Tag: People of God

Mission in the Bible 2: Chosen to Bless the Nations (Genesis 12:1-9)

Genesis 12:1-9

Last week, when I launched this series, I looked at Genesis chapter 3, where God comes looking for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden after they have sinned. As such, God is the first missionary and mission is a God thing.

I used a quote from the great Anglican missiologist Dr Chris Wright, who wrote this:

It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.

This week, we see God beginning to work out the plan of his mission in co-operation with human beings as he chooses Abram and his descendants.

Now before I get into the heart of this, I think it’s worth addressing one issue about this passage that some Christians are relating to the current violence between Israel and Hamas. It’s one that gets trotted out every time Israel engages in actions that are subjected to international criticism. It’s the first half of verse 3, where God says,

I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;

Some Christians take this as reason for saying we should never criticise Israel, and only ever support her. However, there is a difference between criticism and cursing. If criticising Israel constituted cursing, then the Old Testament prophets ought to be deleted from the Bible, because they do plenty of it! No: we can still make honest moral evaluations of Israel’s actions and be biblical. Cursing Israel should just be invoked on things like the constitutions of Hamas, the Houthis, and other radical Muslims who call for the destruction of Israel.

That said, let’s get back to considering what this passage teaches us about mission. We’ll have to say a little bit about the original Old Testament Israel context of each theme that I mention before we understand them in terms of the New Testament and the Church.

The first of three great themes here is what has been historically called election.

When I use the word ‘election’, I do not mean a poll where we choose our politicians. I mean that God elects, or chooses, his people. Here, God chooses Abram to be the forefather of the people he is choosing as his own.

Now some Christians have pushed this to the point of suggesting that God chooses some people for salvation and he chooses all the rest for damnation. Christians such as John Calvin taught this, and later John Wesley argued and disagreed with the followers of Calvin. Wesley said that while he agreed not all people would be saved, God offered salvation to all and it was up to us to respond, to receive God’s free gift.

Because of the Calvinist teaching about election which became expressed as what we call ‘double predestination’ – God predestines some to salvation and others to damnation, as I said – the word ‘election’ has had a bad reputation among people like us who stand in the tradition of Wesley.

But it need not, because it has a positive meaning. Election is not about privilege: it is about blessing. Hear what God said to Abram in the second half of verse 2:

I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.

Election means that God has blessed his people so that they will be a blessing to others.

Now we begin to see why this passage is a missionary text. We are blessed in order to bless others. Sometimes I have done that with a formal blessing at the end of a service: ‘May God bless you that you may bless others.’

We know the incredible blessings of God. We know about his love in creation, his love in sending people in his name over the centuries before finally sending his Son, who even died for us, rose again for us, and even now prays for us before the day he appears again in glory. We know the blessing of the Holy Spirit in our lives if we have given ourselves to Jesus Christ.

And all these blessings are not just so that we can enjoy some self-indulgent spiritual bless-up. God blesses us with the riches of his love so that we can bless others with that love.

It’s why the Bible contains such radical commands as ‘Love your enemies.’ It’s why God placed each of us in the world as well as in the church – so that we have people around us to bless.

In fact, on that subject why not ponder for a moment who you are likely to meet in the next twenty-four hours and consider how you might bless them? What if the church became known as a people who blessed others generously, outrageously, even? And what if at the same time as blessing people we prayed for the opportunity to open up so we can tell people about the source of the blessing, Jesus Christ?

The second theme overlaps with the first, but I’m separating them for convenience. It’s the great nation.

Consider how verse 2 begins:

I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you

The bigger the nation, the more people to bless, and the more who can bless others. Let there be no doubt that in Christian terms, God’s basic intention for the church is for it to grow in quantity as well as quality.

Now I say that in the face of decline that has been going on in our nation for about a century, there or thereabouts. Our numbers are reducing and our average age is increasing. It’s a hard thing to preach that God wants to grow the church when most of the time we see the opposite. Some of us had great hopes for the church when we were younger but have become progressively more discouraged as we have got older.

So let us be honest here about decline as well as growth. Some of the decline is our fault, and some of it is not. To some extent we cannot help it that we live in a society that is increasingly hostile to Christianity. Some of that is a sinful choice to reject God.

But in other ways it is down to us. We have not always been good witnesses. The obvious example of that is the huge number of sexual abuse scandals in churches. There are other factors, too: our unwillingness to share our faith; our ambivalent attitude to strangers; our rejection of core Christian beliefs by trying to make ourselves more like the world – in which case the world says, if you’re just like us then we don’t need to change or join you. And so on.

I cannot guarantee growth to you. If there were a foolproof method, then we would have reduced faith to a form of technology, rather than a mysterious relationship of love.

But we can be intentional about the things that make for growth. We can be disciplined about the ways of growing our spiritual lives – the ‘means of grace’, as Wesley called them. These involve prayer, Bible study, fellowship, worship, the sacraments, fasting, giving, serving the poor, openness to the Holy Spirit, and so on. And we can be intentional about building relationships with people outside the church, as I said in the first point about blessing people and looking for opportunities to share about the source of all blessing.

What we can do, then, is sow the seeds and pray that God will water what we sow.

The third and final theme I want to highlight for mission from this passage is the land.

Verses 6 and 7:

6 Abram travelled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

We know how important the land was and is for Israel and the Jewish people. When they were exiled to Babylon, it struck at the very heart of their faith. ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ lamented the Psalmist. The gift of the land was always conditional upon obedience to God’s Law.

And we still see the importance of the land for Judaism in dimensions of the current tragic violence in the Middle East.

But what sense does it make for us as the Church, the people who have been grafted onto the People of God through faith in Christ? We are not an ethnic group. We come from every tribe, and tongue, and nation (Revelation 7:9).

There’s a clue in the way Jesus takes one Old Testament verse and rephrases it. You will know how in the Sermon on the Mount he says,

Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)

But do you know what Old Testament verse he is amending? It’s Psalm 37:11, which says,

But the meek will inherit the land
    and enjoy peace and prosperity.

Inheriting the land made sense in the Old Testament with Israel. And that it’s the meek who do retains the important truth that the gift of the land is conditional, not automatic. You need to do what God requires.

But for Jesus it’s bigger. The meek will inherit the earth, which makes sense if it’s a multinational people of God. And it also makes sense if that’s at the end of all things, when God will bring in the new heavens and the new earth (Revelation 21:1).

Our inheritance is so much more than what falls within the boundaries of one nation. Our inheritance is the new creation itself.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but what does it have to do with mission? It means that our calling is to take as many people as we can on the journey to the new creation. That doesn’t mean simply that we say, get your sins forgiven and have a ticket to heaven when you die.

It certainly does include our sins being forgiven, but it is so much more. The vision of the new heavens and the new earth where God has made everything new is the hope that inspires us to say that this is what the kingdom of God looks like in all its richness and fulness, so let’s start working for the kingdom now.

And so what inspires us and what we urge people to do is not only come to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, but also to come to him to find fulfilment and true purpose in life by building for his kingdom. Be made new by the Holy Spirit, and work for a world where sickness, sin, poverty, and other curses no longer exist. There really is nothing like it.

That’s why God chooses us. That’s why God wants us to grow. This is God’s mission. And he wants us to bless the nations with him.

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Forming The People Of God (Church Anniversary Sermon) Genesis 28:10-22

Genesis 28:10-22

The other day our cat got trapped in Mark’s bedroom and weed on his duvet. Going up to the loft to find a spare duvet for him, I had to fight past a couple of blankets and several pillows. Thankfully, none of those pillows was a stone like Jacob uses in our reading (verse 11). Unlike him, I don’t think I would fall asleep easily on a stone pillow. Just how tired was he?

Now you may wonder why Jacob’s dream is a suitable reading for a church anniversary, and the answer comes in his naming of the place as Bethel (verse 19), for that means ‘house of God.’

Yet this is no house of God in the sense of a permanent building structure where God’s people gather to worship. Rather, it’s a site where God is at work in the formation of a people for his praise through the patriarchs.

And what we learn here about God’s formation of Israel applies in New Testament terms to his formation of the church.

Firstly, the people of God are formed by God’s initiative.

I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. (Verse 13)

It’s God’s idea to form a people for himself. The people of Israel were not just another nation that emerged from ancient history, and the Christian church is not merely a human institution. God took the initiative. Why?

For the salvation of the world. God’s choice of Israel and his election of the church is not just a case of choosing people for their own salvation whereas he doesn’t choose others. No! He chooses and makes his people for a purpose: we are chosen so that we are a light to the nations. God chooses us so that we reflect his light in the world and that others might be attracted to the Light of the World, Jesus himself.

Now we are used to understanding that in an individual way. Each one of us is a witness to Christ. But we also need to understand it together as the fellowship of the Church. As the community of Christ we are called to be a light to the nations, beginning in our local area and spreading as far as we may be sent by God.

The Christian Church is not an accident. An individual congregation like this is not an accident, either. God made the first move to create this community and call it according to his purposes, of shining his light in the darkness.

So if we are here by God’s initiative, it’s an important question to ask how we are shining the light of Christ here and beyond our walls.

If we can identify how we are shining the light of Christ to the wider world, then we are at least in some respects fulfilling our purpose as a church. But if we realise we are not doing so, then we have some hard considerations. Either we must find ways, or we must close, because we’re only a pretend church.

Secondly, the people of God are formed by God’s promise.

Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. (Verse 14)

There are things we need to do for the growth of God’s people to come. We cannot be passive. We must have intent if we are to grow. But before all that, the growth of the church is about God’s promise. He will make Israel ‘like the dust of the earth’, and Jesus famously promised that he would build his church. It all starts with God’s promise.

So are we seeing the growth of the church? Are people around the world hearing the Gospel through the Christian church? The answers to such questions are a very certain ‘yes’.

But what about us? So many of our churches are declining and aging drastically. Churches are closing all over the country. That doesn’t sound like God’s promise of a growing church, does it?

I think the fairest summary of the overall situation would be to say that in some places we are losing many of the battles against the spirit of darkness, but overall we are winning the war.

But even if that’s the case, we still have to grapple with our decline in contrast to God’s promise of growth. There are many reasons throughout history why churches decline and close. Sometimes, it’s because they are not sharing the Good News. Other times, it’s due to hostility in wider society against the Gospel. In some cases, it’s a bit of both. Or it could be something else, like being disunited so that we can’t demonstrate the love of God to the world.

If we are declining when God’s promise is for growth, we need an honest examination of why that is so. When we have identified why, we need to ask whether that reason can be reversed. If we are not sharing the Gospel, will we learn to do so? If we are disunited, will we be reconciled so that we can show God’s love to others? If we are in a hostile society, can we find ways of being a winsome witness to Christ despite that?

How we answer these questions help us decide what to do if – like many traditional churches in our culture – we are not seeing God’s promise of growth.

How will we respond in our churches?

Thirdly, the people of God are formed by God’s grace.

I could have begun with this point. But it’s also the theme behind the two other points about God’s initiative and God’s promise. The formation and development of God’s people is a matter of God’s grace.

After all, this is a story about Jacob. How come he’s travelling? He’s on the run after deceiving his twin brother Esau out of their father Isaac’s blessing. Esau wants blood. Jacob is hardly saintly.

Yet for all that, as the patriarch of the next generation, God is using him in his long term plans to form the people of God. Yes, this scheming, self-centred man! He’s not exactly the ideal material, is he?

However, when God intervenes in his life here via the dream at Bethel, Jacob responds with a vow that if God will provide for him and protect him, then the stone he lays will be the house of God and he will give a tenth of all he has back to God (verses 20-22).

In other words, grace transforms sinners.

One of my college lecturers said to me once, ‘Never forget that every church is a company of sinners.’ And when we look deeply at ourselves, isn’t that true? Like Jacob, we are unpromising material. We are not obviously saints in the making – at least not when left to our own devices.

But isn’t it also true that over the years we have seen God work changes in our lives as we have responded to all he has done for us in Jesus Christ? Has not the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus coaxed out a response from us to God’s grace?

No, we are not the finished article. We are not people who have got it all together. We are like broken pieces, glued together with gold, like the Japanese art of Kintsugi – and that’s what makes us beautiful.

For the world isn’t always attracted to the smooth operators who seem to have got it all together, whereas broken, fallible people like us who are utterly dependent on the grace of God are a more welcome proposition. We are more relatable.

So for all the challenges that this story is to us, ultimately it’s good news. As God’s initiative in forming the people of God calls us to be a light to the nations and as God’s promise of growth challenges us to face difficult questions if we’re not growing, in the final analysis it all comes down to grace.

And God’s grace is the most remarkable and wonderful thing, making beautiful creations out of broken people. While we believe that, and live out that truth, there is always hope.

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Covenant Service Sermon: The People Of God

John 15:1-10

'Vine on the Dunes' by Tom Gill on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
‘Vine on the Dunes’ by Tom Gill on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

‘I am the vine,’ says Jesus (verse 1). The moment you allude to vines and therefore grapes – and hence to their product, wine – you get into difficulty in Christian relationships. In one Anglican-Methodist church I knew, the bishop was so intent on the communion wine being alcoholic and the Methodists equally determined to use non-alcoholic wine that a way forward had to be found. The bishop wouldn’t tolerate the Methodist suggestion that both forms of wine were made available at the sacrament. He therefore insisted that the wine be made by local worshippers trampling the grapes before the service, so that the Methodists could believe they were drinking grape juice and the Anglicans could believe that the fermenting process had begun. The one time I attended a communion service there under this regime, the lighting was poor and I felt like I was drinking something mushy – it was more like a thick New Covent Garden soup than wine.

But we need not worry ourselves with such farces this morning. When Jesus says ‘I am the vine’, he is making an important statement to people who can hear the Jewish background. In the Old Testament, Israel – God’s people – was described as a vineyard. Isaiah 5 is a notable example. So for Jesus to call himself the vine is for him to claim that he is all that God intended the People of God to be. If we are to be joined to him as branches of the vine, then he is teaching us how to be and to grow as part of the People of God. Jesus is telling us here, then, about how we grow as God’s people. And hence why we read this passage at a Covenant Service.

First of all, Jesus makes it clear that all we do in the process comes under the rubric of responding – that is, responding to God. The passage is filled with assumptions that God acts first, and we respond. Jesus is already the vine, the Father is already the gardener, the Father already loves Jesus, and Jesus already loves us. God’s saving actions come first. Everything we do is because God has already reached out to us in love through his Son.

This is the very nature of a covenant. Ancient Israel’s covenant with God at Mount Horeb was similar to the covenants of their time. A powerful king rescued a weaker party. In gratitude, the weaker parties then responded to the wishes of the powerful one who had saved them. That is what we see with Israel when God has delivered her from Egypt. The covenant is set in place at the mountain of God, and the Ten Commandments are given. Thus Israel was never to keep the Ten Commandments and the other laws of God as a way to earn salvation, because their salvation had already been freely and graciously given in love: God had saved them from the evil power of Egypt. All that Israel did was a response.

That is what we are coming to do today, as well. We are not coming in order to make impossible promises to God, fingers crossed behind our backs, hoping that we might manage to twist his arm into pleasing us. No: we are responding to God’s love for us in delivering us. We come to this Covenant Service, because God has already come to us in Immanuel, God with us, his Son Jesus Christ. We come to make our vows today, because God has already set us free in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and he is continuing to set us free from the penalty, the power and the presence of sin. Today we come, then, not to a severe God who wants to torture us with unreasonable demands, but to the God of outrageous grace.

Let us come and make our promises today, because we are already loved by God. We do not have to win him over. It is rather God who wants to win us over to him. Do not let past or recent failure put you off. His arms are open wide from the Cross. He has stopped at nothing to love us. Our promises today are where we recognise that with joy, and say that we will stop at nothing to love God and love our neighbours in response.

The second theme to pick out here is of remaining – as the branches of Jesus the Vine we are to remain in him in order to be fruitful. We need to be attached to receive the sap that enables us to make a difference in the world as Christians.

‘Remaining’ suggests something continuous, not a one-off event or action. Other translations speak of ‘abiding’, which implies permanent residence. Why is it important to emphasise ‘remaining’ in this way?

Because there is a strand of Christianity which tends to reduce faith down to the moment of decision for Christ, and little else. Do not mistake me, deciding to trust Christ is important, but my point is this: the Christian life is not simply about a decision in the past, it is about on-going discipleship. Jesus called for disciples, not decisions. And disciples are those who are committed to the long haul. By definition, a disciple is a learner, or an apprentice. We do not learn our trade as Christians overnight. The training and the study take a lifetime – maybe more!

So Jesus therefore calls us to ‘remain’ in him. That way, he can nurture us. Remaining in him involves staying closely connected to him, through all the classic ways: prayer, Bible reading, worship, the sacraments, fellowship, solitude, silence, simplicity, fasting and so on. One renewed commitment we might make today is to our spiritual disciplines, or ‘means of grace’, as John Wesley called them.

As well as that, there are a couple of general applications of this notion of ‘remaining’ that come to mind. One is that we simply say to God, ‘I am not going to be a fair-weather Christian. I am going to stick with you, through good times and bad, through times when I feel blessed beyond words and times when for I can barely feel your presence. I will not just be your follower because I receive good things from you, I will be your follower simply because it is the right and good thing to do.’

And in a slightly similar vein, I think not so much of those who are only up for expressing their faith when everything is sunny, I think of those who are struggling to hang on. For those who are finding the going altogether too difficult for whatever reason – painful life circumstances, things getting on top of us, dreadful things happening – I invite you to see the Covenant promises today as just a simple commitment to staying with Christ. I see some of us effectively saying words rather like this: ‘Right now, Lord, I really don’t feel much like this Christian stuff. I can barely keep my head above water. But even if it’s only by one finger, I’m going to hang onto you.’

I believe that when we say things like that, there is good news for us: God’s grip on us is stronger than ours on his.

The third and final element I want to talk about this morning as we seek to grow as God’s people is obeying. ‘You want to know how to remain in my love?’ asks Jesus. ‘You do it by keeping my commands, just as I obey the Father.’

Let me illustrate the point like this. I was once asked to complete a questionnaire to discover what kind of a learner I am. There were four different learning styles that you could be. Most people were not exclusively one type, but a varying mixture of the four. In my case, I was predominantly someone who learned knowledge by studying the theories behind it. I was also someone who learned by reflecting on things that had happened. I learned a little bit by putting things into action, and I learned little or nothing at all from a pragmatic approach. If you know me well, none of that will surprise you – academic, theoretical and impractical.

But for someone like me, Jesus says the way to learn discipleship in the People of God is not by theory. Or at least doing the theory is not enough on its own. It has to be put into practice. I have commended the spiritual disciplines yet again this morning, but just doing them is not enough on its own. What we learn from our devotions has to be put into practice in the form of obedience to Christ.

Two weeks ago I mentioned in passing when I talked then about practising spiritual disciplines that one of the church members I had known in the past who had been most faithful in daily Bible study had also been one of the cruellest Christians I had come across. She was someone who did the theory but didn’t translate it into action. Indeed, unless we act on what we learn we will earn that common charge made against Christians, namely that we are hypocrites.

Ultimately, the need to obey is about love. Jesus links keeping his commands with remaining in his love. Does that sound tough or unfair? Well, granted we often think of love in terms of equal relationships, and so obedience is not the first category that comes into our minds, and we would have to acknowledge that our relationship with Christ is not one of equals. Nevertheless, love is possible, just as we call a child to do what a parent asks in the context of a loving family. If we love someone, we have more than warm feelings for them: we want to do what pleases them. When we do so, that strengthens the relationship we have with them.

And that, I think, ties together everything this is about today. For, as I said first of all, we are responding to a God who in Christ has reached out to us in love in the first place. All that we do is in loving response to his love. And in the light of that love, we secondly want to remain in the relationship: we are in this for the long haul in a disciplined way, even if there are also times when we are able to do no more than cling on. And so thirdly we want to demonstrate that remaining in Christ’s love by obeying.

These things bind us more closely to Jesus the Vine, the True Israel. We become more truly what we have been called to be by grace: the People of God.

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