Sermon Cloud

January 20, 2008

1 Peter 2:1-10 (Part 2-Missional)

What we learned last week was that we are putting all of our eggs in the gospel basket.  We are sold out to it. We think the Bible demonstrates over and over that only God’s grace revealed in Jesus’ perfect life, death, and resurrection can change a sinner’s heart.  That is true both for non-believers who are converted when light shines into their hearts for the first time and they breath their first breath of faith and love for Jesus and its true for Christians as they changed a tiny bit at a time as we look at Jesus. 

            It’s scary to see sometimes how so much of our teaching and effort is around behavior modification.  We recognize, like verse 1 talks about, that we aren’t very nice.  So we shame each other for acting poorly.  We tell each other to act better.  We even establish programs to help us be nice.  How’s that working?  Last week was dedicated to show that it doesn’t work much at all.  They are sincere efforts, but only God’s grace in what Jesus has done can change us, right?  That was last week, but its every week. 

Gospel isn’t believed if it doesn’t flow out

This week we want to focus on the missional outflow in verses 9-10.   9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.  We are chosen because Jesus was chosen by God.  We are priests of this spiritual house because Jesus still serves as the great High Priest over all of His people interceding between us and God the Father on our behalf.  We are a holy nation because Jesus is holy and gives us His holiness.  We are His possession because His blood has purchased us.  Ha, I told you that we aren’t ever walking away from the gospel! 

            Ok, so we are these chosen priests.  Back in verse 5, Peter hinted at that reality and said we offer spiritual sacrifices since we are part of this spiritual house with Jesus serving as the chief cornerstone.  So what is the spiritual sacrifice we offer as this family of priests?  Verse 9 gives the answer…that…meaning this is the reason…you may proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.  Your priestly duty is one thing with two parts.  The one thing is to declare His excellence.  That is THE thing that we are all created to do…it’s our family business.  In that one thing, God is glorified and we are satisfied.  The two parts are:

1.  Declaring it to Him-Worship.  C.S. Lewis was repulsed by God seeming that He was like an old woman fishing for compliments as He commanded people to worship Him.  But Lewis rightly realized that praise naturally flows from what we love.  We talk about the Gator Bowl, great food, fun vacations, people we esteem.  And so it is with God…we’ll praise Him if we think He’s all that.  Consideration of our brokenness and rebellion and God’s sufficiency and forgiveness naturally takes us here.  We see the excellencies of God and we want to talk about it. We want to sing about it.  We want to pray.  We want to feast on these excellencies.  As priests, we do everything we can to stir our affections to rightly recognize and respond to the greatness of Jesus.  We do everything to destroy habits and sinful choices that undercut that.

2.  Declaring it to people-Mission.  This overflow of the gospel rightly flows back to God.  We see great things about God and then we tell Him what’s so great about Him.  But that would be neglecting the other half of our priestly duty: declaring it to people.  I know this is a struggle for some of you.  This is precisely your biggest issue with Christianity:  It just seems so arrogant to be on a mission.  I get that.  But let’s pinpoint the issue.  In every other area of our lives, we invite others to praise what we think is great, so this whole thing really comes down to this issue of beauty and excellence.  If Jesus is the One who makes us right with God and changes us to reflect all of these great things about Himself, it becomes right to express it to Him and to encourage others to check Him out. 

            Others of you might say that your faith is personal and it finds expression to God, but not people?  You ever been to a really beautiful place?  Back in October, I was climbing by myself on Mt. Shavano in central Colorado and there were about a dozen times when I’d notice the trail winding upward through a perfectly quiet snow covered Aspen grove. Or that ridge vista. And I had no one to tell.  I was struck at that moment how much I wished I had someone with me to enjoy it with.  Enjoyment of beauty is not really there until it’s expressed in some way.  Just like praise to God, praise about God to people is spontaneous. 

            Said differently, we don’t really believe that Jesus is so great if it doesn’t find expression with people.  Like we have said, we believe God has called us to be a gospel-centered missional family.  Brock, one of our Redeemer group leaders, told me that they had a family meeting at their Redeemer group in December and they gave themselves an “A” on consistently hitting the gospel, but a “D” on being a missional family.  Our worship leader, Joe, correctly offered another take.  We can’t say we are “A” on gospel if we are “D” on mission.  Does it live in us if it doesn’t come out?  Is it really possible to be overwhelmed with His excellence and only express that to God?  I can’t think of a single other thing that I love that I do that with, can you?  Let’s look at some reasons why we fail at mission, and fail at meaningfully believing and living out the gospel.

Problems with our missional approaches

1.  Political reformation.  Christians have an obligation to defend the rights of the lowest of the low in our societies and many times this will take political efforts.  Surely there are times where morality must be legislated to protect the social fabric of a nation.  That’s what we do with laws against murder, rape, theft, etc. 

But, we have to come to a place of honesty for a moment. There are many who reject Jesus because they think that would mean they would have to be a political right- winger.  I am not here to make statements about those things as much to say that we have many times wrongly assumed that we can politically advance Jesus’ reign here.  Wrong.  I wish we had 10% of the passion for Jesus and standing for the poorest of the poor in our nation and world that we do for putting the 10 commandments up. Vote your conviction, but perhaps we’d be wise to distance being seen as identical to any political party, which in Lubbock equals the Republican Party.  I promise you its hurt us among many. Some of you might be saying, “No worries, I lean way left!”  Well, there are many pockets of Christianity that are wed just as equally to the policies of the left.  I heard a guy say that the left puts too much confidence in solving humanity’s problems through the government, while the right puts too much confidence in businesses.  Might be too simple, but let’s remember what transforms while we vote our conscience.

2.  It stays among “uses”.  Wow, I’m burdened about this one.  Lets assume that the good news of Jesus is flowing out to people around us…that’s great.  That should always be a staple of our lives.  So what’s the problem?  We can end up being as James Smith titled it, “missional discriminators.”  What happens is the gospel can tend to stay with uses and rarely go to the “thems.”  But how sad!  We need to ask God for people who are different than ourselves even while we connect with those who are like us.  Generationally, ethnically, economically different.  What a beautiful picture of the gospel! Every individual and family need to think through how they are helping the excellence of Jesus go to people different than themselves. This is a particular challenge, but it can be done.

            One of the reasons I chose this Sunday for this message is because it fell on MLK weekend.  I think that’s appropriate.  One of my desires is that Redeemer would become a cultural celebration center in Lubbock…where the beauty of God’s redemption of unique cultures would be celebrated and not feared. This is one of our family traits.   On the basis of God’s rule over all people, we desire to include people from all sorts of backgrounds from Hispanic to white to black to Asian and everything else.  We know we are up against it on this because you can tell by our crowd that we start off pretty white.  But let’s pray that we’ll be diverse and then join that prayer to action by actively developing relationships with people who are different than you and serving our city’s poor.  Nothing makes Jesus seem more excellent, in my opinion, that people from every tongue and tribe worshiping Him before the throne.  Let’s pray for God’s kingdom come at Redeemer as it will be in heaven!

            One more thing.  Our vision is for this to explode out of Lubbock. We want to see 20 church plants in the states and 20 mission teams in unreached parts of the world working to expand Jesus’ greatness among places where He is not (meaningfully) known.  Pray about how to use your summers and/or your vacations.  Students, I’ll graduate 40-50 of you every year and most of you are leaving.  That’s great, that’s why I wanted to stay in Lubbock.  Would you consider taking a job on purpose with a church planting team?  Would you consider going to the nations to make Jesus known among peoples with no church speaking the gospel to them?  We have mentoring programs to help equip and educate you to get you ready.  Let’s pray that God’s kingdom will come in all of the earth…it all comes back to Lubbock for us…but it doesn’t stop there! So yeah, let’s ask for God’s grace to go through us to uses and thems!

3.  We don’t value Jesus very much, and have little or nothing to declare. Maybe this hits closest to the real issue and we go back to that first part of the one thing that we to do:  We declare His excellencies and it starts with worship.  We naturally praise what we love.  Write down on the bulletin some things that are great about Jesus.  Lots of times when I ask this, people stall…uh, He forgives me?  Yes, but that would be like me asking, “What do you love about your husband?” and you respond, “He doesn’t get mad when I blow the budget on shopping.”  That’s what’s great about Him?  Surely there is something else.  Maybe we are seeing the problem.  We’ve heard so few sermons and small group/Sunday school lessons about what’s so great about God and have reflected on it so little in our ineffective devotional times, that God has not gripped our soul.  That’s why we don’t talk about Him and love our neighbor rightly.  Or at least not very much. 

Maybe that is really it for most of us. We love Him a little and we praise a little. We share a little. Because our passion for God is small we try to use other things to give impressions of life: programs, political power, energetic worship services.  But can you imagine how different our church and families and campus would be if we were gripped by Jesus’ greatness?

 Make your life all about that one thing:  Declaring His excellence. It’s the family business! Big shock, it all comes back to the gospel and God’s transforming grace through His Son Jesus.  Who will it flow to?  Where will it take you?  Let’s declare His greatness to Him and to one another and ask for Him to send us out.