Untitled Sermon (2)

Transition

“My worth is not in what I own” or “skill or name or wealth or might”

“My value fixed, my ransom paid

“At the cross”

Yes!

I need that reminder this morning

Intro

Welcome

My name is Mike and I have the privilege of being one of the Pastors here at One Hope Church

Today that means I’m going to open up God’s Word with you

Open your bible or bible app today we’ll be in

We’re in a short but significant series called “We Are One Hope Church”

We’re reminding ourselves of what defines us as a church

We started with the core: we are Gospel-centered, meaning we have set our orbit around the good news of Jesus

Then, we continued with the idea that we are Community-driven, meaning we prefer collaboration and connectedness because we believe life and faith are better experienced together

And today we’re going to look at what it means to be a Kingdom-focused church, seeing the world the way Jesus intended us to see it

Tension

We as a society are fascinated with kings, queens and kingdoms

Game of Thrones

Royal weddings

Lord of the Rings

Beyonce (Queen B)

This isn’t a new phenomenon

It’s been happening for thousands of years

Reading in the Jesus Storybook Bible about how Israel demanded a king like the other nations of the world ()

Samuel warned them: all earthly kings will be oppressive, set on wealth accumulation, and overall be takers

He provided Saul and thus began our seemingly never-ending disappointment with the people who lead us

What happens in our culture when the earthly kings and kingdoms let us down?

A leader, a president, a pastor?

We grab the crown and make ourselves the king of our own little kingdom

The result is our greatest source of our stress and anxiety

We are either fixed on building or protecting our kingdom from falling

Worry has 3 elements to it

Belief that you have control +

Fear for your own comfort =

Stress when you realize both are threatened

Building / Protecting our kingdom

Job

Validation

Sickness

All of these become blows to my kingdom

When you become a parent, our family can become our kingdom

They are easy to confuse

Family becomes the ultimate thing to defend

Jesus has something to say to us about our anxiety and worry

Context

Beginning in , Jesus is teaching what has come to be known as the sermon on the mount

He’d gained a following after healing people and performing miracles

He is setting forth principles for everyday life

In starting in verse 25 he addresses our tendency to worry about temporal things

He reminds us that because we’re more valuable to God than the animals and plants, we can put away our worry

We’ll pick up in verse 31 of

Scripture

SLIDE

31 Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Prayer

Jesus, I pray your Word would both deeply challenge and encourage us. Would you take all internal and external distractions and bind them. Protect this time we have together today. Help us to hear with spiritual ears and see with spiritual eyes. Your kingdom come today. Your will be done today. Amen.

Application

The first thing I want us to understand and notice is this word “seek”

33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

It appears in verse 32 and in verse 33

It is an emotionally charged word

It can mean “desire” or “to look for” or “run after”

Some translations add the word eagerly

There’s a contrast in our text

First, we see in verse 32 that the Gentiles or people who don’t follow Jesus seek the answers to questions that are all about their comfort

But when I see their questions, I see me

What are the questions you’re asking?

What am I going to eat?

What am I going to wear?

Where am I going to live?

Who are my friends going to be?

What am I going to study?

What am I going to do with these kids?

What questions are you asking out of anxiety?

Different Priorities

This is the first thing we’ll see today: [SLIDE] kingdom-focused church has different priorities.

Seek FIRST

In other words, replace all of those things with something greater, something better

Change your focus

Adjust your sight

Reassess your priorities

As a people, as the church, we should have clearly different priorities than the world around us

Driving Purpose

So what should take the top priority slot in our attention and affection?

This is where we’ll focus most of our time today

Jesus says “33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

So what is the kingdom of God?

This theme of the kingdom is central to many of the things Jesus specifically in his sermon on the mount but really for his whole time on earth

Even if I preached a 2 hour sermon on this, we wouldn’t have scratched the surface

I’d encourage you to do some further reading particularly with a book called “Seek First: How the Kingdom of God Changes Everything” by Jeremy Treat

It was an excellent resource for capturing a lot of the layers of this topic and is really where a lot of what I’m about to share came from

Treat says this:

“The kingdom is God’s reign through God’s people over God’s place.” - Jeremy Treat, Seek First

SLIDE

[Kingdom of God Graphic with Crown at the top]

Let’s break this down into those three sections

God’s Reign

God’s authority and sovereignty over everything

Became a redemptive rescue plan after sin entered the world

God is reclaiming and renewing what is His

Through God’s People

Kingdom is mistakenly seen as a synonym for the church

That’s too limited

Kingdom is connected to the people of God in that God rescues His people but then employs us to be part of the redemption of what He is restoring

Over God’s Place

The kingdom of God was meant to be a worldwide place of peace, joy, and connectedness with Him

Our sin all but destroyed that pathway

But God is restoring what He originally intended

When we think of the kingdom, we shouldn’t think of what we’ll leave behind but rather what we’ll see restored to perfection here around us

A place, a community, a culture that isn’t polluted with sin and all the darkness that it brings upon us

So just to make this clear, the working definition we’re using today is that the kingdom of God is summarized as God’s reign through God’s people over God’s place.

Then the text says “and His righteousness”

Righteousness = can also be translated as “justice” or “what is right”

We could say “what is just, what is RIGHT according to God” - HIS righteousness

So for us to seek first the kingdom means that we want to pursue and promote the reign, the authority, the power, the deservedness, the worship, the elevation of God as his people in order to change the place where we live and will live forever.

And to seek first his righteousness means we want to join Him in making right what He sees as wrong

Where do these two ideas - His kingdom and His righteousness - converge?

Jesus

To understand what moves and drives the kingdom, look to the king

Jesus is the only real king

He knew this and spoke about this in his time on the earth

He never forgot who he really was

With Pilot as he’s being questioned before being sentenced to death he said that His “kingdom was not of this world”

Jesus is the only one with the intelligence required to run this kingdom

Have you thought about that?

Jesus is so often associated with lower class and marginalized people that we forget he’s a genius

He wasn’t a simple minded carpenter

He was God in human flesh and everything about him was part of His strategy

He chose to enter the world, to live the life, to engage with the people, to be the human person that he was to reverse our expectations of what a king should do and who he should be

He wanted to flip the kingdom itself on it’s head

Whatever has caused you to put Jesus in any other place than a fierce, wise, diligent, smart king needs to be jettisoned today

Far too often, we hear talk about the kingdom without the king

Jeremy Treat says this:

“Unfortunately, much of the contemporary talk about the kingdom paints a picture of a kingdom with a vacant throne. But if the kingdom is portrayed as a utopian world without mention of God, then the Bible’s vision of the kingdom has been lost. The kingdom of God is the vision of the world reordered around the powerful love of God in Christ.” - Jeremy Treat, Seek First

In , it says [SLIDE] “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God…”

Jesus main purpose was to bring people to God and so our main purpose is to bring people to God because Jesus brought us to God

The concept of the kingdom of God is motivating because of how it’s personally affected us

We do not deserve to even be servants in this kingdom and yet Jesus has placed His royal robes on our shoulders

Do you hear this? Not with just your ears but with your heart

We are not just bystanders or messengers of the kingdom

Remember: if you have accepted the sacrifice of Jesus in Your place, you are a RECIPIENT of the reconstructive, redemptive, restorative kingdom of God

And as recipients, we passionately prioritize advancing the kingdom and the righteousness of God whenever we have the chance

This is the second thing: [SLIDE]a kingdom-focused church has a driving purpose

When was the last time you asked yourself: what’s the meaning of this? Does this really matter?

Was it at home in the difficult day-to-day of raising kids?

Was it in your office as you navigate office politics?

Was it here on a Sunday setting up an empty YMCA?

We all struggle deeply with finding meaning and purpose

This purpose of bringing people to God isn’t just for people called to professional vocational ministry

The beautiful thing about this purpose is that it can happen anywhere

Lockheed Martin

Parenting

Sitting with someone in the student union

Embracing the purpose of God infuses every moment of our lives with purpose

It means there are no insignificant moments

Disruptive Impact

So what is the result of all of this?

If we set our priorities different than the way the world is telling us to set them

And we passionately pursue the kingdom and the righteousness of God

This is the last thing: [SLIDE] a kingdom-focused church has a disruptive impact.

By disruptive I mean it has an affect, it interrupts patterns that aren’t right, it makes you look again, it catches you off guard

By disruptive I don’t mean

Disconnected from culture

Disrespectful toward culture

Arguing or attacking or drawing attention to ourselves

Let’s shift our attention again back to our King, back to Jesus

CS Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe writes this about the impact, the disruption of Jesus:

“Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight, At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more, When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.” - C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Let’s not stop there because it gets better

Jesus is in his hometown of Nazareth and goes to the synagogue

He pulls out the scroll of the prophecy that Isaiah wrote many years before and he reads from

He quotes a portion of this but I want to read a little bit more because it’s so amazing

This is prophetic but this is Jesus

[SLIDE]

The Spirit of the Lord God is on me,

because the Lord has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives

and freedom to the prisoners;

2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,

and the day of our God’s vengeance;

to comfort all who mourn,

3 to provide for those who mourn in Zion;

to give them a crown of beauty instead of ashes,

festive oil instead of mourning,

and splendid clothes instead of despair.[b]

And they will be called righteous trees,

planted by the Lord

to glorify him.

4 They will rebuild the ancient ruins;

they will restore the former devastations;

they will renew the ruined cities,

the devastations of many generations.

This is not just a figurative thought, the kingdom of God

It’s disrupts the direction that everything is going

It fixes brokenness that everyone has given up on

It raises up things that haven’t moved in years

Disruptions

Religion

Leadership

Disruptive Impact

Personal

We can’t seek the kingdom and the righteousness of God and not have our day to day lives look different

Prioritizing prayer and study of God’s Word

Connecting with community for the sake of bringing others closer to God

Putting the same level of priority on coming together on Sundays as we do to being faithful in our paid jobs so that someone else can hear you testify to the truth

Public

Mercy

Justice

Outreach

Teaching

Hospitality

Vocation

For us as One Hope this means

Helping (Serving, Mercy Ministries)

Welcoming (hospitality, caring for others))

Doing Justice (fighting injustice)

Reaching people with the gospel (Sharing the the Gospel (evangelizing), outreach)

Teaching people to obey/about God (Discipling/Teaching (growing in theology & grace)

There is change that comes to most broken, the most hurting, the most marginalized people as a result of the kingdom breaking through

Let me remind of our original definition of the kingdom of God

God’s reign through God’s people over God’s place

God’s place is not what it’s supposed to be

This is the already and the not yet that we find ourselves in

The reality that the kingdom has broken through in Jesus and is counteracting the decay of this world

But the day is coming when it will be made new and complete

Until that time, we join in the disruption and wait for the restoration

Closing

A kingdom focused church has a different vision, a driving purpose, and a disruptive impact

A kingdom focused church changes the world!

If we give ourselves to this, Jesus says that everything else will take care of itself

If our priority is more on God’s vision and God’s heart, He promises to take care of the temporal that often gets in the way

The kingdom being first doesn’t minimize the rest of life

“In other words, prioritizing the kingdom does not minimize the other aspects of life; it puts them in perspective. The kingdom of God doesn’t have to compete with our work, hobbies, relationships, and the other important aspects of life. In fact, when rightly understood, the kingdom will enhance every aspect of life, infusing them with fresh meaning and significance.” - Treat, Jeremy R.. Seek First (p. 14). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Where are you missing the kingdom of God? What is causing your blindness?

How are you lacking motivation? What reminder do you need to stir your heart?

Where is God calling you to change your lifestyle? To shift your daily, weekly, monthly rhythms according to a kingdom perspective?

Shift your priorities

Stoke the fire of your purpose with the Gospel

Change the world!

Take this next song to really meditate and connect with God