This morning we’ll wrap up our six week sermon series – I Love My Church. Six weeks ago we began this series by seeing how much Jesus loves His church and why, if we truly love Jesus, then we will love His church as well. Then for the past 4 weeks, we’ve looked at several different ways that we can manifest our love for the church.
This morning, we’ll look at a fifth way to show our love for Jesus’ bride, the church. This fifth aspect of our love is unique because it is the only one that we will not also be engaged in as we spend eternity with Jesus in the New Jerusalem that He is preparing for us. In the New Jerusalem we will constantly be participating in corporate worship. We will certainly enjoy fellowship with each other to a degree that is not possible here on earth since there will be no more sin. We will still be taking part in regular discipleship, being taught by Jesus Himself. And unlike the clichéd pictures of people sitting around on clouds in heaven playing harps, we will all be regularly engaged in ministry.
But the one activity in which we will not be engaging is evangelism. Since every person who enters into that New Jerusalem is already a disciple of Jesus and it will be too late for anyone else to become a disciple, there will be no need for it.
As many of you know, my sermon preparation begins each week at 6:30 a.m. on Monday morning during our men’s Bible study. And most weeks, much of what we discuss during that time ends up having a significant influence and impact on my message. So those men who are there on Monday morning have a head start on the rest of the church in understanding and applying the message.
But on rare occasions, God will lead me in a completely different direction after that time together on Monday morning and on those weeks, the men who were there on Monday will often wonder if I was actually present at the same Bible study where they were. This is one of those weeks.
When I planned this sermon series several months ago, I had a pretty good idea of the main direction I wanted to go with my messages each week and I picked out several passages each week that I thought would best communicate those ideas and concepts. But as you may have noticed, each week it seems like one particular passage would kind of rise to the top and we spent most of our time examining that one passage.
So this week I had picked out several passages that dealt with our individual responsibility to be witnesses for Jesus and we discussed several of those passages on Monday. And I have little doubt that because the Bible clearly teaches that every single one of us has an individual responsibility to be involved in personal evangelism, I could have crafted a message that would have been practical and helped all of us to improve in that aspect of our walk with Jesus.
But as I began to work on the message, God steered me in a different direction, one which is frankly a lot more relevant to how the church as a whole is to engage in evangelism.
Let’s begin with what is probably a familiar verse to many of us. Will you read it out loud with me?
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.
(1 Peter 2:9 ESV)
I’m not sure that we haven’t made the whole idea of evangelism much more complicated and complex than it needs to be and that in the process we haven’t unintentionally ended up making it something that Christians fear or dread rather than the great joy it should naturally be.
So I’m not going to use this time this morning to try make you feel guilty or convince you of the need to reach out to others with the life-changing message of the gospel. I think we all understand that we need to do that.
Nor am I going to try and give you some kind of detailed plan or method that you can use to share your faith with others. While there is certainly a time and place for that kind of training, I want to us to take a very simple look at how I can love my church by participating in the evangelism of my church.
While I could give you all kinds of dictionary or theological definitions of evangelism, I think Peter’s definition of evangelism in this verse is actually much more helpful. Here is my paraphrase of Peter’s definition:
God made us who we are
so we could make known who He is
The first thing we notice in this verse is that the focus is not on the individual, but rather on the body as a whole. Peter is emphasizing the corporate identity of his audience as the people of God. All three of the pronouns “you” in this passage are plural – y’all. So Peter is clearly addressing the body as a whole here. But interestingly, the nouns he uses to describe who they are in Christ are all singular – race, priesthood, nation, people. So even before we begin to look at the verse in detail we see that through Jesus all of us as individuals have been made one.
That shouldn’t really be a surprise to us since this is how God has operated consistently throughout history. He has a long track record of gathering his people into community and giving them a corporate identity for the purpose of making God known to the world around them.
This process began at creation. God didn’t just create Adam. He created Adam and Eve and he gave them a corporate identity as husband and wife and then commanded them to go forth together – not as two distinct individuals - and make Him known:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
(Genesis 1:28 ESV)
Obviously at this point there are no other humans to whom they can make God known, but it is clearly God’s intention that as they multiply and fill the earth and have dominion over His creation, that they will do just that.
Years later, God came to a man named Abram and promised to give him numerous descendants who God would gather together and form into a great nation.
Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
(Genesis 12:1-3 ESV)
Once again, we see that God didn’t just bless Abram for his own personal benefit or even just for the benefit of his family or his nation. God’s plan was that the nation He would create would be a blessing to the entire world – all the families of the earth. As we’ll see this morning the way they would do that is by living together in community with a distinct lifestyle that would reveal the character of their God. God later reaffirms that promise to Jacob and he becomes the father of the Israelite people.
And as that nation stood at the edge of the land that God had promised to give to them, Moses reminded the gathered nation of why God had brought them together as a people:
“For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
(Deuteronomy 7:6-8 ESV)
God had chosen Israel to be His treasured possession, not because they had done something to earn or merit that, but rather as an act of grace and mercy. And His intent was that as a nation Israel would live in such a way that God’s grace and mercy would be evident to the surrounding nations and come to know the God of Israel.
And throughout their history, when even a portion of the nation of Israel lived the kind of distinct life that God desired, God was revealed through His people and outsiders were attracted to their God. Let me mention just a couple of examples:
• When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to worship King Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image and God protected them when they were thrown into the fiery furnace, the result was that King Nebuchadnezzar blessed the God of Israel and commanded that no one could speak anything against Him.
• When Elimelech and Naomi fled to Moab during a famine, a young Moabite woman named Ruth who married one of their sons was so impacted by their devotion to the God of Israel that she famously declared that Naomi’s God would be her God.
But by the time Jesus came on the scene, the Jewish religious leaders had largely lost sight of God’s purpose in creating Israel. So instead of living a distinct lifestyle in order to reveal their God to others, they had become so proud and inwardly focused that they just wanted to “hoard” all the blessings that they had received from God for themselves. So they not only looked down on others as inferior, they had actually isolated themselves from the people around them. It’s pretty hard to be the instrument through whom God reveals himself to others when you won’t have anything to do with them.
I think Peter understood the same thing could happen to the church. And in the nearly 2,000 years since he wrote these words, his concerns have proven to be well founded. So here in this one verse, he reminds his readers of something that had been true since creation:
God made us who we are
so we could make known who He is
Let’s begin by looking at…
Who we are in Christ:
Peter chooses four descriptions here, each of which has roots in the way God described Israel in the Old Testament. I’m convinced he chose these particular aspects of who they were in Christ because each would have reminded them of God’s purpose for gathering them together in community. Although each of these four aspects is so deep that we could easily spend all our time on any one of them, I’m just going to identify each one and give you the Old Testament reference that stands behind each one:
• a chosen race
The wild beasts will honor me,
the jackals and the ostriches,
for I give water in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,
the people whom I formed for myself
that they might declare my praise.
(Isaiah 43:20-21 ESV)
• a royal priesthood
and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”
(Exodus 19:6 ESV)
• a holy nation
and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”
(Exodus 19:6 ESV)
• a people for his own possession
We already saw how God described Israel like that in Deuteronomy 7, but let’s look at one other place He does that:
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;
(Exodus 19:5 ESV)
Obviously every disciple of Jesus benefits personally from who he or she is in Christ. But remember that here Peter is emphasizing that this is our corporate identity as a body. But who we are in Christ is not an end in and of itself. Jesus doesn’t gather us together in His body and bless us with this identity just so we can enjoy it ourselves. He has, as we have already pointed out several times this morning, made us who we are so we can make known who He is.
So exactly how do we do that?
How the church is to make God known
We see how we are to do that in the last part of verse 9:
…that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
On the surface, this seems pretty simple. We just tell people about how God has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light. And certainly we should do that. But what Peter is calling the church to do here goes a bit deeper.
This is the only place in the Bible where the verb that is translated “proclaim” here is used. It is a compound word that means much more than to just proclaim something with our words. It literally means “to fully declare” and it can convey the idea of publishing or even advertising something. The idea of advertising probably is the most helpful in our culture because we understand that advertising a product involves much more than just the words that are written are spoken.
Given his use of other Old Testament references in this verse, it is likely that Peter had this verse in mind when he wrote of proclaiming the excellencies of God:
the people whom I formed for myself
that they might declare my praise.
(Isaiah 43:21 ESV)
The Hebrew verb that is translated “declare” also is much broader than just making God know with our words. In fact, here is one place where the KJV probably captures the essence of this verb better than may other translations when they translate that verb “shew forth”.
So the proclaiming that Peter writes about here is more than just what we say. So I would suggest to you that there are two related and equally important ways that the church is to make God known:
• with our lips
While we have looked at five different ways we can demonstrate our love for the church over the last five weeks, I hope that one of the things you’ve noticed is that all five aspects of our love for the body of Christ are interconnected. While I think it has been helpful to address each of them separately, in reality they don’t operate in isolation.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that the main way we proclaim the excellencies of God as a church is through our corporate worship. As we sing, pray, read Scripture, and listen to a message from the Bible the words that come from our lips are to be proclaiming the excellencies of God.
Unfortunately in our culture, many churches, in what I believe is a sincere effort to reach those who are not yet Jesus’ disciples, have done exactly the opposite of what Peter calls us to do here. Instead of revealing the God of the Bible through their words, they have developed “seeker sensitive” or “seeker friendly” forms of worship that often water down God’s Word in order to make it more “palatable” or to avoid offending anyone.
Instead of proclaiming the excellencies of God, the focus is often on creating an emotional experience in which people leave feeling good about themselves or where they can take away some little nugget that will make their life easier or more enjoyable.
But what the Bible teaches us consistently is that our corporate worship is to exalt God – the totality of who He is and not just the parts we like or are comfortable with. And when that is done, God will draw men to Himself as Jesus confirmed with His own words:
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
(John 3:14-15 ESV)
I am confident that we do a pretty good job of that here at TFC, but let’s make sure that we continue to consistently proclaim the excellencies of God with our lips.
The second way we are to make God known is:
• Through our lives
We’ve already touched on this briefly when we looked at how God intended the nation of Israel to live in a way that revealed who He is to the nations around them. That is the essence of what it means to be a “holy nation”. While we often view being holy as being moral, the word “holy” in both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, means “separate”, “unique” or “distinct”.
God’s design has always been that the community of His people that He formed is to bear witness to the gospel in the midst of a fallen world by living a life that is unique and distinct from the surrounding world.
That is especially true of the church. It is Jesus’ desire that the way we demonstrate our love for each other as we live together in community would have a quality to it that is inexplicable to a fallen world. Our love for each other should be such that even unbelievers recognize that it is supernatural. That is the point Jesus was making to His disciples with some of the final words He spoke to them shortly before His crucifixion:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
(John 13:34-35 ESV)
While people are certainly drawn to God by our words, those words become impotent if they are not supported by the way we treat each other within the body of Christ. When we genuinely love each other, that kind of supernatural love provides our world with a much fuller picture of God’s love than what others could see in the life of just one individual.
That is why the primary evangelistic tool of our church is not a program or a method. It is instead the way that we live life together in community. So again, we can’t isolate our evangelism from our worship and our fellowship and our discipleship and our ministry because those are all things that we ought to be doing together as a community of disciples. And as we do those things together as a body we have the opportunity to demonstrate our love for each other in a way that makes God known.
God made us who we are
so we could make known who He is
Although we’ve primarily focused on evangelism this morning from a corporate perspective, I don’t want to imply in any way that we are not all individually responsible for sharing the good news of Jesus with others with both our lips and our lives. Evangelism is not reserved just for the pastor or the elders or even for those who have the spiritual gift of evangelism. And evangelism is not just getting your unchurched family and friends to come to church so they can “get saved”. So even though we didn’t focus on that personal aspect of evangelism this morning, it doesn’t mean that it is not important or that you shouldn’t work on developing your ability to be an effective witness.
But I think we would all agree that our individual evangelism is greatly enhanced when the church as a whole is made up of those who are living a distinct life characterized by supernatural love. So I want to commend all of you here this morning because from what I see, you have made Thornydale Family Church that kind of church. While that doesn’t mean we can’t improve, I really believe that you consistently make this church a place where others can see the genuine love you have for one another. I believe you make this church a safe place where those who are spiritually sick can come in and see Jesus through your lips and your lives. Let’s make sure that we strive to do that even better.
Do you love your church?
I do. I love my church because Jesus loves the church. He sacrificed for her, He sanctifies her and He sustains her.
And because I love my church, my desire is to demonstrate that love by:
• Participating in the worship of my church
• Protecting the fellowship of my church
• Participating in the discipleship of my church
• Participating in the ministry of my church
• Participating in the evangelism of my church
My prayer is that you’ll love the church like that, too.
[Prayer]
As we close this series this morning, I want to ask each of you to consider making one or more commitments to demonstrate your love for your church. So if you would go ahead and tear off the “Connection Card” on the flap of the bulletin and put your name on it, I’m going to ask you to share whatever commitment you make this morning by indicating that on that card and turning it in after the service.
Would you consider one or more of the following commitments?
1. If you have never become a member of this church, we invite you to make that commitment. I know some of you have been reluctant to make that commitment in the past for various reasons. But for the good of the body as a whole, would you be willing to do that even if it means having to do something that might be uncomfortable to you. Will you do that as a way to say to everyone else who has already made that commitment “I’m with you?” We have only four simple requirements for membership that we will be happy to talk to you about personally if you are willing to become a member.
2. Will you commit to being involved in ministry here at TFC? Will you commit to discovering and developing your spiritual gifts by putting them to work? I know many of you are already involved in one or more ministries and we’re grateful for that, but we have so many more needs and we’d love to help you get plugged into a place of ministry.
3. Will you commit to finding a small group of some kind where you can meet regularly with other disciples for the purpose of fellowshipping around God’s Word? Again, I know many of you already do that, but we’d like everyone to be a part of a group like that.
4. Finally, I hope that you’ve been reading “I Am a Church Member”. I know that we ran out of books last week, so we have more today if you need a copy. It’s an easy book to read, so you shouldn’t have a hard time catching up on the reading. In “Connections” today, we’re going to take some time to discuss some of what you’ve been learning from your reading. For those of you who have been reading that book, it would be really encouraging to know that you’ve made one or more of the pledges at the end of each chapter, so if you’ve done that would you share that with us.
I don’t want you to make any of these commitments lightly so I understand that you may want to pray through some of these things before you do that. But I also know that if you’re like me, if you don’t fill out that card right now and turn it in, it will get lost or tucked away somewhere and you’ll probably never get back to it. So if you’re ready to make one or more of those commitments now, I’ll give you a few moments to fill out your cards while the worship team comes back up front to prepare for our offering.
