Sermon Tone Analysis

Today we are switching gears a little bit to focus on the church, and I want us to talk about a couple things together.

First, what does it look like for you as a Christian to be committed to the family that God has saved you into?

That’s what we’ll be talking about this morning.

Tonight, we’re going to talk about how the church, together as a family, engages the culture that we live in.

So, the task this morning is to encourage and exhort you all to take commitment to the church seriously.

We talked about this last year as well, from the perspective of adoption.

Do you guys remember that?

We talked about how when God adopts us, we not only become his son or daughter, but we also become sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, uncles and aunties, to our Christian family.

We are deeply linked together as a family, whether we always like that or not.

Well, as much as I wanted to just repeat the talk I gave last year – that would’ve been lazy on my part.

Plus, there is so much in the Bible about the importance of Christians committing to the church that we need to see the full scope of God’s design for our lives.

J.I Packer – has anyone read him?

If not you, should.

But he has this clever way of talking about this that I’ve always liked.

He says that no Christian may cut loose from the church and act as if they are the only pebble on God’s beach.

You understand what he’s saying?

The life of a Christian isn’t a choose your own adventure story.

We are grafted into God’s story, which includes the family that he has given us.

This morning we’re going to look at how the Apostle Peter and the author to the Hebrews communicates the importance of the church.

There’s three things I want us to see this morning: God’s Action, Our Response, and Our Commitment

God’s Action ()

are some beautiful words about what God has done for his people.

There are numerous Old Testament references in these 2 verses, and if you have a reference Bible you can check out all of them.

But by referring back to all these promises from the Old Testament, the Apostle Peter is clearly saying that all of God’s promises to his people have been fulfilled in the church.

So, for example, in God said,

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.

You see then how Peter is using this text from Exodus?

God promised, “you will be to me priests and a holy nation.”

Peter now says, “You ARE a priesthood and a holy nation.”

What was promised is now true.

We need to understand how incredible this is.

In order to do that, we have to review a bit of Bible history.

If you had to summarize the entire Old Testament in one or two sentences, how might you do it?

Anyone want to take a stab at it?

God’s faithfulness to his unfaithful people.

You all do know that the nation of Israel like, really messed things up, right?

They didn’t treat each other well, they didn’t treat people outside the nation of Israel well, they abused the land, they abused each other, they worshipped false gods, they relied on foreign kings rather than on God, it was a complete mess.

So, What does God do?

Eventually he says, ok, I’ve had enough.

Over and over again I’ve been gracious and kinds to you, and over and over again you’ve mucked it up.

There were severe consequences for the people’s actions.

God used foreign nations to punish the Israelites and take them into exile.

The glory that the people once had was taken from them.

Throughout the Bible, God’s relationship to his people is illustrated through marriage.

God is the husband, and his people are the bride.

So whenever God’s people sin against God, he considers it adultery.

We are forsaking, in a sense, our marriage commitments to God.

This is the big idea of the first 3 chapters of the book of Hosea.

Here we read about how God commands the prophet Hosea to marry a woman who would be an adulterer, and who will have children with other men, because this would be the image God used to communicate the severity of Israel’s sin.

So, in very strong language, God tells Hosea in chapter 1:

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.”

God uses Hosea’s marriage to an adulterous wife to communicate the severity of our spiritual adultery toward him.

Hosea’s wife, Gomer, ends up having 3 children.

The 3 children illustrate just how badly we have broken our relationship with God.

One of the children’s name is “No Mercy.”

God, in effect, says, I have been incredibly gracious and merciful to my people, but that’s gone.

Now I will no longer show them mercy, and they will face the consequences of their actions.

Another child’s name is “Not my People.”

And again, God is telling his people, over and over again I’ve been gracious to you, and you’ve forsaken me.

So strong is my punishment toward you, that it could be said you are no longer my people.

Now, I give you this brief detour through Bible history to make a point.

Apart from God’s grace, you and I are no better than the people of Israel.

We all have turned from God and sinned against him, the natural man, apart from the grace of God, is without hope in this world.

And God would’ve been perfectly just and right to leave us there.

He didn’t owe us anything.

He had already been gracious over and over again to his people.

The fact that we still draw breath at all is grace from him.

But he didn’t leave us there, did he?

In his perfect plan, and his perfect timing, he sent Jesus Christ into the world, the eternal son of God, to take God’s wrath so we wouldn’t have to.

God loved his people too much to leave us in a place of sin, misery and punishment.

Jesus took our sin and punishment so that our relationship with God could be completely restored.

The restoration that God brings us is total.

Every area of our life is healed and restored by the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Our thoughts, desires, what we love, who we love, what we do, all of that is being restored, because our relationship with God has been restored by Jesus.

So complete is our redemption that Jesus even completely restores our relationship with God.

So you see why what Peter says in verse 10 is so incredible?

God has acted in Jesus to restore what was broken.

And now it’s on us to respond.

Our Response ()

Let’s turn our attention back to together.

I want you to see how the author of Hebrews develops on the work of Christ and applies it to how we respond together as those who follow Jesus.

He begins by reminding us of what Jesus has done for us…

And then he says what that means for us.

We draw near to Jesus, because we ought to have confidence of his great love for us.

We hold fast to what we believe to be true, we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.

These things are somewhat on an individual basis, how the work of Jesus changes our personal relationship with God.

But then in verses 24-25 the author widens up his application to how we relate to one another.

First in verse 24, it says that we are to consider how to “stir up” one another to love and good works.

This word “stir up” is a strong one.

It literally means to agitate, or provoke someone to do something.

It’s kind of like going up to someone and continually poking them until they become agitated enough to do what you want them to do.

That’s what is in view here.

The reason why such a strong word is used is because we are all going to enter seasons of our life where we are feeling apathetic, a bit lazy, uncaring, or tired.

We’re all going to be tempted to just take the easy way out and abandon the call that Christ has in our lives.

And when that happens, we need other Christians who will surround us and provoke us back to a life of service and love to God and to others.

I have a friend, who is now a fellow pastor, who I was telling about this retreat and that I would be coming back to speak to you.

His first response was, “Make sure you tell them the gospel, and make sure you talk to them about the importance of the church.”

He went on to tell me how he had grown up in a youth group, but never took those things seriously, and so far a large part of his adult life he wandered from the faith and spent all his time on his career.

While he’s grateful now that the Lord brought him back and is using him to be a pastor, there is a sense of regret that he didn’t use so many years of his life wisely and with purpose for God and his church.