Resources

Shining Like the Son

Shining Like the Son

Text: Philippians 2:12-18

Proposition: To work out your salvation is to prove or confirm what God’s will for Him saving you is and ultimately that it will enable you to shine like Christ.

Introduction: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.”, Genesis 1:1-3. The first element in creation, even before the sun or moon were created, is light. It is something that we rarely think of, yet it is now known that light has at least 12 essential functions. It is the essence for photosynthesis which becomes the staff of food for all things. It is what is essential for strength in our bones and teeth through Vitamin D synthesis. It is essential for vision, to detect color, for maintaining the temperature around us, for setting the rhythms of sleep and being awake. It is light that creates heat and weather. We measure with light, we heal with light, we signal with it, we sterilize with it and we comprehend beauty with it. The absence of light marks the loss of all these things. Listen to what happened in Luke 23:44, 45, “By this time it was about noon, and darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock. The light from the sun was gone. And suddenly, the curtain in the sanctuary of the Temple was torn down the middle.” The sin of mankind had been put upon Christ as He hung on the cross. 2 Corinthians 5 goes so far as to say, “He made Him sin who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” When that happened on the cross the significance of that moment was marked by darkness over the earth for three hours. We cannot account for that, no eclipse, no gathering of clouds can produce three hours of darkness.                                    

All that light does is personified in Christ. He is called the light of the world for good reason. John 1:4, “In Him was life and the life was the light of men.” I tell you all these things because in Christ you are now called light bearers, in Him you are now called the light of the world.  That is, it is Him in you that brings light to the lives around you, that brings light to your own concerns and fears and is the source of your joy in Christ. Have a look at Philippians 2:12 -18 with me.

Paul makes an incredible statement in verse 12, “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;”. What catches our attention is the last part, the ‘work out your salvation…’ part. It slams into our understanding of the gospel that declares we are saved by grace through faith. It is Paul’s way of saying that salvation was always meant to be something that was functional in its design. We are saved by the blood of Christ on the cross, our sin is paid for or atoned by His life for ours, that’s the incredible design of God in Christ. He transforms sinful humanity into a redeemed humanity by grace through faith in Christ. That has both a long tomorrow view and a present tense view. The long tomorrow view is that we have an eternal life in us that is designed for being in the presence of Christ long after this life has left, ceased to be in our bodies. The long tomorrow view is what we call heaven. The present tense view of the design of salvation is that it be employed here and now, put to use to do what it was designed to do, to glorify God by showing the world Who He is and what He intends to do. When Paul says, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, he is referring to the way we are meant to function in this new state of being made alive eternally in Christ. It would be like taking a course in computer design, finding the parts necessary to make one, spending hours putting it together and setting it on your desk but never plugging it in. It’s design is in place but what’s lacking is function. So let’s ask the obvious question, what does plugging in look like?

1.  Be obedient to God’s directing will. The obedience Paul points to was referenced earlier in in this passage when he talked about the obedience of Christ to the Father in being wiling to offer Himself on the cross for our sins in verses 8 to11. That obedience required a humility to not only surrender His will but also to trust in the Fathers’ absolute sufficiency to carry this to completion and yet still to preserve the unity of Jesus with the Father. Obedience is you taking a step forwards when there is risk confronting the direction God is pointing you in. That obedience was rewarded in Christ’s case, every knee would bow, every tongue would confess, God would be seen and His purposes known by what Jesus did. The inference is that as Christ has done we are to follow in, as Christ was recognized and rewarded so too there will be reward as we obey.

2. You can’t know the sufficiency of God until you are involved. Look at how Paul puts this in verse 13, “for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.” The very action of your will is something God influences, He makes you aware of a situation or need and He prompts you to see yourself as a means of responding to it. Your obedience is you agreeing with His will to be used of Him for His glory. As you obey, the fears that you had of ability, supply, effectiveness and outcome are His to not only overcome but also to bring life to. It’s knowing and then believing that it is God who works in you both to will and do that invites your faith and obedience.

3. It takes the body of Christ to be the body of Christ. Look at verse 14,15, “Do all things without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world,”. There is a plurality implied here, the complaining and disputing require others. The being blameless and harmless requires others. These are directives that relate to the body of Christ, how we interact, how we consider or think of each other in a church community. It refers to lights, not just a single light, to being children of God and not only a child of God. Consider Ephesians 4:16, “from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.” It takes the whole body of Christ to be the body of Christ.

4. Hold fast the word of life. Hang on tight, get a good grip on it, put your full weight on it and trust it. Feel it’s strength by testing it, test it by using it, use it by proclaiming it. Be familiar with the Word, know where it says what it says and why it says it. Hold fast the word by not holding fast other things, choose what and Whom you will love. Then be like a drink offering poured out on a sacrifice, a symbol of joy in sacrifice. Paul calls the church to let joy be present in all they do.

Jesus once said, “…“I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” John 8:12

But then Jesus also said, “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:14-16

It's as you choose obedience to God’s revealed will, it’s as you know the sufficiency of God because you agreed with His will and presented yourself to be His vessel of use, it’s as you do this in the community of the body of Christ, it’s as you hold fast the Word in and through all of this that you will shine as lights in the world. In essence you will Shine like the Son.

All You Need is Love

All You Need Is Love

Text: 1 John 4: 8-21

Proposition: The love of God opens our understanding of Him, it sets the way that we relate to one another, we abide in Him by it, it shelters us.

Introduction: Sometime in early 1967, the BBC began publicizing an upcoming live television event that would be "for the first time ever, linking five continents and bringing man face to face with mankind”. This ambitious program would be entitled "Our World" the world's first global television program, which proposed to link five continents simultaneously by satellites orbiting the earth. A projected 500 million viewers were anticipated, making this the most ambitious and historic television program of its time. Ending the broadcast was the contribution from England, live coverage of the Beatles in a studio recording a song never heard before. They sang a song about the essence of what every person in the world needs. It was simply called, ‘All You Need Is Love’. The song embraced the way that love transforms us, enables us, changes us but being the Beatles they missed the most critical aspect of love, the origin of it. That was a subject that John Lennon could sense but John the Apostle described. Have a look at 1 John 4:8-21.

I. Because God is Love, All You Really Do Need Is Love.

It’s an enigmatic saying, ‘God is love’. On the surface it seems to reduce God to a feeling, to a belief that love is all that God is. The Bible also tells us that God is spirit (John 4:24); God is light (1 John 1:5); and that God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29). Love does not define everything there is to know about God but it does describe how it informs and shapes everything He does. The origin of love was first seen when God gave Adam free will for apart from free will you cannot love. You can’t pay your best friend $1000 to love you, you can’t promise your children a mansion on a hill if they will just love you. Love can’t be bought only given. Look at what John writes in verse 8, “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” You could flip that first part around and say, ‘He who does not know God does not love.’ The inference is that apart from a true knowledge of Who God is, you cannot love as He intended you to. So how did God ultimately intend you to love? Well if we begin with the truth that you are made in the image of God, like Him in the capability of emotion, intellect and will then the love that He intends you to have is the very love He has. That can seem like a ‘tall order’ until you come to the place of knowing Him, surrendering to Him, trusting Him and obeying Him as faith is made alive in you. It would be like thinking of God’s love like an electrical circuit. If the wire comes from God and stops at you then you are lit up, but if it stops at you and then goes on to another and then another the power moves to you and then through you to enlighten and empower others. That is what the love of God is meant to do and be. It awakens you and saves you but the intent is to move in, through and out.

II. Since the Love of God Does Not Demand Worthiness, Neither Can Ours.

Check out verse 9, “In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” What’s the inference here? It’s that apart from Jesus we aren’t alive, we can’t live like God intends apart from Christ. We can go through the motions, we can love in our own way but that always is conditional. I’ll love you only IF… you love me back, if you only will respect me or value me, if you’ll just do what I say or want. In other words the indicator that we are in the flesh is that we put the caveat of worthiness on all our expressions of love. That’s what human love apart from Christ looks like but what does human love in Christ look like? In a word, grace. It is not linked to worthiness, in that sense it is entirely unnatural, not a typical response for people. Check out verse 10, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” This describes the flow of the ‘electricity’ of love, its origin is in Him. If you add Romans 5:8 to this, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”. you see that God’s love doesn’t demand worthiness. The conclusion, since God’s love doesn’t demand worthiness neither can ours if it is to be truly the love of God in us. So in verse 11 John concludes, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Maybe the point is that the design of love is not so that we would look great but so that God would look great! That takes us John’s next thought.

III. The Great Intention of Agape Love Is That People Would See God.                   

Now that can sound like an over the top statement so have a look at what John states in verse 12, “No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us.” The great purpose of Agape love, unconditional love, self-sacrificing love, even unrelenting love is most clearly seen in the incarnation of Christ. The presence of Jesus on earth was in part so that people would see the invisible God. Kind of reminds you of Colossians 1:15, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” Jesus is the exact image of the invisible God, what He does, the Father does, what He says is what Father instructs, what He accomplishes is the Father’s will. Jesus came that people would see God, would know the great love of God for them, would see the reality of sin that we can’t rise above, would know the incredible cost of sin as not just present destruction and eternal judgment in hell but also the very body and blood of the Son of God. Jesus came that we would see what the Father sees and that we would know the degree of agape love that God the Father loves us with. It’s an unconditional love, you don’t have to get all cleaned up before you come to Him. It’s a self-sacrificing love as the Son gave Himself to hands of sinful men that would nail Him to the cross. He took the full weight of the Fathers wrath against all sin in a self-sacrificing way, truth and life that all who would believe on Him would have that life that God has. So John takes this to it’s next intended step, “If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us.” By grasping hold of Christ’s offer of forgiveness of sin and embracing His righteousness as now being our righteousness, we will love one another with an agape love. The simplified conclusion is that by the love of God in you God is seen, God is glorified. That’s the great intention of agape love, that God would be seen, even in you! So John goes on to say that to abide in Christ and alternatively to have God abide in you demands the presence of the Holy Spirit in you. From the moment you accepted Christ the Holy Spirit indwelt you, an ongoing presence in you to comfort, counsel and correct. In the next verses this is what the Holy Spirit constantly counsels, comforts and corrects us in: 1. In testifying that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. (vs 14)  2. In confessing to God and each other that Jesus is the Son of God.  (vs 15)  Do you see that, first we proclaim the humanity of Christ and then we proclaim the absolute deity of Christ. 3. We do this because we both know and believe the love that God has for us. (vs 16). So John restates it, “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” When that happens in you…people see God. That was the intention of love, for God is love.

IV. There Is No Fear In Love; But Perfect Love Casts Out Fear.                         

Though we often quote this as a way encouraging others to overcome the fear of people or the fear of the world the context of verse 17 is different. “Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world.” God’s love also has the purpose of giving us an assurance that we are His. It is meant give a boldness or confidence when we stand before the Lord. Our judgment for our sin has been put upon Him and as Christ now stands before the Father accepted and beloved so too are we in Him. That confidence is meant to direct our steps even right here and right now, it defeats the fear of not being good enough that Satan throws at us. It puts an end to the doubts about the eternal security we have in Christ, ending the question, ‘Can I lose my salvation.’ To fear that somehow God would with draw His gift of the forgiveness of my sin, to fear that I might be subject to utter torment in hell because God couldn’t complete in me what He had begun. God’s love is perfected in us by casting out that fear of His judgment. After all, it was not us who chose Him but He that chose us. John reminds us of that in verse 19, “We love Him because He first loved us.” So ‘All you need is love’, because God is love and God you really need.     

Baptism, The Wedding Ring of the Saved

Baptism, The Wedding Ring of the Saved

Text: Ephesians 5: 30-32; Genesis 17; Romans 2:28,29; Colossians 2: 11,12

Proposition: As the covenant that God makes with man is of great importance so also is the sign of that covenant.

Introduction:  I remember the many times I have been privileged to perform a wedding service. After the exchange of the wedding vows to each other, there comes a part in the ceremony where the Bride and Groom give each other a wedding ring. The preamble to that part of the wedding service sounds like this, “Wedding rings are an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual truths. As they are worn, they symbolize to others your union of marriage. The rings in no way become the force that unites, for that is a matter between your two hearts.” What I mean by that is though the wedding ring is not what binds them together it is at the same time a very important sign that something has taken place in both their lives. It points to an inward and spiritual truth that they are now one with this other person. So the ring in and of itself is just a simple ring, but what it symbolizes to the whole of creation is that you belong to another. This promise or covenant we make with each other is a picture or type of the greater promise God makes with us. In fact every wedding in its symbolic intent has this design in it, that though its immediate context is a man and a woman in a marriage ceremony it is proclaiming to the heavens something much, much greater. In Ephesians 5: 30-32 Paul writes, “For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” The great covenant that God makes with us is to bind us together with Christ by grace through faith that we would be one with Him in righteousness and everlasting life. That covenant God seals with His Holy Spirit and then puts a sign upon our faith in Christ, the sign of baptism. It is a sign that says to all of creation that we belong to another. By grace through faith in Him we belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. We are made part of the church, the bride of Christ. That sign of Baptism… it’s the wedding ring that proclaims Salvation in Christ.

 I. The Covenants’ Sign, From One Symbol to Another.

Where did this all come from?  It began when God instituted a previous covenant sign. In Genesis 17 God commanded Abraham to take all the male children and adults and even the males who had been bought as slaves and have them circumcised. It was such an urgent command that before the day was out Abraham himself and his son whom he begot through Hagar, Ishmael, now 13 years old, and all the males under his care, all were circumcised that same day. It was not an option, if the sign of circumcision was not there then neither was the covenant of God in effect with that person. It was not the surgical procedure of circumcision that God was seeking from these people, it was the heart of faith that believed God would save them as a nation and that this marked them as belonging to that nation and to Him. Over a thousand years later Paul writes in Romans 2:28,29,  “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is not from men but from God.”

I’m not sure why God chose this sign of circumcision, a sign only able to be applied to the males. Was it signifying their headship and that those under that headship were also included in the covenant? Was God cueing us to the importance of a man being the head of the home, a grave and demanding responsibility? Was God perhaps pointing to the way that sin is imparted from conception on and that marking His people in this way confronted the transmission of sin with the transmission of God’s sovereign grace and covenant? In Col 2:11,12  Paul writes, “ and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.” In other words Paul says that the sign of God’s covenant for those who have by faith believed in Jesus Christ is now the sign of Baptism. Every baptism seeks to do exactly that, to proclaim that by faith I now belong to Jesus. It is just as serious a sign, just as strong an order or command, just as significant a symbol as a wedding ring.

 II. The Signs’ Significance.

The image of baptism in the Scripture has always been that of a person being immersed in water. The very word, ‘baptize’ means to dip or immerse. The significance for a Christian is that it proclaims what Christ has done.

Baptism  proclaims three things:

1. It proclaims the truth that Jesus died to pay for our sin.
2. It proclaims the way that Christ was then buried.
3. It proclaims the way Jesus was then raised from the dead in a newness of life.

The raising up out of the waters of baptism symbolizes the way that God has placed new life in me because of my faith in Jesus Christ. That moment I believed in Christ as my Savior, my God, my Lord, He placed the living presence of the Holy Spirit as a seal in me. The old me is now reckoned dead to the power of my sin nature, we now are no longer slaves to sin but have the power to recognize it and overcome it.

Baptism is a public proclamation even as a wedding is. It is a great declaration of faith . Publicly it proclaims my faith in Jesus and my belonging to this great covenant of God where “the two shall become one”, it pictures the great, great wonder of Christ and His bride, the church.

 “Baptism is the wedding ring of our salvation in Christ, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth. It is an obedience that proclaims to others our union with Christ. Baptism is both a covenantal sign and a picture of the force that unites us to Christ. It is His life, for ours, His cross for us and His great, great love for you which nothing, absolutely nothing can ever separate you from.   

Junior Church

Junior church is now available for children ages 5 through 11. There is a craft time and great story lessons from the Bible. It takes place during the morning worship service during the Sermon portion of the service.