Becoming the People of God Archives

Christmas is meant to be a magical time. Snow, presents, time with your family. As an adult though, the pressure to make every Christmas perfect is exhausting. What’s meant to be magical is stressful. It’s exhausting. This exhaustion and stress is a much better picture of what the first Christmas was really like for Mary and Joseph. It was a time of fear and anxiety. Herod wanted to kill their baby. Joseph thought he had to figure out a way to quietly separate from his fiance. Into this stress and anxiety is when Jesus is born. God became human during a time of stress and fear, when the powerless were up against the powerful and fleeing for their lives. And though Jesus appeared powerless throughout his whole life, it’s his kingdom, not the kingdom of the Romans, that is still standing today. The kingdom of the gentle, self-sacrificial servant outlived Herod by thousands of years and counting.

This episode contains today’s sermon and all the lessons and carols from the service!

God has always worked in surprising ways. It’s why, even though it was prophecied through the scriptures, Jesus’ life and death caught people off guard. Surprises have been around since the beginning, when God put order into chaos, gave a 99-year-old man and a barren woman a son, and gave a rebellious nation a king. Who God chooses to use is surprising. David was a shepherd, Joseph and Mary were nobodies, and Bethlehem was a nowhere town. God uses the people amid the chaos of the world to speak his order into it, and Jesus wants to bring order into the chaos of your life.

[During the upload, the podcast audio for this episode was cut off. It has been re-uploaded here. Apologies for the inconvenience!]

Christmas is meant to be a time of great joy, but everyone reaches a point when they realize Christmas morning can never be all it was cracked up to be. People move away, you grow older, or maybe you see the idealized version of Christmas on TV and just wish you had that for yourself. Advent allows us to view Christmas from the perspective of eternity- there will be a day that exceeds every possible expectation in the world. No matter what love you’re missing this Christmas, God will give us every ounce and kind of love we could ever need.

Revelation is a book that needs special thoughtful attention and thoughtful response. Pastor Dean examines Revelation as a whole, and this passage in its context, to help reveal a couple of basic truths: Things are not always as they seem, and the Lamb is on the throne. For us, we can recognize that living between the two comings of Jesus means that there will be hardship, but we can rejoice in the victory from the heavenly perspective given in Revelation. Specifically, that racial divides will be mended when John sees the glorious vision of a multitude full of every nation, tribe, and tongue.

Names are important. Nicknames say a lot about how you’ve been loved by those around you. Celebrities with titles like “Black Mamba,” “The Boss,” and “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” all speak to their skills and how they want to be perceived. For us, today is Christ the King Sunday, and next week is Immanuel. Our whole calendar is framed by names for Jesus. The names God gives us, therefore, are important. Pastor Dean walks us through the beautiful names Peter calls the church in 1 Peter 2. They demonstrate how God already sees us, and who we are meant to live into being.

Christians need encouragement, and we can’t do that on our own. It’s a modern-day lie that you don’t need anyone or that you should do it all by yourself. Instead, Christian fellowship is essential to enduring the hardships of life. The Hebrews Paul is writing to were persecuted by the Romans, and his question was whether their shared testimony and community would be enough to keep them firm in their faith. As Americans, we do not qualify as persecuted in the biblical sense, but there’s a growing sentiment that we’re in the way of culture. Without a firm community to keep us strong, we can get caught in the flow of culture and drift away from our faith until it’s no longer in our lives at all.

[Unfortunately, the audio file for this sermon was corrupted, a lower quality audio was able to be produced from the livestream. We apologize for the inconvenience.]

Like a good shepherd, Peter watches over his flock and exhorts them in the Spirit, specifically calling upon the leaders in the church to lead as he does. Dean walks through 4 methods Peter describes for effective leadership- It all begins with humility and self-discipline.

Paul’s climactic hymn in his letter to the Philippians calls them to a life of other-centeredness–of humility and generosity. To live out their gospel identity and approach one another as Jesus did: not using his power for his own advantage, but emptying himself in obedience to the Father and for the good of the world.

For the diversity of the Body, God has a unique calling for everyone in it. Sam Pascoe, a returning friend and pastor, explains some ways of looking at the kinds of roles God gives the members of the body to properly divide the responsibilities of the church. Even in the Old Testament, God divides the offices of leadership among several people. In Numbers 11, for instance, He gives gifts and roles of leadership to 70 people. In our modern age, God still works this way, giving each member a role that best fits the gift God He given them.

For Paul, the mystery of Christ isn’t just the forgiveness and redemption. It isn’t that you go to heaven when you die. It’s that, for the first time, the Gentiles are included as full and equal members of the covenant. Jesus isn’t just saving the Gentiles who are far away and keeping them separate, he’s joining the Jews and Gentiles together into one new people for Him. When Jesus is joined to the Church as a bridegroom to a bride, the bride is one body– not divided by race or any other significant identity marker. In Christianity, whatever makes you unique is secondary to your identity in Christ. We’re all Christians first, and so we all share our most significant trait in common.

During the years Paul was writing 1 Corinthians, the church was dividing over the importance of different spiritual gifts. People with certain gifts would compare themselves to others, and feel small or insignificant. It is against this backdrop that 1 Corinthians 12. As the people of God, we need to celebrate each other’s strengths, and not make relative comparisons. Everyone has different skills, and the Body of Christ requires many parts. Variety isn’t a side-effect, or unintentional consequence of an open mindset, in the analogy of the Body, it is essential to the Body’s proper functioning.

[Unfortunately, the audio file of this sermon was corrupted, a lower quality audio was able to be produced from the Facebook Livestream. We apologize for the inconvenience.]

In the book of Romans, Paul makes a distinction between those whom he sees as spiritually weak and spiritually strong. Specifically, it had to do with whether or not their consciences were still concerned with dietary laws for Jewish Christians, and food sacrificed to idols for Gentile Christians. The weak felt that meat couldn’t be eaten, and the strong knew that all things are lawful to eat. In both cases, Paul exhorts the church not to correct or tease them, but to love them. In the same way, modern-day Christians have scruples and disagreements over non-critical points of faith. In such cases, the stronger is called to make the necessary adjustments to make the weak feel comfortable. Sacrificial love can mean restricting yourself to help the consciences of those around you.

As Christians, we are becoming the people of God, and yet we already are. Eternal life is a phrase that can be thrown around without fully understanding what the Bible truly means by it. Taken into the context of the expectations God’s people had in the New Testament, its more than just living forever. It’s eternal communion with each other and with God. We are one as a community. We are meant to be one with God, which implies mission because of God’s heart for his people.

Continuing the themes of last week, Johnny picks up again that Jesus did not come for individual salvation, but for the salvation of a whole people. In forming his new community, Jesus grants authority to the church in Matthew 16 through Peter.