God's Advantage Plan
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· 7 viewsProp: Senior adults should leave trustworthy examples for faithful Christians to follow.
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Today we celebrate the Lord’s faithful gift to us in our Senior Adults. If you consider yourself a Senior Adult today, you have reached a goal the rest of us are shooting for.
One of the things I think about when I think about becoming a Senior Adult is Medicare. I’ve learned that there is Part A and B. Then you have to pay for Part C to coverage what A and B won’t cover. One version of Part C is the Medicare Advantage Plan.
I don’t really know much about all that, but I do know this that God’s Advantage Plan for the church is Senior Adults. I feel sad for those churches that don’t have a good number of godly Senior Adults. Senior Adults give the church a great advantage to accomplishing to the ongoing mission of the church. A church is at a severe disadvantage if all the wisdom it can must merely goes back to the 1990s. Listen to what the Bible says about God’s children who are Senior Adults.
1. Some would say that gray hair is a mark of infirmity or weakness. But the Bible says:
31 Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.
29 The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair.
Gray hair is a gift from God, because every day is a gift from God. And, when you have lived your days to glorify God, that gray hair as few as they might be, add up to a person worthy of honor.
No matter how old you are, I think that it is important to remember that you are here for a purpose and that purpose is God’s purpose. If God didn’t have any purpose for you then he would have already taken you home.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.
God knows what he is doing with you. He has had your life planned from the very beginning.
Listen to the Apostle Paul speak about his purpose as he considered the potential of his death:
21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
22 If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell.
To live in the flesh is Christ and therefore, he lives for the purpose of Christ.
God still wants to bear fruit in the lives of older believers:
12 The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
13 They are planted in the house of the Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God.
14 They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green,
15 to declare that the Lord is upright; he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.
What does it look like for Senior Adults to continue to bear fruit? I don’t know the complete answer to that question, but I definitely know a big piece of that purpose. That is to pass on the faith that was handed down to you to the next generation. Now, here me well, I don’t mean some certain style of worship or some particular discipleship structure that you grew up with. Those these change from generation to generation. The goal is not to reproduce the church from the 1950s any more than it is to reproduce the church of the Middle Ages and sing Gregorian Chant.
The role of the previous generation is always to preserve and pass on the gospel and true faith in the Lord Jesus Christ to the next generation.
Faith from the current generation is always built in some sense on the faith of of the previous generation.
Where did the faith that we have begin?
19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,
20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,
God gave the faith to our patriarchs of the faith that worked itself out through Christ and now it must be passed on. Listen to the way Jude spoke of this faith:
3 Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.
God’s Advantage Plan is giving the church Senior Adults who know what matters is preserving the gospel through which God will built his church for generations long after they are gone. These Seniors become crucial examples for the next generation who become examples to the next generation and so on:
You leave an example of:
I. What God Intends the Church to Be? (v.14-15)
I. What God Intends the Church to Be? (v.14-15)
Senior Adults display to us that God intends the church to be a family. Look at what Paul calls the church in v.15.
14 I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that,
15 if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.
A. A place where relationships are fueled by gracious love.
A. A place where relationships are fueled by gracious love.
“the household of God.” “The church” Think about that phrase. The church is the “assembly of believers gathered” and their relationships created the household of God. This redefines our relationships with each other.
The church is God’s family. So in the church, we need to relate to each other as God’s family.
We read Ephesians 2 a second ago. Notice he said that we are the household of God, built on the foundation of faith we received from the apostles and prophets.
19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,
20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,
Some of us are proud of the fact that we have our family in the church. “So your grandmother goes to the church you go to.” We need to relate to each other like we are blood related. The blood that ties us together is Christ. This is exactly what he is going to say in 1 Tim. 5:1-2.
1 Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father, younger men as brothers,
2 older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity.
This empowers us to treat each other with more love and grace than ever before. This means when you see an elderly man in the church, don’t treat him like someone else’s grandfather. Treat him like he is your grandfather. Otherwise, youth tend to think, “Old people, they don’t understand anything.” And Seniors, treat children like they are your grandchildren. One thing I know about grandparents is that they will give their grandchildren a pass on a lot of things.
*I have seen my mother, the same woman that use to beat me with a switch when I passed a note in church, let my kids get away with murder and sprinkle candy on them when they leave.
So, instead of seeing children and youth and thinking. Young disrespectful kids! Treat them like your grandkids. Seeing each other as family allows us to have a lot more grace with each other.
B. A place where the presence of God is encountered among the people.
B. A place where the presence of God is encountered among the people.
We understand that God lives in the heart of believers and that we no longer have to go to the temple with a sacrifice in order to encounter God’s presence. But there is a sense in which, the presence of God does not only live in each of us individually, but that as the church is the body of Christ, God’s presence dwells within his body. So that, when the church gathers we often experience the presence of God in a way that we can’t alone.
16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
So, when we gather together, we should gather together not simply for the fellowship of friends that we haven’t seen for a week (or 6 weeks with the coronovirus.) We gather together not simply to hear teaching from the Word. But, we gather together, we gather knowing that by gather with you and you with me and us together, we can meet God in a way that changes us. When we meet together God meets with us. And we find new hope as believers pray for each other. As we share our deepest hurts and needs. As we confess our struggles of sin and get right with God. True revival of our souls can happen because of the uniqueness of church being God’s family.
II. What God intends the Church to do. (v.14-15)
II. What God intends the Church to do. (v.14-15)
I don’t know if you noticed, but this text actually contains the purpose statement for the entire book.
14 I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that,
15 if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.
Senior Adults, part of what you are to hand down is biblical understanding of how God desires the church to function. How we ought to behave as the family of God.
What does God desire out of worship? What does not belong in worship? What does God desire in the way men and women relate to each other in the church.
For example, just look at how 1 Timothy is structured. Most of chapters 1, 4, and 6 are simply warns against false teachers or some form of false teaching. And chapters 2,3,and 5 teach us how we relate to each other as men women, how we structure for leadership and the qualifications for leadership, and then how we care for widows as we minister to the family.
We need to be passing down to the next generation what the living God desires for His church. These things matter, and if we don’t abide by them, teach them, and then pass them down, we lose them. And, God’s desires matter.
*Just as an example. Complementarianism, how men and women are equal in person but are created as differently for different roles, matters. And, it is under severe attack.
*But the most important truth that is under attack is nature of the gospel. This is why he calls the church to be “a pillar and buttress of the truth.” (v.15)
15 if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.
This is vivid, architechtural imagery of the church holding up the gospel and displaying the gospel before a watching world.
When I was kid, every now and again we would take a trip down to Biloxi. The most interesting thing in Biloxi besides the beach was the home of Jefferson Davis who use to be the President of the Confederate States in the Civil War. What I remembered most about this home as a kid had nothing to do with the Civil War. It had everything to do with the massive columns holding it up. I use to think that if it didn’t have all these columns it was sure to collapse.
We carry the truth. Our responsibility is to promote and protect God’s truth to a watching world. We employ it to make disciples of Christ. But we also promote it to repel the attacks of false teaching.
The Word of God has made it through the worse attacks that humanity can throw at it. Through communism, atheism, humanism, facist regimes devoted to destroying it. Yet it still prevails. The word of God is not endanger of destruction nearly as much as it is in danger of corruption.
That brings up, what is it precisely that we are protecting?
III. What God intends the church to cherish. (v.16)
III. What God intends the church to cherish. (v.16)
16 Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
What we have next is a hymn that emerged in the early church that summarized the gospel. The early church protected the gospel by singing it’s truth. And when things came in that threatened it, they knew it so well, the cast it out.
The gospel, or the mystery of godliness, boils down to these truths.
A. Incarnation: “He was manifested in the flesh”
A. Incarnation: “He was manifested in the flesh”
The second person of the Trinity, God himself, became man, born of a virgin, lived a holy life in our place, then in the flesh died in our place to pay our sin debt.
B. Resurrection: “vindicated by the Spirit”
B. Resurrection: “vindicated by the Spirit”
Proving that Jesus was exactly who he said, was raised from the dead by the power of God so that in Christ we are raised in him forevermore.
C. Exalted on High: “seen by angels”
C. Exalted on High: “seen by angels”
He is forever displayed at the victorious one. The one at which it says,
10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
D. Evangelism: “Proclaimed among the nations”
D. Evangelism: “Proclaimed among the nations”
We take the truth of God’s work and forgiveness and are faithful with to Christ’s great commission.
18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
E. Conversion: “believed on in the world”
E. Conversion: “believed on in the world”
The effectiveness of our preaching is that the Spirit of God uses it to turn rebellious enemies of God in to believing children of God by giving them faith.
F. Glorification: “taken up in glory.”
F. Glorification: “taken up in glory.”
This story comes to an end when Jesus, who was taken up in glory, takes his saints up in glory and we all celebrate at the Marriage supper of the Lamb the grace of God in forgiveness, love, and eternal life purchased by our Lord and eternal Savior, Jesus Christ.
Senior Adults, make sure you hand down truth and the awe and wonder of the gospel.