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Good news of the Kingdom |
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LIKE MOST preachers, I enjoy preaching. But I also discover a frustration, in that there is a week’s break between sermons, and we lose the momentum. This morning, I will sum up what we have looked at over recent months. Let us get our focus clearer, so that we can carry this through with us as we keep heading into this new year. We must see that what we do here must reflect God’s Kingdom. Let’s understand, let’s grasp, what God is looking for from us. We have just read that passage from Ephesians. We have read about God’s secret plan, which he revealed when Jesus came, a plan to unite all things in heaven and on earth under the single head of Jesus himself. My early Christian years were spent in a quite fundamentalist church, where we took Dispensational teaching to be gospel. We were taught that God’s plan would not exactly work out through the Church, that Israel was the real centre of his plans, and that we were an afterthought. We were squeezing through the gap while the train of Israel waited on a branch line until things were clear. Then Israel would move to the main track once more. Somehow, the victory of Jesus got watered down. Let’s be absolutely clear that Jesus is the conquering hero. Let’s understand what true Biblical Christianity is like. So we start here with Ephesians 1. Our verses are these: 9 And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, 10 to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment — to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. It is about the Kingdom of God. Sometimes we get very confused. I was talking to a Jehovahs Witness once who disagreed when I said we have to preach the gospel. He said, “We have to preach the Kingdom of God.” In a way, that is true. We have preached a gospel detached from the Kingdom, and that is a defective gospel. On the other hand, the Jehovahs Witnesses preach a kingdom detached from the gospel, and that is not God’s true kingdom. We need to bring it all back together again. In Mark 1:15, we read that Jesus came into Galilee preaching good news — that’s the gospel — that the Kingdom of God was in reach, and people should repent and believe the good news. In Luke 4: we read how Jesus took the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue and declared that the Spirit of God was upon him, because God had anointed him, Jesus, to proclaim good news to the poor, to declare liberation to captives, to restore sight to the blind, to let everyone know that God’s Jubilee year had finally arrived. That is gospel, because it is good news; it is Kingdom, because it declares that God is recapturing territory for his own purposes and holy plans. And, in Ephesians 1: 8, 9, Paul sums up what this good news of the Kingdom of God is about. It is a plan of unity for the entire creation, unity under the single headship of Jesus Christ as Lord. That has implications for us. It speaks to our situation as Christians. It speaks about our evangelistic goals. It speaks about our society and how we function within it. Those few words have enormous implications.
One of my favourite Psalms is Psalm 133, which begins, How good and pleasant it is, when brothers live together in unity. I like it. It speaks of the source of blessing. It clearly says that God’s blessing comes to a Spirit–filled community. All that talk of oil flowing down over the head of Aaron: do we understand it? It is about the oil of the Spirit, anointing the Great High Priest, flowing down over the body which is under the one head. Jesus is our Great High Priest, who sacrificed himself for us. He is anointed with the Holy Spirit. If we are together in one place under his headship, we are where the gift of the Spirit can flow down onto us. Paul takes up the same kind of thinking. We, God’s people, are to be united under Jesus, our one, true Head. That has implications for us. It must be our supreme priority to be found in Christ, not just as individual believers, but as a community, formed around him. That is the core of what revival is. One of the easiest mistakes we make is to think of revival as what happens to other people out there. When revival came to the Isle of Lewis in 1949, it seems to have begun with a group of farmers who had been meeting regularly to pray for revival. They were reading the Psalms. They read from Psalm 24: Who shall ascend the Lord’s hill? Who shall stand in his holy place and pray? He that has clean hands and a pure heart... They were asking God to cleans and purify their neighbours and friends, and suddenly one of them saw that this was totally wrong. He said something along these lines: “If we pray like this, and don’t see that it speaks to us first, our prayers are humbug, time-wasting, mischievous nonsense.” And he got onto his knees and prayed for God to forgive them all. That was when they were broken and revived, and it was after that that the Spirit of God began to touch the unsaved people in the villages and towns of the island. Revival comes when God’s arrogant people cease resisting God and are broken and formed into a true community, a Spirit–filled community, a community of Christ our Lord. We are called to be a scale model on earth of what heaven will be like. It is our need and our duty always to seek that unity with Jesus and community with one another. In John 17, Jesus prays for our unity: JOHN 17:20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23 I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Do you see what he is saying? If the world sees our unity, it will believe that God sent Jesus. If it sees our complete unity in Christ, according to his will, the world will know that God sent Jesus and that God loves believers in the same way that he loves Jesus. The extension of this fact is that, when the world sees our disunity, we give them the right to decide that God did not send Jesus. No, that’s not right — God gives the world the right to decide that he didn’t send Jesus. Think about it! When I talk about revival, a large part of what I am talking about is bringing us together under the headship of Jesus into a new experience of Christian community. ACTS 2:1 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting...
This same passage gives us clear goals for evangelism and mission. If our goal is to bring about our own obedience to the plan and will of God, so that we should be the first among many to come under the headship and rule of Jesus, then we must have a goal of bringing everything else under the headship and rule of Jesus. Paul wrote 2 COR 10: 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. If Jesus is our head, and if the head controls the body, then Jesus is also the model for our behaviour. He is the one who challenege the thinking of religious people. He is the one who confronted the punitive attitude which would kill a woman taken in adultery and let the man free. He is the one who stood against death and resisted oppression. He is the one who broke chains and let prisoners free in places like Philippi. Being in mission means doing what we can to break bondage so that people can come into the freedom of sonship under Jesus, who is our head. Jesus said that we would do the works that he did, and greater works, because he was going to the Father. He healed the sick, he raised the dead. He overturned mthe money lenders’ tables, he preached salvation to Jews and told a Samaritan everything she’d ever done. He fed the hungry. He received the outcast. All along, he spoke about the Kingdom of God, and preached that eternal life is there for those who receive the good news. When I first began regularly preaching, I used to go to the European Migrant Mission at St John’s Park. It’s now St John’s Park Baptist Church. The first sermon I preached was a reworking of one my grandfather had preached, a simple evangelistic sermon. I preached quite a number of evangelistic sermons there. One day, I realised that my preaching ministry there had come to an end. Although they told me they would be in contact to get me back soon, they never did. I felt a sense of loss at the time, though I knew it was God’s will. It gave me time to think, and I began to realise how shallow a lot of evangelistic preaching, including my own, was. I began to think how much of it was,
It was true, but how much more there is to the gospel! In Christ we are called to transform the world to bring as much as we possibly can under the Lordship and rule of Jesus. That means, effectively, that we are called to bring rulers, authorities, powerful institutions and individual human beings under Christ’s rule. It’s like the story Tony Campolo told about when he and his students went to some impoverished South American country and realised that structural change was needed. They all bought shares in Gulf+Western, attended the shareholders’ meeting and each gave a 5 minute coordinated presentation about what they had seen. At the end, the shareholders were stunned, and the students called on Gulf+Western to repent. They did. They changed their policies in that country and lifted the conditions of the people, with some very simple changes. Never think of conversion as applying only to individuals! We are called to transform the entire world through Christ!
Once you grasp those two points, the rest becomes clear. We may not be able to achieve everything needed to bring our world under the headship of Christ, but we can certainly draw people closer together as part of our response to Jesus. We can work towards a situation where people come under Jesus and are united in him, even if they don’t respond to the message. We can do it, because, as Jesus tells us, even the birds make nests in the branches of a fully grown mustard bush. The Kingdom of God has room for “hangers on”. Sometimes I go into supermarkets and find a bored–looking woman in front of a folding table. You’ve seen it — she is giving away free food samples. Sometimes I try what is on offer. She does it because her company wants people to try it, to see that it is good, and begin buying it. I can’t remember that I have begun eating some new food because of one of those samples, but I carry the reminder of every one. We can offer a foretaste of the Kingdom even to those who don’t want to believe. I saw one of those Wife Swap programs on TV a while back where an Anglo family and an African–American family swapped. The white family was less obsessively driven to succeed, which was good for the kids in the African family; but one great benefit the white family got was that they were exposed to the faith of the African–Americans. And they enjoyed it — so much that they thought they might continue church attendance! Not everyone who enjoys church will stay with Jesus. That is an impossible dream, but no one who doesn’t enjoy what Christianity offers will come to the Jesus whom it is all about. Not everyone who receives grace from God’s people will receive it from God. Not everyone who experiences liberation through the Gospel will remain in the Gospel. But those are not our issues. Our job is to facilitate, to make it easy for people to move towards the Christ who came among us for our salvation.
9 And [God] made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, 10 to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment — to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. God has never abandoned that goal: neither can we. We must make it our supreme goal to be one in the Spirit of Christ, one under his headship. Then, we must strive, we must struggle, to bring all people, all powers, authorities, thrones and institutions under his rule and authority. Finally, we must aim, as far as we are able, to draw even the unwilling into experiences of what Kingdom life can be like, so that their hunger and thirst for God is wakened and many will go on to seek him who sought them through all eternity. This is the year for progress! Let’s resolve, each one of us, to do it! And may God bless us all. AMEN |
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© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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