Who We Are, Part 2: Values 2-4
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Good morning, and welcome to part 2 of our sermon series, “Who We Are”, where we’re going through the values we so painstakingly crafted and adopted last summer.
Today, I’m going to start us with an inspirational quote that sums up what we’re hoping to accomplish by devoting 3 weeks to preaching a topical series on values that we ourselves wrote instead of preaching directly from texts of Scripture in an expository series.
“If you’re going to be, be on purpose.” - Hayden Fleming
Let’s see what we’re aspiring to be on purpose.
We’ll be looking at values 2-4, which primarily describe how we live and work together in our body, our local kingdom outpost here at GBC.
2. Committing to Tenderhearted Relationships
3. Caring for Sinning and Suffering Souls
4. Laboring as Citizens of the Kingdom
2. Committing to Tenderhearted Relationships
As God has established a covenantal relationship with his people, we covenant with one another to live our lives together. Because these relationships entail both obligations and benefits, we seek to show one another abundant grace, mercy, and patience as we help one another grow into deeper maturity in Christ. (2 Cor. 6:16-18; Rom. 12:1-16; Col. 1:24-29, 3:1-17)
Covenant — 2 Cor 6:16-18
16 And what agreement does the temple of God have with idols? For we are the temple of the living God, as God said: I will dwell and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.
17 Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord; do not touch any unclean thing, and I will welcome you.
18 And I will be a Father to you, and you will be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.
We’ve tried to minimize overly theological terms in these values, but as we read the Bible, there’s really no way around the term “covenant” — and this text from 2 Corinthians explains the heart of God’s covenants with humanity. From the very beginning, we see that God wants to dwell with and walk among human beings who are his people, and for whom he is their God. Under the New Covenant, this is emphatically the reality because God has finally created a people among whom he dwells forever by putting his own Holy Spirit within them and writing his laws on their hearts so they enjoy all the benefits and responsibilities of right relationship with him, at great personal cost to himself — namely the death of his most precious Son, who descended to earth and took on the form of a servant, clothing himself in human flesh and becoming human for all eternity.
A covenant, at its root, is a promise between at least two parties with both obligations, sometimes on both parties and sometimes on just one party, and benefits for both parties.
And so because God has made this promise with his people, those who are united with Jesus through faith, we make promises to one another in a very similar way. We are a people bound together in a very serious way, not just by happenstance, and our relationships are defined by certain ways we are to behave towards one another — obligations — and certain expectations we can fairly have of one another — benefits.
Obligations:
we live as living sacrifices (Rom 12:1)
humble discernment (Rom 12:2-3)
playing our role in the body, for the good of others (Rom 12:3-8)
loving one another deeply (Rom 12:9-16)
Romans 12:1 “1 Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship.”
Romans 12:2–3 “2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God. 3 For by the grace given to me, I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think. Instead, think sensibly, as God has distributed a measure of faith to each one.”
Romans 12:3–8 “3 For by the grace given to me, I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think. Instead, think sensibly, as God has distributed a measure of faith to each one. 4 Now as we have many parts in one body, and all the parts do not have the same function, 5 in the same way we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. 6 According to the grace given to us, we have different gifts: If prophecy, use it according to the proportion of one’s faith; 7 if service, use it in service; if teaching, in teaching; 8 if exhorting, in exhortation; giving, with generosity; leading, with diligence; showing mercy, with cheerfulness.”
Romans 12:9–16 “9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Detest evil; cling to what is good. 10 Love one another deeply as brothers and sisters. Take the lead in honoring one another. 11 Do not lack diligence in zeal; be fervent in the Spirit; serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; be persistent in prayer. 13 Share with the saints in their needs; pursue hospitality. 14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud; instead, associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own estimation.”
Benefits:
security (Col 3:1-4, Rom 12:5)
new family (Rom 12:10)
provision (Rom 12:13)
support (Rom 12:15)
How do we live up to these obligations and enjoy these benefits? Ground ourselves in the truth of who God says we are.
1 So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
9 Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old self with its practices
10 and have put on the new self. You are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your Creator.
11 In Christ there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.
We commit to relating to one another with tender hearts not only out of self-interest or obedience simply for the sake of obedience — but because these ways are reflective of Jesus’s tenderheartedness towards his people, his flock. If our old selves are dead and we have been raised to life with Christ, we have Jesus’s heart within us, his law written on our hearts by his Spirit. Tenderheartedness is our new reality, and we are denying both ourselves and our master when our hearts are hard towards one another.
Isn’t it devastating when we start believing the lie that Jesus does not truly love us and accept us as we are, based on his own righteousness freely given to us as his merciful gift? How devastating, then, when we tell our brothers and sisters that we do not truly love and accept them by the words we use and the attitudes we adopt!
Yes, it takes work, and no, we’re not all going to be best friends, but we only harm ourselves and one another when we build up walls, keep one another at arm’s length, and fail to genuinely care for each other. By the way, tenderheartedness involves letting others care for us, too!
Here’s a diagnostic: are you the sort of person that people regularly come to in their suffering? Are you aware of the deepest hurts and struggles of the people in your life here at GBC, generally speaking? If not, ask yourself — is it because you give off an air of hard-heartedness or a lack of care?
Furthermore, are the people around you aware of your deepest hurts and hardest struggles? Are you able to practice Colossians 3:9 and get vulnerable and honest with your brothers and sisters, revealing your true self with all your warts, bruises, and splendor? Or do you present a front, an image of what you’d like the people around you to see because you’re doing fine and you’re just here to help weaker brothers and sisters grow to be more like you?
If tenderheartedness does not characterize you and your relationships, how on earth are you ever going to appreciate the fullness of the height, depth, and breadth of the love God has for you in Christ? We’re meant to learn and see God’s character through living with other Spirit-filled believers who image Christ to us as we image Christ to them; otherwise, those characteristics we cherish most remain nothing more than glorious words on a page or exhilarating thoughts in our minds, with very little power compared to the loving embrace of a brother or sister in Christ on our very worst day. Life together is how we move from saying, “I know God is merciful, but I just feel horrible...” to experiencing God’s mercy in a way that leaves us speechless.
When we recognize our lives are hidden with Christ in God and there is nothing that can pluck us from his hand, we are completely free to love one another as we actually are, warts and all. We’re completely free to forget what others may think of us or what loving them may cost us because God has promised to love us with his own tender mercies until he brings us home and we dwell with him forever as his people. We’re completely free to be totally honest with one another, knowing that we will be forgiven when we grieve one another and recognizing that we, too, are dust. How wonderful it is when we dwell in unity with one another — not because we’re polite and everything is fine, but because we are confident that no matter what happens, we’re going to be able to patiently work through it together to the glory of God because we are family and we’re destined for eternity together.
2. Committing to Tenderhearted Relationships
3. Caring for Sinning and Suffering Souls
4. Laboring as Citizens of the Kingdom
3. Caring for Sinning and Suffering Souls
We seek to compassionately care for sinning and suffering souls — especially those who are oppressed or marginalized — with gentleness and humility that display God’s kindness so that sinners may be led to repentance and sufferers may find healing and comfort. We recognize that we will all frequently need to engage in repentance and receive comfort ourselves. (Isa. 42:3; Mt. 12:20; Rom. 2:4; 1 Jn 4:18; 2 Cor. 1:3-7)
We can understand this value in a couple ways. The first is as a standalone — our lives are characterized by the way we treat people, whether inside the church or outside. We recognize that human beings created in the image of God are spiritual beings whose lives are going to be affected drastically by sin and suffering, and we want to care for those souls in the same way Jesus cares for them — according to Isaiah 42:3
3 He will not break a bruised reed, and he will not put out a smoldering wick; he will faithfully bring justice.
which Matthew quotes to great effect in describing Jesus’s care for the large crowds that followed him in Matthew 12:15-21
15 Jesus was aware of this and withdrew. Large crowds followed him, and he healed them all.
16 He warned them not to make him known,
17 so that what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:
18 Here is my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations.
19 He will not argue or shout, and no one will hear his voice in the streets.
20 He will not break a bruised reed, and he will not put out a smoldering wick, until he has led justice to victory.
21 The nations will put their hope in his name.
The language we have adopted, “especially those who are oppressed or marginalized”, speaks very intentionally to this. I’m reminded of Jesus as being widely known for hanging out with tax collectors and sinners, who were marginalized from society as outcasts because they were undesirable, unholy, treacherous, and generally a drain on the time and resources of the upright, goodly, productive members of society who had their acts together.
Unfortunately, “church folks” have earned a reputation of being the upright, goodly, productive members of society who have their acts together who all too quickly forget that Jesus died for them while they were still sinners and that apart from his grace and the indwelling Holy Spirit, they would be sitting among the people they so gladly look down upon from their high horses.
This language also refers to those who are powerless. In the Bible, this refers especially to sojourners (among the nation of Israel), widows and orphans — specifically widows who had no one to care for them, as we saw in 1 Timothy 5. Widows pretty frequently had no real way of providing for themselves, so it was incumbent upon the church to make sure that they were well cared-for, just as we would care for our own mothers.
God’s care for the powerless and marginalized looms large over the entirety of the Scriptures — think of how many times he works to save people who are hopeless under the feet of the prideful and haughty rulers who have forgotten who’s God and who isn’t. Just off the top of my head, I think of the song of Moses in Exodus 15, Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2 after the birth of the prophet Samuel, the repeated warnings in the prophets against the leaders of Israel that God will destroy them as they’ve devoured the flock of Israel, Mary’s song, commonly called the “Magnificat”, in Luke 1:46-55 (which beautifully picks up and develops Hannah’s prayer, by the way), Jesus’s rage at the money-changers in the temple in Matthew 21, who would certainly have been profiting off the plight of desperate worshippers of the God of Israel… the list goes on and on.
So we have the opportunity and desire to reflect God’s very heart when we stand up on behalf of the powerless in our own context, elevating their humanity and recognizing and proclaiming their value in God’s eyes. This includes advocating on behalf of children who have not yet been born, women in crisis pregnancy situations, and marginalized demographics, especially ethnic minorities who have been harmed for generation after generation by unjust laws that have yet to be overturned and policies that place them at a disadvantage compared to people whose grandparents, for example, could do things like vote and go to school. It doesn’t take critical race theory to understand that I have it far better off because my parents went to decent schools than someone else, whose parents, being equally intelligent and hardworking, were denied the same opportunities because their schools were horrible — and perhaps remain horrible to this day — simply because of the color of their skin. To me, that seems to be common sense, even before we start getting into what the Bible calls right and wrong.
One other group I’m going to mention here while we’re talking about the dynamics of power and authority is victims and survivors of abuse, especially within the church. As complementarians, our theology is very, very easily wielded as a club against women, especially married women, if we’re not careful. To be emphatically clear, that does not make complementarian theology bad or wrong. A lot of very good theology is very dangerous in the wrong hands — the Word of God is a sword, after all, not a pillow.
But we must be a church that takes the cries of hurting people seriously, especially when they are hurting at home — and most of the time, this is simply an empirically-verifiable fact, those cries come from women whose husbands have weaponized Scripture against them and know how to put on a good face in ministry contexts because they can get things done for the Lord and they know all the right words to say, especially if they’ve been seminary trained. Too often, churches worry about the fallout and consequences of holding such men accountable, and the process for caring for these families is incredibly complicated, frustrating, and most of the time, unsuccessful, at least with respect to a fully restored marriage and healthy household, because oppressive husbands are usually too prideful to admit the depth of their sin and engage in the hard work of putting their flesh to death.
In further application, caring for marginalized people also includes speaking of human beings in terms that recognize that they are, first and foremost, humans — embodied souls. Hayden talked a lot about communication philosophically last week (remember “epistemic humility”), so I feel comfortable speaking more directly.
For example, it matters whether or not you choose to call someone an “illegal” or “someone in the country illegally.” There’s a difference between calling someone a “disabled person” and a “person with disabilities.” Think about the difference between talking about “gays” and “people who are same-sex attracted.”
Frankly, there’s no excuse for using language that minimizes the humanity of people created in the image of God by conflating their core identity with something wrong that they’re doing or something beyond their control. At best, it’s lazy. At worst, it’s extremely prideful, and you’re putting yourself in a position of danger by elevating yourself as better than the people you’re talking about — people who will have no interest whatsoever in hearing you talk about Jesus if they overhear the way you view them.
The Lord delights in dethroning his rivals in their pride as he shows mercy to the humble. Remember this the next time you find yourself getting angry at the bad guys the news is telling you are the problem with the world, and then turn off that particular media and find a better use for your time to address a problem you can actually do something about.
The second way to view this value is as a corollary to value number 2, where our lives together are characterized especially by how we treat each other within the church. We recognize that even human beings who have been united to Christ and are bearing the true image of God still sin, sometimes really badly.
We recognize that we are all oppressed by our own flesh as well as the enemy of our souls, both of which seek our death and self-destruction, and so we seek to care for one another by patiently, but firmly, correcting one another when we sin. We don’t do this because we’ve had our own feelings hurt, but out of a concern for the wellbeing of the person caught in sin, as well as a concern for the purity of the church and the integrity of our preaching the gospel — so this is actually a part of pursuing theological integrity, our seventh value, as well.
Paul puts it this way in Romans 2:4
4 Or do you despise the riches of his kindness, restraint, and patience, not recognizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?
and we can add to that John’s teaching in 1 John 4:18
18 There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love.
If we respond to one another’s sin in a way that involves judgment and condemnation, or that generates fear, we’re really not helping each other out and caring for one another — we’re not seeking heart change in the way that God himself changes our hearts, through patience and kindness. The best we can hope to get is behavior modification, which is oftentimes nothing more than a band-aid over a cannonball wound, and we’ll just be walking on eggshells around one another and guarding ourselves against one another because we know we’ll be read the riot act if we cross a boundary, if we even bother to put in the effort to rescue the damaged relationship.
And at worst, we’ll just be playing church, trying to be polite to people we don’t really want to be around because we have to put on our best faces and we don’t have the freedom to be our truest selves while we work together on the most important work we can do with our lives.
As we care for one another in our sin, we’re doing so fully aware that sometime soon, we may be the ones being confronted with our own sin and we may be called on to repent. The Christian life is far less about perfect obedience and consistently getting things exactly right and far more about imperfect obedience, getting things quite wrong, and being ready to humbly admit our faults and ask forgiveness and seek restitution for those we’ve wronged.
Not only do human beings united to Christ sin; they’re also affected by suffering specifically because God grants suffering as a gracious gift. It’s that fine print of faith that we don’t really understand quite so well at the eager beginnings of our walk with Jesus but very quickly come to understand when life gets harder simply because we are his followers and we can’t cheat to escape or dull the pain. Paul sums it up most clearly in Philippians 1:29
29 For it has been granted to you on Christ’s behalf not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him,
and Philippians 3:10
10 My goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death,
Isn’t this value pretty exhausting? Did we really agree that we would care for others when they have nothing to offer us and, in fact, are a drain on our time and resources? This value makes me really glad that God is omnipotent and never grows weary; otherwise, we’d be in seriously hot water.
Anyways, we care for each other in our suffering. If suffering and faith are two sides of the same coin — God’s grace to those who are in Christ — suffering will be the rule, and not the exception, in our lives together. This gives us the freedom to share with one another everything that burdens us, rather than just the really big stuff that we urgently need prayer for, so that we’re constantly practicing for when serious, genuinely tragic suffering comes on us. It’s a lot easier on everybody to bring someone a meal for the hundredth time than the first time, so let’s make sure we don’t wait until someone dies to break out the Crock Pot. It’s good to break it out even when someone is feeling mildly discouraged or slightly more tired than usual, or even just because.
It’s good for us to get used to seeing one another’s houses when we’re not even remotely ready for company. We should not have to feel the compulsion to say, “Ignore the mess” or “I’m so sorry it’s so dirty” when someone drops by to love on us. After all, when one of us suffers, all of us suffer — we’re all members of the same body and of each other as we saw in Romans 12. And it’s only a question of when, not if, it’ll be your turn to suffer. Life together requires an awful lot of comfort, so praise God that we have an inexhaustible source of comfort — the Father of all comfort himself.
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.
4 He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
5 For just as the sufferings of Christ overflow to us, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.
6 If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings that we suffer.
7 And our hope for you is firm, because we know that as you share in the sufferings, so you will also share in the comfort.
2. Committing to Tenderhearted Relationships
3. Caring for Sinning and Suffering Souls
4. Laboring as Citizens of the Kingdom
4. Laboring as Citizens of the Kingdom
Because our allegiance is to Christ our King, we patiently work in this world to see his kingdom advance. We also steadfastly endure the trials of this world as we wait to dwell in our true home, the new heavens and new earth that will come when Jesus returns. (Ps. 2:1-12; 2 Tim 2:1-7; 1 Pt 2:9-17; 2 Pt 1:3-11; Rev 1:5-8, 11:15-18, 21:1-27)
I recognize that my allotted time is running out, so you’ll be delighted to hear that Caleb and I are splitting this value up. It’s incredible to me how well-structured these values are from beginning to end, and value 4 is sort of a hinge that takes our focus from inward to outward. I’ve been focusing on the inward in values 2 and 3, so I’ll stick to the inward aspects of value 4 and leave the outward for Caleb next week.
Truth be told, all of our values come to a head in this value, specifically in our identity as citizens, and in the phrase, “our allegiance is to Christ our King.” Everything that we do, we do because Jesus has bought us and made us his own special people, a new creation, and he has given us instructions about how he wants his people to live — this exercise is nothing more than our attempt to understand his instructions, distill them down as much as possible, and package them up neatly so that we have a shorthand for what we’re doing and so that we can share it with people who are curious about our church.
We love the Scriptures because they’re Jesus’s gift to us.
We love one another because Jesus has loved us.
We care for one another because Jesus cares for us.
We labor as citizens of his kingdom because Jesus truly is king, and there is none beside him.
We’ll see next week that we train people up because Jesus has given us a job to do, and we work with brothers and sisters here and around the world because that job is really, really, really big. I’m sure Caleb will put it much more eloquently than that.
But back to the value at hand.
As citizens, our allegiance is to Christ our King. If I had my way, this would have said, “our primary political allegiance is to Christ our King” because this truly is a political statement. Thankfully, we are a congregation-ruled church and I was shot down, but we can’t miss the fact that as followers of Jesus, we can’t just segregate obedience to Jesus to the spiritual realm. The Christian faith is not merely a mystical, contemplative spirituality where we read great things, feel good about them, and then try to live decent, upstanding lives. Far from it. The Christian faith has hands and feet, and Jesus has invited us into the work of transforming the entirety of creation, bending it to his will until the day he spectacularly returns and finishes the job himself.
We say to the world, then, “We belong to Jesus, and, as far as we’re concerned, what he says goes.” And we say this to one another — with the addition that, “We belong to one another”, and our allegiance is to Jesus’s people, too, because we’re going to be spending eternity together in the new heavens and new earth, so we might as well start practicing now.
Citizens of Jesus’s kingdom are characterized, in this value, by patient labor and steadfast endurance. We want to emphasize these adjectives, especially as it relates to tenderhearted relationships and caring for souls, because without patience and steadfastness, tenderhearted care will never have a chance to develop. Our hearts are so slow to change, and while true, heartfelt affections may develop very rapidly among new friends and family, genuine love really does take time. Trust takes time. Like, one of my greatest fears in becoming a pastor here was, “But what if I have to confront someone about their sin?” even though I’ve been here for almost 10 years and I know everybody to be generally reasonable people, especially with respect to spiritual and ethical matters.
Additionally, the Lord seems to love the fruit that grows the longest the best. Fruit that springs up rapidly is oftentimes suspect in the Lord’s economy, and time has proven that suspicion over and over again. If our work is going to last, it’ll be as we labor deliberately, intentionally, and with wisdom — and as the Spirit empowers us and the Lord blesses us. His ways are inscrutable, and the work of faith is one that looks far more to the task at hand than it does to the results of that task.
Oftentimes, this is hard, especially when the wheels fall off, and most especially when they fall off through no fault of our own. So steadfastness is the order of the day, where we are more inclined to stay the course the Lord has set us on rather than shifting with the winds of providence. The Lord has called us to rock-solid trust in him, not reading his mind and trying to take the blessed path of least resistance at the cost of cutting corners.
And we will only be able to do this as we embrace our heavenly citizenship — as we continue to remember who God says we are.
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his possession, so that you may proclaim the praises of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
And hear how Peter continues in his second letter to how those people ought to live:
3 His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
4 By these he has given us very great and precious promises, so that through them you may share in the divine nature, escaping the corruption that is in the world because of evil desire.
5 For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge,
6 knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness,
7 godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.
8 For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being useless or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now we’ll take the Lord’s Supper.
First, I want to say a word about who the Supper is for and who it isn’t.
The Supper is for those who have been united to Christ by faith. Maybe this week you feel that you’ve been useless or unfruitful. Maybe you’ve failed to be tenderhearted towards a brother or sister. Maybe you’ve been completely uncaring, or you’ve fallen asleep on the job and lived as a citizen of the world rather than a citizen of heaven’s kingdom.
If that’s you, welcome to the club. We have all these values and goals and aspirations, but they are only good for us if we are rooted in the truths of the gospel message, that Jesus died for us, and it’s his righteousness that gives us any standing before God. So we repent when we fall short. And then we repent again. And we keep on repenting, and some day we’ll die or Jesus will return and we won’t need to repent anymore, but until then we’ll continue taking this supper week after week as a tangible promise from God that he is with us and for us because he is for Jesus, and he will keep his promise to glorify Jesus in his people by pouring out the riches of his mercy.
Here at GBC, we also believe the Supper is for those who have publicly displayed their union with Christ through baptism, so if you haven’t been baptized as a believer — after you were crucified with Christ — we ask that you would refrain from taking the Supper.
If these conditions aren’t true of you, or you’re not sure whether or not they’re true, please refrain this week and come and talk to any of the pastors or members of GBC. We take the Supper every week, and you may well be able to join us 7 short days from now.
I’ll invite the servers forward as I pray.