SEPTEMBER 13, 2020 SUNDAY MESSAGE
Transcription Notes:
Well, good morning. It's good to have some people on site. Y'all doing alright.
Well, today I mentioned earlier that we're starting a new series called The Gospel Story. I think as we jump into this often, you kind of think, well, we're all good Church folk, right? Like we have an idea of what the Bible is and what the gospel is because we've grown up with it often in many times our whole life. But we don't sometimes understand that there are misconceptions that we add to that. In fact, the common belief.
If someone were to just drive by today and kind of look here, they have some ideas of what we might think and what we believe in, right? They think that the Bible is just this really old dusty book that you blow off every once in a while, filled with a random hodgepodge of ideas. There's different characters
and events and things that don't quite make sense. And if they know that there's an Old Testament and a New Testament, they're not quite sure how they connect together. They don't know how they make sense.
And then if you read that Old Testament, you kind of wonder, why does that guy seem so angry and different than the guy in the New Testament that we sometimes consider more like this Birkenstock wearing hippie? Maybe that was a joke. I don't know if you all are laughing or not, but got the masks on.
Perhaps the book is helpful for some historical ideology. Maybe the book is for you to become a better person, right? And often the ideas like the Pope knows a lot about. And maybe if I go to seminary, I can understand it. But in general, my idea is like if I open it, I'm going to open it and hope that it says something that might make sense to me.
It's just this jumbled mess of disconnected ideas, stories and people. Well, theologian and author Sandra Richter, she calls that like a wardrobe a really messy wardrobe. The term she uses for it is the dysfunctional closet syndrome. She writes this everyone has a dysfunctional closet somewhere in their lives, a closet where job of the hut could be living and nobody would know it. The closet is cramped, full of clothes slipping from their hangers, accessories dangling down, shoes piled in disarray on the floor.
And it's impossible to tell where one item stops and the next one begins. You can't find anything, and you can't use anything. And so the Bible, in her description, is like this wardrobe just thrown about events and timelines and disarray. None of it makes sense. It's all just kind of mixed up.
The order of events are like sizes, colors, the seasons are mixed up as well. And so if you needed something out of here, how would you even be able to find that? Well, let's be honest. As much as that might be what most people think about what happens here. That might be a lot of what you all think about what happens, right?
You may agree with that. You might recognize in your own heart that there is actually in my mind a disarray, a jumbled mess of things that I don't even fully know how to make sense of in my own mind. And we recognize that in our own hearts. Sometimes we're not sure it looks like a closet that's messy to us as well. Right now, I want to ask you to recognize where you might be at what do you believe about the gospel?
What is it that you think is fundamental about the story of the Bible and what the gospel means? And we're actually going to take a couple of minutes to stop right now in the middle of our service. I'm going to ask you to write down and reflect on that idea. If you have people around you, you can discuss that idea. Don't forget to include children.
And the idea is just this. What do you believe the gospel is if you were to jump on an elevator and somebody said, hey, I think you're a Christian. Can you tell me what the gospel is? And you had 30 to 90 seconds to give an answer to that question, where would you be at with it? And so I'm going to stop right now.
We're going to take a couple of minutes just to discuss amongst ourselves. If you're at home and you have the PDF guide that we've been talking about, you'll see notes in some of the weeks that starts next week. This one has some predetermined notes for you. If you have that here, you can pull it up on your ipad, on your iphone and take a look at it. If you haven't downloaded that yet, please know that we have an accompanying PDF guide, the Gospel Story Guide, that goes along with this.
And so I'm going to give us a couple of minutes just to stop and reflect on that idea when it's time to come back together. I'm going to put a 32nd timer up on the board and I'll bring us back in. So right now, where you're at feel free to discuss, reflect or write down what is the gospel?
30 seconds to close up your conversations. Write down your last thoughts.
When we answer that question, we find that it's not quite as easy as we might have thought originally. Right? Whether you feel confident in your answer that question, whether you feel a little confused or somewhere in between, what we want to do today is accomplish two things. That's it before we leave today, two things we want to help you organize, and we want to help you awaken to some things. We want to organize our closet just a little bit and awaken, possibly to some holes or some perspectives that maybe we haven't included in our previous understanding of this.
And so as we organize this, what we want to do is take some of our garments and start to put them back together. Hang them up where they need to be kind of like a theological Marie condo, but last longer than a couple of months, right. We want to take some of these disheveled shirts and put them back to where they're supposed to be. Pick the things up off the ground. During this time, we want to give you some hangers, some facts that you can hang things on, get them arranged in orderly.
We also want to give you a framework, because if you don't have a frame to hang the hangers on, then it's difficult to know where the beginning is and where the ending is. And so we want to start by giving you this quick framework that there's two sections that many people are familiar with. The Old Testament.
There it is, and the New Testament.
And these two things are actually two sides of the same story. They actually come together a little closer than a lot of us would realize. And to further break it down, what we want to do is to recognize this story being told in six chapters. Now I'm going to talk a little bit more about them, but I want us to start just with this, the idea of creation right at the beginning. And then there's a rebellion that takes place.
And after a rebellion, God sweeps in and gives a promise to a man named Abraham and moves this story along. And then we come to the New Testament, and there's a person, God himself named Jesus, and he goes to a cross. And that's where redemption takes place. And then more movement happens as the Holy Spirit comes. It empowers his Church.
And then we come to the final ending, the renewal of all things along the way. We want to give you some events and some of the stories, the exciting moments that take place as we chart through this gospel stories, some knowledge and some wisdom to fill in the gaps. And finally, what I want you to see is that there's a couple of threads that are woven together throughout the beginning to the end, the whole story. And so if you could imagine that there was just two types of fabric, we have polyester and cotton, first, two things that come to my mind, and these two ideas weave themselves together through every garment and our threads that we're going to use, our Covenant and Kingdom, that God is always and will always have a Covenant and a Kingdom that he is trying to communicate as this story unfolds.
Eventually, what I want us to have is a usable framework, this closet that is organized and able to be utilized for gospel work, that the story would be more comprehensive, that you'd be more fluent in the major themes of that, and that you would see how those details affect you so that you can be a gospel person here on this Earth.
And so as we organize, we also want to awaken to some things. You see, we've had a fairly culturally conditioned understanding of what the gospel is, but we're not always sure of the entirety of the language and the story and other people's perspectives. And the one that we've often been told here in the US is just this section here Jesus. And we know the five finger gospel like Jesus died for my sins, but it's bigger than that. It's broader than that.
The scope is much larger than maybe we would have thought. And so as we use these two ideas, there's a bit of a rediscipleship that needs to take place in the Western Church. We want to surface these things, bring them to your awareness so that we are able to fill the holes and to see the closet for what it is in our understanding of the gospel story. We're going to do that by starting in the most famous verse. That's the only verse.
Well, actually, we have one other secondary one, but we're going to mainly look at John 316. It's the quintessential gospel verse. If you know it, I'm going to be saying it in the NIV version, but you can feel free to speak it out loud. John 316 says this for God. Let's try it.
Let's try it together. Come on. For God, so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Nice job. You guys have been adequately conditioned.
Let's look a little deeper at what this might mean for God. So loved the world that he gave his one and only Son for God. So loved what? Eric Dean for God so loved Common Ground Northeast for God. So loved America.
Now it's amazing how we individualize this, how often we default simply to thinking that this is something that is about us, that we will often take this story and assume it's about me. And if there's a me, then there's an us. And if there's an us, there's always a them, and we try to separate that out and make sure that somebody doesn't have access to this story. But that's not what it says. It's not me.
It's not necessarily you. While you are included, it says God so loved the world. And that word in Greek is Cosmos, where we get our word for Cosmos today. Already you can see it broadening out, and it can refer to the heavens and the Earth and all that is within it. But it also has a connection to the idea of ordering or adornment.
And so it's very much specifically used in a technical military term for the placement strategically of an army on a battlefield. It's used very specifically for the components of that army, each individual soldier that is put in the right place so that they create something so that they move towards they accomplish and say something that shouldn't be that surprising to us, though, right? Because it's Genesis. We see it right at the beginning. God creates he creates something from nothing, and then God begins to order it so that it tells a story so that it has a purpose.
And a first century reader would have had all the nuances of that connected to that word Cosmos. Skip Mohan, who is a Hebrew roots kind of expert, said this the original audience would have heard overtones of full integration into God's purposes. They would have listened to the implied connection between beauty and purpose, and most importantly, they would have recognized that God's love extends to everything he made. In other words, the sun did not come merely to save us. As popular billboards might suggest, he came to order the entire creation what God is after his recovery of the original in all of its aspects.
And that includes men and women. But it doesn't stop there, and neither should we. Saving souls is not the objective. Returning to the original order is, he says, a first century reading might look more like this for God so loved the order of his creation. He was so enthralled by the endorment of creation and what it provided that he sent his son.
Do you see how that widens the scope? Do you see how that changes a little bit of the way we might
look at it? It brings us into a larger understanding of the Messiah and the task that he was trying to accomplish when he was on this Earth. Let's continue. It says whoever believes in him shall not perish to believe again is more than just thinking.
It's more than cognitive understanding. Knowledge. Believing is practice. I didn't say practice. I said practice.
It's the idea. This relationship between doing and thinking, trying to integrate something. So it becomes a process. And in this case, the practice is a process of life change. It's a process of us engaging our hearts in formation around a really tight systematic theology, right?
I mean, systematic theology is not mentioned. What is it says, God's unique Son. So as we order our hearts and our minds, we're supposed to see that our ordering comes not from a static system but a living, breathing, bleeding, dynamic human who comes in the form of Jesus God's unique Son. And then it says that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but sprout wings and escape to the clouds in heaven, where there's naked baby Angels playing golden harvest.
That's a caricature. Right? That's Dante's Inferno. That's not the Bible, says whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Notice that there's not a mention of heaven or hell there, right?
It says, eternal life. Now, I'm not saying this is a statement about the existence of either one of those things. What I'm wanting you to notice is that we often frame the gospel only as an option, you either go one way or you go in the other way, right. And it doesn't take a genius to realize, like heavenly bliss with streets paved in gold or like a fire eternal damnation, I'll take a right every time it's rooted in fear. That kind of gospel is rooted in fear.
And it takes a child to note. Okay, I'm going to take the first option. I mean, something sounds a little bit more appealing to me. And so I want to give you just this quick visual, a little recap of this kind of gospel. I borrowed this from the Bible project.
I just thought it was a brilliant way of communicating. This tends to be our common understanding of the gospel story that God created the heavens and the Earth, and we exist on the Earth. And there's sort of this timeline that we're on. And in this timeline, you and I can find ourselves. That's me.
That's you. It's one of us, right. And there we are. And then the common understanding or maybe misconception, is that depending on how good we are, maybe what we believe right. Then we either go up or we go down.
What seems simple enough. But let me read to you. Mark one, four. It says after John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news. What does that word good news mean?
It's the gospel.
And so this is it in Jesus'words. What is the gospel in Jesus'own words? He's about to say. And this is what he says. The time the chairs has come and the Kingdom of God has come near repent and believe the good news.
Now catch the framework there. I'm about to tell you the gospel, the good news. Then I'm going to say, hey, you have a choice to accept or not accept the good news. So what's in between those two, specifically, the time the chairs has come and the Kingdom of God has come near repent and believe the good news. So with this in mind, I want to offer up a different set of graphics, a new way for us to maybe arrange our hearts and minds around this understanding.
You see, the gospel story involves a timing and the timing is perfect. That's what that word Kairas means. It's happening right now when it should. And that a piece of heaven in the form of Jesus. It's a funny looking Jesus.
I know he comes to Earth. And that time we were waiting for right. There was a promise at some point made. And so we've been waiting for that time to occur. And now it's here.
The Kairos has come. And the Kingdom of God has come near to creation. And then we see ourselves in this gospel story that as we see the way Jesus lived his example of heaven on Earth, we become in greater intensity, in greater formation, in greater likeness to heaven. People here on this Earth, we saw Jesus heal. And we saw him deliver people from things.
We saw him do works of justice. And then he presents us with the decision, repent or turn and believe you see, this gospel story changes lives. Let me say that again, the gospel story changes people's lives. It's not just an escape plan. It's an invitation to jump into a movement of Kingdom stuff taking place on this Earth, that heaven has come to Earth, and you get to be a part of it.
And so the idea is that we would look at Earth, saturate it with ourselves who are Kingdom, heaven people. And so it would look like this heaven and Earth overlapping as we saturate this world with the presence of God's people. And so this awakening is something we need to ingest the fact that it's not your storyline. This is an epic story. It's been going on before you or I.
It's been in progress since the beginning of time. And one person said it like this that it's kind of like we're standing at the edge of a river and this flow and this current is going with or without me. And we get invited to jump into the current, the flow, the timeline of God's gospel story. It's not your storyline. It's not a me centered story.
And while it includes every single one of you, don't hear me wrong. It includes every single one of you. It's about the activity and the purpose of God's Kingdom coming to Earth through you. It's not where you go. It's the fact that God came to Earth.
And that's a huge shift in thinking when we start to think about the third thing is finally that it's not so much about your personal Salvation as much as about the redemption of all things, including you being made new. And we make all things new here with us. Remember the Lord's Prayer, your Kingdom come, and your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. And so as humanity is given this special role, loved so much, they are separate. We are different and set apart from everything else in creation.
But our purpose is to participate in the bringing of heaven to Earth. So we actually have a few misconceptions right to maybe work out, maybe some holes and some gaps inside of our closet that we need to fill in. It's possible that as we try to build this together, we're going to need to listen to voices outside of the typical white evangelical culture to help make sure we understand what's going on, because, look, we're filled with oversimplifications half truths and summarizations. We're constantly trying to domesticate this book with our own cultural preferences and the beautiful, powerful, amazing, but often difficult thing for us is that it refuses.
It utterly refuses to be domesticated.
It's going to take us a process. So let me give you these six chapters, and then we'll head out for the day. These six chapters look like this as each symbol is given. It's kind of a mnemonic device. The ability to remember that first circle is creation.
God made the heavens and the Earth. Give me an o. Give me an H. I'm just playing with y'all.
This second one is rebellion. Let me see your ex. Come on, throw them up, X. Now do this and say, Wakanda forever. Just plain.
But really. And then we have movement. God talks to Abraham and he says, there is a promise. I'm going to rescue you from the rebellion that you caused. And then he's going to send his son Jesus, and he's going to start a revolution, a redemption revolution.
Then he promises again, there's more movement and I'm going to fill you with the Holy Spirit. And you're going to start to saturate this globe until we get to the very end. And the renewal of all things happens. And you see these chapters play out. We have the circle, the X, the arrow, the cross, the second arrow, and that last heavenly circle, the new heavens and the new Earth.
This is what I'm inviting us all into during the next few weeks. As we take a look at the gospel story over the next few weeks, what I want us to do is to stop and reflect where we find ourselves in the midst of this. Right now, as you have thought through what is the key point of God's gospel. How have you been organizing your closet up until now? What did it look like?
Was it in disarray? Was it organized? But maybe it was telling a different story. What holes might you have? And I'm going to actually stop again for a couple of minutes and let you all discuss.
If you're at home, you can feel free to discuss with someone around you. If it's just you at home, then reflect on this, write something down and we're going to take a couple of moments just like we did before, to stop and let me put you in another scenario. If I were to task you today with the option of telling the gospel to someone by next week, you had an entire week to think it through. What would your gospel story include? Now?
Would your story be lifechanging? Does your life tell that story because you have been changed? Let's take a couple of minutes again. I'll put 30 seconds up on the board when it's time to bring it back together. Feel free to discuss or write out, reflect, select.
Now take about about 30 more seconds just to finish up.
As we close up today, we just want to do so by looking at the possible future that we could be stepping into, that we're called to be Kingdom people in a heavenly presence here on Earth and that that is a life changing experience that has the ability, the power to be a lifechanging presence for everyone and everything that we see in all of creation. And so it's huge. It's cosmic. It's big. But it does have personal implications.
And so I want to invite you to dig in over the next few weeks. Begin to ask God, how do you want me to organize my closet? What things do I need to stack up and reframe and pick up off the floor and make sense of as I'm trying to Orient myself. And may we awaken to some new realities, some things that change our lives and then once again make us life changing people here in our world. Let's pray together.
Yes, Lord. We pray in the likeness of your prayer. Great. Are you God in heaven? Your name is Holy.
Use us to tell the grand story of your good news. Your gospel story. May your present Kingdom come through us. May your Kingdom come and your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. In Indianapolis, as it is in heaven and in our neighborhoods as it is in heaven.
God empower us. Help us to awaken to the holes that we might have and help us to reorient and organize around your principles. God, that we would be a life changing force of good, of love, of your Gospel of Ushering, your Kingdom here on Earth. We pray for this together and all God's, people said Amen.
COMMUNION:
(1 COR. 11:23B-26)
“The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
SAVE THE DATE: The 2020 Marriage Retreat is scheduled to be Saturday and Sunday, November 7 and November 8!
PRAYER REQUESTS:
We are hosting prayer team meetings for both the congregation at large and individuals to sign up for individual prayer.
SUGGESTIONS FOR WORSHIP:
Coty Miller’s own “Praise & Worship” Spotify playlist and “Praise & Worship” YouTube playlist (slightly different from each other), both of diverse music that are being constantly updated!
Bethel Music :
Bethel Music’s hours of live music YouTube Playlist, also being constantly updated
Bethel provides chords to most (if not all) of their songs here (just have to register email, but free!)
Live worship moments from the Upper Room YouTube Playlist
Journal writing! (I’m a writer too, so sometimes creative writing and writing my thoughts to God is my form of worship.)
Declare and worship with truth by singing and praying scriptures.
WORSHIP NIGHT! Dedicate a night to worship with friends and family, your house church or neighbors, those who need prayer, love worship, or just enjoy music through a video chat platform like Zoom. You can have one person leading at a time (switching off to whoever else wants to lead) while others sing along, pray, or prophesy, etc.
Serving your community, both online, in person, or both, is a great way to worship God, from spreading encouragement and God’s Word online to physically serving food to others. If you are able to go out and serve, click here for opportunities.
COMMISSIONING:
As Jesus said in John 20:21,
"Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you."
Go, be the Church!
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.