Northside Church - Sydney
Modern Family // Week 1: Spiritual Life
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Look is it me or are relationships always seeming to fall apart? I don't know if you've got a family barbecues and you've got that sort of cantankerous uncle who's still holding a grudge against your third cousin for something that they said at Christmas time about 35 years ago. Or you're at workplaces and everyone's just smiling and there's lots of teeth and it's bristling smiles and they're wonderful and then you overhear them in a Friday night function. I'm talking about how horrible at your work they are and I just can't believe that the company still has you or it would be friends in the school playground and they look at you a funny way because you wore that color ribbon in your hair and you're part of that group and all these relationships that we have always seem to be falling apart. Why is it that we can't somehow achieve a unity and a harmony in community? And I think it's because the world is always characterized outside of God's life, which you know, outside of the message of the gospel, the world is always characterized by this principle, my life for me, my interests first, my wellbeing first in that way, my life for me rather, my life for yours and what is ironic, we sit out in a small scale I guess in the playground when girls don't talk to each other, Lindsay Lohan style mean girls and we sit at the small scale, but then at the large scale we see today billions of dollars chewed up in international diplomacy in order to stop the country's going to war with one another, right? There is something inherent in the human condition that can't get along. Now why am I highlighting all of this? God's an interesting sort of guy, he's an interesting God in that respect because as I've had my head in this book of Ephesians, I see that God, and we've talked about this before in the Wolflowers series, it doesn't necessarily turn up in this world in pillows of smoke or pillows of a fire by night, instead God's idea in terms of demonstrating to the world that he is real and that he is powerful is to somehow bring a bunch of radically different people, the sort of people that would ordinarily tear each other's throats apart, put them all in together in the one room and call it church, and to demonstrate to the world that somehow people who would ordinarily never get along, that somehow there can be unity, there can be harmony, there can be love, there can be blessing, there can be service of one another. And so here's where I'm getting out with this whole title of this new series because we start a new five week series in the book of Ephesians called Modern Family, who said the idea or the notion of bringing a bunch of radically different people together into the one place, into the one family, where they learn how to live together and to love one another was just a plot line for a TV show out of Los Angeles. That's not a new plot line, it happened 2000 years ago in the book of Ephesians and it's called The Church. And that's what we're going to be looking at over the next couple of weeks. And now we're going to have a look at helicopter view, chapters one through to three. We're going to go up, have a look at the broad perspective of it all, and we're going to have a look essentially at the heart of why God wanted to have this modern family in the first place. And then over the next four weeks we're going to have a look at pretty much how it operates over that next four weeks, how God uses things like spiritual gifts, how God uses spiritual growth, how He uses spiritual submission, all interesting topic, how God equips us for spiritual warfare. And so we're going to hit topics that I know for all of us have been things we've had a lot of questions about over the years and we're going to speak right into them over the next four to five weeks. But look, here's what I want us to get away from tonight. Here is Sam's best summary of how we summarize chapters one through three. This is the big banner behind the helicopter in that sense. This is a big idea of all of those chapters when we try and condense it all, and that is this, the God's eternal plan is to recreate a new humanity or a new modern family through Jesus Christ. That's what I want us to take away. That's all we've got to take away from tonight, if you can remember that, is that God's eternal plan was to create a new humanity's modern family through Jesus Christ. And so here we see this in chapter one, I'm just going to read from verse three onwards. It says, "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ, for he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the one he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all the wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in heaven and on earth to get under one head, even Christ. In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having believed you were marked in him with a seal, the promise, the Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession to the praise of his glory. You know that's all one sentence in the original Greek. Feels like one sentence doesn't it? There are a lot of big words in that passage and as I said tonight we're going to take a helicopter view of not just that chapter there, but chapter two and chapter three. Ephesians is a great book to get into by the way, it's only six chapters, it's really easy to read, I encourage all of you to get your Bible, zero iPads or print it out on a bit of paper and read through Ephesians four or five times by the time we're done. There's nothing better than getting in the word. But what we see out of chapter one, I almost want to tonight want to take a big idea from each of these chapters in this sense. And what we see from chapter one, first and foremost, is we see the notion of God's plan. We see that God had a plan, God's always had a plan, all of history is heading towards this Jesus Christ as head over everything. And verses 11 to 12, let's have a look at what it says here, it says, "In him we were also chosen having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will. In order that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of his glory." Now, there is a scary word in there for many preachers. I don't know if you picked it up, but it's one we ask a question about all the time. And it's the one that I was at a real crossroads if we're going to preach this message tonight, particularly in Ephesians one, because Ephesians chapter one is a passage in which essentially is a great grounding and a basis for the doctrine of predestination. And when we hear that word, that has been a topic and an area of theology that is debated all throughout the years, over many hundreds of years in Christian theology. And so the real choice that I had tonight was, well, do I avoid it or do I address it? Like, this would be now where I cue a nice, cutesy little illustration and we bounce right off and we talk about something else. But tonight in that sense, I felt that in some ways we need to address what this means because it does bring us great confusion for time to time. You see, the Bible gives us a view here when it says that we've been predestined, in him we were chosen to have a being predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with his purpose. The Bible gives us a view of the sovereignty of God that he is in control of everything. It gives us a view of that, but it also gives us a view a bit like the way that you look at light when it passes through a diamond. Have you ever seen when light passes through a diamond and it's refracted into about five or ten beautiful different colors? When we approach the doctrine of the sovereignty of God and of predestination of the Bible, we see a spectrum. And a spectrum of one hand that we tend to interpret it as one side that is, I guess, for one of a better term you could say that, I guess it's the contingency approach. That is that all of life's decisions are up to you. This philosophy of religion that basically says your destiny is determined because of your choices. That's what contingency says. That everything's up to you, everything's determined by you, and everything's up in the air and you're the master of your own fate. That view of predestination is a bit like back to the future. And Martin, back to the future one, he's playing Earth Angel on the guitar and sees back in 1955 that his mother is starting to fall in love with him and not his father, George McFly. And as he does so, his future self is beginning to fade away because you can work it out. She's falling in love with him and not his father. And so that view of predestination says that somehow all of humanity's future is the term and by some little butterfly effect choice that you make right now. But then at the other end of the spectrum, this sort of fatalistic approach or fatalism for one of another term says that nothing is up to you, that it's almost that this life is, I don't know, that we're all like spiritual puppets and God is pulling the strings and that every decision has been made in advance and all set out in his big book up there in heaven and that there's absolutely no control that you have over the decisions in your life. But here's the thing that challenges me and I don't know about you, but the Bible gives us a bit of a both and when you look at people in the Bible. I mean, think of characters like Joseph, for example. Joseph gets sold into slavery, he's in a jail for most of his life. He has a weird dream, so he decides to tell the jailer about who decides to eventually tell Pharaoh about it and Pharaoh loves his dream. That dream ends up saving all of Egypt. Joseph gets elevated to Prime Minister of the country because he saves the country from famine and then as a result his brothers who sold him into slavery come all the way back, begging for food and he forgives them and he says, "What you intended for harm, God intended for good." Joseph's making decisions, but this is incredible coincidence in his life that allows glory to explode. Or then there's Esther, we all love Esther, particularly if you're a girl, she's one of the great female heroes of the Bible, but Esther's this gorgeous little Jewish girl who's picked out from all of the countryside out of thousands of young women to be the wife of King Xerxes of Assyria and she's there in the castle and they realize that there is a plot in order to kill the entire Jewish nation and therefore it was really a plot to kill off the plan of salvation for all of the world, God's plan for salvation. And Uncle Mordecai comes up to her and says, "Esta, you've got to do something about this." And she says, "What can I do about it?" And he says, "Come on, sweetheart, you think that you got picked out of that line out of all of those gorgeous girls purely by accident? You've been bored here for such a time as this." And Esther makes a decision to save the Jewish nation. And then of course there's Paul in the New Testament we see in Acts 25, 25, the way that he has arrested by his own people and then he's there preaching and testifying to the various governors of the provinces and his life is threatened and then of course there's that famous line that if he hadn't have appealed to Caesar, he would have gone free. And so Paul goes to Rome and eventually to the place that would lead to his death, but also the very place from which the gospel would explode into Western world, the Western world exploded from Rome. Look, all I'm trying to illustrate here guys is it me, but when it comes to God's sovereign, his plan and our will, it seems to be a both-and, right? I mean, how else can I put it? Here's how I thought I could put it. You can choose the swim wherever you want in a tsunami. You can choose the swim wherever you want in a tsunami. Now I know it's a pretty terrible image to portray, particularly given some of the ones that we've seen in Japan of recent years, but here's what I'm trying to say guys, the scope and the power of the purposes and the plans of God are so inescapable and they're so unstoppable that you have free will and you have a choice. You can either swim with it or you can swim against it, but God is a spiritual tsunami. He's a tsunami. Look at what it says in verses 9-10, "The mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ and to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment is to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ." Guys, what it's saying is that the great mystery of God is that there is a directional bias to the plans of God. God is a tsunami of love and grace that is moving eventually towards his purposes, but this life is not some Bill Murray Groundhog Day type thing where we just go around and around in circles and there's no finite point, there is a point in time in which all things will be bought underneath Jesus Christ. That's the plan. And so in light of that, how's Monday looking? What's on your agenda tomorrow? What's on your tick box tomorrow? At a bigger level, you know, some of you I know, what about the scrapping of wood sides, $45 billion liquid natural gas project in WA? What's that going to do for the jobs? You know, it's going to be under Jesus one day. Well, what about this escalating conflict in North Korea and what is going to happen in the next couple of days, a couple of, it's all going to be under Jesus one day, but what are we ever going to make poverty history? It's going to be under Jesus one day. God is a tsunami of love and grace that is unstoppable and you can swim with it or you can swim against it. It's free will amongst this directional bias and in that sense, here's what I'm saying. If God's plan is to make you glorious, wonderfully glorious under the headship of Jesus Christ, what it means for you this week is that your good decisions, your God decisions will become great decisions one day and your bad decisions will become new. If you are in Christ, there's no bad decision that you can make. You know, Joseph, Esther Paul, they all made decisions, good and bad decisions from a worldly perspective, but their life exploded in a glory that was beyond what they could normally do. So in other words, your destiny is not determined in spite of your choices or because of your choices, your destiny is determined through your choices. God meets you in some mysterious way and works with you dynamically and interactively in terms of this tsunami that is his plan for the human race. In the simplest of terms, predestination means God made a decision about you before you ever made a decision about him. Maybe you haven't made a decision about God yet. The great truth of this passage tonight is there is a tsunami of love, there is a direction of love towards you that has already been made before the world had begun. That's God's plan. God's plan and leads us to the next point is God's eternal plan is to create a new humanity is modern family. Now let's see why we want to talk about this new humanity here and remember this came up in the Warflower series that we did earlier on in the year we talked about the way that God was creating a new humanity that has been created to show the world how life is truly meant to be lived. So I just want to go a bit deeper in that tonight because I think the average person on the street, if you ask them what does it mean to be a Christian, I think well I don't know it means to be a good person or it means to believe in Jesus so you get to go to heaven when you die. I mean that approach is almost like Jesus is the golden ticket out of Willy Wonka. And you get to go to the chocolate factory when this life is off in that sense and heaven will be that and so much more but John Stott says one of the main reasons that the world thinks like this is because the church is overlooked that when the church talks about the good news of Jesus Christ we often talk about it's an individual good news of how you were saved by God but it doesn't talk about a good news of being saved into his new community. And so in that way God's plans not just to save you individually but to bring you into a saved community, the church, that's what happens. As I was saying in the introduction that is the miracle of it all because there is nothing more miraculous than bringing bunches of people that would ordinarily be at each other's throats and getting them to do life together and to support one another but how does that happen? Look at verses 11 to 17 of chapter 2 now. It says in here, I'll read from verse 14, it says, "For he himself is our peace, talking about Jesus, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity," so I didn't make up that term. It's from the Bible. "One new humanity out of the two thus making peace and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which he put to death their hostility. He came and he preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who are near, for through him we both have access to the Father by one spirit." Now that's not a Bible reading and it's a case study, okay? That's a case study. He's talking about the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jews were, they were the God-fears, the God-lovers, the Holy Ones, the ones that had God and the Gentiles were the ones who were godless and selfish and the epitome of all things, they were the heathens from the Jewish perspective. And so in essence, Paul, you couldn't get two groups of people who would be at each other's throats, you couldn't get more two different types of people. And so what was funny is that there was such a hostility between these two, there wasn't just, I guess, an intellectual separation between them, there was a physical separation to the extent that even in the temple in Jerusalem, there was a dividing wall between the Jews in the center of the temple and the Gentiles on the outer courts of the temple. And Paul is saying to, you've got to imagine the context, he's saying to a people who have lived their life on the other side of that wall coming together, you're all going to be in the one room. He's giving a case study, and look, now today, it's not just Jew or Gentile that we talk about, that's probably not the big issue that we've got here at Northside. Here's the principle, here's the firstly the problem that we're talking about, people don't naturally get along. And here's the principle why, is that people, people, all of us, always taking our own distinctives and trying to elevate them above the other person. We're trying to take the things that we're good at. What we regard as our personal assets or our unique distinctives and we instinctively elevated above the other person. I mean, just think of a classic university party conversation, right? Just three questions that always came up when I was at university, what school did you go to? Then the next question was, what do you do? And then the final one was, where do you live? I mean, I'm not sure if you guys have had the same experience right, but it's always the same sort of three questions, wherever you go. What school are you part of? Where do you live? What do you do? And then of course you grow up a little bit, and then it becomes, what firm are you part of? What do you do? And where do you live? That's all that changes, right? Let's see, what's, you know what people are doing there, that they're building walls. They're asking the question and they're trying to say, are you part of my group? You and me on the inside, and you're on the outside, they're building walls. And if it's not at a conversational level, then it begins to happen at a cultural level. And whole races and whole ethnicities begin to hold true to their own distinctives, and of course we get what we call racism in the modern world. The my way of keeping time, for example, which is right on the dot as a Westerner, is the right way to keep time, and if you're from the Pacific Islands and you're half an hour late to our function, then you're wrong and I'm right, and I'm on the inside and you're on the outside, right? That's how it works. We build walls. And so here's what I'm getting at. There's no better way to demonstrate that we're all part of one humanity by bringing together and demonstrating a unity in those who should be at each other's throats, and that's what God is doing here. He breaks down walls in his new community. It's exactly what happened in Antioch, and we've talked about this before, Acts chapter 13. I talk about walls. It was a city that was purpose built with walls to keep the various ethnicities in their corners of the city. And when Paul and Barnabas go down and they preach the gospel, what happens? People try and climb over the top. People climb over the top to do church, this new humanity, and I don't know what to call it, and they make up a word and they give them a nickname and they call them for the first time Christians. New humanity, and therefore, here's what we're saying here, God's new humanity says those social rankings, those social differences, they no longer exist here, and this is why those differences no longer exist in this place. Because when you are in Christ, chapter 1, when you are in Christ, you are a Christian first and a private school kid second. You're a Christian first and a public school kid second. You're a Christian first and a labor voter second. You're a Christian first and a liberal voter second. You're a Christian first and a resident of the lower North Shore second. You're a Christian first and a resident of the Western suburbs second. Are you guys with me? When you are in Christ, there are more in common with those of you who sit in this room than your very own family, where God's modern family hosts. That's why I say since when did a bunch of radically different people come together and learning how to live life together as a family, since when was that exclusively a plot for a TV show? That's the church. That is God's modern family. The church is a community where society's divisions exist no longer. That's the great vision for the church. That's the vision that Paul gives. It's an incredible vision, but are we? Our churches like that, are our communities like that. How do we solve that problem? The world says, will you solve the problem through education? The reason you've got divisions is you're not educated enough. If you went to university and you're educated, you would know that racism is a bad thing and therefore you'd be taught to think differently. And there should be unity. If you think cleverly, there should be unity and our modern day society, we should get along and then although you get to universities and then they don't maybe don't argue about race but they certainly argue about politics. And see, the world says the solution of the problem is the head, whereas the Bible says the solution to this problem is the heart. That's the difference for us as Christians and it leads us to our final point tonight. That's how God does this. He does it through Jesus. What does Jesus do to create a new family? Look at chapter two verses one to five. As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of the world and the ruler of the kingdom of the year, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath but because of his great love for us God who is rich in mercy has made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace that you have been saved. You see, first up we see what Jesus here. This is how Jesus does it. First of all, Jesus makes you alive. I call this the Sleeping Beauty Principle. I've shared this with you before, right? I'm sure I have because I ran it past Kristen and she said, "Can you make sure on Sunday you tell them that you've already shared this example?" I know this one and I know I've already shared it but I can't think of a better way to put it. Sleeping beauty, you look at her and technically sleeping beauty, technically she was alive but practically she was dead and when Paul says, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins," he's not saying that you are physically dead in that sense. In other words, what he's saying is technically alive but practically you are dead. You were dead to the things of God. You were sleeping beauty and therefore to be made alive, if you want to be made alive then if you want to be part of that spiritual life that is God's life, then you need someone from outside yourself, someone from outside your inability to pick yourself up, that bed that she was lying on. You need someone from outside yourself to come in and to kiss you and wake you up again. And of course that's way too girly for us blokes to think about so I've prepared something else that I know I've shared with you before but as I've always said, it's the Han Solo and his carbonite freezing principle from Return of the Jedi Empire Strikes Back. You boys, Han Solo was put into this stuff called carbonite where he was effectively frozen into this rock but he was being kept alive and ended up on the wall of Jabba the Hutt in his palace and so there would be a funny monitor on the side of his carbonite sarcophagus and that would monitor him and what his heartbeat and Han Solo was technically alive but he was practically dead, right? And then of course one of the most beautiful, I'm getting a bit emotional, cinematic moments. In movie history was when a bounty hunter came through the door and pulled him off that wall and unfrosed him and in his blindness he said, "Who is this?" and that bounty hunter pulls off the helmet and layers shakes her hair and she whispers to him, "Someone who loves you." I know, boys, with it was that moment that all of us fell in love with Princess Leia and have remained in love ever since. With boys to be a Christian in the same sense is to have Jesus in that non-romantic sense and bear with me and allergies are never perfect but it's to have him pull you down off the wall and to unfreeze you from the life that you've been living and to awaken you again and do a new life and when you said, "Who's done this?" you hear that voice that says, "Someone who loves you." When Paul says you were dead in transgressions you were technically dead in that sense and so Jesus in awakening you was brought you into this whole new life, this whole new spiritual life, you were technically dead to the things of God, the life of God, the spiritual life of God. Jesus makes you alive, sleeping beauty, Han Solo, principle but Jesus is also funny, he makes you equal, he makes you equal with everyone else. If Paul says it is by grace that you've been saved and grace means that if you've been made a part of God's family without any form of entry test or any form of living up to a standard or any form of dressing the right way or any form of having the right job to get into the family of God or any form without having the right bank balance to get into the family of God. If you've been done, if there's nothing that you can do in and of yourself, if it has only been the work of Jesus Christ by grace to bring you into this humanity in all of us whether rich or poor, whether skilled or unskilled are equals. Jesus makes every single one of us equals, it's a way that in Acts 15 Paul and he's made Peter go down to the Jerusalem council and go to all the Jewish Christians and Paul nudges Peter and he says tell the boys about the dream that you had and Peter the Jew of Jews says you know what I had this dream that said we can eat ham sandwiches for the rest of our lives boys. I know it sounds crazy but we're having a pork party, that's what he says and James it hits him and he says wow apart from the thought that he's looking forward to a ham sandwich he says you know what I see that God shows no favoritism. In other words James got it for the first time that if God makes absolutely no distinctions as the basis of his relationship with you then here it is who were you to make distinctions of the relationships that you have with other people. That's the gospel. More importantly if ever there was anyone who had unique distinctives, if there was ever anyone who had the ability to build a wall, a social wall, if ever there was anyone worthy of raising his distinctives above every other person it was Jesus Christ the God was God. The guy lived the perfect life and yet he gets rid of that in order to identify with you. He makes us equal and so tonight what can we learn from this quickly, four points. If God's eternal plan is to create a new humanity through Jesus Christ, here's the first one do you have a clear perspective, do you have a clear perspective on God's plan, are you seeing the bigger picture, I mean how preoccupied with the small things do we get, how preoccupied with the small things, and God has had a plan for you since the beginning of time. You know Ephesians 2 says that your God's workmanship made in order to do the good works which he has already prepared for you to do. That is the plan Paul saying look up for heaven's sake, see the big picture, get some perspective, see us Lewis, he says it pretty well, he said it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak, we're half-hearted creatures, falling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us and yet like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because they cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea, have you got a clear perspective? Here's the other one, do you see the church as a calendar event or a cosmic event, do you see the church as a calendar event or a cosmic event, if Ephesians 1 to 3, if Paul is setting up the theology for the rest of this letter to say that God's way of demonstrating his reality and his power of the world is through his church, if that is the cosmic vision for that, is that the sort of place that we come to at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon saying I'm not sure if I feel like going. Since when has it got to do with feelings Paul says you were part of a cosmic plan, a cosmic plan that is playing itself out, is church just a calendar event or a cosmic event, how are we trading church, more importantly when we go through and we read these chapters, are we a church like this, are we a church like this, what does God need to show you and I in terms of the ways in which we can continue to live out this new humanity, what are the clicks, what are the differences, what are the comfortable social groups, what are the normal people we like to hang with, what are the walls that we're making in this place, we're not the world's perfect church but that's the vision that Paul puts forward for us, most importantly I guess I've got to ask tonight, are you awake, sleeping beauty, have you come off the wall Han Solo, you can't do any of this sort of stuff unless you've been a mate alive, you can turn up the church for a while but you're not really part of it, Christianity is not an evolution, you're either dead or alive tonight in that sense and so I hope that we see from the helicopter view of these first three chapters that God has plans and purposes for your life that can give you or hope far beyond the circumstances that you face in your university or your open plan desk or in your home tomorrow morning, what has set plans in motion since the beginning of time, he's predestined that, it's his spiritual tsunami and what it means for you tonight is you're not here by an accident, how did you end up here, which conversation did you have with people, who invited you here, how did you become a Christian, God has brought people in and around your life, circumstances, events in your life to bring you to a point for such a time as this, let us not waste this guys over the next three to five weeks, may we understand why God has bought this new humanity, his church together and as we understand that we will look further into spiritual gifts and spiritual growth and spiritual relationships and spiritual warfare but that's all that I ever wanted us to get tonight, the God's eternal plan was to to create a new humanity through Jesus Christ.