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Living as God’s Missional
People Text: Isaiah 61 To date… Restoration always involves our posture toward God in worship, our movement toward others in service and our commitment to loving creation-care in stewardship. ● As you take in the story, you will find (2) particular aspects of God’s nature and character which are consistently being celebrated… “glory” and “righteousness”. “glory”- (Hebrew ‘kabod’, pronounced ‘kaw-vode’) means ‘weight, substance, honor, significance, splendor, reputation, recognition, reverence, richness’. ►Glory always: ~ Lends perspective- it’s the feeling of being in the presence of something bigger than yourself and the vertigo that accompanies it. ~ Gets our attention- it ‘re-orients’ us; keeps us from being distracted by everything else and losing the centrality of God [God will never be the only thing, but he must be the ‘one’ thing]. ~ Calls us to something ‘bigger’- we were created for glory. God has deposited something of himself (his glory) in us as his image-bearing creatures. It is God’s glory which is to give our lives meaning. ►Futility is what we experience when we attach the wrong “price tag” to life. Our entire world’s system is built upon offering ‘illusions of glory’ (meaning); it’s the frustration and fatigue experienced as you invest yourself and expend yourself in that which is ultimately worthless. ►Unfortunately, we often don’t find out what matters until we have expended ourselves on what doesn’t! We experience “glory” as we find ourselves assessing life the way God does; valuing the things he values… sharing his passions (heart). ‘righteous’- word has a variety of meanings, given the context. It can mean ‘innocent’, ‘right in a cause’, ‘ethical in character’, ‘just/justice’. ► The world lacks righteousness because it glories in the wrong things. There seems to be a direct link between what we glory in and the rightly-ordered life. ● So, we have a glory problem… we fail to notice the way life really is, which causes us to attach the wrong price tag.. and, we have a righteousness problem… our lives aren’t right because we’ve ordered them around things which lack substance/significance. The key to righteousness is ‘glory’- recognizing, embracing, and experiencing the self-giving love of the Creator God. And, the result of glory is ‘righteousness’- the re-ordered life which makes God’s self-giving love both identifiable and available to the world! ►Our vision of the future must be guided by ‘atonement’ (every movement of God toward his creation motivated by his purpose of setting things right). I said: as far as I can tell, forgiveness is the only solution; the only way to experience love and live freely. Yes, forgiveness is hard, but the only thing more difficult is living your life ‘all tangled up’ with the ones who hurt you; having your thoughts consumed with ways of ‘getting even’ and never being free of them. Our experience of forgiveness will be incomplete unless we are becoming the kind of people through whom God’s restorative-love is rebuilding, repairing and refreshing. Worship as our response… So, worship is the right response to life because it values what God values and re-orders its life accordingly [It’s a way of letting God know that ‘we get it’]. A word of caution… ►If worship is disconnected from glory, it becomes deceptive and meaningless. Hosea 6:6 “I want you to show love, not offer sacrifices. I want you to know me more than I want burnt offerings”. Almost as if God were saying… [“If you really knew me, you’d know what I wanted” ] ►Our acts of worship are not acceptable if they ascribe glory to God while ignoring the very ones/things he takes glory in. I have identified our considerations over the past couple weeks as “Renewed Vision, Renewed Mission: Living as God’s Missional People”. *Renewed- to make current [not to secure something new] *Vision- a way of seeing what’s all around you from a different perspective; a way which restores appreciation and provides new energies for exploring the possibilities. *Mission- ‘having been sent’ (Latin); directional living. ● All of us are aware that something’s wrong, but the question is, what is the alternative? Often, our posture toward a broken world is harsh criticism. God’s vision is to establish alternative communities who live in the present under the reign of God, which, in and of itself, becomes a form of judgment [in that we are challenging the values of the current systems and setting things right]. It’s not enough to denounce the way things are if you don’t have anything better (“You got a better idea?” Yeah, I think I do.) You see, brokenness is what happens when you run out of ‘energy and ideas’. ● In a very real sense, we are called upon to be a prophetic community- engaging our culture for God; calling it to ‘glory’--- something other, something bigger, something greater.
Wherever you look in the
story, the emphasis is the same: not the rescue and isolation of the individual,
but the formation of a community in which the values of the kingdom are the
order of the day, and people are able to make healing connections with God and
one another for the good of the world. |
