(Isaiah 56:1-8, Micah 4:1-8; Matthew 28:16-20)

That’s what it’s all about.  It’s often said that churches need mission statements.  It’s sometimes said more perceptively that the church has a mission given by God which it needs to discern.  A few go beyond that to realize that it isn’t that God’s church has a mission; rather, God’s mission has a church.  We invoke that mission each Sunday when we pray, “Your kingdom come, and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  At the beginning of this series, we saw what that looks like from God’s end, when all the heavens and the earth are finally made new.  In that video, we see it from ours:  all peoples, tribes, nations, and languages, and every region and landform on this planet, gathered together to pray and praise the Lord with one voice.  As of now, it’s just a vision; but it will be a reality, because God has already done it.  In the Great Commission, we see the road he has laid out before us to follow him in obedience as he makes it happen.  The only question is, will he do it through us, without us, or despite us?

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(1 Chronicles 29:6-9; Acts 2:42-47, Acts 4:32-37)

At various places throughout the Acts of the Apostles, Luke scatters brief progress reports on the church.  I included one of them in our reading last week, verses 12-16 of chapter 5.  By my count, there are nine of them, and they get shorter as the book goes along.  They serve to show us how the message and ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ are spreading across the Roman world.  The first few go beyond that to give us snapshots of the life of the church so that when Luke says in Acts 16:5, just to pick one, that “the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers,” we understand what that really means.  It’s not just that their attendance was up, it’s that they were living boldly in the way that we see here in Acts 2 and Acts 4.

That’s important, because it’s easy to talk about a strong church, or a Spirit-filled church, without having any real idea what that means; and since nature abhors a vacuum, that void of understanding will fill quickly with worldly ideas of strength and goodness.  What’s a strong church?  One that has a lot of members and a lot of money.  What’s a Spirit-filled church?  I don’t know, but those people seem to be nice, moral people, so I guess they must be Spirit-filled.  But this is not what God has in mind.  If you want to know if a person or a church is filled by the Holy Spirit, look at the fruit—how are they living, what are they producing, what qualities characterize their way of life?

What we see in Acts 2 and 4 is a church that has chosen its world, and it isn’t this one.  Everything they have in this world, they’ve placed at the disposal of the world to come.  They had one common goal, and so as Acts 4:32 tells us, “They were one in heart and mind”—or, better, in heart and soul.  This doesn’t mean they never disagreed, or even that they never fought; we know they fought.  Disagreement and conflict are inevitable—and more, they’re often necessary for growth.  Because we’re all limited, we need our different perspectives in order to make good decisions.  Real unity isn’t just superficial agreement, it’s something deeper.Read more→

(2 Kings 6:8-23; Acts 5:12-42)

I imagine all of you know that this Tuesday is Election Day; and I trust that all of you of voting age will go out and vote.  I put that insert in your bulletins because we do need to vote wisely, as a matter of prayer; I also put it in because I found that website to be long on information and short on telling you what to do.  But understand this in light of 1 Corinthians 7:29-31:  “The appointed time has grown very short.  From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it.  For the present form of this world is passing away.”  As John Piper says, “so it is with voting.  We should do it.  But only as if we were not doing it.”

I don’t tell you to go out and vote because your vote matters.  I do believe it matters to you, but on the larger scale, it probably doesn’t.  I’m not telling you to go out and vote because we the people are the real source of authority in this nation.  In human political terms, that’s purely theoretical anymore—the country is too big, power is too centralized, and most people are too far from the centers of power.  We’re ruled, not governed, by an elite, and it’s hard to see how that realistically could be any different.  And in theological terms, Godis the source of all authority; he raises up and brings down whom he will.  We should vote, but not because we think it will do anything important.  As Piper says, and as Paul would have said, we should vote as though we were not voting.

Now, that might seem defeatist, and even pointless.  If my vote won’t change anything, why should I vote?  Well, because that’s what God has given you to do.  Because what matters isn’t what you can make of it or what the human system will make of it, but what God is going to make of it—and that, only he knows.  And because you can vote as though you were not voting, because you don’t have to think it’s crucial, because you know that government isn’t all that and a bag of chips.  Vote without discouragement, because however the election goes, it’s all in God’s plan.  As Piper puts it, “In the short run, Christians lose.  In the long run, we win.”  We’ve seen the back of the book, remember?Read more→