Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Pointing Others to the Life God Has For Them

We’ve come to our final aspect of the vision that God has give us here at the Alliance Church of Quartzsite. We have been talking about God’s vision for four weeks and how we are called to be apart of it. We first talked about how God has an overarching vision. This vision was  creating a creation where he could be a part of it; a place where he could teach and interact with it, just like a parent with their child. Then we talked about how God’s creation rebelled against him, wanting their own vision. But God doesn’t give up on his vision as we can see in Scripture, instead of giving up he fights for it. This is realized in the sending of Jesus to earth to die in our place, so that we wouldn’t face God’s punishment of throwing away his vision, but rather that we would have a way to come back into line with that vision.
All this, we found, was because God’s motivating factor is his love for us. Then we then talked about how, when we accept Jesus as our Savior, and we experience God’s love through this, that there are three responses that need to happen.
The first two responses we explored came from Jesus’ teaching on how to pray and his two greatest commandments. This first was worship or lifting God’s name up. We talked about how, when we came into a right relationship with God, we are to worship him. We are to lift his name up in worship, not just on Sunday mornings, but as David says in Psalm 103 with everything in us and throughout our daily lives and interactions. 
The second response that we’ve talked about, was the second part of Jesus’ teaching on prayer and his second greatest commandment. This second response is that we are to be people that not only lift God up in worship, but that we would be like God in that we would locate and meet the needs of the people around us. We saw that in both Jesus’ teaching on prayer and his second greatest commandment, that needs are important to God and that we are called to be like God, willing to locate the needs that God is working in and meet them if God calls us to it.
Today we’re going to talk about the final response to God’s motivating love. To start off we’re going to take a three question quiz. I’m going to ask you the questions and then we’ll go over each one, by discussing why each is important.
Are you ready to take the quiz?
Our first question is: Which Gospel book, has Jesus mentioning the word “life” the most?
Our second question is: How many times is Jesus mentioned to be the source of life in the Gospel’s?
The final question is: Jesus compares and contrasts himself with a thief in which passage?
So, are you feeling good about your answers? Let’s see how you did. 
The first question is: Which Gospel book has Jesus mentioning the word “life” the most? Answer, the Gospel of John. Here are the numbers: Mark comes in last with only six, which would makes sense, it’s the smallest of the Gospels. Matthew and Luke tie with Jesus mentioning life 16 times. But John smashes those, with a total of 36 times where Jesus mentions life. 
Here’s why this is important: the books of Matthew and Mark are each written from one of the 12 disciples perspectives. Matthew is written by the disciple Matthew, while Mark is written by second generation disciple Mark, recording the information from Peter’s sermons. Luke on the other hand was written, not by a personal eye witness account of Jesus’ life, but rather Luke gathered sources, both from other Gospels that were written earlier and other eye witness accounts. He recorded it all down so that it would be accessible for a non-Jewish audience.
And then there’s John. John is also written from a first hand disciple’s experience, but it was written for very different reasons. Whereas the three other gospels are looking to relay the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, John’s gospel focus’ on Jesus’ impact on John’s own life. I think that it’s because of this that John is the most accessible of the Gospels, because John is telling his story about who Jesus is, rather than giving us a simple historical record. And to John, Jesus’ teachings on God’s love and life greatly impacted him. In fact at the end of his writing, John states, that there’s so much more to tell, but there’s just not enough room.
So the impact of Jesus’ teachings on life, affected John greatly, so we need to understand the why behind it, but before we do, let’s moved on to the next question. 
Question two is: How many times is Jesus mentioned to be the source of life in the Gospel’s?
The answer is 16 times, and take a wild guess where every mention of that comes from? Right, the Gospel of John. John understood Jesus to be more than a good teacher; he understood that life had it’s beginning with Jesus. That all things were created by him. That all things can only live by being connected to Jesus. From the very first verses of his Gospel, John threads Jesus’ words of being the source of life throughout every chapter.
The final question was: Jesus compares and contrasts himself with a thief in which passage?
The answer is John 10:10, where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
John understood that Jesus taught there are two sides to this world: the first is the thief’s side. The thief is Satan, the one who wants to bring down humanity to death and separation from God. The other side is Jesus, the one that wants to bring us into life and eternity.
Why does this all matter? Why is understanding that Jesus spoke so often about life, and why is it important that John was so impacted by this teaching?
In John’s twentieth chapter verse 31 John says, this, “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
Think about this: John was so impacted by Jesus’ teachings and the fact that Jesus isn’t just talking about life, he is life, that John wants us to believe, so that we can experience that life as well.
So, now is where we really get into it. John wants us to understand that Jesus is life, and that we need to believe in him. Okay, that’s something we talk about all the time in the Church. We quote verses like, John 14:6, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

But how does this talk about life, become a response that we’re supposed to have to God’s motivating love?
The how is one, two letter word and it is found in Matthew 28:16-20. I’m going to read the section and then I want you to tell me what the word is.
“Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’”

What's the word? Right, GO. The how of life, is to go and what did Jesus tell us to do as we go? We teach. Teach about what? Well, what did John teach about through his Gospel? John taught, about the life that comes from and can be experienced through Jesus. Remember? John said in chapter 20 verse 30, “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
John took Jesus’ message about life seriously, in fact he took it so seriously that he structured his entire book around this subject. We are called to the same thing, we are called to teach about the life that is only found in Jesus.

Now let’s take a moment and think about this: if Jesus says that he is life and that he wants us to experience life, and we now know that we who are brought into God’s vision are supposed to teach about life, how have we done so far?
How much of an impact have we as the Church done in this world?

PBS has found that since 1999, suicide rates have jumped 28%, which means it’s hovering around 59,000 deaths per year. That would be as if every year a city the size of Lake Havasu, AZ was blotted out.

The National Institute of Drug Abuse says that everyday there are 7,800 new drug users. That amounts to about 2.8 million new drug users per year.

As of right now, there are currently about 400,000 children in foster care in the US alone and about 1 in 5 kids struggle with hunger or in other words 20% of the child population.

Now, just hearing those stats, I ask you, how are we doing as the Church to teach life? 

You want to hear my theory about why this world is so bad off, even with the Church in it? We can blame it on Satan, and yes, I do believe that he has a role in it, but that’s the easy way to explain things. We can blame it on our own sin, and yes, I do believe that our sin has a role as well. And I do believe that this world would be a lot worse off without the Church, but here’s why I think we’ve let it down.
Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

Have you heard this before? I’ve shared with you that I once heard a teacher on discipline talk about how he was doing research on this very verse and he interviewed a Rabbi. The Rabbi told him that the meaning behind the Proverb wasn’t that we would just train and teach a child the ways of God, but that we would teach and train the child in the way, that God created and wanted them to go.
In other words, we are to help our children discover who God created them to be and how they can walk the path of God in their own unique way.
As I’ve reflected on that understanding, I’ve realized that as the Church we have talked about and even taught about the life Jesus has, but too often we try and make people experience the life we have in Jesus, rather than the life he has for them.
Do you see the difference? We try and make people conform to our understanding of God, but Paul says in 1st Corinthians 12:18-20, “18 God has placed each part in the body just as he wanted it to be. 19 If all the parts were the same, how could there be a body? 20 As it is, there are many parts. But there is only one body.”
Yet, we try to make everyone into an eye, or a foot. When go and teach, as John did, that Jesus is life and he wants everyone to experience that life, we are to help them understand  who they are in Jesus, not who we think they should be.
We are called into the vision, that we are to be motivated by love, to lift God up in our worship, to locate the needs in our community while becoming need meters and to point people to the life that God has for them. Did you here that? To the life that God has for them, not the life we have for them, but the deep life that God has in store for them.
My life in Christ looks different than yours, and everyone we reach out to with the life of Jesus needs to also be different.
Finally, I want you to think of this, I believe that one of the hardest theological concepts within Christianity is the Trinity. One God, in three persons, yet one of the things that catches my eye, is the fact that the Father sends the Son and both the Father and the Son send the Spirit. Yet the Spirit desire is to point back to the Son and the Son desire is to point back to the Father.
I think this teaches us what we are to do, we are to point, not to our selves, but to the God who has sent us. We are to go, teach and point back. And that’s our last response and final part of the vision that God is leading us to as the Alliance Church of Quartzsite: to point back to the life that he has for people.
Plants are a microcosm of the life that God has for us. Each of us has the opportunity to point to the life that God has for people, plants show us that God has a purpose and design for each one. Each one living the life that God created them to live and God gives us the opportunity to help the plants around us live. Now, you can kill the chance that plant has to grow and thrive. You do that by ignoring it, or you can help it grow, by doing what is necessary to help it to live. But here’s the things, you can’t make that tulip into a redwood; or that cactus into an apple tree. It’s the same thing with the people around us; we can ignore them and therefore not point them to the life that’s in Jesus, or we can do what’s necessary to point them to Jesus for the life he has for them. By helping them realize who God created them to be.
Today, be motivated by God’s love, to lift him up in your worship, to locate the needs around you that he is working in and to point people back to the life he has for them.

Have a great week and God Bless.

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