways every day as I sin, every day as I struggle to remember Jesus. Thank you that you bled and you died for my struggles, for my brokenness. That we remember the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives in a way that helps us remember that every moment of our lives, in every room, God is present with us. To believe that, that God is present with us. That even when we can't feel it, we know by faith he's with us. We should think and dwell and enjoy our triune God. One of the normative ways to do this is through prayer is to seek our triune God in prayer. Jesus taught the normative pattern of prayer is to the Father. So we should pray normally to the Father. Most of the prayer you see in the New Testament is to the Father, our Father who lives in heaven. But we also should pray with the rest of the Trinity in mind with Christ the Son and the Holy Spirit and be trinitarian and how we think about prayer. To think about God the Father that we are submitting to and enjoying in prayer. And Christ our great High Priest who offers our prayers to the Father and the Holy Spirit who prays for us when we don't know what to say ourselves. Our God is wonderful and he is good and we should orient our souls to toward our triune God and be God centered people, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one true God. And if we make him our pursuit, make him the goal of our affections, of our desires, God will form us in the people that he's called us to be. And I believe that if we build our lives on these first two commitments we walk through that we will set a foundation that is meant to last. That we will build our lives on a foundation that will not crumble. Y', all, I have. I'm serious. I have watched friends who seemed like they were on fire for Jesus, that raised their hands and worshiped and knew all the right phrases and knew all the right correct answers, who did not build their life on this foundation, who began to question the Bible, who began to question the validity of it, who became skeptical, who began to slowly drift in a way that they didn't just walk away from God, they became enemies of God and to this day are still throwing stones at Jesus and his movement. It is important for us to evaluate what are we building our life upon. What is the foundation that everything is built upon? These two commitments are vital for building a foundation that will last.
Let me close with the words of Jesus at the end of the Sermon on the mount in Matthew 7 and I want you to hear these if you have to close your eyes to focus, do so. But I want you to hear what Jesus says to us. He says, everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.
> Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. (Matthew 7:24–27 ESV)
What he just said is that everyone who hears my words hears Christ's words, believes, trusts, obeys, and builds their life upon them. It's like a wise person who built their house on the rock. Verse 25 and the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on the rock. That when the storms of this life shift you and beat upon you, when you feel suffering and trials and the storms of temptation, everything that begins to shake, you won't shift off of the rock because you were built on a solid foundation. He goes on to say, and everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house and it fell. And great was the fall it that Jesus warns and says, if you don't build your life upon me, upon Christ, upon our triune God who's revealed himself in his word. If you don't, it will not last. And when the storms of life come, you will be shifted. But we as a church resolve to commit ourselves to be built upon the rock that is Christ. These two foundational commitments are vital. And if we will build our lives upon pursuing and knowing and delighting and trusting our God and His Word, so that we might know who God is and respond to him in faith and repentance and delighting in him and trusting him and walking out joyfully in obedience, we will stand.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that you might help us begin. Some of us begin to see the beauty of the scriptures that reveal who you are. That we would not believe in anything else, in anyone else, that we would build our lives upon you as our solid rock and faith foundation. But Lord, that comes through your redemptive work in our hearts, through helping us to see you more clearly and growing in us spiritual fruit that helps us know you in Jesus name. Amen.
We're going to respond here by taking the Lord's Supper. I want to read from Mark chapter 14 to prepare our hearts to take the Lord's Supper. Here Jesus.
> And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body." And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." (Mark 14:22–25 ESV)
That when Jesus was sitting with them and he took the bread and he broke and he took the cup of the new covenant, he said, this is my work done for you. The second member of the Trinity looking at us saying, I love you so much that I came to have my blood shed for you. And if you're a Christian and your life is built upon the rock that is Christ, you get to in a moment joyfully come to the table confessing our sin, but confessing our wonderful Savior as revealed to us in the word of God. So in a moment, prepare your heart. There's gluten free back in that back corner over there. But come and take the Lord's Supper. But hear this. If you are not a Christian, if you haven't trusted in Christ My hope is this morning is you would not come to the table, but you would come to Christ. You would place your faith in him, and you'd build your life on the wonderful foundation that is our God. But when you're ready, come.
Re:Member The Why and What of Membership
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Good morning. My name is Spencer. I am one of the pastors here. So we, as I said last week, we are taking a break. We just finished up First Samuel and we are not going to jump straight into Second Samuel. We're going to do that in the new year. We're going to do a series called re member series called Remember. We'll do that through the fall and then we'll do give series and we'll come back to Second Samuel. We're excited about this series. This is an opportunity for us to revisit and remember what it means to be a member of this church. See how clever we are with titles, you guys. There you go. One clap. It's an opportunity for us to revisit what it means to be a member of this church. So we're going to over the next few months walk through our membership commitments and revisit the things that bind us together as beliefs and practices. And then if you are a member of this church, we'll have the opportunity this fall to actually recommit to membership. We're excited about that and we're going to have more information about that at our upcoming family meeting. So make sure that you are there if you're a committed member of our church, to be at family meeting. But we're thankful that we get to walk through this over the next couple months. These 14 different membership commitments that we have before we jump into those commitments today, I want to look at the why and the what of membership. We need to look at the why and the what of membership before we jump into what we actually commit to as a church. Because some folks will pose the question, why membership in the first place? Why do you have membership? Why belong to a church? Some people ask, is church membership even biblical? Like, where do you get this idea? So we're going to examine that idea while also being clear about what it means to be a member of this church. Like what is our membership commitment all about? And there's some language that we use that is going to sound very familiar, that if you ask what does it mean to be a member of of Mill City Church of Cayce, There's a phrase that will show up as we walk through this today. I know it's going to blow your mind like you've never heard it before. But we are a gospel centered community on mission. It's the language we use over and over again. I'm pretty sure it's on the wall somewhere in the lobby. But there's a reason we are that and there is a Reason why that really defines who we are as a church. And we're going to see that as we walk through why membership, but also what it means to be a member of this church. So I want to pray for us and then we will walk through this together.
Heavenly Father, I pray that you might help us have ears to hear this morning. I pray that you might help us see why it is good to belong, why it is good to commit to following you, to delighting in you, to loving one another, to being obedient, to take the gospel to our city. God, I pray you'd help us be present and we'd be not just hearers of the Word, but we would be doers of the Word. As we trust you, we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.
All right, so why do we practice church membership? Someone will ask, where in the Bible do you find the command to be a member of a local church? Now, this may come as a shock to some of you, but you're not going to find any one verse in the Bible that commands for you to be a part of a church through church membership. There's no Third Corinthians that shows up and says, and be a member of a local church and submit to the elders of that local church. There's not any one verse that really makes this crystal clear, which is if there was, it might make the conversation about membership a little bit easier over the years as we've had it. But what you will see is as you look through the Scriptures, you'll see that God is doing something in setting up his church. And that's what I want to do. For the first part in answering why membership? I want to do what's I want to do a biblical theology of church membership, which is going from the Old Testament to the New Testament to see how God is developing this people that is going to belong to him, with him at the center to declare His Excellencies to a lost world. So that's what I want to do, starting off in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis. So God chooses in the Book of Genesis, Abraham that he's going to form a people through. He promises Abraham he's going to have a great nation that's made through him. And in this selection of Abraham, we see that God is going to have a unique, special relationship with him and his people, unlike the rest of humanity. And there's this promise of this great nation, this great people that he's going to bless the nations through. And then when you get to the next Book of The Bible, the second book, the book of Exodus. You see that God takes his descendants, the twelve tribes of Israel who have been slaves in Egypt. He brings them out of Egypt. And when they're wandering in the wilderness in Exodus 19, you see really the formation and the formal covenant relationship that God establishes with his people. And in Exodus 19 he tells his people in verse 5,
> Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
These are the words he shall speak to the people of Israel. Then he tells them that you are my treasured possession. And as this is going to play out, he's going to take this people, his treasured possession to the promised land. He's going to set himself up in the center of his people to be a God centered people that are uniquely his, unlike any other aspect of creation, unlike any other people. And that this people is going to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. This people was meant to be separate from the nations that look different, that proclaim the excellencies of God as a light to the surrounding nations. And then this is Exodus 19, right before Moses goes up to Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. When he gets the Ten Commandments, you see the first four commandments and the Ten Commandments are God centered commandments. This is how to have right relationship with God and worshiping God alone. And then the next six are how to live in good community with one another, how to love one another, how to trust one another, don't lie, don't murder, don't steal. And then the rest of the Old Testament law is really expounding upon those 10 Commandments. It's helping them see in their context, in their time, this is what it means to be a people who has God at the center, who loves one another fiercely in a community that takes care of one another, that looks separate from the nations, that declares how good our God is. And when you read the rest of the Old Testament, you see a people that most of the time falls on their face in trying to live that out, that over and over again. They don't put God at the center, they worship other gods, they don't love each other, they don't serve each other, they take advantage of one another. And instead of looking separate than the nations in order to show how good their God is, they look just like the nations. And that is the reason that they need a Savior and there's this hope from the prophets proclaiming this Savior is going to come. And then Jesus comes.
Flip to the New Testament. When Jesus comes, he begins to develop this with new and better language. You see, if you just take the Gospel of Matthew, just start there. When you start reading the Gospel of Matthew, you're going to see what God is doing. In Matthew chapter 4, Jesus begins His ministry by preaching the gospel, proclaiming the gospel of his kingdom that is coming, and declaring the good news. And then he also chooses a people. He chooses the 12 disciples, these disciples whom he's going to build his church through. He begins teaching them. You keep flipping. Go to Matthew chapter five through Matthew chapter seven. You read the Sermon on the Mount. This is a retelling of the law and new and really better language, showing the heart of God all along for his people. What it looks like to put God at the center, what it looks like to take sin seriously, to live in community. We see some of this and more teaching, more of his ministry. When you get to Matthew chapter 11, you see that he commissions out his disciples. He puts them on a mission trip to begin to declare the good news of the Gospel to the people in the surrounding areas. You keep reading the Gospel of Matthew, you see more teaching, you see more of his work and his ministry. And then you get to Matthew chapter 18. And then Jesus begins to use a word to describe what this people is going to be, that he's making this new covenant people, and that is the church. The Greek word for that is ekklesia. It means church or assembly. And it shows up in Matthew 18. And Jesus begins to describe what this church is going to look like. It's going to be a people who take sin seriously, who hold each other accountable, who practice radical forgiveness. That is unlike the rest of the world. Jesus continues to teach. He continues to form his people. He continues to disciple his disciples. And then it is time for him to do the work that no one can do. He does the work of salvation. He takes his perfect record of righteousness with him to the cross. He dies on the cross for our sins because we were unable to to obey the law. He dies on the cross, taking judgment upon himself. He conquers death at the resurrection, removing the power of death over his people. And then he looks at his disciples at the end of Matthew and he tells them,
> Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
He tells them, you're going to take everything that you've learned from me over the last three years. This message of the gospel that I came to redeem you and save you. This message of what it looks like to be a people that are committed to having God at the center and loving one another. Well, you're going to take that to the nations where they're going to hear the gospel and believe and you can read Mark and Luke and John and you're going to see this story over and over again. Then you get the book of Acts where Jesus ascends to the right hand of God the Father being king over all creation. And then the Holy Spirit descends upon his people and the church begins in Acts 2. You read that Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit stands up, preaches the first sermon at Pentecost and 3,000 people, people place plus people place their faith in Jesus and are baptized. And then we see some of the very first acts of this church and responding to Christ in faith and baptism. It says in verse 42. We'll have more time to study this exact passage in community group this week. I just want to hit some of the highlights to help us see what God is doing here. In verse 42 he says,
> And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
That's the teachings of Christ. They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching. They were a gospel centered people. And it continues into the fellowship and the breaking of bread and prayers. You go to verse 44.
> And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
That they were a people that believed the gospel, devoted themselves to that teaching, but they devoted themselves to one another. They fellowshiped together, they broke bread together, they took care of each other's needs. They saw their brothers and sisters in Christ as more important than money and material things. And they're selling their stuff so that they can take care of one another. And then it goes in verse 47 and finishes.
> And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
That this message continues to be introduced to people who hear and believe and are brought into the church to continue to be a gospel centered community on mission to take the gospel to the world that desperately needed it. The church in Jerusalem continues to expand as you follow the story. Keep flipping through Acts. All of a sudden God has a plan to see scatter his people and involves the death of one of his servants, Stephen. He ordains the death of Stephen who's proclaiming the Good news of Jesus Christ and he's murdered for it. And in Acts chapter eight, after he's martyred, it says, and Saul approved of his execution. And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. And they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. And now we see that the plan is spreading, that it's not just a church in Jerusalem now, it's in Judea and it's in Samaria. And the church is going global. One of the ways this has been described is that the church globally is the big sea church in creeds. That's called the Catholic Church. It's not referring to the Catholic denomination, but the Catholic meaning universal. That there's this global, universal church bound together by Christ. But it's not just in Jerusalem, it's in Judea, it's in Samaria. It's scattered in communities across the world in local churches. That's usually called the little C church. But there are little C churches who are forming together with Christ at the center, seeking to be what God has called them. Now the church is spreading past Jerusalem. And then that man who was involved in the killing of Stephen Saul in Acts chapter nine is on his way to persecute more Christians. And then Jesus blinds him, converts him. And then we know him mostly as Paul. And then Paul is set apart to take this even further. And he plants churches all over Asia Minor, all over Europe. And the church begins to spread and expand. As you continue to read the Book of Acts, you see the gospel spreading all over that region. But as these churches are getting established and they're seeking to be a gospel centered people that are taking the gospel to the nations as they're seeking to be this, they start to run into problems. They start to run into different things, different sins, different struggles. There's a bunch of people who the thing that the. The central binding idea that holds them together is Christ. But they're very, very different. Different ethnicities, different cultures, different classes. And as you continue to read the rest of the New Testament, you see that God had a plan for this, that he starts to write letters, inspired scripture through servants like Paul to these churches to help them see what it means to be a gospel centered people. How to fight for what is good, how to repent of sin, how to live in community, how to still have some missional hustle to take the gospel to the nations. But when you read the beginnings of these letters, you see very clearly that these are individual churches. I'll run through a Bunch of them. Really quickly. The letter to the Corinthians, in First Corinthians, Chapter one, it says, to the church of God that is in Corinth, that is that church in that city with their unique issues. This is a letter to that church. Not all the churches, though all the churches, will eventually benefit from this, helping us see now it's not just one global church. There's individual churches where these people belong to one another and have their own leaders and their own issues they're facing. It continues to the churches of Galatia, that's a whole region of different churches that Paul planted in his first missionary journey. To the saints who are in Ephesus, that's the book of Ephesians. To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi, that's the book of Philippians. To the church of Thessalonians and God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, that's the church in Thessalonica. You start to see that there is one global church made up of individuals, communities of Christians who are seeking to be centered in Christ, loving one another fiercely and taking the Gospel to their friends and their neighbors. And you follow that thread all the way through the letters and you'll get to the end. The Book of Revelation, which we did last year. And as we saw the Book of Revelation, it's not just apocalyptic literature. It's not just proclaiming what's going to happen. It is also a letter written to seven churches. Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea, and as we saw last year, all churches with different problems, with different sins, some needing encouragement, all of them mostly needing a smack across the face from Jesus. But those are all individual churches where those people belong to Christ and. And one another seeking to be obedient in following him and taking the Gospel to those who needed it. So that's Genesis to Revelation. While you're not going to find one specific verse that makes this so clear, what you can see from start to finish is that God had a plan to form a people. And that plan was to be localized in churches where there were people that were so deeply committed to following Christ and having a zeal and a desire to worship and delight in him over all things, to be a people, a community that so deeply loved one another and cared for one another, that looked radically different than the rest of the world. So much so that historians at the time were looking at these Christians and saying there's something different about them. And to be a people who are not so self focused that they were going to use their energy and their effort and their time and their money and their lives lives to proclaim the good news to those who didn't know. That is God's plan for redemption. One global church working through individual local churches all around the world. That is God's plan for the church. So when someone says I don't see membership in the Bible, I just want to say it's, you got to read the whole story. You need to see what God is doing. You need to see God's plan for redemption that is through the local church.
I was talking to a pastor a few weeks back and he was telling me a story about a guy who had been coming to their church and he said, did this guy come? And he was kind of coming for weeks and they started to introduce the idea, maybe you should think about committing here. And he said, oh no, I don't believe membership is biblical. He's like, I'm a part of the big C church, we're all a part of the same church, but I'm not going to commit to membership here. And he was kind of taken aback and he engaged with the conversation. He said, okay, take what you're saying, so you're a member of the big sea, the, the big church universal. He said, yeah. He said, okay, well am I like a pastor in this big old church in the world? And he said, yeah. He said okay, so does it make me like your pastor? He said, yeah. He said, alright, let me share with you Hebrews chapter 13. He said,
> Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.
He said, do you believe that's true? He said, yeah. He said, okay, so if I'm your pastor and you're gonna submit to me, you should go through the membership process at our church. He just laid it out for him and the guy said no and he left and he never came back. And I thought that was quite the clever way to be able to explain and poke holes in the guy's argument. But that passage is incredibly helpful. You read the New Testament letters and you see that God has structured for these local communities that he has pastors, elders that are overseeing the church. So when I look at that passage, obey your leaders and submit to them. It's helpful for me when I'm talking to people about membership. It's like, I belong to this church, I'M one of the pastors of this church. I belong to them, they belong to me. My people aren't down the road. They're the brothers and sisters. They're not across town, they're not across the world. I don't pastor them, I don't oversee their souls. I don't answer for their souls. No, it's this people. And you see that God has a plan and even the oversight of his church. And I think this is important, especially in Southern culture. And here's why. In Southern culture, pretty much still everyone, if you ask them, are you a Christian? They're gonna say, yeah. The overwhelming majority of people in the south are still gonna say, yeah, I'm a Christian. And if you begin to press into that, a lot of times it's, well, I'm Methodist or I'm Presbyterian or Episcopalian, or I'm Baptist or I'm Catholic. And it's like, what does that mean? I was just born Christian, I was born a Methodist. And as you look at the scriptures, you're not born a Christian. And if you continue to press into this, what you also see is there are a lot of people that claim the name of Christ that don't really belong anywhere. They don't commit to any people, don't commit to the Lord locally anywhere. They're just free floating in a way that is so foreign to the scriptures. And then what you'll also see is you'll see people that go, yeah, I mean, I don't really, not really. I don't really, I'm not a member anywhere. I, I like this church for the worship. I like this church for the teaching. I like this church for their Bible studies, like this church for their small groups. I like this church for their outreach. And I kind of just, you know, take everywhere like it's a buffet. And it's like, man, to make the church of Jesus Christ for your own benefit is so foreign to what the scriptures teach about the church that is not the church that Jesus bled and died for. You should be committed to God and his people somewhere. And my hope is that as you look at the grand story, you'll see, yes, you should belong. You should be a member of a church somewhere. Christians are not designed to be outside of the church or just not. And over the next couple months, I hope we continue to see that over and over again as we walk through this.
Now that's the why of why we should belong to a church. Now I just want to, as we end look at the what, what does it mean to belong to this church? And it's gonna sound like a broken record, but it's a good one. It's a record we spend every Sunday. It's what Chet Phillips calls the bee's knees of belonging, which I don't know why he calls it that, but it's really important to us. And that is being a gospel centered community on mission. And that's what you're going to see over the next two months. Walking through this, you're going to see 14 different commitments that highlight that. So let's start with that first part. What does it mean to be gospel centered? It means that we are a church that is bound together by. By one shared story. And that story is the message of the gospel. We are bound together by this one shared story in a way that not just defines us at the beginning in belief, but defines us in belief and practice the rest of our lives. If you look at the American story, okay, if you look at the American story at the beginning, you see that it's a group of people that are anti tyranny. Okay? No taxation without representation. No king's going to tell us what to do. You'll see that it's a people that love freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom of speech. Don't step on my freedoms. You'll see that it's a people that have some hustle, some dogged determination to exist. That's how America began. But that's also the story that permeates through its people throughout time, that even today, Americans don't like kings. Don't tell me what I can and cannot do. We like freedom and there's still some dogged determination to exist. That's the American spirit and it still flows through its people. And we as Christians have a much better story. We as Christians have a much better story. That's not just our origin story, but it permeates through us in our lives. It is the story of Jesus Christ. It is the story of a God who looked on humanity, that rejected him, that spit upon his goodwill, that decided that they wanted to worship what they wanted to worship and find what they thought fulfilling and rejected him over and over again. And God and His mercy does not give us judgment. He sends His Son that Christ comes and he dies on the cross for sinners. And he conquers death at the resurrection. And he gives us grace that we don't deserve to be in relationship with Him. And he forms us more into his image through his work, through his will and desire and good pleasure and that story continues to work within his people. It is the story that saves us, but it's the story that sustains us. In the same way that as foreigners come to America and they become American citizens and in a lot of ways embody the American spirit in beautiful ways, they start loving freedom. They start. They have this dogged determination within them. We do not belong to this world as Christians. Scriptures say that we have. Our citizenship is in heaven. From we have with a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, that we are part of the world that is to come. And as citizens of that kingdom here on this earth, as sojourners and strangers and foreigners, that we embody what it means to belong to him more than anything else. So what we'll see over the next coming weeks as we walk through these commitments, we'll see what it means to be a gospel centered people bound together by that story. But we will also see what it means to be a community. What it means to be a gospel centered community. One of the metaphors that we see in the New Testament for the church, for the this community is the body. So Romans 12, we'll talk about one body, many members. So one body, different body parts, different members of the body in a way that each person is doing their gift to be able to serve one another well. And man, when you see that actually in practice, when you experience what it means to belong to the church of Jesus Christ and have different members of the body who, who love and serve you, it is a glorious story. I mean, if you ever see someone who loses their job, which is a massive loss, and they're crushed, and then someone in their group finds out, and all of a sudden their whole group is messaging them saying, hey, we love you, like we're praying for you. You need to know that your identity is not in the work that you do. Your identity is in the God who loves you, who sustains you. God's going to provide for you. He's going to take care of you, we're going to take care of you. But you need to remember the gospel. And then all of a sudden, they're behind the scenes organizing things. By the time he gets home, there's already been a meal delivered and there's meals to be delivered the next few days. All of a sudden someone else in the church hears about this and they put $1,000 in an envelope and drop it on the doorstep. And all of a sudden he's being provided for, his family's being loved. And then more people in the church find out all of A sudden they ask, can we be praying about this? That you would find a new job that ends up in our prayer message that goes out to our members. Now the whole church is praying and then someone else in the church hears about that and says, wait a second, I know what he does for a living. I got a friend who's hiring for that position right now. They reach out and say, hey, hey, can you talk to this, Talk to my friend. He's hiring. And then within a week, he's already got a job lined up. When you see the church respond like that over and over and over and over again, it makes me so thankful for the church of Jesus Christ and how his church responds over and over again. We've seen this over and over again in our church and it's wonderful. And I wish in some ways more of those stories were told. I know why we don't. Because we don't let the left hand know what the right is doing. I get that. But the stories that go viral are the church hurt stories. And yes, those stories exist. They're real stories with real pain. I'm not denying the existence of them. But boy, oh boy, the amount of church help stories where people rally around one another, it's like 100 to 1 to 1 compared to that. The church is a wonderful people to belong to, to see them in action over and over and over again because they're centered in Christ in a way that helps us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, see something beyond our own interest. And when you see it in action, it's beautiful. It's a family. And that's the language of the New Testament. Often when it talks about the church and is family. When you start learning New Testament Greek, one of the first, you start with the vocabulary words that are the most, most used in the New Testament. And one of the first words you learn in Greek is adelphoi, it's the word for brothers and sisters. Because it shows up over and over and over again in the scriptures to talk about God's people, that we are a family, that we are brothers and sisters in Christ. Paul, when he's making converts, talks about his converts like spiritual children. That we are a family, that we love one another, that we belong to one another. And when you study the Book of Acts, you see this. The church functions like a family. I was trying to explain this to someone recently. I was trying to explain this concept and I was just saying, listen, I'm close with my earthly family. I'm close with my parents, my brothers, and my sisters, like we are, we're close, but boy, oh boy, there's some eternal depth that I have with brothers and sisters in this church that when crap hits the fan in my life, the first few messages are not to family. And that's not to lower my earthly family. I'm real close with them. It's to elevate what the importance of church family is here. And when it hits the fan, I'm messaging people in this church and I got people in this church who rally around in wonderful ways. To belong to a family that fiercely loves God and one another is beautiful, it's compelling, it's wonderful. It is so good to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ. And as you walk through the membership commitment with us over the next couple of months, you're going to see this. You're going to see how we fight for this, how this is so unbelievably important to us. We want to be a gospel centered people. We want to be a community that's like a family, but we also want to take this thing that we hold dear to those who don't believe. We're a gospel centered community on mission. And that's what we're also going to see in our membership commitment. We do not exist to be a holy huddle. We do not exist to be inwardly focused. We exist to take this wonderful news that brought us from death to life, to people, to friends, to neighbors, to co workers so that they might taste and see that the Lord is good and be brought into the family of God. We care deeply about this.
Now, one of the downsides to you using the word membership is because sometimes the word membership in our culture has a consumeristic bent. I mean, you could be a member of Costco. It's a pretty low commitment. You pay, what is it, 80 bucks a year? You know, and then you get to go and buy all sorts of bulk goods that certainly will, certainly some of it will spoil in your cabinets because it's just hard to use up all that stuff before it goes bad. Maybe your family's better than ours. We couldn't do it. Or Walmart. Plus, that's not important. There's a consumeristic nature sometimes to the word membership that makes it about self, that makes it about our interest. And I still think the word membership is worth fighting for. I still think it's worth reclaiming from our culture to help us see that it is not about self, that membership is about something bigger than us. It's about a people who leverage their time and their Talents and their energy and their money and their efforts and their lives so that others who do not know Christ, others who are sprinting towards an eternity apart from God under his wrath, who desperately need to know the love of a savior who bled and died for them, that it's worth our energy and our hustle and our grit to take that. To those who don't believe. It's not a country club. It's more like a military outpost. The membership we have here, we don't want to be a country club. Country club is low commitment. You pay your fee, you get to go play golf, get to enjoy the pool, but you don't keep the greens and you don't scrub the pool. We don't want to be that. We want to be more like a military outpost. Our country has military outposts all over the world. And the members of the US Military who are at those outposts, they are there to serve the interest of America. They. They're there to serve the interests of their commander in chief. They are there bound together, laser focused, whether it's promoting the values of America in that area of the world or at times, whether it's fighting a war, but they are laser focused, committed to the mission of America. And we have something so much better than that. We are citizens of a kingdom that is not of this world. And we serve a king who. Who reigns for eternity. And we get to serve him in a land that we do not belong to, that is foreign to us. And we get to serve his interests taking the gospel to people who do not know him, making enemies, friends, making the lost found, making the dead alive in Christ. That's what we want to be. The church is supposed to be. And I'll be honest, we've had folks in the past who came to our church looking for a country club and they just didn't stick. And we're not perfect. We got our flaws. You've been here long enough, you go learn them. But that's not what we want to be. But we've also had folks who've been there and done some of the Southern consumeristic Christianity. And they see the things that we're fighting for and they love it and they jump on and they see I do. I want to be a people that loves one another fiercely, that chases after Jesus together. That is taking the gospel to those who don't believe. I want to be a part of that. And they jump in and we hustle and we fight to be the church of the New Testament and the scriptures that we see that hustled and fought and was missional and had some dog in it. Like we want to be that type of church to missionaries, be everyday missionaries here in this city, in Columbia. So we want to be. And as we walk through the membership commitment over the next few months, this is something that is going to show up. And at times it's hard. I'm not going to lie. At times living out the ideals and the practices and the beliefs of our commitments is difficult. And what's helpful for my soul, maybe it'll be helpful for you, is I like to take the 10,000 year perspective when I think about all this stuff. 10,000 years from now, are you going to regret when you look back at this life not picking up more hobbies, not being the best pickleball player in the world, not using all your money to level up to the next part of society, to the next class, Are you going to regret not fulfilling the American dream and all of its trappings? Or are you going to be so insanely thankful that the work of the Spirit went to work in your heart in a way that helped you leverage your time and your energy and your heart's desire to be a people so deeply centered on the gospel, so deeply, fiercely loving one another and so outwardly focused that you took the gospel to some of your co workers who currently right now are walking as enemies of the cross of Christ because you love them, because you served them, because you stood in the way between them and hell and said Jesus is better than everything else. And they placed their faith in Jesus and they got baptized and they joined a group and they kept fighting to believe all the way to 10,000 years from now. They are standing in the presence of their Savior, worshiping him with you because you gave your life away to something that matters. That is what our commitment is all about. And that's what we're gonna look at the next couple of months. My hope is that for the members of this church, you'd be so deeply excited that you be so thankful for the work of Christ in our lives that we get to do this together. But if you're not new and you're checking us out, I hope you stick around. I hope my yelling didn't run you off. It's just, I'm just excited, you guys.