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Oaks of Righteousness

Psalm 1, Isaiah 61: 1-3

June 21, 2020 • Rev. Dr. Gerrit Dawson

Isaiah envisioned the redeemed people as being the result of God's own gardening efforts in the world. The LORD calls us "the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I might be glorified” (60: 21). The LORD is both the gardener and the ground in which we grow. He nourishes us with his life so that we become what we were made to be. God is the garden itself: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17: 28). His soil is filled with righteousness. This means that if our lives are grown in God, there will be an essential rightness, a wholeness, in all our living. We will be living from an organic relationship with God.

Walls of Salvation

August 9, 2020 • Rev. Dr. Gerrit Dawson

Christianity identity is received. It’s a gift that comes from placing your life in Christ’s hands. Shed your baggage, pride and stubborn will in order to enter the gate of the City whose walls are salvation. Before you make the decision, those gates look very narrow. Rumors are that life in the city is constricting and dull, oppressive and confining. But the people on the ramparts are shouting a different message. Come in! It feels like death. And it is. You have to drop your pride, your personal identity markers, your goals of what makes for security and well-being. You have to take up the song of praise to the LORD of the City. It’s a narrow pass. But inside, you get reclothed. You get gifted with a new identity that is actually the one most like you all along. You get identity as a beloved, redeemed child of the High King. You become part of his massive re-blessing plan in the world. We have a vision. We have a message of highest hope. We have a gospel. Good news. Good tidings of great joy which shall be unto all people. For unto us a savior has been born. A savior has lived the life of true flourishing love and faithfulness. A savior has died to cleanse away our stains. A savior has risen to break death. A savior reigns who beckons the world to come to him and be part of the building of his great City. Jesus Christ, the Son of God who became the Son of Man, is the Lord of this City, and there is room for all who come. Could there be any better vision for our world than the City of God whose walls are salvation and whose gates are praise?

The City of the LORD

August 2, 2020 • Rev. Dr. Gerrit Dawson

Interaction with the world, even enjoyment of its good, is not what undoes us as Christ’s people. Our over-identification with the world is not simply because we have common cause with the affairs of the world. Rather our failure to lift up our hearts, to see Christ in heaven and give thanks is what undoes our mission and compromises our witness. As citizens of the City of God, we may participate in the life of the world, striving with it, thankful for it, bruised by it, hoping for it, knowing that this is not our truest home. We touch these things but lightly. We do not possess anything and so we possess everything. For we belong to Christ and all things are his (I Cor. 3: 22-23).

Priests of the LORD

July 12, 2020 • Rev. Dr. Gerrit Dawson

The reason we are given such a privileged title, "Priests of the LORD," is so that we may proclaim God's mighty acts of mercy toward us to the world. We have been called in order to be sent. We are the ones who get to make the connection between the Triune God and the world of lost humanity.