Northside Church - Sydney
EXPATS Week 1: Exiles & Foreigners
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Some of you may have been in that situation where it's been a long hard day, four o'clock. People will run around to your desk and say, "John or Jane, want to come out for a drink?" There you go. You're about to that wild uni party and the guys say, "Look, come out with us. It's going to be a crazy night. Let's go. Let's do it." Do your head. What about ask yourself the question, "How do I stay strong in the faith when none of my friends believe in this Jesus stuff?" What about the questions about how do I deal with an antagonistic family member? Or should I really be hanging out with non-Christians all the time? Have you ever asked yourselves those sorts of questions? If not, there's certainly some of the sorts of questions that I get all the time in the pastoral ministry that I get them all the time with people wondering what am I supposed to do with this sort of stuff? And tonight we begin a new series that hopefully will unlock not so much the answers to those questions, but the principles behind each of those different situations in our lives. How would it act? How would it react to those situations? And for that reason, we're going to be going through the book of Daniel together for the next six weeks here on a Sunday night. Now, some of you, if you know your Bible or well, you think that's the Old Testament, Sam. That's 600 years before Jesus even turned up. So if we're doing the math correctly, that's like 2,600 years old. Like what the heck has that got to do with our life today? How can that possibly relate to our life today? So old. And the funny thing is Daniel is a exilic literature. It's like books like Esther and Bits of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. And really these books talk of a time of exile around about the sixth century before Jesus even turned up on the scene, where the Israelites were taken by King Nebuchadnezzar, who was the king of Babylon, like a superpower of the area. And Nebuchadnezzar took away from Israel, he took them away from their culture, he took them away from their arts, he took them away from their buildings, he took them away from their city, he took them away from a place where everyone believed in the God of the Bible. And he took them away and he took them into a culture that was either indifferent or even hostile to the God of the Bible. And Israel was left asking themselves, how do we live a believing life in an unbelieving world? And guys, isn't that the question we ask ourselves every day? Because it's some ways, like it's not 2,600 years ago, but that's part of what is happening to us today. It's probably one of the most relevant books to our situation as Christians in the church today, because in the past we've enjoyed, at least in the Western world, a sense of supremacy and priority of the Christian faith in politics and in cultural life and in university life and in economic life. But today it seems to have faded, right? And so like Daniel, we're God's expats, that is where foreigners and exiles living in foreign lands. But guys, I need to be upfront with you tonight, I'm not actually going to read from the book of Daniel tonight, I know, crazy. I'm going to read from Jeremiah, because if any of you have seen Star Wars, and I hope by now if you've been part of this church, you would have, it's your homework, right? You know, the beginning of Star Wars, episode 4, which is not actually the first one, but it was the first one to come out, there was a long sort of yellow bit of riding against the backdrop of space and said a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and it filled you in on the back story. And so Jeremiah in that regard fills us in, it's the yellow riding against the backdrop of stars for the book of Daniel. It fills us in as to what was happening and what was happening. You see, the book of Daniel's about this Israelite guy who ascends to these places of priority in this pagan, unbelieving culture. And we sort of wonder, how did he get there? And he sort of got there because Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, comes along and he attacks Judah, and he raids Judah, and he carries the people, the Israelites, back into his own city. Now, what I didn't know is that Nebuchadnezzar actually came to Jerusalem, I don't have fun saying that tonight, I don't know, I should just call him Nebi. He actually came to Jerusalem twice in 587 BC, he knocked Jerusalem down, but he actually came 10 years before that, and here's what he did. He didn't take everyone the first time, he actually took 10,000 people, I'm thinking that's a funny thing to do, who did he take? He took the professionals, he took the professional media people, he took the professional military, took the professional artists, he took the professional financial guys, and he carried them back into the city. Now why would he do that? It was either just a crazy thing to do or it was really clever because what Nebi was trying to do here is what he was doing is how do you make a foreign country submit to yours? What you do is you take the very core, the very heart of that culture, and you take them into your culture, and you indoctrinate them, you Babylonianize them, and you make them believe all your cultures and all your beliefs, and so therefore Nebuchadnezzar was trying to destroy the biblical worldview of an entire class of people and thereby making the Israelites Babylonian. That was the way he was going to get him to submit, and so when the professional class gets to Jerusalem, this is, we're still doing the long time ago in the land far, far away bit, right? Okay, this is just background. Now when the professional guys get to Jerusalem, they go and actually settle outside of the city, and during that time, these false prophets, these speakers on behalf of God, stand up in the city of these false prophets, and they begin to rise up from within this Israelites city in Babylon, and if you want to know what they said, then read Jeremiah 28 for homework. But here's a summary of what they said, they said, "Don't go in there, don't be a part of that city." That's a wicked city, they're unbelievers, have nothing to do with it, stay out. And we're prophesying to you that God is a judge, and one day he's going to come down and he's going to whoop their butts, and he's going to call down his wrath upon him, and he'll get us out of here, so just keep away. Now Jeremiah, the real prophet, the real guy in the scene heard this, and he wrote a letter to the Jews in exile, and this is what it said, and this was the blueprint for Daniel's life, and this is the blueprint for some of the principles that we are going to be covering over the next couple of weeks. Jeremiah 29, verses 4 through to 14, "A Jeremiah says to the people, he says, 'This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and settle down, plant gardens and eat what they produce, marry and have sons and daughters, find wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage so that they too may have sons and daughters, increase in number there and do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and the prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says, 'Do not let the prophets and the diviners among you deceive you, do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to you in my name, I have not sent them, declares the Lord. This is what the Lord says, 'When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then he will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me. When you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.' Wow, and a very famous verse in the middle of all of that which I often don't read in that context. So here is the key choice of an expat, right, is either assimilate or separate. Expats, they want to either get totally engrossed in the culture, learn the language, eat the food or play tennis with the girls, right, and Jeremiah shows us something radically different. He shows us not assimilate or separate, but a third way. The way that God gives us a principle that to live a believing life and an unbelieving world. And here is what we will learn from this passage. And first of all, we learn that God planned for his people. God planned for his people. I will come to that in a second, but does the name whisper about this church mean anything to you guys? I know it does for you, Rob, we talked about them a few times. If you go and look them up on Google, you will see a whole stack of images and they are wonderfully inspiring placards that they have. Pluckards that say stuff like America is doomed and thank God for dead soldiers and God hates you and destruction is imminent. Is it just me or when you hear that, do you instinctively ask yourself how can Christians get themselves to that level? How can Christians get themselves salt-tight, so angry, so hostile, so judgmental to the world around them? It is crazy. And I guess part of the thing I am asking myself is how do we stop ourselves from getting to that level of extremism? What sort of checks and balances are there in the church that stops Christians from getting to that point? And I will leave tonight the verse 7 of the passage that we just read is a bit of an antidote to it all. Verse 7 says this, it says, "Also seek the peace and the prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile." You know? The city to which I have carried you into exile, so here is a remarkable thing about this story straight up. Here is the crazy thing, it was part of God's plan to turn his people into exiles and foreigners. God planned this and God was saying through the Prophet Jeremiah, "Your loss of cultural power, your need to live as believers in an unbelieving world is part of my plan. It's my plan and I have taken away your supremacy of the culture and I have taken away your political and social power and I have taken away the faith majority you have. It was my plan." And here is the thing, if you fail to see that bigger picture with what God is doing here, then you can go one of two ways, you can either get real hostile, you can get the way that the psalmist says in Psalm 137, "O daughter of Babylon," the psalmist was talking about this situation, right? And the psalmist says, "O daughter of Babylon, doom to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us, he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." It's pretty hostile. So you can either get hostile or you could get overly optimistic like the false prophet Hananiah that Jeremiah was having to go at in chapter 28 of Jeremiah when Hananiah prophesies, "I'll break the yoke of the king of Babylon within two years, I'll bring back to this place, all the articles of the Lord's house that never can ask a king of Babylon to remove from here and talk to Babylon." In other words, two years, God's got to sort all out, it's cool. So on one hand you can be hostile, on the other hand you can be overly optimistic about the situation, and in some ways churches today can take the same approach. Churches like Westboro can take a Psalm 137 approach and say, "Blessed is anyone, the goes and starts kicking heads in the world in the name of God," or you can have optimistic churches and say, "Don't worry, God's coming back to judge the world, so forget about the world, and let's just worry about us." It's God's problem, but guys, here's the thing, both approaches fail to recognize how the God of the Bible works, and here's what I love about it, because look, I'm grappling with the question about what do we do in our current sort of loss of power and status in our society and even our own nation at the moment. Here's what I love when you look at the biomes, you look historically, look at Christianity in the Roman Empire, look at the spread of African Christianity, look at the spread of South American Christianity, look at the spread of some of Asian Christianity at the moment in parts of Asia, or look biblically, particularly at the book of Acts, you're going to see a common pattern emerge, and a common pattern that is this, that Christianity always blossoms when it's moved outside the power structures of the culture around it. When it's moved away from the center of power, that the people of God are at their strongest when they're weak. Sound familiar? Biblical. All right, and so, for these people of God, in the Old Testament here, life in this great sort of multi-faith society and city of Babylon, it's not some senseless, tragic disaster. It was part of God's design for them all along, and it means for us guys is that we need to see the bigger picture. Our God is a big God. Our God is so powerful that he can even work in weakness. Our God is the sort of God that, you know, he's just a totally upside down sort of God, and so in that sense, when we look around us and see Christianity becoming a minority, my question tonight is, could it be that this present situation is just part of his grand plan? God planned. God planned what? God planned that his people were to be expats in a foreign land. That's the second thing we learned tonight, that there were to be expats in a foreign land. Now, I love the way that God seems to teach me or just put illustrations straight into my hand when I'm going to preach on something in any given week. And this week I was up in Queensland for a couple of days visiting some family and coming back for a conference on Friday night, I almost missed a plane. First time I've ever been in that situation and I was getting real close, it was stormy weather, I was starting to freak out. And literally the two people in front of me had been in the line and they had all their bags packed there, same flight number, we'll talk into each other and they got bumped to the next day. I had to be back here for six o'clock. And I walk up to the counter and like any anointed band of God, I handed the lady my ticket and she said the flight's closed. And I thought I can't be closed, I've got to get on this flight, is there anything you can do? And then she says, "Well, check it out." She opens it up, gets me a ticket, I race to the gate, get on the plane and discover that I've been upgraded into business class. So, anointed, it was beautiful. But that's not the story. The whole story is, no kidding because I messaged Kristen before the plane took off and you could ask her tonight. No kidding, I turned to the lady next to me and she was lovely, she was dressed so well and I turned her and said, "Dai, you know, what do you get up to? What keeps you busy?" And she says, "I'm an expat." And I thought, "This is perfect sermon research." You know, I had to do a bit of sermon stuff and so we got talking about all the cool places that she'd been to. She'd been to Israel and she'd been to Bangkok and then she'd been to Singapore. And I thought, "Oh, Singapore, I can relate to that because I've been to Singapore." And I said, "Did you go down to the hawkers stage and you go and eat all the food down there?" No. "Oh, did you go down and see all the stuff by the river?" I'm not really. I said, "What did you do in Singapore?" And she said, "I played tennis with the girls." Bridge Club. There was lots of stuff for me to do. Bridge Club, we had parties, we had all sorts of cool stuff to do and the British American Association and the so and so and so association and the expat association. Expats have a choice, assimilate, separate. And so that was the choice that the false prophets were proposing. Get out, separate from the culture around you, stay out otherwise you're going to lose your purity and you're going to lose your holiness and you're going to lose your identity so stay out of the city. Now guys, isn't that the sort of mindset that have caused traditional churches around the world to muck this up so badly in the past, to prescribe ways of living to their congregations and their people that literally tell them to stay out otherwise you're going to lose your purity and your holiness and your identity and don't mix with the people of the world. Stick together. But here's the thing, here's what would have blown the mind of the people in Jeremiah's who were hearing Jeremiah's words. You see, whilst the other prophets were saying, get out, God through the prophet Jeremiah was saying, get in, get in, he says, get into the culture. Look at verse four onwards again. This is what the Lord Almighty says, build houses and settle down, plant gardens, eat what they produced, marry, have sons and daughters, increase in number and so you don't decrease. Think the priests and the prosperity of the city. See, God was saying, I refuse to give you only two choices in this situation, there's a third way in how you're going to live here. Look, he's saying, don't assimilate, don't lose your identity, don't become so assimilated into the culture that you become Babylonian, that's why he said increase in number, increase in number, remember who you are, remember that you're Israelites in exile. But on the other hand, he says assimilate, build houses, settle down, have kids. So don't assimilate, but do assimilate, don't assimilate, but do assimilate, hang on, pause, time out, what's going on here, which way is it, like if I get too involved in my culture then I'm not going to do the wrong things, here's the principle guys, the principle of the pattern that runs through the whole Bible and throughout the gospel is that God is not so much concerned with what you do as he is with what you worship. And so sin, we traditionally think is doing bad things, but sin, I've always said is it's building an identity on anything other than God. Sin is placing your ultimate trust in anything other than God. And so see how the principle works when Christians go into the culture, doesn't mean that Christians shouldn't have careers because careers are worldly things, no, but if you turn your career into your ultimate sense of significance and not God, then that's a problem. Does it mean that Christians shouldn't be financially prosperous because money just promotes greed and greed in the world around us, no, but if money becomes your ultimate sense of security instead of God, now we've got a problem. Does it mean that Christians shouldn't party because having fun is evil? Fun's not evil, but if fun is your only source of happiness and joy and not God, we've got a problem. See, are we talking principles, not practices? So when you look at the outcome of what happened in the exile with God here and what he promised, he says here, verse 12, "Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will listen to you." You know, what's that about? It's about what you worship, it's about what you put your ultimate value in your life, it's about who you're looking to do for your sense of security and you're looking to in the midst of this unbelieving world and their time and their trouble in the world, it was designed by God to point them back to him, to worship him again in a new way and with a new heart. So in other words, he's saying, don't forget your expats, don't forget that this place is not your permanent home, you haven't got your permanent residency here, I hate to tell you that if you're a Christian, your PR is not here in this world, so get involved in the culture, but don't get so involved that you forget where you really come from. I mean Paul says it really well, doesn't he? Philippians chapter three, verse 20, he says, "For as I've often told you before and now say again, even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ, the destiny is destruction and their God is their stomach and their glory is in their shame, their mind is on earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly await a savior from there." You see, even Paul's saying, you tonight are God's expats, you have heavenly citizenship and earthly temporary residency and so it means what choices are you making assimilate or separate, can you see there's a third way? Not to assimilate totally into our culture, but we're not to separate totally from our culture. Well how does that happen? I'm glad you asked. As we see finally tonight, God planned for us to be His expats, for His people to be expats for the prosperity of the city. You see, how can you not assimilate but also not separate from the culture around you? Like it's a difference between an earthly expat and a heavenly expat. You see, as I was talking to this lady on the plane and I was asking all these questions and trying to understand why wasn't it that she didn't just go and take a language class every now and then, just hang out, eat some of the food. And as I began to hear her story, I realized that she had no reason to. Life was stitched up and it was sorted in this foreign land and she had all that she could need and she had friends within her culture. In other words, for her there was no need to go into the city, there was no reason to go into the city and that's the key for us guys. The key for all of this is our motivation. That's why the people with the expats of God are so different. You see, verse 7 tells us here that the Jews were to seek the peace of the city. Listen to this. Also, seek the peace and the prosperity of the city to which I've carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers, you too will prosper. You see peace when it says that's a word shalom, it didn't mean just, you know, peace. It meant the whole sort of reunification and the restoration of the city and the unwinding of the degradation that was happening in the city and God saying, pray for that, guys. And then we come into that famous verse in which we see that the prosperity of the people of God is not just for their own benefit. Verse 10, this is what the Lord says, "When the seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you and plans to give you a hope and a future." Now guys, I don't know about you tonight, but often, here's the revelation that God gave me this week. Often I read that verse so individualistically and I have never really read it in its full context until I pulled this passage out this week and began to study it. You read that? It says, "When the seventy years for Babylon are done, my plans are to prosper you, win the city prospers." He's not saying, "Believe in me and I'll pluck you out of there." He's not saying, "Get on my side. You win. They lose." He's not saying, "I have a plan for you that you win," and we forget about them. Now what it was saying is that God's purposes would have blessed not just his own exclusive people, but both the believer and the unbeliever through this exile. And so what he's saying is he's saying, "I don't want you to go into the city and build you little churches. I don't want you to go into the city. My expats are not to create their own little tennis clubs and dinner parties and bridge games. They go into that foreign culture in order to bless that culture. And so when I read that, my heart sank because the God of the Bible, surely we can see it tonight, the God of the Bible is not about shoving placards in people's faces. The God of the Bible is saying in this verse in this passage tonight, "For the workmate who's going to jeer at you tomorrow because maybe you decide that you won't cover up the fact that you went to church tonight," he says, "I placed you there for them." The God of the Bible says tonight for the family member that is still struggling to come to grips with their faith and now is frankly becoming antagonistic every time you bring God up in a conversation. God's saying, "I placed you in that conversation for them." The God of the Bible is saying, "For the friend who after years of knowing that you're a Christian still doesn't even have the slightest bit of interest in your faith." God said, "I've placed you in their life for them." And guys, it means for us tonight that we as of the church have so much to offer the unbelieving society around us for its blessing. I mean, like if the Jews came into that city ramshackled and had the audacity to follow the commands of their great God and blessed that city in spite of that, then surely we can too because God's plan for our church is not that we fight the city or that we judge the city or that we rebuke the city, but that we pray that God will prosper city through us. And so guys, is your motivation right? I mean, is there a reason for you to go into the city? Because if there's no reason, then you're always just going to separate and stay within the club. See, it's God's plan that we might be expats for the prosperity of our city. And you'll probably think at a night, "What is this God on? Is he serious? Has he seen the world out there? Does he know my workmates? Does he get my family members?" What sort of God can expect us to go and love a world that is so hostile and indifferent to him and even to ask for that matter? Is he? What's he on? Can he seriously expect that? Come on guys, you know me well enough by now. You know where I'm heading with this right now. He already did. Those who passed by, held insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, "Oh, you who are going to destroy the temple and build it again in three days, save yourself. Come down from the cross if you're the son of God." And in the same way, the chief priests and the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. "He saved others," they said, "but he can't even save himself. He's the king of Israel. Let him come down now from the cross and we'll believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now. And if he wants him for, he said, "I'm the son of God." And in the same way, the rebels who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him. Guys, only in Jesus Christ, the Christians have someone who stared a hostile, unbelieving world in the face and loved the city for the sake of the city of God. Until we look at the cross of Christ and see a man dying for a culture that was so hostile toward him that it killed him, we're either trying to simulate in order to avoid that hostility or we'll separate and become hostile towards the world around us, but we'll never go into the sake of the city for the city. But even for Jesus, even the question of assimilate or separate was one that he had to grapple with. You see, if he assimilated, he wouldn't have been killed. He'd still be sipping tea with the Pharisees. But if he separated, then he never would have left that wonderful place at the right-handed a father and humbled himself and became a man for our sake and died for us. He lived the third way. He didn't even live the third way. He also lived out the promise, the Jeremiah, and his contemporaries yearned for, and the Israel for years after yearned for that statement that said, "Well, then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me. When you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you." Because finally, in the person of Jesus Christ, exiles and foreigners would now find God. And so, guys, look, the reality is at one point we were all foreigners. The real problem, the big problem in all our lives is not just how we live a life of faith in an unbelieving world, but it's a problem the gospel solves. The gospel's this, at one point, all of us were exiles and foreigners. At one point, all of us were foreigners, not just in a different country, but far away from our true home, our home with God. And through the exile of Jesus Christ on the cross, we would be brought home by God. I want to ask you tonight, you need to come home. When you're an exile from God, you're away from him, and you're experiencing the plans and the purposes that he has, not just for you, but for this whole city. You're part of that adventure, you're part of that plan. If you're not, you can be through faith in Jesus Christ. You can pray with us up to back tonight, you can ask us about it. But to my brothers and sisters, Christians tonight, are you finding it hard to love a city that doesn't love you? Look to the example of Jesus as a start step one. We've got five weeks to go. That's all I want to get through to is to try to assimilate or separate. But that is often the only choice is that earthly expats think when they go into a different culture. It's different for us. It's different for kingdom expats, because on the other hand, we're different because God planned us that he's his expats, heavenly citizens, due residents to go into the city for the love and the sake and the prosperity of the city of Sydney. Are you living out that identity this week? What does it look like? We'll join us next week.