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Our task Mark 1: 1 – 15 |
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THERE ARE several Biblical statements about how Jesus defined his ministry, and what it means for us to be in ministry with him. We need to understand Jesus to know our own goals. In 1972, after 26 years of Liberal Government in Australia, Gough Whitlam appeared on the political scene as the new Labor leader. He was the face of a credible Labor opposition, able to match leaders like Menzies and that honorable man, John Gorton, and far abler than Billy McMahon. People were tired of the Coalition, and the Labor Party adopted the slogan, “It’s Time!” And people agreed. It was a message that resonated with the voting public. It was time for a change, and Labor won a landslide victory. Last week we saw how Jesus struggled against Satan in the desert and then returned to Galilee in the Spirit’s power and began preaching in the synagogues. In today’s passage we read that Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. It says, 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” He had a very simple message, that the Kingdom had arrived and that people must respond to it through a radical change of mind and direction and a faith–commitment to the good news. In other words, if it is real, it must become our highest priority. We must abandon the old, worn–out ways and commit ourselves to the idea that this message is true and has to be lived out. Jesus came with a message, “It’s Time!” Only his message was that it was time to mount a challenge to Satan, that it was time to challenge the ruler of this world, the cause of all the sin and sickness and sadness. It was time to stand for God as the good and righteous ruler of the universe, and begin re–establishing his command over the earth. In Luke 10, we see Jesus sending his disciples out in ministry, and his message is this: LK 10:8 “When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. 9 Heal the sick who are there and tell them, `The kingdom of God is near you.’ This is always our first message. We need to find as many ways as we can to tell our world that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and now is the time to believe and act on that good news! Sometimes we evangelicals have preached a limited gospel, because we have talked about the gospel and forgotten the Kingdom. Our gospel is good news of a Kingdom — never forget that. Otherwise, we bring people all kinds of other apparent good news. You hear people preaching wealth, you hear people preaching self–realisation, you hear people preaching happiness, and many people find those things when they become a Christian. But many do not. Jesus wasn’t wealthy. He said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. He himself had no fixed place of abode. He had nowhere to lay his head. He would legally have been a vagrant in Australia. And he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Our good news is good news that God is re–establishing his rule in the world. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all the other things that you really need will be added to you. That is our primary message.
But we can also turn to Luke 4, the continuation of our passage from last week. We read about Jesus preaching in the synagogue in Nazareth, and he reads from Isaiah, where it says, LK 4:18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners Jesus applied this passage to himself, because the passage continues: 20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21 and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Here we find Jesus defining what it means to proclaim the Kingdom of God. It means
If our first call is to bring our world under the rule of Jesus, our second call is to establish social change. When I was a teenager, we would read this passage, and our pastors would tell us, “This is spiritual..It means the spiritually poor find the riches of Christ, those captive to sin find release through believing the gospel and having their sin taken away. The spiritually blind see the grace and mercy of God in Jesus, and their eyes are opened to the gospel. The people whom satan oppresses are delivered. And one day Jesus will return and God’s favour will come to the earth.” Fortunately I know nonsense when I hear it. To be fair, those things are included in the message, but what Jesus said, and what his hearers heard was news of social revolution, of the poor getting power, of criminals getting out of gaol, of blind beggars not having to beg any more because they had been healed, of society’s victims being rescued and restored, and of the promise of God’s favour having been fulfilled right there in the Nazareth synagogue. A spiritual message would not have stirred up the people. But when the people still took it as a nice, comforting message, Jesus spelled it out for them: God was going to bless sinners more than he would bless the regular church–goers. God would rescue and release and restore Gentiles because the Jews were not willing to receive God’s goodness. When they took in the full implications, then they were enraged and wanted to kill Jesus on the spot. This was a very practical message of God doing a new thing among human beings. Isn’t it so often true that people become angry when they are told that God may be working with someone other than themselves? What if someone said to you, “God is blessing the Muslims ahead of you!” How would you feel then? That’s the kind of thing Jesus was saying to the people in the synagogue. So Jesus had a very practical message of great hope, and he made it very clear that you didn’t have to be a Jew to receive it. If you think about how he sent the 72 out in Luke 10, you realise that he commanded them to exercise a very practical ministry among the people they came to. Jesus told them to heal the sick and to proclaim the gospel. In other words, to meet material needs and to meet spiritual needs. When people saw their diseases healed, and heard that the Kingdom of God had come by, then their experience showed them that the message was true. We evangelicals are right to proclaim the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ. But we have turned God’s ordained order upside down. We come with a message and tack on the ministry. Jesus sends us with a ministry and a parallel message. Do the deeds and then explain them. If you don’t believe me, think about the first great miracle worked in the early church. Peter and John were going to the Temple and were obstructed by a crippled beggar. They could have squatted down alongside him and explained how God loved him and had a wonderful plan for his life, and how sin kept him from experiencing the blessings of salvation, but, if he repented and trusted Jesus, he would be saved. And that crippled man would have stopped listening as soon as they talked about that wonderful plan. What wonderful plan is there for someone whose best hope is to die on the job so that he doesn’t starve once he is too old and feeble to beg any more? But the apostles healed the man in the name of Jesus and then, while he was giving proof of Jesus’ power by walking and leaping and praising God, then they preached the gospel to all the people who had come to see. Practical ministry leads to powerful declaration. The last passage which sets the Kingdom agenda that I want us to consider today is in Acts 2, where we read that the coming of the Holy Spirit fulfilled the ancient promise through the prophet, Joel: 2:17 “ `In the last days, God says, There are some very important promises here. The Holy Spirit is for all now, not just for a special few. He comes to ordinary families, to the sons and daughters of everyday people. He comes to young and to old, in different ways perhaps, but in the same power. And he even comes onto male and female slaves, the lowest in social standing in those times, empowering them to prophesy like the most exalted men in Jewish thinking. Female slaves, kitchen hands and child feeders, would begin proclaiming the most vital words of the Lord God himself, in the power of the Spirit who was on Isaiah and Ezekiel and Samuel. This is radical stuff! It is a message that God is doing a new thing in which ordinary, traditional boundaries are broken down and great deeds will be done by the poor, the weak, the uneducated; by women and slaves and foreigners.
I want to sum this up for us. These passages speak of the kind of church we must become. We saw Jesus proclaiming a message that God is doing a new thing and is calling all people to repent and to submit to himself as he establishes his rule over all the world. That sets our basic orientation. Our calling is to exalt God, to proclaim his rule and to call all people in. It is evangelism, but more than evangelism. It is the determined effort to bring people to worship God through faith in Jesus. When we call people to faith, we call them to submission to God through turning from their old loyalties to this fallen world. When we evangelise it is never real evangelism unless the ultimate goal is placing ourselves and everyone who responds under the rule of the King of kings. Worship is never merely about the music we sing or whether or not we clap or raise our hands. These things are always secondary, As Paul writes in Romans, Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God — this is your spiritual act of worship. Worship is about giving ourselves to God. So our church must, above all other things become a church which evangelises for the purpose of worship. The second thing we see is that our church must become a church of practical ministry, of service to those who need our service. There is a wide range of needs out there, and an effective church is a church which brings good news of hope and joyful salvation to people who have forgotten what hope is. A recent newspaper article about trends in Christianity revealed that the growing churches are those churches whose members are most involved in serving the community. For thirty years, conventional wisdom has been that conservative churches are the ones which grow, and there is truth in that. But it is closer to the full picture that Biblically–oriented churches which have a serving mentality grow, and Bible preaching churches which have nothing else stagnate and fail. Our church must become a serving church to a far greater extent than is now the case. The third thing is that our church must always strive for the greatest degree of equality and autonomy for every one of our people. There are three great Baptist principles: free and equal access by believers to God; free and equal access by believers to his Word, and a free and equal society. I have to say that we are often better at talking about these things than we are at doing them. But it means that, if the world sees women as second–class, we will not. It means that, if the world treats some ethnic groups, some employment choices, some family backgrounds as second class, we don"t. It means that pastor and people are equals. It doesn’t mean that your skills and mine are the same, but it means that yours are as valuable as mine, quite probably more so, in the bigger picture of things. Some of the most powerful preachers have been women and slaves. Never forget that! So, on the basis of these passages we are talking about a church which elevates worship and evangelism under the banner of God’s kingdom rule. We are talking about a church which serves the community in a way which demonstrates the Kingdom of God and puts it into effect in the lives of men and women. Finally, we are talking about a church where there is true every–member ministry, because every single one of us is a Spirit–filled, Spirit–empowered child of God. Imagine how that looks! We soak ourselves in prayer and then go out to the streets and lanes to bring people in. We meet together to sing God’s praises, to deal with the battle–wounds, to place ourselves once again under the rule and authority of our King. We spend spare time visiting the sick, devising projects to care for the lonely and the underprivileged. We work, we sing, we pray. Some tutor kids who don’t get help at home, Some manage internet access for travellers. Some teach skills to help people break out of poverty traps. Some visit prisons or lobby for better treatment of the mentally ill. And all of us do it, according to the gifts we are given. We don’t apply outdated and unbiblical rules, because we are the people God has called out to create a new beginning right where we are. The time has come. God’s kingdom is near. Repent, and believe that very, very good news! 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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