DNA 2021
Love.Jesus.Simple
Cleansing the Clutter
August 22, 2021 • John 2:13–25
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. All right. Well, I guess that's a sign from God that there's no time limit on this sermon. Praise God. If you're new, welcome, and we're so glad that you came early today. The 15 minutes early to the service, it felt like a sacrificed, didn't it? A little bit? Good. Good. That's the whole point. We should just keep doing that every single week, just incrementally change the time. We have coffee in the back. We brought coffee back in. So enjoy. I don't think we have any announcements other than God is good all the time. So let's pray. Heavenly father, we thank you so much that you are a God who loves us. And we do understand that we live in a fallen, sinful world. We have a fallen flesh that seeks satisfaction in sin. We rebel against you. We have that nature. And then we also live in a fallen world. The world is against the church. And on top of that, we have an enemy, Satan and his army of demons, vying for our souls and opposing the work of God. Therefore, we shouldn't be surprised that we lose vision of you, Jesus. Our vision gets cluttered. I pray today, remove that clutter. Jesus, in the same way that you entered the temple with a whip and zeal for the house, we pray, make us a people who are zealous with a holy zeal to cleanse our temple of sin, our personal bodies and souls to ruthlessly fight sin and to also oppose sin in the church when it creeps in or anything that gets added onto the pure gospel of Jesus Christ. Holy spirit, we welcome you into this place. We pray that you lead us, that you equip us. I pray that you today comfort the afflicted and also afflict the comfortable and continue to build your church here in the city. And Lord, we thank you for the privilege of getting to work with you. You don't need us, but we need the invitation. We need the work because that's what shapes us into the image of God and that's what keeps us close to you. And I pray, Lord, make us a church that is as zealous as you are about the church. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. The title of the sermon today is Cleansing the Clutter. This is our Love Jesus Simple series. This is our DNA. It's to refocus us on who we are, our identity, and given our identity, what we do, our activity. And then with our activity, what's the vision? Where are we going? And we talk about love. That we are given the great commandment to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. We're given the great commission that we are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, son, the holy spirit, and teaching them to do everything that Jesus taught us. And we have the great compassion where Jesus says that we are to care for the least of these of the world so love. By Jesus, we talked about the living word of God as attested to in the written word of God, the second person of the Trinity that reveals God to us and that reconciles us to God. So we focused on Jesus. And today we're talking about simplicity, to simplify, to get rid of anything that gets in the way of the most important, of the most essential. So we can be a church that majors in the majors. I drive a 2007 Highlander, and I do that on purpose because I can park. It's got three row seating. I've got four kids. I can park it in tight spots. But also, it's old and I don't care if it gets dinged up. It's tremendous. I am not attached to my car at all. Therefore, we have never had it detailed, ever. Ever not once. And then we started looking around, there's crayons from 1980. It's just nasty. I look around and I'm like, "You know what? This is one of the reasons probably why we hate driving this thing." So I took it to a detailing place. My wife took it to a detailing place in Allston. I don't even know the name of it, but I love their little motto: it's a spa for your car. So I went there and they got it detailed and I couldn't recognize the car. It was pristine. And for some reason, I think it started driving better. I don't know if there's a connection, but you know that connection when it's clean and you want to be in that car. So there's something that happens when our houses get cluttered. People are fascinated with hoarders, people that just keep getting... And we watch shows about it. There's a whole movement about deep cluttering and simplifying, focusing on the essentials, living in little homes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this is why we do this on an annual basis because in the church, there is a tendency for things to get cluttered. Question. If you're new to Mosaic, I have multiple introductions in the introduction. This is my second introduction. Question. How much of your waking hours are spent looking at man-made things? Of your waking hours, how much percentage of that are you looking at man-made things? I'm talking about your apartment. I'm talking about the brick and mortar around us, the asphalt around us. I'm talking about the mediocre transportation. I'm talking about Storrow Drive. My brother and I and my dad were stuck in Storrow Drive traffic yesterday. And my dad looks around and he's like, "This is why I hate cities." He lives in Jamestown, Rhode Island, on the ocean. He's like, "I hate this." I was like, "Imagine living here 12 years." And then, you know what he says? "But there's also a lot of benefits to the city." He does this thing to encourage me, like keep living here. This as important. But just think about how much of your waking hours is man-made things. And on top of that, you're at work. You're staring at a screen all day. And then when you come home, you got your phone. You don't even go to the bathroom without your phone. You're just staring at man-made things all the time. Plus, we're surrounded by unbelievers. Most of us, the only time that we relate with Christians, fellowship with Christians is when we go to church or a community group. So there is so much to be discouraged about because everything manmade is sinful. And on top of that, we're surrounded by people who don't know God. Yes, cities are tremendous because there's so much more of the image of God per square foot and there's also more of the human flesh depravity, the reprobate nature per square foot. Not to mention the demonic oppression when there are so many concentrated souls and Satan is vying for these. So during the week, we lose focus. We lose sight of what's most important. And this is why Sunday morning is so important. This is why community group is so important. This is how I feel about Sunday mornings: I feel like I'm your tour guide. And I pull up and I've got this massive, massive van. I'm like, "Hey, get in. Get in." And I drive you to the mountains. I take my machete and I'm like, "You know what? Grab a machete too because this sermon is going to be hard work." And we're just climbing the mountain with machetes, climbing, climbing. And then you're tired. I'm like, "Have some more coffee, have some more water, caffeine, holy spirit hydration. Let's go." And we're slugging away, machete after machete after machete. And then finally you begin to see a little clear and then finally you get to the top. And I just point you, look to the cross, look to calvary, look to the glory of God. And that fills your soul and you're encouraged. And then we go back down the mountain and we drive you back into the mission that is the mission of God here in the city. And you're like, "Ah, I got to do it all again." Yes. And that's why church is so important. So everything we do at Mosaic is very calculated. It's like a good coach managing the energy of the team, the momentum of the team. It's like a good CEO, who knows the data, who knows the resources at hand and how to strategically invest for the maximum benefit of the organization and everybody. And it's like a good general who knows the soldiers and knows the mission and cares for the soldiers and actually gets off his high horse and says, "I am on the mission here with you. We are on the front lines." I shared the gospel with I think it was a random guy on the street just by saying hi. I said hi to him. He said, "What?" I was like, "I just wanted to say hi." And he's like, "Everything is messed up," and that's not the word he used. He says, "Everything's messed up." I was like, "I know. I know. Politics is messed up and the economy's messed up, everything." And he's like, "Everyone asleep." I was like, "I know. I know. I'm trying to wake them up. I'm trying to wake them up." He said, "To what?" I said, "The true reality." He said, "You know the secret?" I said, "Oh yeah." So he told me he's going to come to church today. So I'm extra pumped. So hopefully he does show up. But this is why we're here. We have zeal for God. We have zeal for God's people and we have zeal for God's house. And we have zeal for the mission of God. This is why the sermon is so important. And I pray that we never lose sight of that. Today, we're in John 2:13-25. Jesus Christ the context is. And the beginning of chapter two, he begins his ministry because mom asked him to. He's at a wedding and they ran out of wine. And that was a major full pot. And Jesus is like, "I know it's a major full pot. You got any water?" They had 180 gallons of water. And he made the most delicious wine that they had ever tasted, not boxed wine, not wine with an animal on it. That's when you know that's not good wine. He made the best wine that they had ever tasted. That was awesome. People know his glory. And the very next thing he does is he enters the temple and he starts cleansing it. So that's our text today in John 2:13. The Passover of the Jews was at hand and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple, he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changer sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, "Take these things away. Do not make my father's house a house of trade." His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." So the Jews said to him, "What sign do you show us for doing these things?" And Jesus answered them, "Destroy the temple and in three days, I will raise it up." The Jews then said, "It has taken 46 years to build this temple and will you raise it up in three days?" But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When, therefore, he was raised from the dead. His disciples remembered that he had said this. They believed the scripture, the word that Jesus had spoken. Now, when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them because he knew all people. He needed one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man. This is the reading of God, totally and authoritative word. May you write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Two points to frame up our time. First, Jesus is consumed with zeal for God's house. And second, are you consumed with zeal for God's house? Point one begins with Jesus Christ going to Jerusalem at the Passover feast. Now, you got to remember the importance of the Passover feast. What was the Passover feast celebrating? It was celebrating the fact that God led through Moses the people of Israel out of Egypt, after captivity, bondage, oppression for four centuries. And how did God lead them out? Sign after sign, after sign, after sign. And Pharaoh kept hardening his heart, hardening his heart. And then finally God said, "The only way to get you out is through death. The only way to give you life and freedom is through death." God sent the angel of death. The angel of death was going to pass through. And every firstborn in every single household will die, the first son will die, unless the doorframe is painted with the blood of the lamb. Now, whoever believed... This is cookie. This is crazy. They didn't even have the sacrificial system yet. But God was saying your sin, Israel, your sin, Egyptians, your sin deserves death. And the only way to save you is a substitute, a sinless substitute. Someone must die in your place if you are to live. So the Passover feast was for them to remember God's grace. God, you saved me because someone died for me. God, I'm celebrating your love and remembering your wrath for my sin. And all the Passover feast was, it was a big, thank you. God, thank you, thank you, thank you for saving me, for saving us. So we gather annually to do that. And we see in Jerusalem, in the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and he could see the money changer the sitting there. The animals were sacrifice. Deuteronomy, the people of God were told you need to raise the animal yourself. The animal has to grow up with you, grow up with your family. It has to basically be a pet. And then you got to take this animal and you got to take it with you to the temple, however far it takes, however much work it takes. And you need to feel the emotional pain of this animal, the one you knew dying in your place. We have emotional attachments to animals. We do. That's what God was doing. I want you to take your beloved. It's hard to even say, like you're beloved, your dog, your cat. That's what God was doing. But then the religious people realized, okay, that doesn't make practical sense for people to bring the animals. Let's make it a little easier. And you know what? This might solve our funding issue. People aren't tithing as they should be. We've got buildings to build. We've got capital campaigns. We've got staff salaries to pay. So you know what? Let's sell the sacrificial animals at the temple. Let's tell them there. Let's just offer it as a service, just to make it a little more convenient for those whom it's hard to go to worship. And then the people would come and they're like, "Oh, I can buy an animal. Tremendous." And the people that couldn't buy the animal because of price gouging, it's like when you go into the Red Sox, a hotdog is like $80. They got you in there. You're in. You're in. That's it. It's supply and demand. Now, you're in. Okay. Here's the price. So the poor people couldn't do that. So the poor people are bringing their own animals. They're bringing the pigeon. And then the people are like, okay, that adds another layer of difficulty. We've got to solve that problem to continue our streams of income. So they said, we're going to have inspectors. We're going to inspect the animal. Oh, your lamb, it's got a blemish on it. What blemish? There's no blemish. There's a blemish. It's a lemon. You brought a lemon. Well, we have another vehicle that we can sell you. Well, we'll buy this one. You can trade it in for that one. We'll give you 20 bucks for your little lemon lamb. And then we're going to sell you one for a hundred. And the person doesn't have a choice because it's the religious inspectors. It's the first used car dealership right there at the temple. And then on top of that, they would take the little lemon lamb, they would take that lamb and then sell it to the next person. Tremendous income stream. And they're like, you know what? This is great. Let's keep doing this. And then they're like, why are we using Roman currency? Whoever controls the currency, controls everything. So let's create our own currency. They create their own temple currency. They're like we're done with the fiat dollar. We're going to use Bitcoin. That's what we're going to do in the temple. We got our own temple coin. That's what we're going to do. And obviously, when you get there with the money, I'm sorry, your money's not accepted here. So you can trade it in. Obviously, there's a little fee on top, the Coinbase fee of whatever percentage it is. That's what's going on. So they're making money left and right off of whom? Off of people that want to show up to the temple and say thank you to God, to know more about God. So you got extortion and you got corruption. And it's all run by the people who are tasked with the job of telling people that God wants to forgive their sins. So John 2:15, what does Jesus do? Making a whip of cords. And I want to pause here for a second to show how premeditated this was. This wasn't Jesus hot headed, seeing something he doesn't like and going and tossing tables and causing chaos. He deliberately, methodically sits there, prayerfully making a whip, a whip of cords. And he drove them all out with a temple them, the people with the sheep and the oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. Does this Jesus have a place in your theology of God? Because if this Jesus isn't in your theology of God, you don't know God. I understand that some people naturally are not wired to loving this Jesus I am. I love this Jesus. This is my favorite Jesus. This Jesus, when he comes back in Revelation with a sword coming out of his mouth, with a huge tattoo down his leg that said, "Lord of lord and king of kings." I love that Jesus, because that Jesus Christ kill me. And if you can kill me, I'm going to follow you. That's that's how I'm wired. But you need the savage Jesus in your theology. This is the start of his ministry. What did he do for the first three decades of his life? He was a builder. He worked with his dad and he was builder. He built things. So I see, like, he swung a hammer. There were no power tools back then. So if you build stuff, you're yoked. This is yoked Jesus showing up at the temple. Well, how do I know he's yoked? Because he doesn't need two hands to turn over tables. He's got a whip in one hand and he's tossing tables with the other hand. And what is he doing? Jesus Christ, yoked carpenter, cage fighting Jesus. This Jesus is declaring war against the establishment. He's declaring war against the priest and against the temple religious system. He's declaring war against every single person who's getting in the way of people meeting God, people in authority who are getting in the way of people meeting God. That's what sparks his zeal and he makes a whip. And what does he say in verse 16? He told those who sold the pigeons, "Take these things away. Do not make my father's house the house of trade." Jesus, what is motivating you emotionally to do this thing that might bring you to the brink of death. The priesthood has the Roman soldiers at their disposal. They can whack you in a second. Jesus, you're risking everything to do what? What are you motivated by? He's motivated by a love for his father's house. This is my father's house. This is where God, the father, is worshiped, where the children of God gather. This is my house. When I go to my dad's house, I take off my shoes. But the only thing I do diff... Well, I take off my shoes in my house because my wife does the same thing. But at my dad's house, I walk in and I open the fridge. What do we got? What are we eating? It's my too. Is it my house? No, but it is my house. My mom never said, :Make yourself at home." She already knows. Jesus walks into his house. He doesn't take the whip and go to someone else's house. This is my house. This is my house. So we need to clean it out, clean and declutter this house. The main issue is he says, "Why did you make my father's house, a house of trade?" If you want to do the business side and selling the animals, do it outside. Don't do it in the court of Gentiles. That's where they were doing. So in the temple, there's the holy of holies. And there was a place where the men of Israel could enter. And then there was a court of the Gentiles. The court of the Gentiles couldn't go into where they were doing the sacrifices. This is as close to God as they could come. They didn't see how graphic the sacrificial system is. They didn't see it. That wasn't emblazed on their hearts so they understand the gravity of what's going on, that this animal was dying for you. These people want to go to pray. They want to go connect with God. And they find themselves in the midst of bizarre, animals bellowing and bleeding, selling. It's like the New York Stock Exchange on a Friday after noon. You're trying to pray and all that people see is business. And what does that communicate to people that do not know God? What that communicates is these people don't care about God. The people in charge don't care about God. Why should I care about God? If the people in charge have a transactional relationship with God. I give God money, he forgives me of sins. That's what we're doing here. You want your sins atoned for, forgiven? We'll take your money. That's it. Your sins are forgiven. Kind of what the Catholic church did before the reformation. It was the same thing, transaction, business. We're going to build buildings and we're going to fill up the coffers. And then we're going to fill up our own bank accounts. It was the same, same thing, people getting in the way of people worshiping God. So Jesus, in verse 17, his disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." Zeal for your house will consume me. And probably they remembered these words after the resurrection, from the deeper vantage point of everything they had seen. And what this is, is a quote from Psalm 69:9, "For zeal for your house has consumed me. And the reproaches of those who reproach, you have fallen on me." Now, initially, this was written by David. David is saying he felt a reproach. He suffered reproach because of his zeal for the house of God. Now, it's fascinating, it's both from the Hebrew, Psalm 69, and the sub teigen, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This is where you got to get your machete ready just for a little bit. We're still swinging. What's important there in the grammar is that tense is in the past tense. For zeal for your house has consumed me. That's a past tense. John turns the past tense into a future. He says, zeal for your house will consume you. It will consume you. Why is that important? Because John is treating the Psalm as a messianic prophecy of the ministry of Jesus. This is the Messiah. This is the prophet who was promised that will come and he will speak God's word to God's people. He's the priest that will come and atone for the sins of God's people. He is the king. He's the anointed one who will force people to submit to his rule. Psalm 69 is one of the six Psalms most often referred to in the New Testament, and Jesus quotes this multiple times, twice in the book of John. John 15:23-25, Jesus starts talking about the fact that people hate him. Whoever hates me hates my father also. And if I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my father. But the word that is written in the law must be fulfilled. They hated me without cause." This isn't they disliked me. This is they despised me. And then John 19:28, Jesus on the cross, "After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said, to fulfill the scripture, 'I thirst." And the jar full of sour wine stood there. So they put a sponge full of the sour wine on the hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus received the sour wine, he said, "It is finished," and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit of prophecy, again, written in Psalm 69, fulfilled in Christ. What happened to king David happened much more to an infinite degree more to David's great descendant, the Messiah, Jesus Christ. David wanted to build the temple. He loved the place of God, the worship of God. He loved it. He suffered a reproach for it. Jesus Christ loved it and suffered reproach for it. But ultimately, it wasn't the temple that he really cared about. It was the presence of God that people were thwarted of entering. And then Jesus Christ ultimately to destroy that temple allows the temple of his body to be destroyed as fulfillment of the temple and replacement of rights and sacrifice. And what's so resoundingly clear from this text is that Jesus Christ was opposed. There was outright hostility from the religious people. And then at the end of the text, we see people, "Oh, we like Jesus. He's awesome." And Jesus, it says, did not entrust himself to them because he knew what was in them. He knew how fickle people were. So you've got hostility from the representatives of God and superficial loyalty from everyone else, which is just a sugar coated hostility. And yes, in our culture, that hostility crowd is growing. You tip people's holy cows and see how zealous they become. The holy cows of gender, sexual identity. How things should be set up in the church. You tip holy cows, you tell people that what they do in their house... I'm not coming into your house to clean it. I'm not doing that. I'm making a whip, but I am proclaiming God's word. And when you hear God's word and are offended by it, that's the point to awaken you. That's the point. I don't go into your house with a whip and I pray, dear friend, return the favor. Do not come to our house with your own whip, trying to change Jesus, change God, change God's word. You know why? Because if we allow you or someone to do that, hypothetically, it's not anyone sitting here. Hypothetically, if we allow you to come in and change God, change God's word, change how God told us to do things, then Jesus is going to come with a whip. And who is he going to start with? Me. Me. So I don't want to do that. I don't want to mess with Jesus. I want to snuggle with Jesus like the apostle John. I want that. Don't kill me, please. Thanks. That's the Jesus that I want. So I want to stay in his good graces. That's what's going on. So on the one side, people are growing in hostility to God. So to those people who are like, "Yeah, Jesus got a whip." So that's what we preach. And then to the other people, there's just a superficial loyalty, "I love Jesus." And I see this with a lot of young people. You show up to church and I already know why you're here. You're here because you want to marry someone. Tremendous. So don't fake it. Don't fake being a Christian. Don't fake it. Don't ruin someone else's life. And if you're faking it, you're not going to discern if the other person is actually solid Christian. So that's what I'm saying. Like the superficial loyalty, Jesus rejected that as well. And you know what happens? As soon as Christianity gets difficult, the profession of faith just disappears. It's just gone. And you need to be ready right now. You need to say in your heart, "Okay. If the Taliban knocks on my door and says right now, 'Bring out your daughters to me just because you're a Christian." What are you going to do? Are you ready to suffer for the faith. That's a decision you've got to make now. And Jesus Christ said, "Take up your cross and follow me daily." Meaning there will be a price to pay. Jesus comes and he starts with his own. John 1:11, "He came to his own and his own did not receive him. They were convinced they were loving God by hating the son of God." And that's an important word. The religious elites crucified Jesus thinking they were loving God. The things humans can get away with when they think they are doing God's will. Stalin went to seminary. Stalin was a trained pastor. He thought he was doing what's best for humanity. Be careful that in the name of something you call good, that you don't create barriers for people to meet God. And that's a word to us, to Christians. I've seen this. I grew up in a church like this. I grew up in a church I didn't want to go to. There were barriers there. Do you think boy bands were cool? Then, they were never cool. But before boy bands took off here, they took off in my Russian church. We had four dudes show up that can't sing, but they got slicked back here. I was one of the boys. We did that one time. Dennis, remember that? We did that one time. And then I looked back and I cringe. No wonder my friends didn't want to go to that church. They didn't preach the word. They didn't explain that this is real, that Christianity impacts every single day. How real this truly is. Because we were paying attention to the color of the carpet. That's what we talked about at member's meeting, not saving people, not bringing people to church and seeing people meet Jesus. Not once did I see someone who's an unbeliever show up and say, "You know what? I have no Christian background and I want to become a Christian." I didn't see that once. And I couldn't take my friends to church because they didn't speak Russian. So that's what I'm saying. Christians have this tendency to add stuff to church that keeps people away from seeing the point. And the point is that you are a sinner, that God's wrath is upon you, you deserve Jesus whip and ultimately his sword. But Jesus Christ came and he was consumed with zeal so much so that the one that came with the whip allowed himself to be whipped, allowed himself to be scorched, tied to a pole, shirt taken off. Roman brutal machines of death whipped him with a cat o' nine tails and at the end of every single one of those strands was a rock or a piece of bone to get his back and flesh, to get pulled. So he allows it so that you don't have to, so you don't have to bear his wrath, so you don't have to bear his sword of judgment. That's the point. And Jesus came and he said, that's it. That's what I'm trying to say. I am your only hope to salvation. And that's why the people who are closest to him and heard the message closest to him, most of them hated him. A lot of us think, people, if they just knew how great Jesus was, they'd love him. This is a lie. This is a lie. And that's why people are like, "Oh, don't read that text. Don't read that text." When people really understood who Jesus was, the few, the select, the chosen, they became Christians. Everybody else despised him. They wanted to kill him outright. Why? Why would people hate Jesus? Because the same Jesus who tenderly says, "Come onto me all of you are burdened and heavy laden and I will give you rest." The same Jesus made a whip of cords, drove people out of the temple, scattered and upset, their animals, overturned their tables, scattered all their money. And how does that make you feel? That's an important question. If you really understand, how does that make you? Did Jesus hurt their feelings? Yeah. Wasn't there another way, Jesus? Could you not have like sat down with them and had a conversation, give them a little therapy, brokered a little deal. And like, hey, you guys are doing this wrong. Let me point you to God's word. Do a little Bible study. No, it's not what he does. Because that's not enough to awaken them. What they needed was someone to come in and to hit them where it hurts most, in the pocket book and the ego. And to know that they don't care about the thing that he cares about most. And if they don't care about the thing that he cares about most, they will suffer consequence. So what did he care about most? In John 2:17, his disciples remembered that it was written zeal for your house will consume me. The word zeal comes from the word deboil, like boiling water. That's inside. It's boiling. His blood is boiling. And obviously, there's lots of examples in scripture of unholy zeal. Like when Peter who just woke up from sleep and watching Jesus get arrested, he's like, "Ah, I'm zealous. I'm going to chop off this guy's head," and only gets the ear. And then Jesus is like, "What are you doing?" That's unholy zeal. And St. Paul says there's people that have zeal not according to knowledge, but Jesus' zeal was holy. There was nothing wicked about it. His zeal is as holy as his love and his gentleness and his grace. His zeal was his love. He was zealous because he was so loving. Zeal is love made angry because the thing you love, the one you love is being hurt. That's what's going on here. Jesus loves God. He loves the house of God. And he sees that what these people are doing is pulling people away from God. And one of the ways that they were trying to pull people away from God was trying to make it easier, trying to make the church more palatable, God more palatable. Okay. You don't have to raise the animal. We'll do it for you. We'll make it more efficient. We'll make it more timely, more convenient. What better convenience than to sell the sacrificial animals there? A one-stop-shop worship. They took the pain out of worship. They took the pain out of worship. They began to encourage lazy worship, loveless worship, sacrificeless worship, and they catered to their consumer mentality. You come in, you pay, you receive, and creating a customer mentality. And then customers. Well, the customer is always right. If it's a business, if church is primarily a business, the customer is always right. A lot of churches do that. The customer is always right. So that's what we're going to preach. You know how many people you can attract with a message like that? Joel Osteen fills a football stadium primarily because he has nice hair and a beautiful smile and a wonderful jawline and he serves ice cream. He just gives people ice cream. That's all he does. Pay me I give you ice cream. Pay me I gave you... He looked at the church and he's like, "I can offer you ice cream for your soul." You go there, you're uplifted, you're encouraged. Everything is awesome. Wonderful. He doesn't call me to do any of this. This is tremendous. You show up here and I say, "Grab your machete. We're going to war. This is what we do." We pull you to work. You show up, you have a pulse, we tell you about Jesus and we'll give you a job. That's what we do. Because that's the best thing for you. I grew up painting with my dad, who likes painting if your house looks bad. Don't get mad. Tremendous. I was six years old. He's like, "You want to work with me tomorrow?" I said, "Tremendous." I show up to work and I'm working. Was I good? No, I was terrible. He didn't need me there. I needed to be there more than he needed me to be there. I needed the service. I needed to learn how to work hard. I needed to learn how to sacrifice. And that's why God gave us sacrificial systems. That's why, when God says, "I want to forgive your sins. And also, take up a cross and follow me." And that's why God does talk about wrath. He talks about for every instance of God's love and mercy and grace in holy scripture, there's three instances of his wrath and damnation and hell. Why does he do that? So when he saves people, they understand what they're saved from. So they're motivated to give all of their life, all of their zeal to save those who are not yet Christians. And here, these people didn't care about it. John 2:18, the Jews said to him, "What sign do you give us for showing these things?" And what's fascinating is their demand betrays them. It betrays the fact that they know that he's not a kook, that he's not just a revolutionary. They feel his authority and they saw it in his eyes. And what they're saying is not, "Oh, teach us how to change the worship. Teach us what we're doing wrong." No, they didn't care about that. They cared that he was tipping their holy cow of authority. And that's why he's like, "You want to sign? Here's the sign, destroy this temple. And in three days, I'll raise it up." Obviously, he's not talking about destroying the temple. that's what they used in order to arrest him after and those are the insults that were hurled at him as he's hanging on the cross. And he's not talking about this temple, he's talking about destroy this temple. That's the sign that... A lot of people are like, "I believe in God. If there was a sign from God." There is a sign from God. A guy lived, a guy died, and a guy came back from the dead. That's the sign. And that's the sign that everybody gets. God is an all equal opportunity sign giver. Everybody gets the same sign. Tremendous. But you've got to believe in it. You got to understand why he's on the cross. You got to understand what he did for us. What's fascinating is the same zeal with which he started his ministry, that was the same zeal with which he did his ministry. Him cleansing the temple was just a sign of everything else that's coming. Everything he taught. The Jews had 618 laws. This is what you got to obey in order to be made right with God. And Jesus is like you can't be made right with God unless you believe in me. And then the 618, let's just condense it. Let's put it in a shot glass, distill, two commands. Love God and love people. Tremendous. Go do it. They want to sit around and have Bible studies instead of doing the stuff that is in the Bible. So Jesus starts his ministry by cleansing the temple, cleanses the people of God, and ends his ministry doing the same thing. And this is what a lot of Christians owner of Stan. This action, what Jesus did is so important to our theology. He does it twice. He does it at the beginning of his ministry, in John 2, and then he does it at the end of the ministry. And Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have that second one. And the context says in Matthew 21, Jesus enters Jerusalem on the holy week, enters in the holy week as the king. Everyone's screaming out, "Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna." And then as a king, he enters the temple again to do the same thing. And that's Matthew 21:12-17. Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple. And he overturned the tables of the money changers and seats of those who sold pigeons. And he said to them, "It is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers. And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he healed them. And when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, 'Hosanna to the son of God,' they were indignant. And they said to him, 'Do you hear what these are saying?' And Jesus said to them, 'Yes. Have you never read, out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise.' And leaving them, he went out of the city to Bethany and lodged there." He did the same thing. This time, he adds, you've made my house a house of prayer. You've made a den of robbers. He calls it my house, and this is my house. I'm in my house. And you made it a den of robbers. And here he quotes Jeremiah 7, where God tells Jeremiah, go into the temple and preach the sermon. And in that sermon, Jeremiah accuses his contemporary as bringing into the temple all of their sins. So it's not even just about the sacrificial system. It's about the fact that you don't use it. The sacrificial system, the whole point of it was raise a little lamb, care for it, love it, walk it all the way down to the temple and watch it's throat slit for your sins so that you go home and you remember the bleeding of that sheep that you loved and that's to motivate you to live a sinless life, a holy life, a life of zeal toward God. So Jeremiah says to these people in verse eight, "Behold, you trusted deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear false, make offerings to Baal and go after other gods that you have not known. And then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name and say, 'We are delivered,' only to go on doing all these abominations." "Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it," declares the Lord. What they were doing, but this is what's happening in so many American churches today, so so many. You go in and you're like, "Oh, Jesus is the new sacrificial system? Tremendous. I'm going to sin all week. I'm going to live a godless life." Zeal for sin instead of a zeal for the savior. And then you come in on a Sunday, oh yeah, I committed adultery. Okay. Let's repent of that. I stole. Let's repent of that. I worshiped other idols. Okay. I swore falsely, let's repent. I murdered someone. Jesus said, if you hate someone in your heart, that's tantamount to murder, meaning they didn't care about Gods will at all. They just used God. So Jesus quotes these words to these people, den of robbers. And he inflamed their zeal. And that's what got him killed. Ultimately, his zeal did consume him. Ultimately, he did die for us. Jesus was zealous for God. And they were zealous for self power, money, status, positions. And the same battle raging in their hearts is raging in every single heart today. Jesus wants to cleanse your heart of sin. He wants to enter your life with not a whip. Right now, in this life, while you're alive, he wants to enter your heart with mercy and love and grace and forgive you, cleanse you with his blood. This is the beauty. Jesus wants to cleanse you with his blood, not his whip. The whip comes later. But if you bow your knees to Jesus Christ, if you repent of sin in this life, while you're alive, everything is forgiven. You talk about great business models. You could talk about great deals, you could talk about streams of income, all that. This is the greatest deal in the history of the universe. All of your sins are forgiven. So repent. But once you do, you need to know, he expects something from you. He expects you to live zealously for him. And this is point two, Jesus is consumed with zeal. Oh, wow. Point two is going to be really fast. That's why I needed the timer. Dangerous. Okay. Are you consumed with zeal for God's house? When you see this Jesus with a whip, how does that make you feel? It should make you feel that, hey, I don't know if I'm as zealous as he is for God's house, for God. And we're all zealous for something. And you just follow your time, talent, treasure, where your skills are used, where your time is used, where your treasure is used, where it goes naturally, that's what you're most zealous about. And we need to ask ourselves, are we zealous for God? Are we zealous for God's temple? And God's temple obviously is in Jerusalem. Now, God's temple is the church universal, lived out in the church local. And again, I have this conversation all the time. People are like, "I'm a Christian, I'm part of the universal church." That's like me going to you and saying, "Are you a human being?" And they say, "Yeah, I'm part of the human race." Do you have a body? If not, you're Casper the Friendly Ghost. Same thing. Are you a Christian? Are you part of the universal church? Are you part of the local church? If you're not a part of a local church, you're probably not alive. That was the love sermon or the Jesus sermon. I don't know. I preach the same thing every week. Are you zealous for God's work. Are you zealous to please God? Are you zealous to declutter your own soul and life of sin? And your answer, I want you to look at the data. I want you to look at the evidence. If you say I'm zealous for God, look at the data. Where does your time naturally go? Where does your money naturally go? Where do you thoughts naturally go? Look at the data. Study yourself. Show me the receipts that you are zealous. And also, is there anything better to consume your life than zeal for God's house? Is there anything better? If you know me personally, when I get zealous about something, I get zealous. So when I talk about God's word, I am... If I'm not sweating profusely, like I'm at a workout, I'm a CrossFit right now, then I'm not even trying. No. When I get zealous about something, I go all in. I went vegan one time. I dropped like 40 pounds. I was yellow by the end of that. And after that, I started powerlifting. Go completely. I get zealous. I became an amateur boxer just for fun. I get zealous. And the whole time with all of my different whatever, I'm zealous for the church of God. I love the church. I love this church. I love it. I love the scriptures. I love the church. I want to give all of myself to it. And I remember reading J.I. Packer, Knowing God. And he has this section about the zeal of God. If you know God, you have to be zealous for God. And this little section, it's chapter 17 of Knowing God, it changed my life. He says zeal and religion of Christianity is a burning desire to please God, to do his will, to advance his glory in the world in every possible way. It is the desire which no man feels by nature, which the spirit puts in the heart of every believer when he is converted, by which some believers feel so much more strongly than others that they alone deserve to be called zealous men. In religion, Christianity is preeminently a man of one thing. It is not enough to say that he's earnest, hearty, uncompromising, thorough going, whole-hearted, fervent in spirit. He only sees one thing, cares for one thing. He lives for one thing. He's swallowed up by one thing, and that one thing is to please God, whether he lives or whether he dies, whether he has health or whether he has sickness, whether he is rich, whether he is poor, whether he pleases man or whether he gives offense, whether he's thought wise or whether he is thought foolish, whether he gets blame or whether he gets praise, whether he gets honor, whether he gets shamed. For all this, the zealous man cares nothing at all. He burns for one thing, and that one thing is to please God, to advance God's glory. If he is consumed in the very burning, he cares not for it. He's content. He feels like that, like a lamp. He is made to burn. And if consumed in burning, he has done the work for which God appointed him. Such a one will always find a sphere for his zeal. If he cannot preach, work, give money, he will cry inside and pray. If he can not fight in the valley with Joshua, he will do the work with Moses and Aaron on the hill. And if he is cutoff from working himself, he will give the Lord no rest till help is raised up from another quarter. And the work is done. This is what I mean when I speak of zeal and religion. May God make us men and women of zeal. And that's going to absolutely ever change the world. Revelation 3:15, 16, 19. "I know your works. You're neither cold nor hot. I would that you were either cold or hot. So because you were lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." Those are the words of Jesus. "Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline. So be zealous and repent." Titus 2:11-14, "For the grace of God," that's our salvation, "Has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and live self-controlled upright and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope." "The appearing of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for God's work." And then practically, how does this work? As a church, we focus all of our attention on three things. And those three things are meant to fire up your zeal to the Lord. It's not the only things that we do, but this is where we focus our energy: on our worship services, on our community groups, and our service teams. Acts 2, that's what the early church did. At my house, I live with five females. They're wonderful. They're my favorite roommates. We do three things in my house. We worship God. We talk about God all the time. We read scripture. We pray. We talk about God all the time. My daughter, Milan, is four. She was visiting her aunt and her aunt said, "Do you love God?" She said, "Yeah." And her aunt said, "Why?" And we're expecting, "Oh, he made me. He gives me good stuff. He feeds me." She's like, "Because he told me to." Oh man, that's good. That's good. Love because he's God. That's tremendous. That's great theology. So we love each other. We love each other. We worship God. We love each other. We fellowship and we serve each other. That's every good family. Worship. God, tell each other that you love each other, spend time together, and then serve each other. That's what we do. We worship God. We fellowship in community groups. And if you aren't in one, join one. And then we serve on a weekly basis. And why do we do this? We do this to fire up our faith. And at the center of all of that is the holy scriptures. Jesus Christ, after his resurrection, with the disciples walking the road to Emmaus, he just gave him a Bible study and their hearts burned that they were fired up for the mission of God. So everything we do in our worship service, community groups, and service teams, we do with scripture at the center. So if you're like, "I am so zealous for God right now. I am so pumped." Now we're descending down the mountain and we're about to get back in the van and drive back into the city. I am so pumped. What can you do? Well, I've got a job for you. I've got jobs. And I've got a slide with jobs. Oh, this is what we need. We need help. In operations, we need 10 greeting team members, 12 tear down team members, which is tear down in setup is tremendous if you like working out and you pay money for that. You can just get rid of your membership and come to church. Six security team members, six special events team members. So all of this. Production is a little harder because for production, portfolios are required. So if you've got a photography, video, you need skills. Sorry. We believe God's perfect. So everything we try to do here, we try to do with excellence. So if you stink, don't sign up there. And then mini Mosaic, we need to nursery assistants, prayer. Crucial. We need three prayer team members and two intercessory prayer team members, in particular, men. This is requested. Why? And you're like, is that misogynistic that we want particularly men for the team? We want everybody. But right now the team is carried by women. Gentlemen, sign up. Tremendous. You're welcome. So that's that. So if you'd like to sign up, tremendous, http://brookline.mosaicboston.com/serve, or you can go to the app. Conclusion. I had conversation this week with a girl from the church that got a job and she's working at this job. It's a brand new job in a city. One of the things that they do and one of the benefits that they include is they want to motivate their people. One of the services that they had included, they invited this guy in, who was a guy who's like he created a business for himself, like gathering people in his living room, like people are working, company execs, and he would all force them to cook together. They cook a meal together. So everyone's on the same plane. The guards go down. They all eat the meal together. They sit around on a circle and the guy asked one question. And the reason why they do this and the reason why it's so effective is because apparently they found out that companies where people are thankful to be there are so much more successful. And this is the one question that they ask and they talk about, who is the person in your life that you have never thought to say thank you to? I heard that and I was like aaah. I'm getting goosebumps now. That's so powerful. Who's the one person in your life that you never thought to say thank you? And I knew right away. I knew exactly, second grade Mrs. Wodziak, little Polish lady. And I was still in ESL at that time. And I will never forget, it's Christmas time and we had to bring gifts. We had to do the Santa swamp thing. You had to bring a gift and then one of the other kids gets your gift and you get one of their gifts. It was tremendous. And I brought the gift. I don't remember what I brought. And I saw the biggest box under the tree. Because all the kids got to sit there for like weeks looking at all these presents. And they scoped out the biggest one and it came up and I held it up. It was weighty. I was like, this is the one. And I stole it. Second grade. So obviously, on the day of getting the gifts, some kid is not going to have a gift. The day comes and finally they're like, it's the last person. The last person has no gift. There's no present for the little kid. I'm sitting there with my two gifts. Peace to Jenna at second grade. And then Mrs. Wodziak pulls out a present from under her desk, same size. And the kid opens up. It was the same thing that I stole, 64 crayons. You remember those boxes? Same thing to this kid. I'm like, obviously she knew I stole it. She knew. And she gave me mercy. And then in secondary, we took a field trip to Sturbridge village and all the kids had money. I didn't know we were supposed to bring money. Also, my immigrant parents were like, "Money for what? You're lucky we feed you." So then we get to Sturbridge and all the kids are buying stuff and they bought yo-yos And I was like, oh, man, I wish I got a yo-yo. I was scoping out one to steal. And then Mrs. Wodziak comes up to me with a green yo-yo. And I never said thank you. I think she was a believer. She's the one that taught me in one fell swoop about mercy. You don't get what you deserve. And grace. You got what you didn't deserve. That's a powerful question. And I want you to ask that question. What's the one person that you've never thought to say thank you? I want you to say thank you to them if they were alive. I want to pause right now and say thank you to the members of this church and everyone who serves, gives time, talent, treasure for zeal. You're zealous for God. So thank you. Praise God for you. And I'll just end with this. The reason why that question is so powerful, because I've been thinking about that all week. I'm like, why is that so powerful? I know. I know. Because there's one that most people who are alive have never said thank you to. You've never even said thank you. God, thank you. Thank you for giving me life and God, thank you for dying on the cross for my sins, not giving me the wrath that I deserve, and then giving me love and mercy and grace that I don't deserve. God, thank you. So in terms of love, Jesus, simple, and simplicity, that's what we're going to focus on, worshiping God. So let's worship him together. Heavenly father, we do come to you and we just say thank you. We thank you that you're a great God and a holy God. And we thank you, Jesus, that though we deserve the whip, you took it for us. We deserve the cross, you took it for us. We deserve the wrath of God, you took it for us in order to forgive us and give us mercy and then also give us grace. And make us the people who are motivated with gratitude, with thanksgiving, and zealous for you, zealous for your house, zealous for your people, and zealous for the mission of God. And we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We Preach Christ Crucified
August 15, 2021 • 1 Corinthians 1:18—2:5
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. Usually about this time of the year, we do this every year, where we focus on the DNA of Mosaic. The reason why we do this is because every single organization has mission leak or mission creep, where they forget why we exist. So we remind ourselves of why we exist and we communicate that with the three words, love Jesus simple. This is our DNA. Why do we use the word DNA? DNA is the information within every single organism that gives identity, that dictates function, how we are going to function, and it dictates the activity of this organism. I use the word organism because church is an organism. It's not just an organization. Church is alive. Jesus Christ says that the church is His body. It's alive. It's an organism. And the church is His bride. It's alive. It's an organism. And that's why we use the word DNA. The DNA is the blueprint, it's the recipe, the code for who we are. Last week we talked about love is the motive for everything that we do, because love was the motive for everything Jesus did. Jesus Christ loved God and loved people by primarily loving the church. So we do the same. And today we're talking about Christ as Christ is the center of everything that we are. He is our identity, and He as we proclaim Him, His word, that we proclaim Christ crucified, that is the power of God onto salvation. St. Paul said, "The power of God is in the gospel for anyone who believes." The reason why we do this series is to remind ourselves of the mission of God. CS Lewis says, "There exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence." So we must strive very hard, by the grace of the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it. At the center is Jesus Christ. He's the center of everything we do. He's the main point of everything we do. He's the main point of the Christian life, of the Christian faith. And this is our message that your happiness, your eternal happiness, the eternal happiness of every single person wholly depends on Jesus Christ, what you do with His life, death, burial, and resurrection. If you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, you are saved by grace through faith, saved meaning you need to be saved. By grace is a gift from God, and it happens when you believe that Jesus Christ didn't just die, He died for your sins. When you believe that Jesus didn't just come to show us the way to God, that He is the only way to God. It sounds outrageous, I know, and it always has. But when the message is proclaimed, people do get saved. So that's why we do this on a weekly basis. Our text for today is 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. I didn't bookmark it, so let's see if Pastor Jan knows his Bible. Oh yeah, right there, 1 Corinthians 1:18, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. For it is written: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.' Where's the one who is wise? Where's the scribe? Where's the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. "For the foolishness of God is wiser than men and weakness of God is stronger than men. Consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you are wise according to worldly standards; not many were powerful; not many were of noble birth. But God shows what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So that as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.' "And I, when I come to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and fear and much trembling. And my speech, my message were not implausible words of wisdom but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." This is the reading of God's holy and infallible, authoritative Word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts. Why do we preach Jesus Christ crucified? That's why. I can just say amen and pray. That's why. The scripture says, "For each Christ crucified, that's all we do." Did St. Paul write to the church in Corinth? Did he tell them any other things other than Christ crucified? Yeah, of course, he did. But the central message that impacts everything else is that Jesus Christ died on a cross for our sins. Three points to frame up of our time. First, the cross is folly. The cross is power. And the cross is wisdom. St. Paul starts with where everyone knows the first time you hear the message. The secret to the universe, the secret to reality, the secret to understand yourself, the people around you, the secret to understand all the world history is the fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sin. The fact that when you hear that, the first time you ever hear, the natural reaction is: "It's folly. It's foolish to believe. You believe this? You gather on a Sunday to proclaim it? You believe this?" Yes, it sounds folly. That's the point. In verse 18, "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing. But to those who are being saved, it is the power of God." On the one hand, yes, it's folly, but it's also power. Let's start with it's folly. St. Paul in this text, he talks about two groups of people, the Jews, and he talks about the Greeks. The Jews he's talking about, religious Jews, that grew up with the mosaic law, the 10 commandments that God gave through Moses. They believed that they were religious. They believed that they could save themselves through their own efforts. And then the group, the Greeks on the other hand were too sophisticated. The Jews are too religious for Jesus. The Greeks are too sophisticated. So we start with the Jews. For the Jews, the cross was a scandal, scandalous to say that God became man. It was scandalous to say that God's Messiah was crucified. That's like saying God sends a king who then loses, He's crucified. It was an impediment to them, first of all, because in law of Moses, there's a Bible verse in Deuteronomy that says, "Cursed is anybody who hangs on the tree." So when St. Paul comes in, when the disciples come in, they say, "Our Messiah died on a cross." They looked at text, and like, "You're saying our Messiah was cursed? That's blasphemous." On top of that, they hated even the idea of crucifixion because so many of their countrymen died through persecution. The Romans would come in, and anytime there was an insurrection, they would take all of the people, hundreds and thousands of them, and on the way into the city put up cross after cross after cross and execute people. So for Jews to hear that your Messiah was executed through crucifixion, they had the same visceral, emotional antagonism to it as telling a 20th-century that your Messiah died in a concentration camp. The same visceral reaction. Besides the cross, telling Jews that the Son of God died was ludicrous. They had a high view of the divine transcendent God. They had a very inflexible commitment to monotheism, that God is one. It was in their Shema. It was blasphemous to say that there's a second person, there's trinity, there's God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, but it's one God, three persons. That was blasphemous to them. So they had theological, intellectual, emotional opposition to it. And we see it all culminating in St. Paul. Paul before he became Paul, he was Saul. He studied under Gamaliel. He's the greatest theologian, probably theological mind to have existed probably second to Jesus Christ. What did Paul do in his early ministry? Well, he thought that he was doing God's work by persecuting Christians. When he heard about Christian, when he heard about Jesus Christ dying on the cross, that this is the Messiah, he had such a visceral reaction that he wasn't just motivated to speak out against it. It wasn't just about him not liking the message. He would actually physically hunt down Christians, persecuting them to the point of terrorizing them and then killing them. And that ministry started with him watching the death, the stoning, physical stones were thrown at the first martyr, Stephen, and Paul was there. He hated that message. And what changed his mind was when he met Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. So for the Jews, the religious people, they had a visceral reaction against this truth. And for the Greeks, they just felt too sophisticated to believe that their hope, their eternal happiness, eternal life hinges on what they do to a carpenter who then became an itinerant rabbi who died in Judea on a Roman cross and that crucifixion had anything to do with God. Because there was a stigma attached to crucifixion. The elite Greeks and the Romans were embarrassed that this was even a part of their society. The scholars who study the writings of the Greco-Roman literature at that time, they point out the fact it's rarely ever mentioned. It's like the French never talking about the guillotine. This is in us. They would rewrite their own history. They didn't want it to be part of what they did as a society. Crucifixion was regarded as the worst form of death. It was worse than dying in an arena where animals, beasts were released from trap doors. They weren't fed for days and released to tear Christians limb from limb. Dying in an arena eaten by animals was considered more noble and honorable than being crucified. Being crucified was worse than even being burned to death. Crucifixion was that brutal, and any person that was crucified left a legacy as being the worst kind of criminal scum. That's why the early churches was ridiculed, mocked for worshiping. And they said, "An evil man. Your God is a criminal. Your God was crucified. How can you believe this?" Archeologists excavated the quarters of the Imperial pages in the Palatine Hill in Rome. It dates back to the third century, so the 200s. In it, they found this carving on a wall, and it's a picture of a little boy who's got his hand raised as if he's worshiping someone on a cross. It was a body on a cross. And instead of a head, they put a head of a donkey. And underneath it said, "Alexamenos worships his God." Little boys were mocking a Christian little boy who worshiped Jesus Christ dying on the cross. It was blasphemous for them to believe this is true. And you can Google it, Alexamenos worships his God, to see the depiction. Not many people worship someone who's been executed with an electric chair. No one puts little electric chairs around their necklace or a needle for lethal injection. No one hangs a noose around their neck as a little symbol of something great. No one does it with a guillotine. Yet we do as Christians. We wear little crosses to remind ourselves that our savior died on a cross, experienced excruciating pain. We had to come up with a word to describe just how bad crucifixion was. We worship a Savior who died the death of the most heinous, monstrous criminal. And on top of all of this, for the Greeks and the Romans to tell them, "It wasn't some political statesman like Cesar who died for your sins. And it wasn't some philosopher like Socrates who died for your sins. It was just some obscure carpenter, amateur rabbi." And here come the Christians proclaiming what? Proclaiming the secret to human life is found in some rabble-rousing rabbi from a distant Judea, telling people that the meaning of life is found in the life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension of Jesus Christ. And as we do so, that was crazy then, it's just as crazy now. It's always been crazy to get up and to tell someone, "Hey, unless you believe in Jesus Christ that He died on the cross for your sins, you're going to spend eternity in hell, apart from God." that's always nuts. It's always crazy to say that. But that's what the early church did in the beginning. And that's what we continue to do. And by the way, here's the other challenge of doing that. The moment you say that, that very moment, what else are you saying? What else am I saying when I say Jesus Christ is the only way to go? What am I saying? I'm saying there's no other way. I'm saying there's no other way. So what I'm saying is every other way is wrong, every other way is a lie. Jesus Christ is the only way. Right, that doesn't feel good. That sounds so intolerant. If there was another way, then Jesus Christ would not have had to die on a cross. It was the only way. That's what it took. There's no other way. So yes, I'm standing up here, and I am saying that everything else is wrong. Islam is wrong. Buddhism is wrong. Atheism is wrong. Secular is wrong. It's all wrong. And you saying Jesus Christ is one of them, that's wrong too. When our world hears that, they say, "That's folly. That's folly." But for us, we love this message. Yes, it's naturally repugnant. Yes, it's naturally faintly ridiculous. But it's also wonderful to us. What makes us think it's so wonderful? How could anyone think this is wonderful? How could anyone give their life to this message? Give their life for this message? Give their time, talent, treasure to invest resources in the propagation of this message? It's so improbable, so unsophisticated. It's so offensive to our culture or taste. It's foolish. But it's got power. And that's why we do what we do. This is the only thing that can really save us. And this is the second point, that the cross is power. 1 Corinthians 1:22-25, "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." So the Jews would say, "Hey, we want more evidence. We want more signs. We want signs like Moses. Moses did the signs as he led the people of God out of Egypt, out of captivity. We're looking for the same political Messiah, and we want signs to go along with it. For the Greeks, they want sophia or wisdom. Their civilization astounded the world with its progress. Their advances caused many to abandon belief in traditional God. We want something that polished. The Jews said, "We want something religious." These guys said, "We want something really, really polished." St. Paul comes in and he says, "The greatest sign that God could give is that God the Son, Son of God, Son of man died on the cross for our sins, and He came back from the dead." For the Jews, a crucified Messiah was an oxymoron, like a married bachelor. For the Greek, it wasn't so much more irreverent, it was just ridiculous. But St. Paul says, "There's another piece, there's another element. It's not just this message. It's not just information. This information, when God the Holy Spirit takes it and applies it to your heart, when the God of grace gives a man, a woman by the Spirit of God a brand new heart, summons that heart to Himself, what was first thought as foolish is recognized as the deepest wisdom. Initially thought as weak and silly, it's nothing less than the actual power of God. This is where the power is. The power source is the proclamation that Jesus Christ died for your sins. Karl Barth in the 20th century was probably one of the most influential theologians. At the end of his life, he was giving a lecture in the '70s in Princeton, theological lecture. At the end, he was doing a Q&A, and one person asked him, "Hey, Dr. Barth, you have read tens of thousands of theological tomes. You've written hundreds of theological tomes. If you could synthesize the greatest, the greatest truth that you discovered, the greatest nugget of gold to share with us from your vast experience, what would it be? And he said, "That's easy. Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so." That's it. That's our message. Jesus loves us so much that He was willing to die on the cross for our sins. And when you realize, when it goes from, oh, Jesus did that thing to He died for my sins, my particular sin, when God reveals the darkness of your sin to you, the cross becomes life and life when you realize that nothing short of the death of the Son of God would be adequate to atone for our sins. And this is what we do every single week that I stand up here and I just remind you how evil you are, that you don't understand yourself, you don't understand the world, you don't understand anything. You don't understand parenting. You don't understand that they are born as little evil, cute little baby. They're evil. You're evil. You don't understand marriage unless you understand it's two evil people getting married. You don't understand the economy unless you understand it's evil people. Politics, it's all evil people. It's all evil. You don't understand any of them unless you understand that we're all evil. And it took Jesus Christ dying on the cross for our sin. Every single person, there's two realities to you, to every single person. The first one is who you are on paper. The first one is whom you project yourself to be to the world. It's what you have achieved. It's what you look like. It's your LinkedIn, it's your social media. That's one part of you. And then there's the real part of you, the daily life part of you, the no one's in your car when you're on Storrow Drive part of you. My wife tells me, "Don't forget that our back windows are tinted, but the front ones are not. So when you drive, Pastor Jan, you just need to remember that people are going to see you." I'm like, "I know, I want them to see me. I want them to hear my horn when I'm discipling them to be a better driver. I want to do that." So there's two parts of it. There's the you part when you interview for a job and they're asking you, "Hey, what's your greatest weakness." "Is I work too hard. I work too hard. I care too much. I can't stop working. That's me. That's my greatest weakness. I'm going to put in 100 hours a week on this job. Tremendous." And the real part of you is one month into your job. That's The real part of you when you work 10, maybe 15 hours a week. Maybe. So your company knows that you're online, you get the little Mouse Jiggler so when you stop working it just says, "You're online. You're online." That's the real part of you. The real part of you is... Your roommates, ask them the real part of you. Your spouse. Yeah, I know the real part. That's every single one of us. And deep inside we know that for all of our moral goodness showboating, for all of our virtue signaling on our bumper stickers and our yard signs, deep inside, when no one's looking, there is so much evil right in there. We just don't have the power, most of us, to sin in the way that we really would want to sin. If you were a trillionaire, and you can do whatever you want, would you live a holy life for God? There's sin in our hearts, every single one of us. We're all moral failures, inveterate sinners, no more able to rid ourselves of our pride, selfish impurity, sexual sin, hypocrisy, dishonesty, envy and different-stored God. And that's really what it boils down to. God created you. He has power over you. And if you are indifferent toward Him as if God doesn't exist, you are living your life as a huge middle finger to God. I don't care. That's the greatest level of sin that there is. You created me. You have total claim over me. You have a moral code for me that I don't even know what it is. And then we also have standards for ourselves that we break. We have standards for other people that we ourselves break. And as soon as we realize the true weight of our sin, that we sin against the holy God, we deserved what Jesus Christ went through. He went through hell. We deserved that, but He was willing to take it. We see the holiness of God, the justice of God, and the love of God all coinciding at the cross. When you hear, and when you understand that this terrible death, it was horrifying, and it was horrifying for Jesus. It was terrible because it had to be terrible. Only such suffering, such a sinless victim that God, man, He alone could pay the terrible debt that we owe God. And when you realize that Jesus did that for me, He died on the cross for my sin and my sins, that Jesus Christ is the only one that stands between me and the judgment of God that I deserve, when you see that, now the terrible cross becomes the most precious message that you've ever heard. It's wonderful. It's powerful. Scripture says, "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who is hung upon a tree.' Jesus Christ was cursed. Deserved blessing, was cursed because we deserved that curse. He was doing it for us so that He could extend blessing to us. We're like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. For the son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. Why did Jesus do this? Because He loves us. He loves us. That's the only reason why He did it. 1 John, 3:16, "By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers." He died for us when we were His enemies, when we were His sinners. He did that because He loves us, so that He can forgive us. Jesus Christ loves you. We are not to take that for granted. Jesus Christ the God of the universe whom we've rebelled against, turned our back on Him, He loves us. 1 John 4:9-10, "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. And this is love not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." On the one hand, God loves you, but that doesn't make sense unless you understand that God hates you. It's true. A lot of us, we've just taken the message of Christianity, "Jesus loves you," put that as a bumper sticker. Your buddy, Jesus? Yeah, yeah, you're cool. Look up the word propitiation. It means He absorbed the wrath of God. Meaning God has a wrath against you. God hates you. In your sin, apart from Christ, God hates you. When people say things like, "Every single one of us, we're a child of God." No, we're not. We're creatures of God. But if you reject Jesus Christ, you're not a child of God. You're still in your sins. So for love of God to make sense, you need to understand what it took for God to not hate you anymore. And it took Him pouring out His hatred, His wrath,... on Christ for your sins. We receive the love of God when we believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. Here's what the early Christian father, Tertullian, described this. This is how he described the place of the cross, the heart of the early Christians. He says, "Every forward step and movement, every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, and all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead sign of a cross just as a reminder that the cross is the center of everything we do. The cross is power. And also, the cross is wisdom." St. Paul uses this word 17 times in the 1 Corinthians, wisdom. In the first three chapters, 16 times. In all of his other letters, he uses the word wisdom only 11 times. So this is crucial to him. It's the Greek word, sophia. I remember I loved that word so much in seminary. I named my first daughter after wisdom, Sophia, Lord give us wisdom. If anyone lacks wisdom, God gives us sophia. So anytime I say Sophia, just a reminder that I need more wisdom from God. I went on a roll in seminary, and then we had our second kid. I was still in seminary, cage stage, where everything's about seminary. And then I had my second kid, my second daughter. I liked the ESV's Bible version so much I named my second daughter ESV, Elizabeth Seraphin Vezikov. I was going to keep doing that with all my other kids. My wife was like, "That's enough. That's enough. We're not going to play that game." But he talks about wisdom here as this is how you understand the world, that you do not truly understand reality unless you understand that Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins. And that's why he does this analysis of it doesn't matter how wise you are in the world. It doesn't matter if you have a PhD from Harvard. It doesn't matter if you're a president of Harvard. Doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter you're noble birth. None of that matters when it comes to knowing the greatest truth at the center of the universe is that Jesus Christ is Lord, Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior. If you don't know that, if you don't believe the greatest truth at the heart of the universe, you're wrong. If you don't know that this is true, you're wrong about the most important fact. Therefore, no matter how wise you are from an earthly perspective, you're a fool. If you don't believe that Jesus is Lord, if you don't submit to Him, you're going to die. You're going to stand before Him, and all of your eternity you're going to be saying, "I was a fool. I was wrong about the greatest truth." That's why he talks about wisdom. And that's why in 1 Corinthians 1:25-2:5, he goes on and he's like, "Consider your calling, bros. Not many of you were wise, not many by worldly standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." And what he says, "What makes the difference, what made you a Christian, it's not your education. It's not your bank account. What made you a Christian, what made you a Christian is that God chose to save you so that no one boasts. And that's why he goes on, "God chose... " That's verse 28. He starts at 27, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not to bring to nothing things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, and sanctification, redemption. So that as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.'" So if you are a Christian and I ask you, "Why are you a Christian? Why are you a Christian?" and if you say anything along the lines that begins with I, if you say anything where it's like, "I believed. I studied. I read. I chose Jesus," then I don't know if you're a Christian. Because it wasn't you at all. The answer is, "Jesus saved me. Jesus chose to save me." Christians need a robust understanding of election and predestination. But what makes the difference between an unbeliever and a believer? What makes the difference between someone who's dead in their sins and someone who is alive to God? What makes the difference? What role did you play to decide that you are going to be born? Nothing. No one asked you. No one gave you a vote. You weren't interviewed. Nothing. Same goes with becoming a Christian. You become a Christian, the only reason you're a Christian: God saved you. The only reason I'm a Christian. God saved me. And I can't believe God saved me. If you know me, I have a hard time following Jesus as it is. But if I wasn't a Christian, if I know the Holy Spirit, I would be one bad guy. I'd be a terrible dude. I'd be a gangster or a legal gangster. That's working for the IRS and stealing money from people legally because taxation is theft. I'd do one or the other. But God saved me. That's it. This is what he's saying, he's like, "You heard the message that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins. Jesus was crucified for you. You Heard it, but what makes the difference between one person hearing another person hearing is God chose you. God by the power of the Holy Spirit saved you. You need to understand, you played zero role in that. If you're like, "Well, how do I know if I'm elect?" Choose yourself. That's how I say. Choose Jesus, and then you're elect. But you only chose Jesus because Jesus chose you. That's how it works. So that there's 0% of your work in being saved because Jesus saves. You know who we are? We're the degenerate, reprobate sinners. We should have been left in our sins. I got one Bible verse, one very special Bible verse the Lord laid on my heart today. At the next Mosaic members meeting, this is the next... 2020, my t-shirt idea was, "2020, skubula happened." If you don't know what skubula is, look it up. My idea for 2021 is from 1 Corinthians 4:11-13. Let me read the text. "To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless. We labor working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted; we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become and are still like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things." I want a t-shirt that says, "Mosaic Boston, scum of the earth." That's what I want. Or if we ever rebranded the church, I want to be http://scumoftheearthchurch.com. That's what I want. This is tremendous. What's your message to the world? You're all scum. We're the worst scum of the earth. Jesus Christ died for us. The Son of God died for us? What? To make us children of God. I can't believe it. And by the way, this message is what transformed the world. St. Paul was writing to Christians who lived under tyranny. Not only was it illegal to be a Christian, but they were persecuted for their faith, made a show in arenas where tens and hundreds of thousands would gather to watch Christians getting eaten by lions and crucified upside down, et cetera, et cetera. And by the way, if you're not a Christian, you have to answer the question of how did Christianity, despite the odds, how did it grow from one Jewish guy, kind of a rabbi, kind of a carpenter? He had 11 guys and then St. Paul gets saved. And then with them in 100 years is 25,000 Christians in the Roman Empire. And then when that generation of eyewitnesses died, it became even more powerful so that by the time Constantine comes to power in 310, we go from 25,000 Christians in the year 100 to 20 million Christians by 310 A.D. In 200 years, it grew by 40% per decade, the greatest movement in the history of the world. How did that happen? It happened with people proclaiming the message: Christ crucified. Just to give you a perspective, it was illegal to be a Christian. They didn't have church buildings. They didn't have any institutional resources. So how in the world did that happen? They proclaimed the one message that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we are to submit to Him. We haven't submitted to Him. We deserve damnation, but Jesus Christ is also savior. And then once you're saved, you've got to bring everything, every part of your life in submission to Jesus Christ. And startled the message, Jesus is Lord. And they got that from Deuteronomy 6:14 where it says, "Hear all Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord you got with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." The Lord is one. Yahweh is Lord. Jesus shows up and says, "I'm Yahweh. I am Lord. I'm king over everything." God is one, and the task of our lives is to bring every aspect of our lives under the reign of Jesus Christ, every aspect of our life, from our finances to our work, to our domestic life, to sexuality. Everything we bring under the reign of Jesus Christ. And the reason why we focus on Jesus in particular is because that's how the New Testament explains how we are to do ministry. God the Father puts Jesus in a position of preeminence, and the Holy Spirit blesses the church when the church focuses on Jesus Christ. Why? Because of the role he played in redemption, but also the role that God the Father gives Jesus as sitting at the right hand of God the Father. Psalm 110:1 says, "The Lord says to my Lord," so God the Father speaks to God the Son, "'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.'" And Paul even suggested the actual function of the Lordship was given by the Father to the Son, it's passed to Jesus. Ephesians 1:20-23, "He," God the Father, "raised Him," Jesus, "from the dead and seated Him at the right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named not only in His age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under His feet and gave Him as a head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all." So Jesus is in the position of preeminence, and that's why we focus on Jesus. That's why we talk about Jesus all the time. If you ever move away, and you're looking for a church, this is the secret sauce of finding if it's a good biblical church. When the pastor gets up there and preaches a sermon, he's got to say the name of Jesus at least 50 times. That's just from my professional experience. It's got to be at least 50 times. You just talk about Jesus. If you don't talk about Jesus, huge red flag, huge red flag. And if you change the name of Jesus, if it's like Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints, no, don't change the name, it's just Jesus Christ. You talk about Jesus Christ because the Bible tells us to talk about Jesus Christ. And when we talk about Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit takes that message. It is power, and it is wisdom. Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Him. Our identity, our destiny as a church must be inextricably linked to Jesus Christ. He's the only way into a relationship with God. A lot of churches talk about God in general, some nebulous idea, so that you can think God is whomever you want, that God demands whatever you think he demands. But when we say Jesus Christ, this is a historical figure who lived in a particular time, particular place, human body. He really lived. He really taught. He really died. Historical fact. We're not talking about spiritually or this is metaphor for something. He literally died for our sin, and He literally rose from the dead. So when we talk about Jesus, we're talking about what's at the heart of scripture. Jesus Christ is the door. He's the connection to God the Father. George Adam Smith, 19th-century biblical scholar, but wanted to see the holy land. He meets a shepherd in the holy land, and the shepherd was very hospitable. They spent the day together. And at the end of the day, the shepherd said, "Hey, do you want to see the fold where I keep the sheep?" And he goes into an enclosure with four walls, and there's an opening in one of the walls. The sheep all came in, and the shepherds said, "This is where they go at night." And then George Adam Smith asked, "Hey, where's the door? Where's the gate." And the shepherd says this: "When the light has gone and all the sheep are inside, I lie at that open space and no sheep ever goes out but across my body, and no wolf comes in unless he crosses my body. I am the door." Jesus Christ is the only way into a relationship with God, and He's the door because He laid down His life for His own sheep. Apart from Jesus Christ, we are nothing. Apart from Jesus Christ, we have no message as a church. Apart from Jesus Christ, we have no mission as a church. We take all of our talking points from Jesus Christ. I pray that we never become like the Church of Laodicea, which a lot of the churches in Boston, historically, they became the church in Laodicea. Church of Laodicea, Jesus Christ is standing outside the door knocking. A lot of people use that verse in Revelation 3 to say, "Oh, Jesus is standing at the door of your heart, and He's knocking." No, Jesus doesn't stand at doors, and He doesn't knock. He breaks the door down and regenerates people. That's how Jesus saves people. But he's talking about Jesus not in terms of one particular soul. He's talking about Jesus Christ is standing outside of a church. It's the Church of Laodicea. How did Jesus get outside the church? They forgot to let Him in. Jesus is standing outside the door knocking. They forgot to let Jesus in. So the question we're going to ask is, for myself, is Jesus Christ the Lord of my life? For my family, is Jesus Christ the Lord of my family? Is Jesus Christ the Lord of my community group? Do you talk about Jesus in your community group? Is Jesus Christ at the center of my conversations with other Christians, or do we talk about the Red Sox finally going to turn things around, or the Pyths, they really got a squad this year? Or are we're going to talk about politics? What really brings things into perspective is when someone dies, someone close to you dies. I had a family member that passed away this week. And we had a gathering with my family yesterday, completely different. Just the reminder of how close we are to death. You know what we talked about? We talked about Jesus. We hugged each other. We cried. We told each other how much we love each other. We focused on what matters. Every single one of us needs to live every day like that, that this day could be my last. Because there will come a day that will be I last, and we have no idea when that day comes. Imagine if we lived like that, that every time you saw an unbelieving friend, you want to tell them about Jesus. This is the only hope you have. This is the only way to God. This is the only way for your sins to be forgiven. And with Christians, why aren't we talking about Christ all the time? It could be our last day. The greatest example I see this is in Elijah. I'll do this, and I'll close with a quote from John Stott. Elijah in 2 Kings, the day before he gets taken up to heaven, it's his last day on earth, you know what he does? He wakes what's up, and he preaches the gospel in Bethel, preaches about God, preaches in Jericho, preaches in Jordan. What you realize is he's just living a normal life. It's just what he did every day. He just shared with people about God over and over and over. He followed the normal schedule. He so followed God as shepherd. Didn't have to do anything out of the ordinary on his last day alive, and he goes to heaven in glory. He's lived his day every day like it was his last. Imagine if we did. Imagine if we as a church had that kind of urgency. There's people around us who are dying, who are going to die and spend eternity either with God in heaven or apart from God in hell. It all depends on what they do with this message. I can't save them with the message, but I can proclaim the message and then let the Holy Spirit do what the Holy Spirit will do. Jesus Christ is our touchstone. He's our defining center. He's our founder. And therefore, he has preeminence in our life as a people, our life as a church. Oh, here's the last thing I wanted to say before John Stott. The gospel is something so simple that every child can understand it. And the gospel is the wisdom of God, that once you start to plumb the depth... It's like the message, "Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior or Christ crucified," and you read it and like, "Oh, tremendous." But then it's like you take the message and you pull it out. It's like an accordion. And you see it's like level after level after level after level. And then you see it's dimensions. You're not just talking about one dimension or secondary, you're talking about multiple dimensions of the gospel as it applies to every aspect of your life. That's why we focus on the gospel. Okay, John Stott, end of his life. If you want more theology on the cross, the greatest work written on this and the most accessible is written by John Stott. It's called The Cross of Christ. It's probably one of the greatest books of the 20th century. It's a modern classic. In the preface to the masterpiece, this is what he writes: "I try to show that the cross transforms everything. It gives us a new worshiping relationship to God, a new and balanced understanding of ourselves, a new incentive to give ourselves a mission, a new love of our enemies, and a new courage to face the perplexities of suffering. In daring to write a book about the cross, there is, of course, a great danger of presumption. This is partly because what actually happened when God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ is a mystery whose depths we will spend eternity plumbing. And partly because it would be most unseemly to feign a cool detachment. For willy-nilly, we are involved. Our sins put Him there. "So, far from offering us flattery, the cross undermines our self-righteousness. We can stand before only with a bowed head and a broken spirit. And there we remain until the Lord Jesus speaks to our hearts His word of pardon and acceptance, and we, gripped by His love and brimful of thanksgiving, go out into the world to live our lives in His service." Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you that you are the head of the church. Jesus, we thank you that you died on the cross for our sins. Jesus, we thank you for this message, and we thank you for the power that you bring by the power of the Spirit when this message is proclaimed, when this message is understood and when this message is believed. I pray for every single one of us. Make us a people who love the message of the cross and love the way of the cross and live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And Lord, I pray that you continue to save many people in this city, in this region. And use us in the process as we proclaim your gospel and pray this in Christ's name. Amen.
Love the Church
August 8, 2021 • Ephesians 5:25–27
Audio Trascnript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. Good morning. Welcome to Mosaic Church. My name is Jan. I'm one of the pastors here, along with Pastor Shane and Pastor Andy. And if you're new or visiting, we'd love to connect with you. We do that through the connection card that you can get in the back at the Welcome Center. If you fill it out legibly, return it there, we'll get in touch with you over the course of the week. We also have a virtual one you can get in the App Store. Just search Mosaic Boston on Google Play or the App Store, and you can also get the card online on our website. With that said, would you please pray with me over the preaching of God's Word? Heavenly Father, we thank you that you, the eternal God, have taken us finite, temporal beings who rebelled against you. You could have let us go, leave us alone to wander from you, to rebel against you, and you could have allowed us to die in our sins. Instead you sent your on, Jesus Christ. You loved us so much that you gave your son Jesus Christ to live the perfect life, to proclaim the Gospel, to speak truth to us, because we needed it and because you love us, and love means not just giving people what they want, but giving people what they need above all else. Jesus, you did that, and then on top of everything, you went to the cross to atone for our sins. It was the only way that we could be reconciled with God the Father. And by the power of the Holy Spirit today, we can be reconciled with you and Jesus. Jesus, you save us, and you saved us so that we can covenant together as your people in local churches as an embassy of God, a nation within a nation, a kingdom within a kingdom, to proclaim the glories, the excellencies of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ. That's our job. I pray, Lord Jesus, show us how much you love the church. You love the church with an intimate, affectionate, a marital, a spousal love. Make us a people who love your church as much as you love the church. That makes the people who are part of the church want to see the church thrive, because the church is your body, and the church is your bride, and the church is your flock. It is your temple. The church is your army. And make us a people who don't just commit, don't just join, but make us a people who care for and are zealous for and pray for and serve the local church. And as we do, Lord, deepen our relationships with each other, and make us a people who don't forget there are many in this city, in this region who don't know you yet. Make the people care about them and go and pursue and preach the Gospel, and welcome them into the fold of God. Blessed art thou and the Holy Scriptures. Right now we pray this in Jesus's name. Amen. We're in a three week sermon series that we're calling Love Jesus Simple. Those are the core values of Mosaic Boston as a church. Those values shape everything we've done, everything we do, everything we pray to do, and they've shaped the past decade of this church, and we pray that these values shape the next decade and decades, Lord willing, to come. And what do we mean when we say love Jesus simple? We mean that love is the motive for everything that we do. Jesus is our message, and simplicity is our method. What does love mean? Well, love means the God-given gift of love, which is so much more than just sentiment. It's volitional. It's an act of choice. I choose to love you. And the same way that God points to us, takes unlovely people, unloving people, and He chooses to pour out His love on us, that's the same love that motivates everything we do. It's a love that speaks truth into people's lives. You speak the truth with love. When Jesus Christ came, He lived a perfect life. He fulfilled all of the law, and He summed up the essence of Christianity, the essence of the law, by saying this. That the essence of faith is love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. A holistic love for God. And love your neighbor as you love yourself. So, how did Jesus Christ... He perfectly did both of those. How did He do it? What did He devote Himself to? Did He go around singing praise songs and teaching people to sing praise songs, because hey, if you love God, you sing? Is that all He did? No. And in terms of loving people, did He just start soup kitchens and meet people's physical needs? That's not all He did. He did something so much more. In order to fulfill the commandments to love God and to love people, He devoted Himself to something. He loved something. He loved so much that He sacrificed for something. What was that? It's the church. Jesus Christ fulfilled the two greatest commandments, love God and love people, by loving the church, giving Himself for the church. Our text for today is Ephesians 5:25 through 27, just to frame up our time together. And if you're new to Mosaic, what we usually do when we preach God's word is we take Holy Scriptures, it could be a paragraph, and we go verse by verse through the text. Today I want to architect, or lay out the architecture of what the church is from the whole framework of Scripture. There's going to be multiple Scriptures, but this will be our landing point. Ephesians chapter five, verses 25 through 27. Would you look at the text with me? "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself up for her, that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, so that He might present the church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish." This is the reading of God's holy and infallible, authoritative Word. May He write these internal truths upon our hearts. What an interesting text to start with. My wife loves this text. She's like, "Baby, you better get that memorized." She said no tattoos, unless I get Ephesians 5:25. A tremendous tattoo, in the Greek. Just to remind myself, husbands, love your wives. Incredible pattern. But the pattern is given to us because it's based on a reality. What is that reality? The reality is that Jesus Christ loves something above everything else. That He loves this church as a way... He loves the church as a way to love God and to love people. This is what Jesus Christ devoted Himself to. I remember being, I was 22 years old, out at college, working a consulting job in outside D.C., Fairfax, Virginia, and I would drive every day from 8:00 to 8:29. I was driving my '99 Toyota Solara to work every day. And grace to you, John MacArthur would go on, and it was the first time I ever listened to expository preaching, verse by verse. Fell in love with it. And then I remember listening to John MacArthur sharing his testimony about how God called him to be a pastor, and he asked this question. He said, "Hey, what should I do with my life? What should I devote my life to?" And he said, "I love Jesus Christ and I love the Scriptures, and in Jesus Christ and in the Scriptures, I see that Jesus devoted Himself to something, and He devoted Himself to the church above all else. Everything He did, everything He taught, everyone He served, it was all for the church." So why would we not devote ourselves to a greater degree to a church? And I pray that this sermon, this sermon series in particular, will deepen our love and zeal for the church of Jesus Christ. Three points to frame up our time. The church is gathered. Second, the church is family. And third, the church is temple, body, bride, flock, army, all different metaphors to define this reality of what the church is. And I start with the church is gathered, because gathering in all of the metaphors and all of these instances is essential. Gathering isn't merely a nice thing that Christians do. Gathering is central to what the church is. Gathering is who we are. Apart from the gathering, if the church does meet, there is no church at all. The Greek word for church is ekklisia, which just means assembly. And a lot of people, when they want to talk about the church, they want to primarily go to talk about the universal church. Let's not talk about local church. Let's talk about universal church. So that's where we'll start. Tremendous. And then we'll talk about the local church. But the universal church is the universal gathering of every Christian in Heaven. Every Christian that has lived, every Christian that currently lives, and every Christian that will, in a sense. Because in Heaven, it's above time. It's a timeless place. So in Heaven, Hebrews 12:23, it says, "The assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in Heaven." So in a sense, every single Christian who is alive today, physically, you're here. Spiritually, you are already assembled in the universal supernatural church in Heaven. Yes, it is a future reality, but it's also a present reality. Seeing Paul writing to all of the Epistles of the cities, but Colossae, for example. He writes to them in chapter one, verse two. He said, "All of you who are in Christ, you're in Heaven already. You're in Christ, because Jesus is seated at the right hand of God. You're in Christ, but you're at Colossae." So in Heaven you're assembled, but also here on Earth you're assembled. So even from Saint Paul's perspective that if you are part of the universal church, obviously, obviously you're part of the local church, because faithful local churches are earthly displays of the Heavenly church. Here's how I want to frame up church membership. A lot of people ask me, because a lot of people, a lot of Christians really have no ecclesiology, and perhaps that's some of you. Perhaps you grew up in a church with... There are churches that never talked about a church, never talked about the importance of church. It's like being on a road trip, and you know where you're going, but you never talk about the car itself that you're in. You're just focused on the journey. Yeah, it's important, but you've also got to care for the car, and you've got to gas up the car, and you've got to change the oil, et cetera, et cetera. So, we have to speak about the church. The church is crucial. And a lot of people are like, "Give me a Bible verse. I just want a Bible verse for the church." I'm going to give you a lot of Bible verses today, a lot. So, you're going to be kind of blown away by how much Scripture's going to come at you real quick. But I'm doing this for a few reasons, because I love Jesus, and I love the Holy Scriptures, and I love the church. I love the church, and I love this church, and I pray that you dear Christians fall in love with the church as much as Jesus Christ loves the church, and become a member of the local church. So Matthew 18:20, "For where there are two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." All right. Jesus is talking about Christians gathering together, and Jesus is present through the Word. Well, a lot of people take this text out of context, and they use it as an excuse, justification for them not having to be part of a local church. Which is very ironic, because actually, the whole pericope, the whole text, has to do with the importance of the local church, because he's talking about church discipline. But before I get... I remember I was at a prayer meeting. I joined a church in Moscow when I was doing a study abroad. I loved the church, and they had a prayer meeting. I was like, "Awesome." And I met a guy there who it was his first time, and when it was my first time, he was training for the Olympics in wrestling, and so we were like, "Yeah, let's hold each other accountable, and we'll go to even prayer gatherings." And we gathered. It was me, him, and there was two older ladies every single time. The two older ladies, they'd say the same thing every time. What they would say is, "Where two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus, Jesus is there with us." And I was like, "Oh, that sounds good." But on the one hand, you're pulling a text out of context, because that text is talking about church discipline in Matthew 18. On the other hand, Jesus said, "I am with you always, until the end of the age." So, Jesus is with every single individual Christian, yeah, so it's not like I need another Christian to say, "Okay, you've got a little Jesus. I've got a little Jesus. With your powers combined, now Jesus erupts." That's not what's going on in here at all. So, you can't use this text to justify you chilling around your fire pit with your boys, smoking a cigar and drinking beers and talking a little about Jesus, saying, "That's my church." That's not your church. A church has qualities, qualifications, clear lines of delineation. And in that context... And we'll get into Matthew 18... it assumes that there's a body of believers. It assumes that we know who's in, who's out. It assumes that there's spiritual leadership. It assumes that the members meet together repeatedly in gatherings. It assumes ordinances and accountable membership. So, from the perspective of the Old Testament, gathering, the assembly of believers was also always crucial. God saves Israel, brings them out of captivity in Egypt. And the very first thing that He does is He gives Moses the law, and the people of God gather on Mount Sinai to receive God's law. They hear God's law spoken, and Moses calls this in Deuteronomy 10, 9:10. He calls it The Day of Assembly. And then God afterwards says, "Hey. Now I want you to build a tabernacle where the people of God gather on a regular basis for the festivals, for the sacrifice, to hear God's word expounded, explained, for the people of God to worship and praise God." And then Israel would gather in synagogues. They would gather at the temple when it was built, and at critical junctures in the history of Israel. King Solomon, when he dedicated the temple in Second Chronicles, he called it "all of the assembly of Israel." Then Jesus Christ, He goes to the cross, He dies, He's buried, and then for 40 days He's teaching His disciples. And then He finally ascends to Heaven, and He said, "Don't leave Jerusalem. Don't do anything until I send the helper, the Holy Spirit." On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends upon the people of God, thus forming the first church. And as the church was formed, they knew who was in and who was out. In Acts five, the persecution of that church, and it said, "For fear of the persecution, others would not join the church." Assumption that there's joining. So when people are like, "Give me one Bible verse about church membership," I'm like, "Hold on. I'm going to give you the whole New Testament." Because the New Testament doesn't make sense apart from churches. Christianity doesn't make sense apart from membership in local churches. That's what Jesus was doing in the Gospels, is training up the leaders of the church. And in the Book of Acts, what we see is the Holy Spirit descends upon the early church, and what we see is the church grows. They go from Jerusalem to Judea to Sumeria to the ends of the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire. Saint Paul even wants to plant churches in Spain. What are they doing? Planting churches in city centers, so from there they could influence all of the Roman Empire. So when people are like, "Hey, give me a Bible verse for church membership," I'm like, "That's like saying, 'Give me a Bible verse to prove that God created everything.'" Yeah, there's one. In the beginning, God created all the Heavens and Earth. Boom. God created everything. But then the proof of it is... Look around. That's how God treats it. And then in Scripture, it's just assumed. It's assumed God created everything. It would be ludicrous to believe anything else. That's how Scripture approaches church membership as well. Obviously this is part and parcel of the faith. Who starts churches? This is crucial before we start defining the church. God does. Saint Paul says, "I planted, Apollos watered." But God gave the growth. God's the one that's planting churches. So in Acts 20, verse 28, Saint Paul says, "Pay careful attention to yourselves, and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God, which He obtained with His own blood." He's talking about the elders in Ephesus who are leading a particular group of members in a church. This is Jesus's blood bought church, and He has ordained you. He has chosen you as overseers by the Holy Spirit. That's where it starts, the calling from God. Jesus starts churches. Jesus also ends churches. In the Book of Revelation, he writes seven letters to seven churches, and to the church in Ephesus he says, in Revelation 2:5, "The words of Jesus Christ. 'Remember, therefore, from where you have fallen. Repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lamp stand from its place, unless you repent.'" Because the church had stopped proclaiming the Word of God, stopped obeying the Word of God, and Jesus says, "I call you to repentance." Because He loves them, so He gives them a hard Word. That's what love means. Giving them what they need most, not what they want most. Calls them to repentance. Or else, He says, "I'm going to snuff out the light, the life of your church." So there's a lot of churches. There's a lot of church buildings, even in our own city, that are dead. God snuffed out the lamp stand a long time ago, because they wouldn't repent. Every reference to the word church, almost every reference in the New Testament is about the local church, a group of Christians who covenant together, make a clear... There's a clear relationship. You hold me accountable, I hold you accountable to gather regularly for worship of God and ministry of the Gospel, to proclaim the Gospel to one another and to unbelievers, underqualified church leadership. So, that's why Titus has given to us in First Timothy, "For worship the preaching of God's word, the ordinances of baptism and communion." And yes, there is a universal church, but we're physical beings. We're physical creatures. Right now we're in a time and we're in a place and in a space. So in the same way that our spirit is in the universal church of God there, our bodies need to be in a local church here, and we gather as an assembly, just like the early church did on the day of Pentecost. After they get saved, what do they devote themselves to? That's a tremendous pattern. We should devote ourselves to something similar. Acts 2:42, 47. "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together, and had all things in common, and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need, and day by day attending to the temple together and breaking bread in their homes. They received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people." And the Lord added to their number, which is clear. This is how many we have. "Day by day, those who were being saved, they devoted themselves to the preaching of the Word, the understanding of the Scriptures." That's the apostles teaching. "They devoted themselves to fellowship." We get to know each other. We know who the other members are, and they did that by fellowshipping in homes, and that's why we have communities. We meet for worship on Sundays, for the Holy Scriptures, to worship God as a corporate body, and then during the week, we meet to have fellowship with one another, breaking of breads, communion. They prayed for one another, and they voluntarily met one another's needs. I remember in college bible study, a guy was like, "Yup, this is why. This proves that Jesus was a socialist, and the early church was just... They were all socialists. They just sold everything, and they gave everything voluntarily." Voluntarily. That's the difference between socialism and Christianity. Socialism wants to demand, force everyone into generosity. You can't do that. That doesn't usually end well. You need gulags for that. Jesus does that by changing people's hearts. Now we're generous. So, what we see is that Christianity is inextricably linked to the local church. The local church is the New Testament's expression of Christianity. And we see what happened in Acts, and it continues as the church grew. We see it in the Book of Acts, and then we see the Epistles of Saint Paul. If you don't understand the importance of church membership, clear, defined, who's in, who's out, you're not going to understand the Epistles. Every single one of the Epistles is either written to a church, or is written about churches. That's how important it is. And that's the Epistles. And then from the Epistles, we get the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation begins with seven letters from Jesus Christ to seven churches, and the Book of Revelation ends with Jesus Christ coming back dramatically for His bride, who is the church. And just to give you a few other verses, First Corinthians 11:18. Just assume that a church gathers together. "For in the first place when you come together as a church, when you assemble as an assembly." And the original First Corinthians 4:23, "If therefore the whole church comes together." So, the assembly of the covenant members who said this. "We are a church body." They're coming together, gathering together. So the gathering is a distinct event, and then Paul provides specific instructions on what believers should do in church as the church gathers. First Corinthians 14:19, "Nevertheless, in church, I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than 10,000 words in a tongue." First Corinthians 14:28, "But if therefore, if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church, and speak himself to God." And the New Testament instructs Christians as they gather to do things that can only be done when you meet together. Teaching, admonishing one another, singing, psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, and reading Scripture publicly. First Timothy, 4:13, "Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture to exhortation to teaching." And when we gather together, we remember our hope that is in Christ, that Jesus is our high priest. He is our temple. And because our hope is in Christ, that's why we gather. A lot of people have this backwards. A lot of people say, "I have a relationship with Christ. He's forgiven all of my sins, and now I could just feed myself off of podcasts, or go to conferences and read Christian books. I can have a great time, and listen to my own preferred style of worship, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." But in Hebrews 10:19 through 25, the writer of Hebrews, he grounds the commandment to not forsake gathering in the hope we have in Christ. So, because we have this hope, because He's our high priest, because we can go to Him, let us go to Him by gathering together. This is Hebrews 10:19 through 25. "Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He opened for us through the curtain that is through His flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the House of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up in one another love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near." So we're not to forsake the gathering because of the hope we have in Christ. And even when the author of Hebrews wrote this, there were clearly people there, as is the habit of some... And I always feel, whenever I talk about church membership or the importance of attending a church, I always feel like the teacher that gets up and starts berating all the students who are there, berating them because of so many students who are absent. And I get it. You're here. But that issue, that's always been an issue. There's always been Christians who just hear what they want to hear. "Oh, Jesus forgives my sins. Oh, Jesus is my personal savior. Now I can just follow Jesus on my own," without understanding that no, you need to be part of a church. You need the church. The church needs you. And then also, Jesus envisions the church as a whole when it speaks to the unrepentant sinner. This is in the context of church discipline in Matthew 18. One of the reasons I've been... So, I grew up in a Russian church that my dad was a minister at. Became a member at 16. Moved to college, outside after college. Moved to D.C. Joined a church there where my uncle was a pastor. It was kind of like family, so church goes together. But I remember the first time I joined a church on my own volition, outside of family. I had to make a decision to join this church. It was FBC Durham, where Pastor Andy Davis was, is still the pastor. Where, like you had to decide. This church, what do they believe? How do they do ministry? And it's a volitional decision. My wife and I, we said, "Look. We want to join this church," even though I was in seminary, and it was just for a short period of time. But I knew we needed it. I knew we needed to go to another body of believers and say, "Please hold us accountable. I do not trust myself, because I know the flesh wants an excuse to walk away from God, walk away from faithfulness. My wife and I and our family, we need this. My soul needs this. I need you to hold me accountable, and I will return the favor." And that's how Jesus views church. Actually, one of the only times He uses the Word ekklisia in the Gospels, He does in the context of church discipline, which is going to a Christian who's living an unrepentant sin and speaking truth into that person's life. As awkward as it is, as hard as it is, this is the most loving thing to do when a person is walking away from the faith, because it wakes them up from the spiritual stupor of sin. So, this is Matthew 18, 15 through 20. "If your brother sins against your brother," you know who your brother and your sister is, because you have defined relationships with spiritual family. "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church." So, it's clear who the church is, clear who's in and who's out. Tell it to the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and tax collector, meaning the person is no longer in the church. The person's in the category of an unbeliever. A believer, by definition, you're a Christian if you repent of your sin. As soon as you stop repenting of sin, you, by your lifestyle, are showing that you are not a Christian. So now you are like a Gentile or a tax collector, so now you're not a brother or sister that we hold each other accountable. Now you're an unbeliever that we are preaching the Gospel to. Verse 18, "Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven. Whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven. Again I say to you, if two or three of you agree on Earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in Heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them." So in that context, you see. When the gathering of two or three people who agree, "Yes, this is true. Yes, this is God's will," and yes, this person to testifies to be a Christian isn't living in line with the Gospel, is living in unrepentant sin, now that person is no longer a church, a part of the church. So it's clear who's in, who's out. Saint Paul, in First Corinthians chapter five there's a sordid account of a gentleman who was sleeping with his mother in law, and they were just celebrating. They're tolerating this sin as a church, because they're so loving. And Saint Paul says, "That's not loving. That's actually the most hateful thing you can do when someone's living in sin and you're celebrating that sin. The most loving thing you can do is to say to that person, 'You're on track to end up in hell for eternity, unless you repent of your sin.'" So then Saint Paul says this. First Corinthians, 5:4, "When you are assembled, when the church ekklisia is assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, and my spirit is present with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord." On just the first reading, you know, that's not love. It's the most loving thing that can happen. If a person is walking away from the truth, from Christ, who is the only way of salvation, there's no coming to God the father except through Him. This person is walking away, pursuing sin. And if we as a church say, "Oh, that's fine. That's okay," we're doing the biggest disservice to that person, and we are ruining the testimony of the church and the community at large. So, Saint Paul then later in that chapter says, "Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? We are to judge brothers and sisters. Are you living in line with the truth of God?" And that's what we mean by love. A lot of you... And I've heard this several times... "I come to Mosaic, and I just feel insulted. You just tell me how much of a degenerate, reprobate, pagan, just ungodly person." That's what I do. That's what I do, because I love you. Because I love you. I don't want you to go to hell. Life is short. Eternity is long. Hell is hot. And there's only one way out, and that's through faith in Jesus Christ. That's why we do what we do. So a lot of people, when they think, "Oh, love. It's sentimental. It's gooey," if someone says they love you, but never tell you the truth, that person does not love you. They tolerate you. Indifferent is not love. Indifference is actually the greatest level of hate. Even if a person says, "I hate you," at least they care about you. Indifference is like, "I don't care what happens to you." That's not what we do. We want to tell you the truth, and this is why church membership is so important. In church membership, you say, "Please tell me the truth. Please hold me accountable." So church is gathering of the saints, and this is how we actually grow in sanctification to become the Christians we're called to be. You can't play a sport just virtually and say, "Okay. I did that sport." You can't play football. You can't play Madden Football in a video game and say, "I'm a football player." You're not a football player. You're not a football player. I don't care what football you're talking about. American football or soccer or whatever. I don't care. You've got to actually play. And yes, football players, during the week many of them don't even look like football players. But if you don't show up for game day, you are not on the team. And that's really what church membership is. Who is the team? With whom are we on the team together? So the gathering of the invisible church is made visible weekly in the gathering together, and then why? Because the church is also family. The church is family. In a family, individuals matter, as does the whole. And you need that balance. My wife and I, we have four daughters. I love my four daughters individually. Individually. They're very different. Each one of them has a... You need a very distinct approach to each one of them. Each one of them, I've learned that approach, I use that approach. We love them individually. And I even tell them, and I say, "Don't tell the others. You're my favorite. You're my favorite." I tell each of them that, and then they get together and they're like, "Dad said I'm his favorite," and the other's like, "Ah, he told me the same thing." Yeah. You are my favorite. Tremendously. But I also love them as a family, as a whole. And a lot of Christians, they just want this. It's like yes, Jesus loves you individually. If you were the only person to be alive, to have ever lived, Jesus would have still died for your sins on the cross. That's how much He loves you. Your name is graven on His hands. Your name is written in the Book of Life with the Blood of the Lamb. He loves you individually. But not at the expense of loving His family corporally. God is Father, and He adopts children into His family. When you become a Christian it's a process of adoption, and God loves his family corporally. So we reject the two extremes of spiritual individualism and institutional Christianity. Spiritual individualism says, "I have a private relationship." By a personal relationship with Jesus, what they mean is, "It's private. You can't ask me about my relationship. You can't ask me what I believe about Jesus. You can't hold me accountable for anything. Who are you to judge me? It's just me and Jesus." And we reject that, because that contradicts Scripture. We also reject institutional Christianity, as seen in the traditional Roman Catholic church and Roman Catholicism, where they say there's no salvation outside the church and necessitates sacraments for salvation. We reject that as well. We do believe in individual regeneration. When you become a Christian, you yourself, the expectation now is you join the corporate body of believers, and you make your spiritual individual experience a congregational reality. That's why Scripture talks about church as a household of God. That you're adopted, and now you're in the House of God. First Timothy, 3:14 and 15, "I hope to come to you soon," Paul tells Timothy, "... but I'm writing these things to you so that if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the Living God, a pillar and a buttress, the truth." Paul writing to Timothy, who is a pastor, an elder of the local church, and he said that church is a household of God. We're a family. A family of truth seekers, a family of truth defenders. And as the redeemed family of God, yeah, we are His special people with a special purpose. To do what? To model what God expects of us all. So, we as a church need to... The vision should be that we reflect to the world, to the community, what it means to be a redeemed people. That we are a city within a city, a people within a people, a nation within a nation, so when people look into the church, they say, "This is how God intends for people to live." This is how God intends for family to happen, for marriage to happen, for sex to happen, for raising children, for money, for job, everything." It's a categorically different humanity. Therefore church membership is important, because if there's a member of the church, a member of the family who is not representing God the Father, is not mirroring or growing in the likeness of God the Son, or isn't walking in the Holy Spirit, but is actually walking in the flesh, that's when we need to come along to this brother or sister and say, "Look. For the witness of the church, for the witness of this body, we need to work together and lead you to a path of repentance." The other thing about family. This is why family is so important. How many of you have siblings, and you had no say in who your sibling is? No say. Just none. You had no clue. My mom and dad, I'm the oldest of five. My mom and dad, it was me and then three sisters. And I thought we were done. I thought we were great. I thought it was tremendous. We're doneski. And then I'm in sixth grade. I had a brother show up. Like, "Ugh. Great. Tremendous." And I love him. He's great. But I had no choice. You get to choose your friends. You have no say of who your siblings are. I told my daughter. I was just kidding around. I have four daughters. I told my daughter Sophia, I'm like, "Oh, I can't wait to have a son. I still want a son." She started freaking out. "No, not another one. Please, no." It's already hard enough for her at school to tell people that she's got three siblings. Like, haven't you heard of climate change and overpopulation and stuff? No, I haven't. The Bible says kids are a blessing. Praise God. Hallelujah. But my wife said no more for now, so who knows? But what I'm saying is that kids, they have no choice. They have absolutely zero choice. You have zero choice. Same thing with the family of God. And we have people come in from bigger churches, maybe down South, where they've got a program for everything. They've got a niche group for everything. And they come in and they're like, "Okay, which one of your community groups is the young adult ministry? Which one of your community groups is the singles group? Which one of your community groups is parents with children, or moms of preschool? MOPS, moms of preschool?" And we don't play that game. I don't see any of that in the Holy Scripture. We have community groups for Christians. And I want your community... I want you to join a community group. You can't be a member of the church unless you join a community group, because that's the only way where we can actually shepherd you as a family. The little family gatherings, get to know each other. We're interconnected, interdependent, et cetera. But in a community group, I want it to be slightly uncomfortable. I want it to be slightly annoying. There's people that show up and they have a different house smell, from a different... You know what I'm saying? You're different. You're just a different aroma. It's all right. Welcome. I've got a different house smell. And there's people that show up with accents. Yeah. We want you to sit there and actually have a hard time to figure out what this person is saying. We want you to do that. Because in the Kingdom of Heaven, there's going to be people talking all kinds of different languages, so let's learn them now. So, this is what we do as a church. And you know what? When you show up, now you have to learn how to love. Love isn't just getting along with people who are just like you. That's not love. That's affinity. That's easy. Love is when you have people who are very different from you, slightly annoying, maybe smell differently, their theology is off, and you love them because you choose to love them. I love my daughters. There's an affection there. We love them. We're generous with words of affection, and with massages and hugs. They love the little scratchy scratch before they go to sleep, and the little tips of your fingers. They love that. I do that on the face, and then I close their eyelids, just you're asleep and then that's it. Because I love them. It's tremendous. But there's some days where everyone's exhausted. You show up and you're like, "Just figure it out. You brush your own teeth. You wash up. Find yourself dinner. I'm out. I'm locking myself in the door. You're lucky I haven't abandoned you." There's days like that as well. And the only reason I haven't abandoned them at moments like that is because I love them, and love means I made a decision. I did that with my wife, until death do us part. I do it with my kids. It's a covenant relationship. That's why covenant membership is so important at Mosaic. You make that covenant because you're saying, "There will be days where I would have left, had I not made a decision to love you." And that's why church membership is so important. First John, 3:10, "By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not practice the righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother." And here it's not just physical biological brother. It's spiritual brother. He's talking about the brethren in the church. So, we are a gathering. Church is a gathering. Church is a family. And then I'm going to give five more metaphors. It's a temple, a body, a bride, a flock, an army. And as I give you these five metaphors from Scripture to describe church, I want you to think through these metaphors through the prism of the mission statement of Mosaic. What is the mission statement? Mosaic's mission statement is we exist to love Jesus, love those who love Jesus, and then love those who don't yet love Jesus. Love Jesus. This is our worship. This is our obedience. This is our service to God. Love those who love Jesus. This is we love other Christians, in particular this household of God with whom we covenant together. And then love those who don't yet love Jesus. We do those two because we want unbelievers to come to know Jesus. So, the first metaphor is the temple. The temple assumes collective. You're interlocked. You're interdependent. Collective worship, collective ministry, collective witness. We've heard from First Corinthians and Second Corinthians, where it says that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. So, this is the verse that people use to say, "Hey, you shouldn't abuse alcohol or drugs. Hey, you should eat right and exercise." Your body, your physical body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. You should care for yourself. Yes, it is you singularly, but most of the time that metaphor is used plurally. That you together are the temple of the Holy Spirit. And you see this in First Corinthians chapter three, verse 16. "Do you not know that you," plural, "... are God's temple and God's spirit dwells in you?" Meaning every single Christian is filled with the Holy Spirit, and when we come together, we come together as building blocks or stones of the spiritual temple, and when we're gathered together, we experience more of the work of the Holy Spirit together. First Peter 2, four through eight, talks about this. "As you come to Him a living stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God chosen and precious. You yourselves are like living stones. Like living stones, being built up as a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifice that's acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, for it stands in Scripture. Behold, I'm laying on Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious. Whoever believes in Him will not be put to shame." So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone and a stone of stumbling and a rock of a fence. They stumble because they disobey the Word, as they were destined to do. Jesus is the cornerstone. Every single Christian in a local church is a stone that is built up together. So, from the perspective of the prism of how do we love God, love Jesus, love those who love Jesus, love those who don't yet love Jesus, from the perspective of the temple, is we first of all need to be part. I need to love God and honor God and obey God's commandment to be part of a local church, because that local church has a space in the wall of the temple that I need to fill. So, now I'm in there. I fill that need. Whatever that need is, I bring all my talent, time and treasure. Whatever God has given me, I do that. And as I do it, I'm interconnected with the other stones that have the Holy Spirit, Christians. There's people underneath me that I am standing on their shoulders. I need them. I need them to serve me and teach me. There's people above me. I need to serve these people. I need to support them and encourage them. And there's people next to me, to the left and to the right. So that's from that perspective of like, this is how I love God. I do what He calls me to do. And I love other believers, but I also understand that there's room for those who are not yet Christians. So, we will never get to this point as a church where you say, "We're big enough. We've got enough members. We've got enough Christians." No, because as soon as you say that, you insulate yourself and you forget the mission, that we are to welcome other people to join, to be part, to allow God to build them into the community. Ephesians 2:19 through 22, "So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone in whom... " Excuse me. "In whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In Him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit." Here are the whole structures, the church an emphasis. He's writing this letter to a local church, and to that local church he's saying, "You're a structure. You're being joined together. You are the holy temple. You're being built together." So from the one hand, you need to know that God builds the church. On the other hand, God uses us to build the church. So where am I building the church? With whom am I building the church? For whom am I building the church? That's for God, and for those who don't yet know Him. The second metaphor that we're looking at, point three is that Christ, church is His body. He loves His church. He's so intimately involved with His church, that He views His church as His body. A lot of people who just say, "I love Jesus and only Jesus," they worship a decapitated Jesus. It's like cutting off His head, and, "I love Jesus, and I don't need His body." Jesus Himself views the church as His body. I'll give you just one illustration of this. Saint Paul, when he was still an unbeliever, he was persecuting the church, zealous for the things of God, not knowing the things of God, ignorant of the truth. He's going to persecute Christians, to imprison them, to kill them. Jesus stops him on the road to Damascus, and look what Jesus says. "Now, as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from Heaven shone around him, and falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him... " And this is the voice of Jesus, "... a voice saying to him, 'Saul, Saul. Why are you persecuting... " What? Christians? Why are you persecuting the church? No. "Why are you persecuting me?" Jesus is so intimately involved with the church, if you persecute the church, Jesus feels it. It's His body. Therefore how you view, how you engage, how you serve, how you love, how you care for the church is how you engage with and view and care and love for Jesus Christ. Christ is the beloved Son, and as people who are created in Him, redeemed by Him, now our identity is in Him. Christ is the beloved, and in Him, we the church are also His beloved body. Ephesians four, 11 through 16, "He, Jesus, gives the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, the teachers, the spiritual leaders," qualified spiritual leaders, for what? What's our job? What's my job, Pastor Shane's job, Pastor Andy's? What's our job? To do the work of the ministry? No. Our job, we're basically coaches. I'm Belichick. That explains my preaching style. This is what I do. I'm Belichick. I'm going to start preaching in a hood. I'm Belichick. All of you are Tom Brady. Don't go to Tampa. Don't go. It's nicer there, I know. But still. You're called here. Your job is to do the work of the ministry. My job is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up the Body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith, of the knowledge of the Son of God to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullest of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. "Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ from whom the whole body. So we hold on to Jesus, the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow, so that it builds itself up in love." We, the local church, are the Body of Christ. So how do we love Jesus from this perspective, looking at the body through the prism? How do we love Jesus? We love Jesus by doing the job that He has designed us to do in the local body. And we love those who love Jesus, we love other Christians, because they're other body parts of Jesus, and my, me as the gift that God has given me, I need to bless others, and they need to bless me, and we're interdependent. And how do we love those who don't yet love Jesus? When the body is healthy, when the body is functioning, is firing on all pistons, so to speak, that's when we can fulfill the mission of God most effectively, and that's when the love of God and the spirit of God draws people to Himself. First Corinthians 12:12 through 27, "For just as the body is one that has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one spirit, we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit. For the body does not consist of one member, but of many. If the foot should say, 'Because I'm not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that will not make it any less a part of the body. But if the ear should say, 'Because I'm not an eye, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? And if the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them as He chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you,' nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you.' "On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer. If one member is honored, all rejoice together." Now, you are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it. That's why we call it membership. People are like, "Ah, I don't like membership. I'm not a big fan of organized religion. Membership reminds me of Costco. Nah, I don't want to do that." That's not what we mean when we say membership. We're talking about you're a member of a body, and each one of us has a very specific role. For as long as you're here, you need the church and the church needs you. The parts are important, but so is the sum. And then the church is the bride. More than 30 times in the New Testament, the church is called the beloved. The church is the Bride of Christ. Ephesians 5:22 through 27, "Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church's body, and is Himself its savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her, that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, so that He might present the church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. That she might be holy without blemish." So, the church is the Bride of Christ. And you need to meditate on this if this is the first time you're hearing it through the prism of loving Jesus, loving those who love Jesus, and loving those who don't yet love Jesus. We love Christ as the church. We love Him by pursuing holiness, by being washed with the water of the Word. What's He doing with the preaching of the Word? It's revealing sin or blemishes, unrighteousness, unholiness, so we want to love God by saying, "God, where must we repent, so that we can be a bride that is unblemished?" It's like when people get married, they say like on your wedding day, that is the pinnacle of your physical attraction. Like for both, like both groom and bride. You did the whole protocol. You worked out. Body fat is as low... You know, that's as low as it's getting. You got the hair did and your skin therapy and all that. You're looking tremendous. That's what they say. You prepare for that wedding. In a similar way, the church needs to be... This is why. We're preparing for the wedding day in Heaven, when Jesus comes and returns, takes His bride, and we're going to rejoice and celebrate at the wedding supper of the Lamb. So that's number one. That's how we love God. How do we love one another? "Hey, brother or sister. This is unbecoming of the Bride of Christ, this lifestyle." Like, "This is a blemish, and let's work through this together. Repent of sin." And then for unbelievers, we do the same thing and we say, "Look. Jesus accepts us as we are." Jesus did not choose a perfect bride. He did not. He chose a very unperfect bride, a very blemished bride, a very sinful, unrighteous, unholy bride. So unbelievers, yeah. You're all welcome. That's how we enter the church together. Jesus Christ welcomes us, accepts us as we are, and then loves us so much that He transforms us into His own likeness. Jesus committed to an imperfect bride. So just this idea, like when people say, "I love Jesus. I just don't love the church." It's false. That's false. You don't love Jesus. If you don't love His bride, and you don't love the church, it's like you coming up to me like, "Jan, I like you. I just don't like your wife." Yeah, I'm never talking to you again. Well, I'll pray for you, but we're not hanging out. And that's what people do with Jesus. "Jesus, I love you. I can't stand your bride." And Jesus is like, "I love my bride, so, sorry." That's how it is. So, that's number one. The other thing is a lot of people say that church is a man made invention. "It's not God's idea. God just wants a relationship with me, that's all." That's not true. The church is God's invention. Jesus Christ is going to marry the church. It's His bride. He loves the church. And then the other thing. A lot of people are like, "Yeah, but church is full of so many hypocrites." And that mindset, it's usually like people who have that mindset who are perennial church hoppers. Just go to a church, just consume. Go to another church, consume. And they never commit. Here's what I say to people like that. If you ever find the perfect church, please leave it, because you're going to ruin it, because every single one of us is a sinner. We're imperfect. We're all sinners. Charles Spurgeon said this: "If I had never joined a church until I found one that was perfect, I should have never joined one at all. And the moment I did join it, if I had found one, I should have spoiled it, for I would not have been a perfect church after I had become a member. But still, imperfect as it is, it is the dearest place on Earth." Yeah, we're a fellowship of the flawed. We're all sinners, though repentant. That's the difference. And Jesus does accept us, and He does bring us into a relationship with Himself because He loves us as a husband loves a bride. So, we're also the flock of Jesus. Jesus is our great shepherd, who laid down His life for the sheep. And Jesus said, "My sheep, hear my voice," and then they follow me. First Peter, 5:1 through 5 is important. "So I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker of the glory that is going to be revealed. Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you, but not for shameful gain, but eagerly, not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples in the flock. And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." I use this text because it's so important. He's talking to pastors, and he's saying, "You, pastors, are shepherds of the sheep that is God's flock. But don't forget Jesus is your over shepherd." So what he's saying is, "You, pastors, are still sheep. You're sheep following the shepherd. The better you follow the shepherd, the better you know how to shepherd the flock for your sheep." So, the idea here is we're the flock of Jesus Christ following Him, but you can't just be the dumb sheep that's always consuming and only caring for itself. You've got to grow to the point of you now are a mature sheep, and a mature sheep cares for the other sheep. So the mature sheep are the ones on the outside, and the ones in the front and the ones in the back, keeping the immature sheep who are still growing in the middle, following Jesus. And the mature sheep should be the ones that when they see a sheep wandering, they're the ones that go and get it, or notify the shepherd, "Hey, let's go get it." And those are the ones on the outside that see a wandering sheep by itself and say, "Hey, repent of your sins, little dear sheep, and turn to Jesus Christ and follow us. You're in the flock now." So, that's where we need to grow. And then finally, the church is an army. Church is an army. If you don't understand this reality, you're not going to understand church as God called it to be. The church is by definition militant, and I use that word on purpose, that we are waging a spiritual war individually fight the good fight of faith. Stand firm in the Lord, and in the strength of His might, all of Ephesians six. And we also wage that war together. Yes, we were rebels. Yes, we were enemies of God. Yes, we were on the opposing team. We were in the Kingdom of Darkness. God saves us, snatches us out of captivity. "Now we join His army, and our weapon is the love of God, the Gospel of God, and empowered by the Holy Spirit in prayer... " This is Ephesians 3:7 through 10... "Of this Gospel, as made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which is given to me by the working of His power to me. Though I'm the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. Through the church, manifold wisdom of God, made known to whom? Who's the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places? It's Satan. It's demons. It's the demonic. He's saying that when the Church of God assembles, when it worships, when it obeys God, when it prays, the demons are looking, and the demons are in trepidation, trembling before the Church of God. This is why Satan hates the gathering of Christians. Satan wants to destroy the gathering of Christians. This is why whenever you see an authoritarian regime, a political regime come into power, the very first thing they start to attack is the physical gathering of Christians. I've seen this intimately in the Soviet Union. My dad and my uncle, other family members, spent time in gulags for being Christians, for gathering as saints. You see this with the CCP. The Chinese Communist Party makes a habit of breaking up churches, and this should make us pause and think, why? Why do they care so much about these just regular people, Christians gathering to proclaim the name of Jesus Christ? Why do they feel so threatened by the gathering of believers? I'll tell you why. Because they listen to the message, and the message is that our ultimate allegiance is not to a political party, and it's not to a political figure. It's not to a king, and it's not to a nation. Whatever political figure comes into power, we say, "That's not the guy. That's not the guy. That's not the guy. Don't put your hope and trust in that guy." No. We are not citizens primarily of this land, of this nation. We are a Kingdom within a Kingdom, a Nation within a Nation. We are an embassy, and we are ambassadors of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and He is giving us marching orders here, which is to go and make disciples of all nations. So, that's why at church we don't just sit around in a circle and talk about our feelings, and if that's what you do primarily at your community group, get past that quickly. Because from feelings you've got to go to the fact, of the fact that God gave us marching orders to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we do that. That's how we're organized. Because we love God, we love Christians, and we love those who don't yet love Jesus. I'll close with this. John 13:34 through 35, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another by this. All people will know that you are my disciples if you love one another." A few questions to finish up our time. What if the church hurt me? Do I still have to go to church? The church hurt Jesus. The church wounded Jesus, and Jesus still shows up. So go to church, join the church, be the church. Well, what if the church is annoying? Well, so are you, so go to church. What if I connect more with God and nature than with people? Go to church, and then go to nature. Do that after. What if I can just get everything I need from an online service? Well, it's literally called a service, and if the only one being served is you, that's not a worship service, so go to church. What if I'm afraid of COVID? Well, do you go to the grocery store? Do you go to the gas station? Do you go out to eat? Do you go to house parties? Do you go to sporting events? Do you fly? Well, I don't want to put anyone at risk. Well, do you drive? Because if you drive in Boston, you're putting everyone at risk. But Delta, but Lambda, but Kappa. But the Alpha and Omega said that we go to church, so go to church. Love God, and... That's Jesus, by the way, if you don't know Revelation. Love God, and love people by loving the church. Amen. Let's pray. Jesus, we thank you for this time and the Holy Scriptures. We thank you that you love the church, and I pray infuse our hearts with the same love for your church, for your local church here at Mosaic here in Boston, the Greater Boston area. Continue to build your church, Jesus. We love you and pray this in your name. Amen.