PLEASE NOTE: these are the notes I use to preach from, if you would like to hear them in context, please watch our YouTube video.

-Continuing sermon series: making & maturing disciples of Jesus, we seek to do that as a transformed people who are glorifying God through gospel centered worship, gospel shaped community, gospel driven mission, leading to gospel rooted growth.

-Started preparing this week, then realized what I wanted to say was essentially the storyline of Scripture.

-The gospel is the story of the Bible: God, man, Christ, response. Spurgeon, all roads in England lead back to London, all passages of Scripture lead back to Christ

-Just as the gospel, and all of Scripture center around Christ, so does the outworking of God’s mission. Think of a passage like Luke 19:10 “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.” Because people are lost, they must be found, rescued, saved, which is only possible because of Jesus. 

-What is/should be the mission of the church?

-“Mission” has come under scrutiny in recent years, since I moved here Bruce and I have been having a dialogue about how to define “missions,” what is included in it, what drives it, and even what is a “missionary”

-When we talk about this, you may have even heard the idea “all of us are missionaries!” and I always want to stop and ask: is that true? 

-One of the best movies to come out of the early 2000s is a classic Pixar movie called The Incredibles. It’s about a family of superheroes who have the profound misfortune of living during a time when being a superhero is outlawed. Yet they’re trying to raise their family (who are all superheroes, except for Jack Jack until the end of the movie, spoiler alert!) keeping their super powers under wraps. The big bad guy is a non-superhero who creates machines to become super, and then captures “The Incredibles” family. “And when everyone’s super, no one will be.” I feel that way with missionaries! If everyone’s missionaries, then no one will be.

-Some of this, I realize is semantics, but since God revealed Himself through words I think I’m ok to care about them! There are some people who are called to leave their community, family, home and go to a new community, culture, country to preach the gospel until the whole earth is filled by God’s glory! That’s a different burden than we have/experience here! I married into a family of missionaries, they have a different burden than I do! 

-We’ll get to all of these issues in this message (again, I’ll do my best to be brief!) but this is such a massive topic, God literally takes the whole Bible to talk about His mission

READ/PRAY (Matt. 5:13-16)

1. God’s Mission: The Whole Earth (Gen. 1:28, Gen. 12:1-3, Isaiah 42:6, 49:6, Phil. 2:12-18, Matt. 5:13-16)

–Psalm 19, Isaiah 6 – purpose of every created thing is to glorify God. How does that happen?

-The idea of peace (shalom) permeates everything. Everything is properly ordered, functioning correctly, everything is worshipping God.

–Luke 19:40 “If these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” THEY ARE! Humans are the only part of creation that willfully choose to disobey. This is why God has invited His people from creation until He returns to join with Him in bringing his glory to the ends of the earth!

–Gen. 1:28 “Fill the earth and subdue it” Because humans are created to image God, we’re created to reflect His glory throughout the creation. One of the ways the world is full of His glory is by humans filling and subduing the earth. 

-Had some fun debates at seminary about creation care, because that’s a section of this, but the garden of Eden was meant to continue spreading out until it contained the whole earth: continue cultivating, nurturing, expanding God’s reach throughout the earth.

-Gen. 12:1-3 “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

-Ultimate fulfillment in Abraham’s greatest son, Jesus

-What is the reach of Abraham’s blessing? ALL the families.

-This theme continues through Israel as God’s chosen people, meant to be a light shining into the world, an example. This is why the Chosen Land was smack dab in the middle of the known world. Every other nation sprang up around them, watched them, saw what it meant to obey Yahweh. Their unique way of living served as a visible demonstration that obeying God leads to flourishing, disobeying God leads to death.

-The problem was the eventually, God’s chosen people were the ones who disobeyed, and lead to the diaspora, sent out into the world.

-However, even their disobedience and destruction didn’t thwart God’s plans. I think we have a tendency to view God’s mission as completely dependent on us. God chooses to use us, God commands us to be faithful, but if God’s ultimate mission were dependent on fickle, forgetful us, what kind of a God would he be? 

-A corollary to that is it’s never too late to join in with what God’s doing! Today can be the time where you start working with God instead of against Him!

-This is signified by later on in Gen. 15 when God’s covenant is enacted with Abram (to be a blessing to the world) by taking the penalty for breaking the covenant on Himself, leading to the need to send Jesus to bear that penalty.

-Yet even in the diaspora, God was still using his people to point to Him!

Isaiah 42:6, 49:6

-Even as God’s people are scattered across the globe, sent off into exile, what do they still do? The shine as lights in the darkness, so that God’s salvation will be demonstrated to the end of the earth. 

-This isn’t Plan B, this wasn’t a shift, God doesn’t change, He has no need to change, and nothing catches Him by surprise. God’s mission since Genesis 1 has been: God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule.

-This idea that God’s people are a light to the world isn’t only found in the OT

Matt. 5:13-16

-Salt was used primarily for preserving and purifying. Didn’t have refrigerators, so they used salt to slow down the decay of meats. But salt also must remain pure. Unlike our labs that can use salt water, they had to use marshes, so much of their salt was pretty gross! The point is we need to preserve what God’s mission is meant to look like (living out the kingdom ethics Jesus preaches here), and by living a gospel shaped life (pure) we will help preserve the way God wants humans to live.

-Similarly, we are to be examples as light. Think about this, how do we see literally everything. With light! Either sun or artificial light. We, as Christians, are here to shine as light in the world, which means we live different lives than the world lives. We have different priorities, we spend our money differently, we work differently, we love differently. Remember that quote from the second century last week on no one being able to find any reason to hate Christians? We’re not supposed to withdraw and isolate ourselves, we’re supposed to go out into the entire world so people can see!

-But note: what’s the end goal: give glory to your Father. We don’t join in God’s mission to feel good/look good to other people, we do it because we’re to be faithful & obedient to God.

Phil. 2:12-18

-Paul expands on this idea in Philippians. Coming right after the command to have the same mind of Christ, but a couple things to note about how Paul expands the idea.

-“work out your own salvation” 

-Live out, apply your own salvation. You are already saved, Eph. Says you’re right now seated in the heavenlies with Christ, but we don’t see all the implications of that yet. We live in a time between Christ’s 2 comings, so we have been saved from our sins, but we don’t yet see the full completion of that salvation, so Paul is saying you have access to die to your sin, so live like that!

-It is God who works

-All of this obedience isn’t a white knuckle, pull yourself up by your bootstraps sucking it up, it begins and ends with God. Even your desires to be obedient don’t come from yourself, it comes from God in you! But what does that look like?

-I owe Micah thanks for showing me this one. Notice how difficult the burden we have to live is in vs. 14-15.

-End result is 15: so that we may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the world.

-That comes about by: not grumbling or complaining. That’s it! So simple, but have you ever realized how unique this is? Yet how rare is it that this isn’t happening. If you read through the wilderness wanderings before entering the Promised Land, do you know what God’s people were repeatedly accused of? Grumbling and complaining. What tends to happen when people gather together? Grumbling and complaining! “I didn’t like the music today, I didn’t like the preaching today, I didn’t like his clothes, that didn’t speak to me” Yet what are we called to not do? Grumble or complain.

-That is how we shine as lights in the world! Don’t complain about your job, give thanks! Don’t grumble about your house, give thanks! Don’t complain about where you are in your life, give thanks! Don’t grumble about how someone else hurt you, give thanks that God saved you!

-God’s mission is to have a transformed people who live completely different than the world continues to want us to live. This lets us shine as light in the world bringing glory to God.  But we can’t do this alone! So we next need to look at God’s method to bring about this mission

• God’s Method: The Church (Matt. 16:13-20)

-A very misunderstood passage! One that the RCC has misunderstood profoundly. 

-What does Jesus say the gates of hell will not prevail against? The church. The church is the means by which God’s mission is carried out and demonstrated in the world today. That’s where the church has the ability to denote what takes place in heaven. Do you think the church matters?

-Lots of debate about what constitutes a church! I’ve shared this before, but I remember being told from people in college that their “church” was at Starbucks Sunday morning (but don’t worry, they still skipped that too!)

-I know some people that just say it’s the “called out ones” (literal translation of the NT ekklesia), so it’s people, WE are the church. I had one friend tell me this week who was trying to plant a church, that someone told him his mistake was that he tried having everyone meet together. Everything I read about the church in the NT is meeting together. 

-Even reading through Acts can be tough: is it prescriptive for all eternity, or is it merely descriptive of an event that took place?

-What is the church? Belgic Confession

-Gospel is preached, sacraments are celebrated, practices church discipline 

-“In short, it governs itself according to the pure Word of God, rejecting all things contrary to it and holding Jesus Christ as the only Head.”

-Now, that doesn’t mean we cease to be the church when we walk out of our gathering, there are 2 aspects to us being the church: gathered and scattered. There’s a tendency for us to swing between 2 extremes, spend a season over emphasizing the church gathered, respond by over emphasizing the church scattered.

-As I was thinking about this idea this week, I started thinking about the way we breathe. Which would you say is more important, inhaling, or exhaling? 

-You don’t live unless you have both! The church doesn’t live unless we have both gathering and scattering. Only gathering is a cult, only scattering is a random smattering of people. 

-The church, gathered and scattered, is God’s chosen means of carrying out his mission to the world, unlike every other group or organization on the planet!

-Who makes up the church? Each one of us.

• God’s Messenger: ME! (Matt. 20:25-28, 2 Cor. 5, 1 Thess. 1:5-6)

-When I was in high school, we had a substitute named Dr. G who would begin every class having us repeat his mantra: I will behave. If you say it 3 times you start to believe it, so we would repeat his phrases 3x. Didn’t matter how many times you’d had him before, same routine every, single, time. 

-I am God’s chosen messenger to tell the world who He is, to glorify Him

–Matt. 20

-Think of the upside down way Jesus commanded us to live. Where does it make sense to willingly become a slave? 

-The way we are God’s messenger is by representing him to everyone. Could also say we need to be like Jesus. Look for ways we can serve those around us, that’s what God has called us to do! Not a doormat, but actively looking for ways to honor others better than ourselves.

–2 Cor. 5

-We’ve talked about this passage a lot, for a reason! Because of the gospel shaped community we aspire to be, reconciliation comes between us and God, and then we now have the job of carrying out reconciliation. We’re now ambassadors. That means we represent someone else! We can’t claim to speak on our own behalf, we can’t claim to live on our own behalf, everything we are and do is meant to represent God in the world!

-Look at this phrase: “God making his appeal through us” Today we speak on behalf of God!

-How do we do that? Think back to breathing again! We need to breath in God’s Word (Col. 3:16), then breathe out God’s Word in our interactions with other. We need to let God’s Word, the gospel message, saturate all our conversations. There is no difference in the core message when we’re doing: evangelism, missions, or discipleship. Let God’s Word come out in all your conversations, then trust God with the rest. Like the parable of the sower, we speak the gospel everywhere we go!

-1 Thess. 1

-Lastly, “You know what kind of men we proved to be among you.”

-Our walk needs to match our talk. We can’t merely preach the gospel, we need to LIVE the gospel! That’s how we join in God’s mission to let his glory fill the earth. 

–John 20:21 “Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.””

EFCA: We believe that God’s justifying grace must not be separated from His sanctifying power and purpose. God commands us to love Him supremely and others sacrificially, and to live out our faith with care for one another, compassion toward the poor and justice for the oppressed. With God’s Word, the Spirit’s power, and fervent prayer in Christ’s name, we are to combat the spiritual forces of evil. In obedience to Christ’s commission, we are to make disciples among all people, always bearing witness to the gospel in word and deed.