God's Heart Beating in the Life of the Church

Intro

If you have your Bible’s or apps with you, I want to invite you to open up to Genesis 17 and keep that side by side with Acts 2:38-39 which is printed for you in your bulletin. If you don’t own a Bible that’s OK we have some in the seats in front of you that you can use.

While you’re turning there let’s pray together.

Cathy Park Hong’s book Minor Feelings is a collection of essays on her lived experience as an Asian American woman in the United States. In one of these essays she draws a distinction between “speaking about” life experiences outside of your own, versus “speaking nearby” such experiences. To “speak about” a life experience is to speak authoritatively, as though this experience is our own. Well, that works when you have in fact had the life experience you may be speaking about, but it shouldn’t be too hard for us to see the trouble with speaking about experiences that are far removed from our own lives.

If you’ve ever had dinner with a toddler, then you have likely seen this play out in real time. Because what often happens when you present a new food to a toddler that they are unfamiliar with? “I don’t like that!”

“What do you mean you don’t like it? You haven’t even tried it! How could you know!?”

The fact of the matter is that some things, many things, can only be learned by experience. As a man, it would be impossible for me to know what it is really like to be the only woman in a male-dominated environment at work. Right? And for me to pretend otherwise would be naive at best, or misogynistic at worst.

Instead, Hong suggests that we learn to “speak nearby” experiences outside of our own. To speak nearby is to speak informed and close to a subject, but sensitively enough to avoid trying to speak for, or in place of, those who have had the relevant experience to truly speak about the given subject.

You’re thinking, ok, that all sounds overly semantic, and what exactly does this have to do with Acts 2? Maybe you’re right, but I think this distinction between speaking about or speaking nearby is actually really helpful as we frame our time together this morning.

This morning we’re going to look at God’s heart for children and families, including, or even especially, vulnerable children and families. I want us to see how the heart of God is bound up and revealed in what Jesus has done and is doing in his people.

But I also recognize that engaging on these subjects requires a certain level of trust, and we are still getting to know one another. So as we prepare to jump in, I want you to know the posture from which I am speaking from this morning.

I have never been involved in foster care or adoption. That was not my experience as a child, nor have I entered into that calling now as an adult. So I have no intention of speaking about either as if I know the joys or the pains of these experiences.

But I do hope I can earn your trust as one who endeavors to speak nearby these beautiful, complex, and often painful experiences; to speak nearby as the son of a broken family; as the younger brother to an adopted older brother who didn’t receive the help he needed and took his own life; as the husband to a wife who was put into foster care as an older child and was later adopted; as a father who lost his first child in a miscarriage.

I know that for many of us, home can be the saddest place on earth, “family” can be the word we like to hear the least, and talking about children can evoke all sorts of hard feelings, even painful trauma.

So if that’s you this morning, I want you to know that you are seen in this place, not just by me, or by other pastors or church members, but most important by God who knows you and loves you.

Are you with me? So even as we get into God’s Word this morning if I say some things that are hard to hear or believe, I’m with you. I feel it too. But I believe that the beauty of who God is, and the love he has promised to us, they are a rock for us to stand on or even hide behind in all of our doubt and pain.

Alright lets get into the texts. One point broken up into 3 headings, are you ready? Here it is: God’s heart for families, every family, beating in the life of the church.

God’s Heart for Families

Let’s look at the text. You may be familiar with the context of Peter’s words here, which come at the end of his Pentecost sermon. God’s Spirit has descended upon the Apostles and has filled Peter with this Word to give to the people, a Word about Jesus and how we might find life in him.

And what I want you to notice right off the top is that these words in verses 38 and 39 are supercharged with Old Testament promise. If we had time I’d have us look at the preceding 37 verses which are packed with Old Testament promise that find their climax in verses 38 and 39. Instead, I want you to turn and look at Genesis 17, particularly verse 7.

You see Peter, as he proclaimed God’s promises to the crowds, was pulling on a pattern and theme that emerges in the opening pages of Scripture. Here in Genesis 17 God is continuing, or clarifying, his promises to Abraham which began back in Genesis 12. Here is what God says in verse 7:

Genesis 17:7 ESV

And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

I will establish my covenant, my promises, between me and you, and your offspring after you. You and your offspring. What does that sound like?

That’s Acts 2:39. The promise is for you and for your children. You see there is newness in Peter’s words, and that newness comes from the revelation that all of God’s promises are now met and found only in Jesus Christ. We’ll get to that in a minute. But the promise itself is old, old, as old as God’s first promises that he made with his people.

I will be God to you, and to your children. The french reformer John Calvin said on Acts 2:39 that Peter is simply teaching what God had revealed to Abraham, that this promise is ALWAYS in force: I will be God to you and to your children.

God loves families. He has promised to work in families. Which means - hear me now - God’s design for families is wholeness. That is his intended design. That is his heart for families.

God’s Heart for Every Family

Now, this is where we need to make some space for hard, painful, realities. Many, maybe even most families, are not whole. This is so for a variety of reasons that I don’t need to name because you already know.

So what are we supposed to do with that? What do we do with this chasm between God’s heart and design for families to be whole, and the painful reality that most families, our families, are not whole? Are we to conclude then that his promises are void or ineffective?

No. Instead, what the pages of Scripture reveal to us is that God sees our families that have been broken by loss, death, sin, or complex social and economic factors. He sees our families and recommits himself to us, such that we might be able to say that God’s heart is for every family, including, or even especially, those that have been shattered by the effects of sin and the fall.

Stay with me here. No sooner does God promise himself to families than does he also reveal himself as the protector of vulnerable and afflicted families. In Exodus 22, he pledges himself to be the one who will hear the cry of the widow and the fatherless, in Deuteronomy 10 as the one who will execute justice on their behalf. In Psalm 68, David pictures God in his holy habitation and, beholding the beauty of God in his dwelling place, he ascribes to him the title: Father of the fatherless, protector of widows.

Here’s the connection I want us to make. God’s commitment to the wholeness of families is inextricably linked to his promises to protect and execute justice on behalf of vulnerable or fractured families. They are two sides of the same coin. For God to fiercely love families means he will be rise to be their protector when their wholeness is threatened.

If I can say it more pointedly: God’s justice for the vulnerable is firmly rooted in his character as a covenant-making, promise-keeping God.

Now let me just pause here. I recognize that there is no way I can qualify what I just said in a way that resolve the doubts or confusion many of you might be feeling right now. If God’s heart for families is wholeness, if he is the protector of vulnerable families, then how come that has not been my experience at all? Why has my experience with family been so painful? I know that place well, because I’ve asked myself similar questions often.

The truth is I don’t have answers for you. I wish I did. But I do know one thing to be certain. I do know that it is not because He doesn’t love us. These things do not happen to us because he doesn’t care. How do I know that? Because if that were the case, Jesus never would’ve come down and gotten involved in our mess. He never would’ve taken a family on to himself, only to experience the loss of an earthly father, the pain of siblings who didn’t trust him, the sadness of leaving his mother behind. One thing we know for certain: Our God is one who sees our suffering, who joins us in it, and takes concrete action against it in his death and resurrection.

So as we navigate these painful, confusing questions for our own life, Jesus is the center that can hold us together. Even when it feels like everything else around us unmanageable, Jesus is the rock we can stand on and hide behind.

In the life of the Church

Ok, so what does all of this mean for our life together in the Church? And here is where I want to press in with you to see how God’s heart informs the life of the Christian community. We’ve seen that God has promised himself not just to individuals but to families, and that when the family is threatened he therefore pledges himself as its protector and advocate. That’s his heart. That’s his character.

And his people, as those who have put our faith now in Christ, who have been given His Spirit, his heart is to become our heart. He wants us to love what he loves and hate what he hates. Does God work in supernatural and extraordinary means to rise up as protector for the vulnerable? Absolutely. But his ordinary means to operate is through his people, who are to become those who will follow God’s leading into difficult places to protect the vulnerable, to preserve a sense of wholeness, to advocate for those without a voice. Watch this.

Deuteronomy 24:17 - You shall not pervert the justice due to the fatherless or the widow. Psalm 82:3 - give justice to the fatherless and maintain the rights of the afflicted. Isaiah 1:17 - bring justice to the fatherless and the widow.

You see, these are not abstract commands that are somehow disconnected or of minor importance to our faith; they are core to the character of who God is and the kind of people he wants us to become. When we ignore or minimize those for whom God clearly has a special love for; when we discard these commands as unimportant; when we allow the overwhelming need to paralyze us from taking action, we are striking at the very heart of who God is and who he wants us to be.

Just this week my wife Neva and I toured Wendell Phillips school on the West Side with Sajan and Rayvey George. Of their 650 students, nearly 15% of them are homeless or in foster care. While I was encouraged by the work the staff and teachers are doing for these children and families, I was also overwhelmed at the pressing needs right here in our neighborhoods in this city. As I listened to Carissa from Family Hope share a couple weeks ago about the opportunity to serve families and be a part of keeping them whole, I was encouraged, and at the same time it was daunting to think about how my families life would have to change to be a part of that work.

The reality is that there is profound family brokenness all around us. And speaking personally, it is so easy for me to live my life in a way that isolates myself from the needs, or to allow my sense of being overwhelmed to just lead to hesitancy or inaction. I suspect I’m not the only one feeling that way right now. So what do we do collectively as a church when we look at who God is and who he wants to be and we realize we have both individually and collectively fallen drastically short?

This is not a comfortable place for us to be, but I think it’s a good place for us to be. Now we find ourselves in the place that Peter’s audience found themselves in Acts 2. Peter had just preached about God’s Old Testament promises finding their fulfillment in Christ, the same Christ who they crucified. And their response in verse 37 just before our reading says that when the people heard these things they were cut to the heart and said, “What shall we do?”

And Peter responds with 3 actions: Repent, be baptized, and believe. Let’s consider what each might mean for us this morning.

First, repentance. The opportunity is available for each of us this morning to cast ourselves before God and acknowledge the ways in which we have failed to consider his heart, and the ways in which we have not allowed his character to shape our own lives. As our heavenly Father he invites us in to repent before him not out of condemnation but so that we might have the opportunity to grow in his likeness. And as part of that repentance it is fitting for us to ask God to impress his heart even further upon us by the power of his spirit, that we might grow in love for who and what he loves.

Second, baptism. I do not think it is a coincidence that we have a baptism in each of our services this morning. We had actually chosen the Scripture for this morning long before we knew that there would be baptisms scheduled. There is a duality for us to meditate on this morning. On the one hand, we remember our own baptisms, that we are children of the promise. On the other, we remember the vows as a congregation to support families in the raising of their children.

These vows to support families in the raising of children are rooted in who God is. And there are so many ways for us to follow through on these vows. We can volunteer in children’s ministry or an after school program. We can babysit so parents can get a much-needed break. We can befriend and support single mothers and fathers in our midst. There are two concrete ways we can act on our vows this morning. The first is by joining the work of our deacons and giving to their mercy fund. You’ll hear more about that in a minute. The second is by being a part of the meeting in the gymnasium during the Sunday School hour. We will be presenting opportunities to support the families in our church who are involved in the work of foster care and adoption. If we want to grow as a church by caring for vulnerable families and children, it’s going to have to begin by supporting those who are choosing to get directly involved.

Third, we believe. For any of this to make a long term difference in our own lives, for us to really become the kind of people who love as God loves, we first need to grasp the abundance of love and grace that is found in Christ. If any of us have faith in Jesus this morning it is only because God first promised to love us. He loved us by taking on all of our sin and sorrow upon himself. When we cast ourselves on him we encounter the one who not only stood in our place but who can even sympathize with us in all of our pain and sorrow. We might even say he can not only speak nearby to our experience, but he can truly understand and speak about our experiences because he has taken on the fullness of human experience upon himself. Family, this is unfathomable grace. And it is bound up in Jesus. Turn to him. Believe in him. He alone has the power to transform our hearts.

I think one of the most beautiful moments in all of Scripture comes in Jesus’ final hours as he was hanging on his cross. In John 19 we read of how with his last breaths, his heart was beating for his family. Seeing his mother, Mary, and his disciple John before him he looks at John and says “Behold your mother!” It was of special importance to Jesus that his mother, his family, would be taken care of in his absence. But he also looked at his mother and said, “Behold your son.” I don’t think he was speaking in metaphor.

You see, one of the beautiful but almost paradoxical teachings of Jesus is that the importance of the nuclear family is elevated, and at the same time, our sense of family is broadened to include the entire household of faith. One of the ways that our God preserves and creates wholeness in our lives is by inviting us into his family where we can experience a multitude of relationships with people who are being healed and redeemed by their Savior.

So as we prepare to come to the table this morning, be encouraged by what Jesus is doing here among us. He is knitting our hearts together into a family. Maybe another way for us to apply our passage this morning is as we come down to receive the bread and the cup. As you come down, look around you at the people coming forward with you. They’re not just friends or church members, they’re brothers and sisters; mothers and fathers. May our hearts be lifted as we consider this privilege that Jesus has purchased with his own blood.

If you’re here this morning and you have not put your faith in Jesus, I want you to know that we are really glad you are here. It’s our privilege that you would take time on your Sunday to be with us. Please hear again the words of Peter in Acts 2, that this promise of life in Jesus is for all who are far off, everyone who the Lord calls to himself.

The Lord is calling you to himself this morning. As our congregation comes to Jesus’ table, I want to invite you to come to Jesus himself. And you can do that in so many different ways; you can stay in your seat, you can come forward and just fold your arms over your chest if you’d like us to pray for you. But we would ask you not to take of the bread and the cup; and that’s not to be exclusive, but only because apart from faith, these are of no benefit to you.