Apostles Church

THE HOPE OF OUR CALLING
Sometimes there is a misconception that God is just making an arbitrary choice of whom he will save.  But we saw last week that there is nothing arbitrary or capricious about his decision – he decides according to his divine wisdom and for the sake of his glory.  It’s very thoughtful and intentional, it’s just beyond our ability to fully grasp. 

Likewise, there is nothing arbitrary about the call to follow Jesus.  The idea isn’t that “oh, we’ve been saved and now we sit back and live the sweet life as children of God and let God do his thing.”  In fact, we’re going to look at Ephesians chapter 2 next week and see that we’re actually called to something and for something.  In Eph 2:10 it says that,

“…10For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Here’s the hope of our call that Paul prays for: that we would be freed by Jesus from our bondage to sin, be freed to live a life of good works like Jesus, and ultimately spend all eternity with Jesus.  Jesus is the hope and object of our calling.  The hope of our calling is that Jesus has done everything we couldn’t do so that we could have the life God imagined for us – which is to live the kind of life that Jesus lived. 


That’s why we talk about loving our city with the message and mercy of Christ.  The message of Christ is the gospel which leads to forgiveness of sins and fellowship with God.  The mercy of Christ brings peace and healing into places that are chaotic and broken.  God has left us for now in this broken world but intends for us to participate with him in healing it.  The church is intended to be a healing presence.  The church is to live in such a way that people who don’t know Jesus and aren’t following him would actually see him in the benevolent working of his people.  That’s what we’re called to. 



THE GLORY OF OUR INHERITANCE
We’ve entitled this sermon series “Wealth Redefined” because in Ephesians, we get a number of insights into what true wealth is. 

When we hear this language of “inheritance” we should be keyed in that this passage is challenging our concept of wealth.  Inheritance is a monetary term right?  We think of a relative dying and leaving us a fortune, or a closet full of old Time magazines, depending on what your family is like.  It’s a picture of someone bequeathing something to us.

Well our inheritance as Christians is actually what we call “sonship”.  Back in verse 5 it said that we were “adopted as sons through Jesus Christ.”  In Romans 8 Paul tells us that if we are God’s children then we are heirs – in fact, we’re co-heirs with Christ.  This means that we’ve been granted all of the privileges of the sons of God.  Just like when a family has a biological child and then adopts a child, the adopted child gets treated just like a biological child.  In the way they’re regarded by the family, there is no difference.  They get the same opportunities, allowance, activities, etc.  And this is our glorious inheritance, full acceptance as sons and daughters of God. 

But here’s our problem: we’re more concerned with material aspects of wealth than we are with “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” which Paul says we have back in verse 3.  It’s hard to for us to quantify“a spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”, and we can’t assign cash value to it so we disregard it. 

Listen to what CS Lewis says about how we think:
“Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Lewis understands that our spiritual inheritance as sons of God is like a holiday at the sea when compared to the mud pies of worldly wealth that we consume ourselves with. What Paul, and Lewis, are saying is “quit concerning yourself with temporal conceptions of wealth and give your attention to the surpassingly great reality that as followers of Jesus the whole Kingdom of God is yours! 
You are sons and daughters of God and your inheritance is every spiritual blessing in heaven.  Quit messing about and clamoring for what the world calls wealth!  Instead, recognize the immensity of your true inheritance. 

The glory of our inheritance is that our future is secure and we’ve been given all the privileges of the children of God and all the treasures of the Kingdom, so that now we don’t have to fear risking or losing anything in pursuing the life we’re called to. 

And remember, Paul isn’t praying that this would be true – that we would get this inheritance or have this hope.  We do have this inheritance and hope; he’s praying that we would recognize it. 


POWER FOR US WHO BELIEVE

In verse 19 we see the third thing that Paul prays for here – “and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might 20that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places…”

There are at least two things that mankind has proven itself incapable of overcoming, throughout history for as long has people have lived.  We’ve proven ourselves incapable of overcoming sin and death. 

Every person who’s ever lived, with only one exception, has failed to achieve moral perfection.  Most people don’t make it past infancy and certainly not past 2 before exhibiting signs of their fallenness.   


Just like mankind is incapable of naturally overcoming sin, they’re incapable of naturally overcoming death.  Even with all of the amazing and phenomenal medical advancements we’ve seen in the past hundred years, even with smart guys like Steve Mason who are figuring out how to cure cancer, we will not be able to figure out how to overcome death.  Guys like Walt Disney and Ted Williams, despite their best cryogenic efforts to preserve their dead bodies until a time when scientists will be able to revive them, have not been able to overcome the inevitability of death. 

Only one man, Jesus, has ever been able to overcome sin and death – and it was by the power of God alone.  This immeasurable power of God, which enabled Jesus to defeat sin and attain moral perfection, is the same power which raised Jesus from the dead and is the same power that is given to those who believe.  That should take you back…

This power of God reverses the power of entropy and decay and brings about renewal and life.  This is part of glorious inheritance of the saints; it’s the manifestation of the hope of our calling.  It’s by this power of God that we can say that death no longer has mastery over us and that ultimately death and suffering will be vanquished in all of creation. 


THE PREEMINENCE OF CHRIST
   
In these last three verses here is a picture of the preeminence of Christ, of him being placed above everything as the glorious King over it all. 

We’ve talked several times in the past few months about what it means that the Kingdom of God is coming in fullness, but that it’s only here in part now.  That eventually, God will wipe away ever tear, abolish every pain and trauma and bring peace.  For now, the people of God are to display a measure of that as a foreshadowing of what is coming. 

But the outcome has been determined.  That’s why we can say that the hope of our calling is sure and our inheritance is secure. 

It’s like when you’re at a theater watching a movie.  The outcome of the story is written – it’s already determined, but as you watch it you have no idea what’s going to happen.  You experience suspense because you’re in the dark on how it will turn out, not because the outcome is still really up in the air.  Essentially that’s what’s happening in this epic existence that we live.  In this struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, life and death – the outcome has been determined but most of the world doesn’t recognize it.  God has revealed it to us through the scriptures however.

What Paul shows us here is that at the end of this whole thing, just before the credits role, Jesus is sitting on the throne as King over everything on earth and under the earth and in the heavens, and everything is subject to his Kingship. 

That’s how the end plays out.  But in the meantime, and this is what we so often see on a daily basis, we’re still very much living within the chaos of a fallen world. 

HUMAN TRAFFICKING

1.2 million children being trafficked each year.  100,000 people trafficked into the US each year, not including domestic trafficking.  Trafficking is the second most profitable illicit industry in the world, just behind drug trafficking.  In some parts of SE Asia, children are being sold for as little as $40.

The question for us as a church is how will we respond to this.  We’ve been involved with this issue for a couple of years and have worked in a number of ways towards abolition.  I’m excited that this new partnership with Love146 is going to provide opportunity for us to do more. 

Many of you have said to me, "I’m really passionate about this issue – what can I do?".  If you’re one of those people and you want to get involved at a deeper level in addressing this issue, we’re starting a Love146 Task Force here in NYC where we will work together to do education, awareness, advocacy, community policing and fund raising.  If you’re interested in being a part of that, you can go onto our website and register to sign up.  In the coming weeks I’ll contact everyone who registers and we’ll begin to talk specifically about what our response will look like.  What we want to do is not to have a spasm of compassionate emotion, but develop a sustained response of compassionate action.  That’s what the task force will be focused on. 

There is a lot that an appropriate response entails over a long period of time, but briefly here’s what I want to say to all of us.  Three things: invest your resources, pray fervently and respond locally. 

If you really want to know the number one need right now, its money.  Increased financial resources available to combat this issue will be a game changer.  Most of us don’t want to hear that, I know, and a lot of you are uncomfortable with me talking about money.  But if you really want to know how you can have the greatest impact as an abolitionist today – it’s invest your money into it.  Where we spend our money indicates what we really value most.  So think about how much you value the end of slavery when you set your budget next month.   

Secondly, it will take the full power of God, working through his church to end this atrocity.  So pray for that.  Do you know that prayer gatherings continue to be the most poorly attended events we have at Apostles Church – and that’s true for most churches in America.  That has got to change.  How much we pray indicates how much we really want this to end.  So if you say you want this to end, and that you believe in God, but you’re not praying, it isn’t very believable. The children who being raped tonight deserve more from us. 

Lastly, respond locally.  I told you that this problem is systemic and complex.  What I saw over there is that there is a web of social injustice in the world and you can’t really separate its parts neatly.  So when we volunteer at crisis pregnancy centers here, when we tutor at risk kids in our city, when we address local poverty, we are addressing human trafficking. 

If you really want to make a huge impact, consider adopting or fostering a child.  Poverty is one of the biggest drivers in trafficking, and that’s an amazingly Christ like way to address it.   If you want to know more about why that’s the case, sign up for the task force. 


CONCLUSION


If we fail to understand the hope to which we’re called, the glory of our inheritance and the power of God which brings life from death, then evil and oppression will continue to proliferate, unchecked and unabated, because we will be people who are without vision.  If we have no vision for what God is calling us to, then we are impotent to make any real difference in our world. 

Gary Haugen is the president of the International Justice Mission – another organization working to end human slavery – and he has seen everything from the brothels of Svay Pak to the Rwandan genocide back in ’94.  Listen to what he says:

[regarding the children who are trafficked]
“The deepest hurt comes not from the injury itself, but from the knowledge that they are so despised by some who would will their suffering and so unloved by others as to be unmoved by their suffering.  And it all need not be so.  Indeed, there is nothing I am more passionately convinced of through all of these travels through the world of brutal injustice than the simple truth that it need not be so.”

The first morning after I returned from SE Asia I woke up at 4:30am with these words clearly in my mind.  And these are the words I want to leave you with:

“Fortunately the thing that’s most needed right now is the thing that we have more of than we even know what to do with: money.  We are the wealthiest people in the history of the world, not by a little but by a lot.  And we will have to give an account to God one day of how we responded to that privilege in the face of crippling poverty and need. 

But I truly believe that we, as a church community, will continue to grow into being a people of radical generosity.  We will learn to live with less entertainment, we will learn to live in greater simplicity, we will learn to put our money and our energy and our creativity where our mouths are. I believe we will join Jesus where he is - with the poor and broken and oppressed.  I believe that this is possible and that with God’s help we will do this and we will make a difference in our generation.  I believe that we will emerge from our selfishness and show the other half of the world that we can share.  I believe that we will invest not only our money, but our time and attention and passion to see the peace of God replace the chaos of this broken world.  And I believe we will see things like human sex trafficking ended."

That’s what I wrote down and that’s what I believe.  Some of you will scoff and say that it’s Pollyannaish and naïve.  But some of you will hear that and be inspired to actually believe it yourself and make it happen.  Some of you will hear in it echoes of the hope of your calling and the glory of your inheritance and the immeasurable power of God that is at work in you.  My hope is that, for us as a community, it will be the latter. 

May we have an increased vision for that today.