Podcast appearances and mentions of matthew hodges

Post Production Episode 175 feat. Jared Holt TEASER by Liquid Flannel - Politics & Pop Culture Discussions with Chuck Williams, Brendan Williams, and Matthew Hodges

Talking masculinity, gender wars, and plains politics with Matthew Hodges (@mattthegweat on Twitter). For more episodes go to unpopularfront.com Follow Ben on Twitter @marxistmanny facebook.com/unpopularfront.

COKCC Minister Matthew Hodges Sermon covered Luke 1:26-38 during December 8, 2019 Sunday Service.

COKCC Minister Matthew Hodges Sermon covered Proverbs 1:1-7 during November 4, 2019 Sunday Service.

In which we discuss: Grizzly (1976), The Night of the Grizzly (1966), making the most of our education, the worst types of babysitters, Rosebud(?), and how Amity means friendship. Featuring guest host Matthew Hodges of The Bread Line Podcast (@user-572505758), Liquid Flannel Podcast (@user-947004816) and The Red Wall Podcast (@user-985956733). Happy hour is a social construct. Thanks to Mastering Engineer @dehartmusic.

COKCC Minister Matthew Hodges Sermon covered 1 John 3:1-4 during May 19, 2019 Sunday Service.

On episode 62 of sh!tpost, host Jared Holt is joined by Matthew Hodges to give an oral history of drug subculture as it relates to the development and creation of the broader internet. (Disclaimer: This episode is not an endorsement or encouragement of drug use.)Follow Matt: twitter.com/MattTheGweatSHOW NOTES: https://shtpostpodcast.com/62-drugs-the-internet-7-01-19-ft-matthew-hodges/ Get on the email list at shtpost.substack.com

Even in the year 2019, there is a worry about the label of feminism when it comes to men. I just want to be clear, when I get a chance to talk to a lot of men there’s a lot they agree with in regards to pro-feminist values. You know except a few idiots here and there that try to be contrarian. It might feel like those idiots are everywhere but they’re not. Not that I see anyways, I see a lot of guys that are confused, misinformed, feeling shamed, feeling anxious about what they should support. They’re worried that if they embrace the word feminism, that they are more prone not only from other men but from women who are now holding them to a much higher standard. My question is, why is that label so hard to hurdle? why is it so hard for men to say that they are feminist? Men's Lib Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/comments/b9vs3u/do_you_believe_that_menslib_should_be_considered/ and my episode with Matthew Hodges from MensLib The Man's Survey: https://www.chatelaine.com/survey-define-masculinity/

The first episode in the Facebook Interview series with special guest and great friend, Matthew Hodges. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/selfinterrogation/support

On this episode we speak again to Matthew Hodges a little more deeply on his own foundations around masculinity, and his father and his family. And we also end on an inspiring note about equal rights that is threaded all over r/MensLib Matthew is also the host of Liquid Flannel and of The Bread Line German also did an AMA at r/menslib

I have long been a fan of Reddit’s MensLib subreddit just for things like their confidant and direct approach to tackling men's issues in an intersectional way, their constant and hardworking mods team, and the daily discussion on all things guys but in a way that’s inclusive, educated, and not made to vilify others. So I was so happy to have Matthew Hodges, the founder of MensLib on Modern Manhood to have a long discussion about why he wanted to start MenLib, the values and foundations of that community, and his own personal life. And as usual, we talked a lot so this will be in two parts. These are also the links The Gender Knot episode, and Next Gen Men's Patreon page.

Welcome to the Bread Line Podcast, a show about food and food issues through the lens of leftist social and environmental justice by Matthew Hodges, Anna Markow, and Mark Wayne.

Chuck and Brendan welcome Matthew Hodges to discuss upping our twitter game, the MensLib Reddit community that Matt started, and ways to combat racism emboldened by the Trump victory. Someday we hope to have an episode where we don't even say the word "Trump" stay tuned for whenever that exciting day happens!

Introduction Paul as he was evaluating his preaching ministry in Corinth, said, these remarkable words, 1 Corinthians 2:3. He said, "I was with you in weakness and fear and much trembling." So I feel that today a few weeks ago, I felt led by the Lord I felt pressed on my heart that Ephesians 6:9 would be a jumping off place to talk about an issue that faces our nation and our church, our ministry and this community, and that's the topic of racism. Since that time, I've done a lot of reading. I've done a lot of talking to friends, both black and white. I've talked to leaders in the community, other pastors. And the more I've had those conversations, the more this sense of fear and trembling has increased, not decreased. This is a hot issue for people. It's hard for people, it's hard to hear, it's hard to talk about, it's polarizing, it's divisive, and painful. That's why I somewhat identify with Paul's self-assessment weakness, fear, trembling. But, you know, I also stand before you today with a tremendous confidence in the power of the Word of God to make changes in human hearts, that the Word of God has a supernatural power to change the world. It's been going on for 20 centuries the Gospel of Christ and so Paul continues in 1 Corinthians the next couple of verses saying, "My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with the demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom but on God's power." So I just have a sense of confidence that the Word of God is powerful to demolish satanic strongholds, and I just consider racism to be a satanic stronghold, and I think 2 Corinthians 10 says that we wield weapons that have supernatural power to blow up satanic strongholds. Blow them up. I believe that racism is a subset of the overall darkness satanic darkness that's come on the human race. It's a subset of it, that darkness is the darkness of sin, of rebellion against a holy God. But God has sovereignly shown his light in the darkness. Isaiah 9:2, "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light, on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned." And that light is Christ. Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." And God's word is light. Psalm 119:105, "A lamp to our feet and a light to our path." And the Church, God's Church is light, we are the light of the world, Jesus said. “He lights a lamp and puts it up on a stand and it gives light to everyone in the house.” And so it says in Isaiah 60, speaking of the heavenly Zion, "Arise and shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. Behold, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you, nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn." So the obstacles are huge, problems are complex, seem to be insoluble but I think where the darkness is the greatest, God's light can shine most gloriously. Where the enemy is seen to be strongest, God's power is displayed most radiantly gloriously and that's what I want to see happen today and through our church. I. Recent Events Search Our Souls Summer of 2016 So we begin by just looking at recent events. Recent events, just search our souls. This summer has been a hot summer. Now I know it's hot, it's hot, every day. I had some hope last week when it got to be 75. I'm just weak and it's not because I'm from Massachusetts, I don't like the cold either. So it's been steaming hot this summer. But the heat I'm talking about here, is the heat of current events. It's the heat of the issues connected with this topic of racism. On July 5th, Alton Sterling a 37-year-old African-American man was shot several times at point-blank range while being pinned down by two white police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And the incident and downloading of the videos led to ever escalating protests, resulting in a July 9th, demonstration, in which police officers were injured. And then the next day, July 6, Philando Castile was fatally shot, in St. Anthony Minnesota. Police officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled him over in St. Paul, Castile's girlfriend Diamond Reynolds was with him in the car, and after being asked for his license and registration Castile notified the officer, he had a license to carry weapon and one in the car and office told him not to move, and as he was putting his hands up, the officer, shot him in the arm four times and he bled to death. Diamond Reynolds video live streamed it and it obviously created immense reaction culminating in the shooting of three officers in Baton Rouge July 17th. All of these things coming together. And these events at the beginning of the summer just two more in a series of high profile events, all fitting that description of interactions between people of color and law enforcement. The names have been burned into our minds, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, places like Ferguson, Missouri, North Charleston, South Carolina have become the focus of intense national scrutiny. A year ago in April 2015, in Baltimore, in the city of Baltimore, there were significant race riots, racial riots involving the injuries stemming from incidents involving injuries of Freddie Gray at the hands again, of law enforcement officials pushed the outrage of African-American community to a boiling point, and demonstrations got violent. Somewhere in the midst of all of those events that we've been discussing, that have been going on in recent years, a controversial group called Black Lives Matter was organized, and has become an increasingly vocal, and visible part of the political election and other parts of the landscape. Borrowing a phrase from Thomas Paine's opening words in his American crisis written around the time of the American Revolution. "These are the times that try men's souls." Or search our souls, should search our souls. My Own Anguish and Journey So, I have searched my soul and I've been thinking about myself. So who am I? Where do I come from? What's my background? Well, I was born in Boston, I was raised in Eastern Massachusetts, I was Irish-Catholic, went to college as an unbelieving, nominal Catholic. Never dreamed when I matriculated as a freshman at MIT, that I would end up the senior pastor of a Southern Baptist Church. I don't think any of those words would have meant anything to me at that point. What in the world is that? On this issue, as I find myself now the senior pastor of a predominantly white Bible Belt Southern Baptist Church, pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention which I learned after I became a Southern Baptist, that it was started in 1845, when slave-holding missionaries wanted to take their slaves with them on the mission field and Northern Baptists refused and so, they broke off and started the denomination of which this church is a member. I was surprised to find that out, but it's just history. 1845. The same year this church was established. The more I've learned details about the struggle for the Civil Rights Movement and the terrible injustices of the Jim Crow era, institutional racism, that segregated South. So I didn't see with my own eyes, I was more in 1962, so the Civil Rights Movement was going but I was really little, I didn't know much about it, but since the Civil War ended, and 13th or 14th amendments, were passed ending slavery. But then the situation just was still horrible, for blacks in America. And then I look at my own heart and I just have always had, honestly revulsion and hatred for those kinds of things. It's always been part of my life but honestly I didn't have any black friends growing up. None. There were just none in the community at all. I know that Boston was a focal point of racial tensions and demonstrations and even riots, violent riots during the busing era. But again, I didn't know much about that. I think in my heart, honestly, I'd always wanted to have African-American friends, but I just didn't have an opportunity. So I was wired that way, but in the end, it didn't really help me because I tended more and more to think that's got nothing to do with me. That's not who I am. It's not what I think, it's not what I've done. So I don't really need to think about this topic. But I believe that I have a position of responsibility in this community, a position to lead this church, to preach the Word, and I'm increasingly aware that most of my sins, and the racial issues have to do with sins of omission, not sins of commission, things that I should have been doing and haven't been doing. And I'm going to have to give the Lord and account some day, for my ministry in this community. And the issue of racial reconciliation is going to be one of the themes we're going to discuss, I believe, and I want to be faithful. TGC and Mika Edmondson Back in May, I attended the stakeholders meeting of the Gospel Coalition. Every other year, we have a conference, a big conference and then the alternate year it's just the Gospel Coalition gets together and we're a group of mostly pastors, but also evangelical leaders from different denominational backgrounds. And we had the privilege of listening to Dr. Mike Edmondson talk about this theme, this title, it was assigned to him, "Is Black Lives Matter", that group, "the New Civil Rights Movement?" Well, that talk just blew me away. I didn't know that much about BLM. I learned a lot from him about it. He did a great job of just tracing out very carefully the differences between BLM and the Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Significant differences. For example, the Civil Rights Movement was originated in the black church and was steeped with biblical themes and a desire for reconciliation, genuine reconciliation between blacks and whites, a genuine unleashing of biblical truths by Dr. King and others. Many of the leaders were pastors etcetera, they used non-violence that many said got from Gandhi but Gandhi said he got it from Jesus, so let's just give the glory of Jesus of loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, winning people's affections by that kind of behavior. And that was the strategy. BLM is different in many ways. I think perhaps most significantly by their embracing of the Gay Rights Agenda and linking those two together in ways that Evangelical Christians find repugnant, especially black leaders who were active in the Civil Rights Movement, just find utterly repugnant, and don't agree at all that it's the same. Also some embracing of socialism, socialistic themes by BLM and seemed countenancing violence and other things just some significant difference but none of that was what really moved me. What really moved me was at the end he said, "Do you understand why BLM has been raised up? Why? It's because the evangelical church has stayed on the sidelines on this issue. There's been no coherent, well-thought out, vigorous evangelical answer to these social issues. That's why." He said, "We the church can do better than Black Lives Matter. We must do better than that. We must step up and speak the truth about these things, so that that movement becomes by contrast, pathetic and obsolete because these issues are so, in such a healthy, beautiful way being addressed by the Church." So his words burned in my heart, I was moved. I was moved to tears. So, three weeks ago, I was going to a place to study and write my next sermon, which I thought that morning my next sermon was going to be on spiritual warfare. God willing, that will be next week. But instead, I ran into a friend of mine, African-American man named Eddie White, who went through our internship a number of years ago. Eddie was a layman in his church and just felt the leading to become a vocational pastor. He wanted to become a pastor. Found out about our internship, did some research on the website, and downloaded some things. That same day he saw Matthew Hodges driving the van with the First Baptist Church thing on the side, he's like, "Woah! A sign from God." He followed him to Liberty Street, got out and had a conversation, went through our internship, eventually left his job, went to Southeastern Seminary, and is now a pastor. Big fork in his road and we were privileged of being able to walk with him. Saw me right away, recognized me, we hugged. And I stood there in the parking lot and talked to him for 50 minutes on my study day. But I didn't realize that the Lord had different plans for me and that a whole different sermon. So, we got to talking about these themes. He said, "Pastor you need to come with me to the Greensboro Civil Rights Museum." I said, "When do you want to do it?" He said, "How about this week?" So we went that Thursday. It's the kind of thing that changes your life. He took me first on a tour of NC A&T, traditionally black college. There we parked and then I was walking by a statue with four guys on it. Now, we did more walking by that statute, he came back and said, "These were the Greensboro Four." I didn't know anything about the Greensboro Four, many of you do, many of you don't. But there is this big statue of four men standing side by side. The Greensboro Four were students at NC A&T during the Civil Rights era. Back then by law, public institutions were segregated. The lying slogan at the time was, separate but equal. Well, they were separate, the “separate” part was vigorously enforced, but the “equal” not at all. Separate schools, separate motels, separate restrooms, separate water fountains, separate swimming pools, separate places on public transportation. John Piper said in his book Bloodlines, he said, "How could you communicate more clearly the lie that being black was like a disease?" Well, there was a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, for you younger people. Woolworth’s was that generation's version of Walmart. I remember Woolworth’s, I actually walked into a Woolworth’s once. But there was a Woolworths there and they had a lunch counter and the lunch counter had a place where you could sit and eat. But it was open to whites only. Blacks could order food there, but they had to take it out. So these four students thinking of just a way to agitate and to affect change said, "Why don't we go to lunch counter and sit down and order something and not leave till they serve us?" So that's what they did. Four students, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and Joseph McNeil, did that on February 1st, 1960, at 4:30 PM, walked into Woolworths, went right, they couldn't sit side by side, but they found seats, sat down and ordered coffee. They were obviously immediately refused and urged to leave fervently, but they didn't leave. They stayed there until the store closed that night. The next day, more NC A&T students joined in this and it started to grow. 20 more students recruited from other campuses joined in, white customers heckled them while they peacefully studied to keep busy. Just reading books, newspaper reporters, a TV film crew covered the second day, and more and more people got involved. Within one week of the initial protest, Greensboro students throughout North Carolina in different other campuses following black campuses like Central here and all that, here in Durham, started similar protests. It became a whole pattern of protest, and it was incredibly effective. The original Woolworth’s in Greensboro, where those demonstrations were happening, however, was losing money hand over fist to the tune of $1.6 million, during those weeks. So the store manager Clarence Harris quietly asked three black employees to change out of their work clothes and order a meal at the counter and it was done. The segregation of that lunch counter was finished. So we were standing there on the campus. He told me this story, etcetera. I didn't know anything about it. We went from there to the Greensboro Civil Rights Museum, which is at the Woolworths where the Woolworths was, but it's not a museum. And we went in, and it was just extremely moving for me, to walk through that place to see the photos up on the wall to be reminded of what things were like. It's recent history friends, recent history. And it's difficult to look at those pictures, pictures of violence, the Birmingham Police turning a water cannon on peaceful protesters, freedom riding buses being firebombed, lynchings. I saw a Coke machine there that was in the bus terminal, I think, at that time. Again, segregated had a black section, white section, but the Coke machine had been designed to have two faces to places to vend. So with the wall separated, but you had the white side and the black side. The white side was 5 cents a Coke, black side 10 cents. The woman who was giving us a tour said, "I was down in the Coke Museum down in Atlanta, they didn't have one of these machines down there, one of those historical machines. Didn't show it." But it's there in the Civil Rights Museum. Clear evidence of separate but unequal, I mean unequal price. So at one point, I look over at Eddie and there's tears streaming down his face. I was just at a museum, just looking at pictures, thinking about history sober-minded, but he was feeling at a whole different level. His mother had been involved in the counter demonstrations there at NC A&T, she had been a part of it. She told them all these stories. And it bothered me that it meant more to Eddie than it meant to me. It felt like we weren't as one as we could be. I wanted to be more one with my friend. This pattern of non-violent protest continued. There were certain other aspects people would challenge like they had things called pray-ins, where groups of black people would go to predominantly white churches, and come and just kneel and pray, taking whatever abuse came. Some white churches responded by having human chains, blocking people from getting in. Some churches did that. It's possible our church did that, not for sure. Anecdotally we heard that that happened. So, that's history. What is “Racism”? So, what is racism? What are we even talking about? Can I tell you, first of all, I don't really know how to define race? The more I think about it, the harder it gets. I don't even know what it is. I can define ‘human race.’ But I have a hard time defining race. It's very, very difficult, just has to do with physical features or attributes that cluster a group or identify a person. Racism John Piper defines this way, "An explicit or implicit belief or practice that qualitatively values one race above another." So, it's a belief leading to actions that one race is superior to all others or maybe to a specific other race. So superiority of one race, inferiority of the other race or races, and then actions that flow from it. I think it has to do with a bias, a slant, a perspective that always goes in one direction, coupled with denigration and even hostility toward others. That's what I think of when I think of racism. I was at a basketball game my son was playing in a week ago. We're sitting in the stands, and the father of one of Calvin's opponents was sitting behind me. He had a good set of lungs. And I just thought the man was exceptionally biased in all of his comments. They all seemed to go from one slant. Whether the refereeing or the plays that were made or his praise or his condemnation, everything went one direction. But what really got me was when he said, "We should be wiping up the floor with this team." I was like, "Alright I'm about ready to say something." My son's been playing basketball most of his life. He can play a little. So he's not a mop. I kept my tongue. I don't know if it was cowardice, or good manners, or Christian sanctification, but I didn't say anything. I don't want to trivialize at all racism, but it's that bias, where you see every current event, whatever from your angle, and then that denigration of the other people where they're like mops or lower than you. That's what I think of. Why Am I Talking About This Now? Now, why am I talking about this now, why today? Well, I've already told you, one reason, current events. I don't want the church to have its head in the sand like we don't know what's going on, and we're not relevant. That's a lie. The Bible is perfectly relevant to everything that's going on, the Gospel is. But also the text that you heard Ben read for us look at it again, it says, "Masters, treat your slaves in the same way,” the same way that I encourage the slaves to have in mind the invisible Jesus, every moment that they serve, and they do their service as unto him. Masters, I want you to be aware of the invisible Jesus all the time, in how you treat your slaves. Do not threaten them. Talked about that at length last time, not going back into that. Since you know that he who is both their master and yours doesn't have, Now here's the phrase. "And there is no favoritism with him." “No partiality” some translations give us. He's “no respecter of persons.” So I've meditated on, “there is no favoritism.” That's where the sermon title comes from. There is no racism with Christ. So as I thought about, “What does it mean?” I think there's a positive and a negative side of there's no favoritism. First, he equally delights in every person that he has made in terms of their amoral distinctives. He just enjoys how he made you. He just delights in the color of your skin, the color of your hair, the color of your eyes, the shape of your eyes, the shape of your nose, the shape of your chin, your height, all of those amoral diverse tendencies of humans, God delights in all of them, equally. Now that's unbelievably important. Even aside from the topic of racism, I want all of you to be able to look in the mirror and say God made me, and be delighted in what he made. And God does make differences. He does make distinctions. Frankly, where would the Olympic games, be if there weren't differences between people? Everybody would finish in a tie. God makes differences, but Paul says clearly in Corinthians, "Who made you different than anyone else?" Answer, “God did.” And what do you have that you didn't receive? Answer, “Nothing, everything I have, I received.” “And if you did receive it, then why do you boast as though you did not?” That kills racism right there. Every difference, God made, and we should delight in it. God just delights in what he has made. So what I want, is I want us to be able to look at each other's faces and just delight in what God's made fearfully and wonderfully, and just say, "It's beautiful, all of it because my Father made it." So that's positive, there's no favoritism with God, it goes that way. Then negatively, on Judgment Day, every moral decision. So I talked about amoral distinctions. Every moral issue will be evaluated fairly and justly by God. There's no favoritism, no special deals, no skillful lawyers with their special techniques, no sweetheart deals, no bribes, none of that. Romans 2:9-11, "There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile, but glory, honor and peace, for everyone who does right, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile, for God does not show favoritism." That's what that means. So Judgment Day, level ground. So, we face the challenge of racism and we have weapons of biblical truth in our hands. Now, if you look at your outline, the bulletin, I want to look at five biblical just heat-seeking missiles, that destroy racism. But I want to cluster them together. I want all of them together, that if we really embrace these biblical theological themes, racism should be gone forever, certainly from the Church. II. Biblical Doctrine Destroys Racism Creation: The Whole Race Descended from One Man So, first creation. Biblically, the Bible teaches plainly all of us are created in the image of God. Every single human being is equally in the image of God, and even more fascinatingly, all of us are descended from one man. That's amazing. It says in Acts 17:26, "From one man, he made every nation of man, that they should inhabit the whole earth, and He had determined the time set for them, and the exact places where they should live." Now why, why is that relevant to race? Well, it's because people get separated, like after the flood gets separated from each other and settle in certain valleys, and just are there without interactions from outsiders. And then they have children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. Some genetic tendencies start to float to the surface and then they all start to have those tendencies. Like, God celebrating in Isaiah 18, the people of Cush, the Cushites, what we call modern Ethiopians, he said, "Go to a people tall and smooth-skinned." It's just delight that God has in that beautiful people. But he describes them physically. How do they get to be that way taller than other people? They're all descendants from Noah, all descended from Adam, but it has do with how God sovereignly orchestrated these things to happen. It's a beautiful thing, and God knew exactly what happened when he put all of that in the genetic code of Adam. Boy is he going to be surprised when he has a red-headed kid and one with black hair, and he's like, “Huh? Interesting.” You know, interesting. And just a journey of discovery Adam and Eve finding out just how diverse it can all get. But it's just a beautiful thing. Fall: The Whole Human Race Equally Sinned in Adam Secondly, the fall. Every single human being on earth, is equally fallen in Adam. We all fell in Adam. Romans 5:12 says, "Sin entered the world through one man, and death sin. And in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.” We're all sinful in Adam positionally, and then we're sinful in ourselves actually, because we received from Adam a sin nature and though we don't sin, all of us sin exactly the same ways. So no, I don't sin exactly the same way as other people, but all of us are equally in need of Jesus, the Savior, all of us. And so Paul is very clear about this in Romans 3, "What shall we conclude then? Are we any better?" Romans 3:9, "Not at all." So, there he's talking to Gentile. Are we any better? Are they any better? We're all in the same place for he says, "Not at all, we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles are whites and blacks whatever, either or you want to put it, are equally under sin." “As it is written, There is no one righteous, not even one, no one who understands, no one who seeks God, all have turned aside, they together become worthless.” There is no one who does good, not even one, that's all of us. There's a unity in sin here, shameful unity, unity in shame. And you can say, "Well I don't do this." Yeah, but James 2:10 says, "Whoever keeps the whole law and stumbles at one point of it, guilty of breaking all of it." And then there's that multigenerational aspect in Matthew 23, Jesus said, "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.'" Now, listen, the next thing Jesus says, "And so, you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then the measure of the sins of your forefathers." Now, friends, each person stands or falls on his or her own actions. We're not responsible for the sins of our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But there's something going on in what Jesus said there. And so for me to disavow guilt, say, "I wouldn’t have done it, that's not who I am." It's not helpful, that's not a helpful way it's true, but not helpful. I didn't commit the same sins as a clansmen, who did a lynching, or as some evil people that bombed little girls in Birmingham, or a governor that blocks Brown v. Board of Education. I didn't commit all those same sins, but I'm human, like that. Each of those people are, we're all human. And I can't say, "Look, I know I would never have done any of those things." In Daniel 9, Daniel prayed in solidarity with his people, the Jewish nation. Daniel being a pure man not sinless, but he just included himself. "We have sinned, we have violated your laws, we have broken your covenant, we have disobeyed, you." And there's that solidarity. So God gives to each person according to what he has done, that's true, but God calls in us with humility to recognize the same sin nature in me, as in anybody else. We all need a Savior. Redemption: Elect from Every Nation Were Equally Redeemed by Christ Thirdly, redemption. Thank God, there is a Savior. Thank God, Jesus came to save us from these sins and in God's plan, he elected, he chose people from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation, to be redeemed by the blood of Jesus. Revelation 5:9, "You were slain, [speaking to Jesus,] you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men, for God from every tribe and language and people, and nation." Revelation 7 pictures them standing around the throne and worshipping God in white robes and saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne." So in that way, Romans 3:22 says, "There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." God presented him as a propitiation of blood sacrifice, the one who turns away God's wrath through faith in his blood. We're all saved the same way, thank God. Church: The Church All Over the World is One in Christ And then fourthly, that brings me immediately the doctrine of the Church. Having been justified, we are then assimilated, by the Spirit into one Church worldwide. And we have sweet fellowship through the Spirit with people of radically different backgrounds than us. We have become one body in Christ. That's just true, there's not different works God's doing all over the world, one work. And so, Galatians 3:27-28, says, "All of you who are baptized in Christ Jesus have clothed yourself with Christ. There is neither junior Greek, slave nor free, male nor female for you're all one in Christ Jesus." And then Colossians 3:11, "Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and is in all." So that unity of the Church, that destroys racism. And then finally, best of all, Heaven. Where are we going? What's it going to be like when we get there? How beautiful is that? We are going to see people from every tribe, and language, people and nation. I already said, Revelation 7:9-10. I believe, maintaining amoral diversity. Purified, all of us from our sins, but different from one another. I can't imagine, some matrix of people all standing the exact same height, face, shape and all that. That's just weird. And I wouldn't know why that was even what happened. In our resurrection bodies we all look exactly alike and that doesn't make any sense to me. But we'll be pure from all sins, pride, racism, it'll be gone. And we're going to be together, and these central topic of Heaven will not be any of us. It'll be Christ and his achievements and we're going to be together worshipping. And so, Isaiah 60, the picture of the heavenly Zion, gates standing open continually to receive wealth from the nations pouring in, diverse displays of worship to almighty God, that's what that is. Isaiah 60:11. So These five biblical themes have the power to destroy racism, creation, fall redemption, church and heaven. III. A Journey of Unity John 17: Trinitarian Unity Now, my go-to verse on multi-ethnic churches has been for years, John 17, Jesus's prayer that all of the world who hears the Gospel through the words of the apostles, “that all of them, Jesus prays may be one, Father, just as you and I are one, may they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me. And have loved them even as you've loved me.” One of the key things I've said this before, I'll say it again, I believe you should go through John 17, the so-called high priestly prayer of Jesus and say everything Jesus asked for, he gets, everything, 100% because that's just Jesus, he never prays outside of the will of the Father ever. So it's like, "Oh gee, I wish Jesus could have the unity he prayed for." No, he's going to get it, it's going to happen. We are going to be in Heaven as one as the Father and the Son are one. Now, what does that mean? It's a mystery, but in the doctrine of the Trinity, we have ‘separate’ if we can use that language, persons who have a perfectly one relationship with one another and never ever disagree about anything, ever. And not only that, but they passionately hold their views with each other. I really, really love Jesus. Well, I really do too. And that's how Heaven's going to be like. I mean not exactly like that, but better. But that sense of passionate oneness around the truth and the works of redemption and Jesus, but he's thinking about now may they be in the process of becoming more and more one to let the watching world see a work that only God could do. Don't you yearn to see that in this local church? That we would put the Gospel on display by supernatural unity, but the journey ahead of us is going to be hard. It's a journey of hard work, of seeking out areas, pockets of sin and shining the Gospel light. And so, a journey of justice and love stands in front of us. There're just serious social issues to address. The evangelical church has traditionally had a blind spot on social action and social justice. There's a long history of this. The fundamentalists tended to withdraw from science and culture and just pull back and just get in their own plays, and just celebrate Jesus crucified and bodily resurrected the fundamentals, but to not engage the surrounding culture. And this is part of that lack of engagement. Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, wrote a book called Divided By Race: Evangelical Religion and The Problem of Race in America. They said this, "Recall that in the Jim Crow era, most evangelicals even in the North, did not think it their duty to oppose segregation. Instead, they felt it was enough to treat blacks they knew personally with courtesy and fairness." “So my job as a Christian is just be Christian to everyone I know. Just treat them kindly and with respect and that's it. And not challenge the structural institutional sins, not do anything about that.” That's a heritage. IV. A Journey of Justice and Love So what is our goal? This is a slogan I've got. And this is like what's in front of me? A prayer goal on the issue of racism in society and structurally and in institutions. I got this from a quote in Piper's book, Bloodlines, "To render race inconsequential for life opportunities, to render race inconsequential for life opportunities, or irrelevant let's say. It doesn't matter what your race is, here are the opportunities." That's the goal. Now, I will say that's much more true now than it was 50 years ago. I think that clearly, progress has been made, and isn't that encouraging? The Christians through action and non-Christians too but just through common grace whatever, you can become, the society can become less racist and more openly, or overtly, just. So that's encouraging to us to try. But that's what we want to see happen or in Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous statement, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." That's a different way of saying the same thing. So we have a biblical commitment to act especially in proportion to our positions of responsibility. So the more that God's given you, the more He's going to require from you. So we have a commitment to speak up. Isaiah 1:17, "Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow." Isaiah 1:17. Later Isaiah 58:6, "Is not this the kind of fasting that I have chosen to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?" Or Proverbs 31:8-9, "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves", that's advocacy, "For the rights of all who are destitute, speak up and judge fairly and defend the causes or the rights for the poor and needy." There Remain Serious Social Issues to Address So present hot button issues, what are we going to do? Let's take the law enforcement and people of color issues. Now these are terrible incidents, but it's pretty obvious that I tend to see them differently than my black friends do. And that's a problem for me. I want to see things more together. I want us to be together and see it, and to understand what they see when something like that happens. Some people deny that in those incidents, there's any racism at all. I don't know how you can know that, but there isn't any. What happened is that people are resisting arrest, and then this happens, etcetera. Other people think it's nothing but racism all the time. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. On those that say there's no racism, all there's specific cases though, they've become a little bit difficult to explain when like an African-American gentleman's on his back with his arm, straight up, and just trying to surrender quickly whatever, and still get shot. And then, does the society react properly? The grand juries and all that, do they do the right thing? So there's just issues with that all over. I know that most of the people within a one-mile or three mile radius of this place that we might seek to reach would see things radically differently I think than us, and that should matter as we're trying to reach the community. But there's deeper issues than that. I'll tell you, on that particular one, I saw a panel discussion, a round table discussion after Ferguson. And there was this one African-American sister in Christ, who's married to a black police officer, she said, "I can't tell you how conflicting this whole issue is for me. I see it very much from the angle of racial justice, but I want my husband to come home safely at the end of the night." And those are touchy moments when there's tension. And you got a split second decision. It's hard to know what to do. What kind of training? What kind of response after the fact, investigating the incident? Hard to know. That's what she said, speaking honestly. But I know there are deeper issues. Present Conditions There're heartbreaking issues concerning the African-American community, especially young men in the African-American community. Homicide is the number one cause of death for black men between 15 and 29 years of age and has been for decades. 94% of all black people who are murdered, are murdered by other black people. It's heart-breaking. The more you look at this, it's just shattering. It's like, "Lord, what can we do?" In the past several decades the suicide rate among young black men, has increased more than 100%. In some cities, black males have a high school dropout rate of more than 50%. I was standing in line at Lowe's yesterday with Calvin, hoping you don’t if I tell. Calvin was turning on flashlights and turning them off and he was urging me to buy one of them. Like I'm good. High energy, lots of stuff going on. I just wanted to check out and leave. African-American woman standing next to me, she said, "That's just the way boys are. I have three sons of my own." We got into a conversation. "How old are your sons?" Her name was Lynn. "How old are your sons?" "Well praise Jesus they're 19, 18, and 15." I said, "Well Calvin's 15." We got talking. She says, "A 19-year-old and he's still a virgin.” She said that to me. We're total strangers. A little awkward. It's awkward. It's like, "Oh, good for you. Keep it up." But just the themes of raising young men and the challenges of doing that, and how hard it is, and this is much on her mind as a mother. These themes come together, they're not in a vacuum, they come together in a complex of issues, In 1965, the year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, 24% of black births in America were to single women. Today, the number is 72%. Just the devastation and being raised without a godly father who can give direction to a young man as he grows. Now, as we look at this complex of issues, there tend to be polarized answers. Answer number one, answer number two. Answer number one tends to focus on personal responsibility. Individuals need to take personal responsibility for their education, their morality, their actions. They need to live up to standards of society, and not get into the kind of difficulties that cause all these troubles. Alright? Focus number two is structural or institutional reform. There has to be significant changes made to society and structures in society. Bigger than any individual and it's going to take massive efforts to make. Those are two approaches, two different approaches. Social or political conservatives tend to be in the first camp, Republicans. And then social, what do you say, political liberals, etcetera, Democrats for the most part tend to be in the other. And there you've got that divide. What do you do? And African-American scholars are divided in the same way. Two Seemingly Conflicting Poles Henry Louis Gates Junior of Harvard, said, "The causes of poverty within the black community are both structural and behavioral. It's not one or the other." He said this, "Not to demand that each member of the black community accept individual responsibility for their behavior, whether that behavior assumes the form of gang violence, sexual activity,” you name it, “is another way of selling out a beleaguered community." But Elijah Anderson of Yale said, "Without a massive program of reconstruction, inner-city residents, especially young black men will remain mired in hopeless circumstances that they cannot escape." Now, if you go with the more structural intervention side, things get even more complicated and divisive. Government intervention has made a difference, a big difference, like Brown versus Board of Education and other things with the Civil Rights Act. It does make a difference. But sometimes structural intervention makes things worse, like things like affirmative action programs are criticized, even by black scholars because they establish a preferential treatment for blacks, the kind of writes, impermanently a gap, which is insulting frankly, to African-Americans at that point. But then how do you level the playing field? So what do you do? Shelby Steele, African-American scholar says this, "Blacks can have no real power without taking responsibility for their own educational and economic development. Whites can have no racial innocence without earning it by eradicating discrimination and helping the disadvantagde to develop both sides." I feel harmony with that statement. So for us, we have to look at what God's given us, what positions of influence, what has he given us that we can use to level the playing field in an intelligent way. John Piper: “Seven Feelings Rise In My Heart” Now, as I was reading Bloodlines by Piper, he got to after going back and forth and back and forth for far more pages than I burdened you with this morning. He just stopped in the middle of the book he said, "Can I tell you I have seven feelings right now?" That's John Piper by the way, he just has seven feelings. Most of us have one feeling, he has seven. But they were just so thorough and complete and they lined up and I just thought it was right. What were his seven feelings? “Alright, first I feel regret for my own sin in this area. Sense of regret. Secondly, I feel sorrow over cycles of despair and depression, and hopelessness and brokenness and the ruin of so many human lives. Thirdly, I feel anger at sin on all sides of this equation. No one's escaped. There is no one righteous, there's no one clean on this one. And I feel anger about that sin. Fourth, I feel frustration over untold layers of complexity of trying to actually solve this thing. It's frustrating to me that everything we try to do actually seems to make things worse sometimes. Fifthly, I feel empathy with the truth claims as I perceive them to be true on all sides of this debate. I feel drawn by the truth that I read and it's like, ‘Yeah that's true.’ Sixth, I feel a great longing to see the Gospel unleashed in this issue. And the Gospel preached, and individual saved, and lives transformed. And then finally, seventh, I feel tremendous hope for the future. Not just the eternal future of what's going to happen in Heaven but that even in our society, new things can be thought of, that will greatly improve life for everybody involved.” V. Application The Gospel Alright, so for me, applications. First and foremost, I always seek to preach the Gospel. And I actually see a lot of folks that are here that aren't usually here. Glad that you're here, praise God for that. I don't always know why people come to church, but I know this, none of this issue, this reason is by far the most significant issue of anybody's life. Jesus said, "What would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?" So even if the entire world of opportunity were handed right to whether you're black or white, it wouldn't matter if you weren't a Christian, if you weren't born again, it will do you no good on Judgment Day. And beyond that, all of the biblical truth that I've talked about only gets unleashed in the lives of believers. People who believe these themes. So come to Christ and trust in Him. Embrace the Gospel, the Gospel has power to change hearts. Ask God to Search Your Heart Secondly, if you're a Christian, just take Psalm 139:23-24, and just say, "Search me, O God, and know my heart, show me patterns of sin inside me." Now on racism it may be issues of deeper hardness in your heart toward individuals that may be there. And you didn't know it was there. There's some hiddenness that can happen there. Could be some sins of commission, things you've said or done in the past and you should feel ashamed for it, and you feel that and you want forgiveness for it. But it might be like me, mostly sins of omission, that you've shrunk back from getting engaged frankly. Shrunk back from energetic ministries and out of laziness, selfishness, cowardice, whatever reason, "Search me, O God and show me know my heart." Seek New Friendships Thirdly, seek out genuine friendships with different people, people different than yourself. When I say seek out, I mean get out of your usual patterns, and go be involved in ministries or other things that enables you to make new friends that are different from you. And as you have opportunity, if they are, blacks with whites or whites with blacks, talk about these things. And don't shrink back from talking about it, but lean into the topic of racism like we've tried to do today and say, “Help me think better about this.” I want us, I want me and Eddie White, I want us to feel the same about the things that his mother went through. I want to feel the same and be one with my brother. And I want to be good friends. That's going to be one of the most important things you can do, genuine friendships with people who are different and genuine communication. Pray For An End to Racism Fourth, pray for an end to racism, that race would someday be irrelevant inconsequential for life opportunities. Just pray for that. Pray that God would work. And if you say that there's no such thing as bias, there's no such thing as, well very controversially the phrase, “white privilege,” things like that. Look, I understand why you might think that way. I understand certain aspects and some of them amoral and some of them moral. You don't want to feel like the things you learned in your education were just handed to you because you're white and all that. I understand all that. But I liken it to bike riding. I like to ride bikes for exercise, and I've just found that uphills are harder than downhills. Have you guys, maybe some of you right bikes and you know, it's just when it's like this, it's hard. And when I get to the top, I'm exhausted.: But if I get to turn around and come back down, I remember riding out in the Blue Ridge Parkway. I was with a friend of mine, and we rode uphill for two hours and downhill for like 20 minutes. Scariest ride of my life. Over 50 miles an hour on thin tires. I don't think I'll ever do that again. But it was exhilarating. But bias is like that. It's just like every stroke of the pedal is a little bit harder just a little bit harder. Like is it real, is it actually happening? Well, that's where friendships can come in, where you can actually communicate. What we're seeking is often called the level playing field, achieving it may be a lifetime work. I don't know, but that's the goal. That's what we're looking for. And pray for FBC Durham to be a light in a dark place in a city on a hill. Pray for us to do creative ministries. Find ways to reach out. I was talking to Nathan Miles after the Wednesday meeting about the refugee issue. And I didn't even touch how the refugee issue is an issue of racism, too. And I mean, I could go on and on about this. But just that kind of ministry will really help us grow in terms of social justice and getting involved or urban ministry. So many of you guys are involved in that. Pray that God would do a multi-ethnic work, in this church just more and more people of different backgrounds becoming members here. And then finally, don't see color blindness, seek delight in what God's made. Let's just really enjoy each other in what God's made and delight in it, like we will in Heaven, so close with me prayer. Prayer Father, we thank you for the time we've had to look at this topic. I just thank you for this church. I thank you for the hearts of the people here, I thank you for their eagerness to hear from God and from this word, and they're consistent trust in the Word to take this church where it needs to go. God, do a work, a supernatural work of unity and love and justice in our church, and through our church. Help us to be more energetic and active than ever before in issues of social justice, but with the saturation of the word of God and the inherent scriptures in the Gospel of Christ, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

So last week in Ephesians 2:11-17, we saw how Christ's death on the cross has demolished the “barrier, the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles, by abolishing the Law with its regulations, thus making peace between Jews and Gentiles.” The Law of Moses excluded uncircumcised Gentiles from the assembly of the people of God. God Himself established that barrier. God set it up, and it did in fact keep the Gentiles out. But God also removed that barrier, in Christ, by establishing in Christ a new covenant in His blood, and welcoming anyone, Jews or Gentiles, into close fellowship with Himself. Jew and Gentile unity in Christ, therefore, is possible, it is promised, it is commanded as a result of this New Covenant in Christ. Now today, the basic thesis or idea of this sermon is this: If barriers between people that God did set up have been completely removed by Christ, then how much more are barriers that God didn't set up get removed in Christ. That's the basic idea. It's a "how much more" argument. If barriers that God did set up had been removed, then how much more those He never set up. The dividing walls of hostility between people that destroy peace on Earth have been addressed at the cross. So Christ's death lays the foundation for the removal of every “barrier, every dividing wall of hostility,” resulting in a supernatural unity between Christians of all racial, and ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. A World Divided Now, in this sermon we're going to address two of the most controversial, two of the hardest topics facing us in America today; the issue of racism on the one side, which has been very much in the news over the last year, but not just the last year. And then, the issue of immigration and illegal aliens, and other issues like that, which are very much in the news in this campaign. So, we begin by looking at our world, which is a world divided. We live in a bitterly divided world, with many dividing walls of hostility separating people. They're around us constantly. We think about racial conflict in the U.S. over the last year or more, honestly, over the last century and a half, honestly, even beyond that. The issues of race connected with police incidents led to open racial conflict in Ferguson, Missouri, and demonstrations in Baltimore, Maryland. It's given rise to the movement Black Lives Matter. The level of hostility between blacks and whites has been one of the greatest disgraces in American history, and continues to be a bleeding wound in our national identity. Sometimes, we must wonder if anything can ever heal the rift, the rupture, this wound between us. But honestly, black-white hostility America is not the only example of the deep divisions that continue to rend our world. What I'm going to call in this sermon, “us versus them,” the dynamic of us as a group versus them as a group is all over the world. Just go to the hot spots in the last century and you'll know what I'm talking about. For example, if you went to the Balkans with a long history of racial and religious conflicts between Serbs, and Croats, and Muslims there have bubbled over again and again into war. And when that happens, then revenge creeps in, memories, bitterness, a steel curtain, a “dividing wall of hostility” comes between people. Or think about recent events like Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. Russian troops under the command of President Vladamir Putin. That is leaving scars between those people's national hostility and hatred that those actions have caused. In 1994 in Rwanda, there was a terrible genocide of the Tutsi people by the dominant Hutu majority. A 100-day period in which 800,000 people were slaughtered. Today, the survivors of that conflict live side by side in the same communities trying to forgive and forget, but they know what other folks have done to their loved ones, their ancestors, their relatives, husbands, wives, children, etcetera. Many in Korea and in China retain an intense hatred for the Japanese for the atrocities committed by Japanese troops during World War II, as well as ongoing historical revisionism in Japanese textbooks in which past events are not dealt with honestly. In Nanjing there's a massacre memorial dedicated to the memory of 300,000 Chinese people wantonly slaughtered by occupying Japanese troops. Many Chinese feel an obligation to hate the Japanese forever, a nationalistic obligation. Every year on December 13th in Nanjing, the date the massacre began, then alarms are rung throughout the city so that people will never forget. I could go on and on. You know what I'm talking about, we live in a divided world, a world of “us versus them.” A deeply fragmented wall, fractured by sin and hatred, memories, bitterness, the “dividing walls of hostility.” This is the very thing that Jesus Christ came to remedy. By reconciling, vertically, sinners to God, and then as a result, horizontally, sinners one to another. God’s Plan for Unity Now, God's plan for unity is established throughout the Scriptures, but we see it right in the book that we're studying. Look back at Ephesians 1:9-10. There in Ephesians 1:9-10, God talks about what He planned to do through Jesus, what His purpose is, in Christ. So look at verse 9, Ephesians 1:9-10, "And He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in Heaven and on Earth together under one head, even Christ." Now, that is so breathtakingly glorious and overwhelming that you could meditate on it the rest of your life. You probably have read over it several times, and didn't even notice it was there, you were more focused on the election and predestination verses that precede it a few verses before that. And your head was spinning, and you missed that one, what God is doing in verse 10 of Ephesians chapter 1. God is intending to “bring everything in the universe together under one head, Christ.” It's what He's doing. So, as we said when I preached through in Ephesians 1, sin has had the effect of a fragmentation grenade in the universe, blowing things apart into bits. First and foremost, vertically, humans with God. Then secondly, horizontally, humans one from another. And then, thirdly, the physical creation, the universe around us, which is groaning in its bondage to decay, falling apart. Sin blew the universe apart. The Gospel of Jesus Christ reverses and brings all things back together and makes them one, in Christ. That's what's going on in the world, that is the story of human history. This is the supernatural unity of the human race that only the work of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit can achieve. The United Nations cannot achieve it with all of its diplomats, its diplomacy, its rule and reign. No treaties can. No laws, we cannot look to the federal government or to local officials to do this. It's something that is vastly beyond any force on earth to achieve. The memories are too deep, the bitterness is too real, the hatred, the yearning for revenge. Conversely, the ongoing pride and arrogance that's at the root of racism. We'll talk about that. No external force, the United Nations, no human force can remedy that, it's impossible. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ can, it has, it's going on right now, and it will win in the end. So, I actually stand before you extremely filled with hope and optimism even though this is a dark topic. I'm looking forward to a world, New Heaven, New Earth, a New Jerusalem, in which there will be no racism and no divisions. God's going to win, and that's exciting, isn't it? Perfect Unity Based on the Trinity But Jesus died on the cross to bring about perfect unity between people. In John 11:51-52, it said that Jesus would “die for the Jewish nation, and not for that nation only, but also for the scattered children of God to bring them together and make them one.” Let's ponder that. Ponder that. That is what God is doing. So, how great is that unity that Christ is affecting? Well, it is perfect unity. Absolutely perfect unity in the pattern of the Trinity. If you look at John 17:20-23, just listen, you don't have time to look there, I'm going to be moving fast in this sermon. So if you're incredibly fast with your Bible or whatever, you can keep up, otherwise just listen. But there are just so many verses that teach about this unity. John 17:20-23. Jesus prays, He says, "My prayer is not for them alone," present apostles, "But I also pray for those who will believe in me through their message. That all of them may be one, Father. Just as you are in me and I am in You. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me that they may be one as we are one." Do you hear that? As we are one, it's a trinitarian pattern of unity. "I in them and you in me, may they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." So, if you look carefully at what Jesus prays for there, He's praying that all of them “may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” “All of them,” is all the elect. Those who will one day believe in Jesus through the message of the Gospel. Revelation 5:9-10, "And they sang a new song, ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.’ " That is marvelous, Revelation 5:9-10. So astonishing diversity along with a perfect heavenly unity. That's where we're heading. Now, the unity between the Father and the Son is absolutely perfect. There's never the slightest disagreement, or shadow of conflict between the Father and Son. Never has been, isn't right now, and never will be; they are perfectly one. So what that means is, they agree about everything. I mean, down to the smallest detail. Jesus said in Matthew 10:29, "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered." That's the incredible detail of the mind of God the Father over everything. What I say to you now is, the Son agrees about everything the Father thinks about all those things. ‘You mean the Father and the Son have agreed how many hairs should be on my head?’ Yes! They are in total agreement, there's never been a disagreement about how many hairs should be on your head. You may disagree about how many hairs should be on your head, but the Father and the Son have never disagreed about how many hairs should be on your head. They agree about everything all the time. This is mind-boggling. That's where we're heading, with a multitude from every nation on the face of the earth. We’ll have that level of agreement about everything. Disunity: Addressed in the Epistles Now, unity in the churches then, is a huge issue in the Epistles. How many New Testament Epistles plead with the churches to be one, to be united, to get along with each other? Answer: Almost all of them. And frankly, probably if you look at it closely, all of them. For example, later in Ephesians, look at Ephesians 4. Just flip over maybe one page, verses 1-6. There it says, "As a prisoner for the Lord, then I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is overall and through all and in all." That's a strong appeal to unity in Ephesians 4. But so also you see the same in 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians was about a church ripped apart by factions and divisions. “One followed Paul, one followed Apollos, one followed Cephas, one group followed Jesus,” I don't know what that meant. Sounds good, I don't know, it sounds divisive, too. We're the Jesus party, don't know about the rest of you. And Paul said this in 1 Corinthians 1:10, "I appeal to you brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another, so that there may be no divisions among you, and that you may be," listen to this, "perfectly united in mind and heart." Perfectly united. Does the same thing in Philippians chapter 2. He says, "Make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or in vain conceit, but in humility, consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others." Unity. Same thing in Romans. In Romans 14, he deals with Jew/Gentile divisions over controversial issues; meat sacrifices to idols and special religious days and all that kind of thing, and he pleads for unity among Jewish and Gentile believers. It's an issue in all over the New Testament. Unity Makes for a More Powerful Witness Now, here's my point: The greater the unity within a church, the more power that church will have to preach the Gospel in that community. The more that unity is surprising and super naturally based, the more power will come in preaching the Gospel to that community. So, if you look again at John 17:22-23, as Jesus prays that they may be one as we are one, John 17:23, "I in them and you in me, may they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me." So, that's not talking about Heaven, that's talking about right now, as the world watches us and as we become more and more united, the world will want to know more about Jesus, will want to learn more about Jesus, because they know how hard it is for this unity to happen. It's something that just doesn't happen. So, surprising unity glorifies Christ. So, in Palestine, if you have former Muslims and Jews converting and becoming Christians, and they're living out that unity in worship, let's say on a Sunday morning, that is a powerful witness to the Gospel and to the surrounding community. It shines in a very dark place. Just ripped apart by factions and divisions and dividing walls of hostility. And that's happening. Reading about the church in Bethlehem, the Baptist church in Bethlehem, look it up, it's an interesting place. Imagine being the Pastor, of First Baptist Bethlehem, Israel. Not Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I'm sure they're having a good ministry, too. But the focus there, it's amazing, putting the Gospel on display. So in the Balkans, when Serbs and Croats and former Muslims come together and come to faith in Christ, and then shine with a supernatural unity, it just makes the Gospel more powerful in that community. In Korea when Koreans and Japanese Christians come together and worship, the same thing. So also in Durham, North Carolina. What would be the most surprising unity? I think it would probably be the issue of the black-white division, the African-Americans and Caucasian people coming together in a supernatural show of unity that will make the Gospel very powerful and shine in this community. Jew/Gentile Unity: Pattern for Worldwide Reconciliation Gentile Exclusion Now, let's go back to last week just to root all this in the text. I am preaching Ephesians 2:11-17, just in case you were wondering. “I thought we were an expository kind of preaching church though.” But I want to root it in that. So, home base for Ephesians 2:11-17 is Jew and Gentile unity. The spiritual work that Christ did to make Jews and Gentiles one stands as the pattern for all surprising unity all over the world. That's my basic thesis here. The Jew and Gentile issue was a special case in redemptive history, because it involved the Law of Moses. It involved God's direct action in separating people up. He put up the barrier, the dividing wall. It was erected by the Law of Moses, the Law of God. So that included dietary regulations, circumcision, other certain rules, a focus on genealogies, all those kinds of things, the Gentiles were excluded. And again, the basic thesis of my sermon, then if barriers between people that God did set up have been removed in Christ, how much more then barriers that God never set up have been removed by Christ? Christ's death lays the foundation for the removal of every barrier, every “dividing wall of hostility,” resulting in supernatural unity between Christians of every racial, ethnic, linguistic, national background. So how was it back in the day before we were Christians? Look at verse 11 and 12, "Therefore, remember that formally, you who were Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised by those who call themselves the circumcision, that done in the body by the hands of men. Remember, that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world." That's what we were. We were aliens. We were strangers. We were outsiders. How it is Now If I can push it to one of the application points at the end, we were illegal aliens in the Kingdom of Heaven, we were. We were outsiders. There were laws against us. So what has happened then? Christ has come. Look at verse 13, "Now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ." Verses 14 and 15, "For He himself is our peace who has made the two one." That's what Christ has done. So Christ has brought us near, we are near to God. And being near to God, we are near to each other, near vertically, near horizontally. We've been brought near. Christ is our peace. First, we're at peace with God, “having been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” Romans 5:1. And then, horizontally at peace with each other as well. What Christ Has Done to the Law In order to achieve this, though, Christ had to do something to the Law, and He has. Look at verses 14 and 15, "He himself is our peace, who has made the two one, and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in His flesh the Law with its commandments and regulations." Do you see that right on the page? These are strong words, very strong. The ceremonial laws, what excluded Gentiles from the Assembly of Israel. Do you remember in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down? Do you remember how residents of that area went out with sledgehammers and started pounding on that wall, breaking it apart, and later selling fragments of it with the graffiti for lots of money? But they were breaking down that wall, and what joy. Can I tell you, this wall was unbreakable by anyone but Christ, and He did it in an afternoon, in a single day, removed this forever. So look at the language. The language is powerful here. The ceremonial law that excluded Gentiles from Assembly of Israel. It required circumcision, established dietary regulations. It forbade intermarriage between Jews and the Canaanite nations. It required national unity among the Jews and annual pilgrimages. It upheld genealogies and the ability to prove that you were physically descended from Abraham. But this Law, this barrier, this dividing wall of hostility has been removed. Christ has destroyed the barrier. He broke it down, tore it down. He has abolished the “Law with its commandments and regulations,” abolished it. Hebrews 8:13 goes beyond and says He's made it obsolete. This is language that we would never dream to use of the Word of God, but Christ has done this. “Destroyed,” “abolished,” “obsolete,” and established in His blood a New Covenant that is the basis of our unity. And in the New Covenant these old racial distinctions are obsolete also. They're gone. They don't mean anything. What Jesus Has Done to All His People So what has Christ done? That's what He's done external to us. What has He done within us to bring about this unity? That's staggering as well. Look at verses 15-17. “His purpose was to create in Himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God by which He put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who are far away and peace to those who are near.” So, Christ has made us one, “He has made the two one,” our spiritual union with Christ is also a union with one another, a mystical, spiritual union we have with every true Christian all over the world. And He's made one new man out of the two. So this means we have been transformed. We're different men and women, different boys and girls. We have been changed. We've had the “heart of stone taken out and the heart of flesh put in.” We have been made new in our minds and in our hearts. That's the only way it can happen. We're “new creations.” And so Jesus has made peace vertically with God, and peace horizontally with one another. Verse 17, "He came and preached peace to you who are far away, and peace to those who are near." And so, on that evening of the first day of the week, resurrection day, the greatest day in history, Jesus came to the upper room where the disciples were, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, came right in and stood in their midst. And then He said these marvelous words, "Peace be with you." And then He showed them His hands and His side. You understand the link between the two? Again He said, "Peace be with you." And so, our peace is blood bought. It's expensive. It's been paid for by the blood of Jesus on the cross. And by His resurrection, we are transformed. We're made new. So Jesus has put to death our hostility by the cross. How is that? By reconciliation, by reconciling us vertically to God through His blood. He has, as I said last week, reached down and taken the sword of revenge and hostility and bitterness right out of our hands. You understand He's done that? Do you remember the parable of the 10,000 talents? Remember that? There's a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants, and there was a man there who owed him 10,000 talents; 750,000 lbs of gold. Some of you may collect gold, you don't have 750,000 lbs of it. The gross national product of the Roman Empire, that's what you and I owed before God, and God cancelled all that debt. But then that servant went out and found horizontally, found one of his fellow servants who owed him about a third of a year's wages. It's a lot. It's a lot of money. And he grabbed him and began to choke him, "Pay me what you owe me!", he said. And that servant fell on his knees and said, "Be patient with me. I'll pay it back." But he refused; would not forgive. Instead, he had that man thrown into prison until he should pay back all he owed. Well, the king hauled that guy back in. He said, "I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to, you worthless servant. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had on you?" In anger, his master threw them into the jail to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed. And Jesus said this, "This is how my Father will treat each of you if you will not forgive your brother from the heart." Well, that reaches down takes and takes the sword right out of the hand, doesn't it? I cannot horizontally be unforgiving to anybody if Jesus vertically is going to forgive me for all of my sins. That's the power of unity. That's the power. Jesus has opened a door of access. Look at verse 17 and 18, "He came and preached peace to you who are far away and peace to those who are near. For through Him, we both have access to the,” same Father, “to the Father by one Spirit." So the same Father, same Son, same Spirit, same access, that's unity. That's what we have. So, we're at peace with one another, and we have access to the “Father by the same Spirit.” But we can't go into the Father's presence covered with the muck of unforgiveness, bitterness, and racism, and arrogance. We can't. We must give all that up. How This Destroys Racism So, how does this destroy racism? Well, racism is essentially self-worship. We worship our own skin. We worship our own culture. We worship our own particularities and differences. The cross destroys self-worship along with all idolatry. The cross humbles all lofty, arrogant, proud hearts; and racism is lofty, arrogant, proud in a matter of the heart. The cross enables, empowers forgiveness. The cross teaches the truth about race. For what is it? Acts 17:26, "From one man, He's made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole Earth. And He determined the time set for them, and the exact places where they should live.” So, we are genetically one. And God willed a marvelous, amoral diversity among us. We don't look all the same, thank God! We look different, we have different hair colors, we have different eye colors, we have different physiological things about us. But we also have been settled in different places on Earth and in various mountain valleys and other places, and allowed to just flourish and do culture and develop post Tower of Babel, some languages and other aspects of culture, and those are cultural issues of cultural diversity. Again, I am not using the word diversity the way some educators use it these days. I'm talking about amoral diversity, the differences that God delights in. So, color blindness is not part of my message here. We are different, and we will celebrate. I think we'll be different in Heaven. I think that's marvelous. And so, the ultimate end of this in Revelation 7:9-10, "After this, I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count from every tribe and language and people and nation, standing before the throne in front of the Lamb, and they were wearing white robes, and they are holding palm branches in their hands, and they cried out in a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.'" Dealing with the Problem of Racism in the U.S. and at FBC Long, Difficult History: Race-Based Chattel Slavery Now, let's zero in on the special problem of racism in the United States. This is a long and difficult history, race-based chattel slavery is the basis of it. The first slaves came to the New World, to Jamestown in 1619 on a Dutch ship, which brought 20 Africans captured from a Portuguese slave vessel. Actually, the records aren't clear, they may not have been slaves, but indentured servants, as many poorer white people were, who came over across the ocean for economic opportunity, and they would sell themselves in indentured servitude for seven years, and then they would have their freedom. And so, the records would show of the white indentured servants, their names and then their date of release. But interestingly about the Africans, there was no date of release. So, that might have been right where it started, right there. Slavery was made legal in the colony of Virginia in 1640, though there are only a few dozen slaves at that point. But lucrative crops, like especially tobacco, greatly increased the desire for field workers in Virginia and other colonies. However, even at that point, most of them are white indentured servants coming from England, but The Great Plague and The Great Fire of 1660 in London wiped out a stream of indentured servants flowing to the New World. There was plenty of work to be done in old England at that point, and they didn't want to make the perilous journey, and they didn't need to be indentured servants. They could just work there. So, now what do the plantation owners do? And they turned at that point to chattel slavery among Africans, and the slave trade began in earnest at that point. And over the next 200 years, somewhere between six to seven million Africans were transported in inhuman conditions to America. The issue became intensely regional, as we know, leading to the Civil War. 1845: FBC Durham and the Southern Baptist Convention In 1845, two things happened, relevant to us. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded that year, and First Baptist Church Durham was founded that year; 1845. Now, the SBC, The Southern Baptist Convention, was founded because of a split among Northern and Southern Baptists who were meeting together to foster missions, and to pool their resources for missions. But they couldn't agree on whether a slave owner could serve as a missionary and bring their slaves with them. And so, the Southern Baptists divided over that issue. That's our denomination. For me, growing up as an Irish Catholic in Massachusetts, not an awesome thing. I didn't know that at first when I got involved in the SBC. But isn't it amazing how the Lord said what God has made clean let no one call defiled? God has the ability to clean things up, and I'm grateful for that. Praise God for that. Well, we know about the Civil War reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, lots of history many of us know somewhat, some of us know very well. The Civil Rights Era During the Civil Rights era in our nation, the first half of the 20th century, began the focus of the Civil Rights Movement, the segregation that was involved there, blacks and whites were separated in society. Blacks couldn't use the same drinking fountains, attend the same theaters, eat at the same restaurants. Here in Durham, the Woolworths on 124 West Main Street was the site of a historic sit-in at a lunch counter, and Martin Luther King Junior was present at that time. This was one of the first presentations of non-violent, but direct responses to segregation laws, right here in our city. This pattern became a major strategy for Dr. King's non-violent approach to overturning unjust laws. Now, in 1963, Dr. King, Martin Luther King Jr., was in prison, was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, for his involvement in a demonstration. And he wrote a letter from a Birmingham jail, April 16th, 1963. The letter was written to white clergy who were urging him to be patient and not take such radical steps against racial injustice. "Slow down, be patient." He wrote out of the passion of his heart. I'm going to quote some of it. "For years now, I have heard the word, wait. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This wait has almost always meant never. We have waited for more than 340 years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it's easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will, and drown your sisters and brothers at whim, and when you have seen hate-filled policeman curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity, and when you have seen the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society, when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and you see tears welling up in her little eyes when she's told that Funtown is closed to colored children. And then you see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people. When you're forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness, then you'll understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope sirs you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience." Are We All Racists? There's a sense of urgency even now in our nation to address the issue of racism. I say that we Christians have the only answer, there is no other answer. This past year, I don't know when, but someone found a photo right from the steps of First Baptist Church, Durham, of two white men standing in suits with a serious look on their face and a black couple on the other side, and we don't know what's going on there, but what was happening here during those years? I wasn't here, most of you weren't either. I went through the phone book, the church phone book about six months ago to count the people who I still regularly expect to see attend worship here on Sunday mornings, whose date of joining FBC precedes mine, 57 of you. That number is getting smaller all the time. You know it can't get bigger. Think about that one, you'll figure it out. But there's a certain number of you that were here in those days. And it's difficult to look back. And there's two categories, always sins of omission, sins of commission, and it's hard, but that's what happened, that's where it was, and they are just questions. I don't know what this church was doing then. So it brings us to this poignant issue. Are we all racists? All of us? So, talking to Matthew about this, he says, “Racism,” he calls me Doc, “Racism, Doc, racism sneaky, kind of hides in there.” Would it shock you, FBC, if I told you that I don't struggle at all with any temptations toward tobacco or alcohol use? Would that shock you? Well, I don't. I would guess that a lot of you could say the same thing. No big achievement. Some of you maybe couldn't. But it's no big achievement. Alright, well, would it shock you if on the other hand I said to you, "I don't struggle with pride at all."? "Thank God, I have learned to conquer my pride so completely, I know it will never trouble me again." Would that bother you? “Yes!”, alright, thank you. Can I get a witness, right? Yes. Okay. Well then, apparently there are some sins that only some people struggle with, and we can honestly say “I'm not struggling with that,” I'm not saying I couldn't in the future, but it's just not a problem for me. And I need put no effort toward killing temptations in that area. But there are others that are so pervasive that we know that probably we struggle at some level. I think that racism tends more toward the second, not the first. It's more subtle than you may think. And just because you're not racist toward one category of people, doesn't mean you might not have a latent racism toward another category. So, it's sneaky and it's difficult. How it is Now So, how is it now? Well, this church, FBC Durham, has grown a lot since the mid 60s. There are many fruitful ministries that cut across ethnic lines and put Christ on display. But the actuality is that there is a clearly dominant ethnic flavor to this church. If you don't know what I mean, then just take a minute and look around. See, everybody is too embarrassed to do it. But you know what you would see if you looked around. People who study these things sociologically say you have to reach a 20% level before you could genuinely be called multi-ethnic. 20%. If 20% of those that worship in a church on Sunday morning are not of the dominant ethnic background, the dominant, then you're multi-ethnic. Also, statistics show that less than 7% of the congregations on Sunday morning are multiethnic. So that leads to a statement that I've heard, that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week in America, and it is so voluntarily. It's not like there are segregation laws on this, just people, and here we go, homogenous unit principle, you ready for this? People like to worship with people like themselves. Someone once said there should be a corollary to that, saying, "Yes, but they ought not be permitted to do so.” But what are you going to do? How do you stop it? I have yearned for years, to see FBC Durham to be a genuinely multiethnic community, and we're not, not yet. And just because we yearn to make it so it doesn't mean it will happen, it's very difficult to have it happen, it's hard. Now, I praise God that across an average year, not just blacks and whites, but many different ethnic backgrounds worship here on Sundays. It's fantastic, I love to see it. We have a flourishing international connections ministry, people from many different nations worship here as a result of that. The black and white issue is not the only one, I praise God that we have African-Americans that worship here with us. Application But we have here a tremendous opportunity for ministry, and that's what I want to transition to now briefly, just some applications. Come to Christ! First and foremost, can I just plead with any of you that are here that are not Christians to come to faith in Christ? I am offering zero advice to non-Christians on the issue of racism. I have no advice. Now, you could say that's extreme. We can influence non-Christians. I think that's actually true, I think we can, we can be salt and light, but to the heart of the issue, only the Gospel can transform the human heart. So I am appealing even beyond the issue of racism, which is temporary, for the sake of your own souls that you flee to Christ while there's time, that you find forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ. Self-Examination Secondly, if I can just say to Christians, would you please take Psalm 139:23-24 and say, "Search me, O God, and know my heart on the issue of racism. Show me if there's anything in me that's offensive to you. O God, help me not assume I'm not racist in some way. Please God, drive it out of me. Please make me, as much as possible, heavenly in my outlook now, before I ever get to Heaven. I know, Lord, if you will do that, I'll be far more fruitful and effective in ministry. Make me heavenly, forgive me, God, for what I've done. Forgive me for things I've said. Forgive me for sins of omission, forgive me for sins of commission on the issue of racism. Please change me, God. Search me and know me." Delight in What God is Doing Here And then delight in and get involved in the kind of ministries that are going on here. There's a lot of good things you can do. International Connections. Any chance those brothers and sisters would like a little help? Talk to Ron Halbrooks and others. Chase, can you guys use volunteers? Yes, he's saying yes. If you would like to get involved in teaching English on Wednesday evenings or other forms of ministry, fantastic. One of the best things you could do is say, "We would like to host some internationals in our home, we'd like to have them over, we'd like to get to know them." Many internationals never visit a home. You'd like to get involved in that. Now, concerning racism, can I just tell you the very fact that overt racism could never be tolerated in this church is something to celebrate. If I ever, if the elders ever heard that anything like that ever happened, it would be a matter of immediate church discipline, and we should praise God for that. That's progress. So the spirit in which I'm commending some change to you is this, 1 Thessalonians 4:9-10. "Now, about brotherly love, we do not need to write you for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other, and in fact, you do love all the brothers throughout Macedonia. Yet, we urge you brothers to do so more and more." So, we're doing better than we were, but we can definitely be urged to do so more and more. That's all. So get involved. Get involved in International Connections, get involved in Prison Ministry. In a couple of weeks, we're going to have a chance to hear a testimony from a brother in Christ who was saved in Prison Ministry. We need men, specifically men, to get involved in that ministry. So, pray for it and see if you can get involved in that kind of thing. There are so many things we can do in terms of City Outreach. Talk to Matthew, he'll tell you the kinds of opportunities that we have here. Let's see if we can more and more pray toward our church being genuinely multiethnic, pray toward the 80%-20%, pray toward the 20%, and then 25% and 30%, whatever God wills. Pray that God would make us a genuinely multiethnic church. Matthew Hodges gave me a bunch of applications. Three pages, I think, Brother. If you want the full list, and it's good, alright. I'll tell you what, I'm going to bring these papers to the back of the church. I'm going to hold them in my hand until someone says, "I would like them." All you have to do is just promise to read them all. I don't have time to read them all, but I'm going to say a few things. The window for racial and ethnic unity at First Baptist Church is now open. Let's use it, let's employ this open window, this opportunity. Racism is a complex issue that needs the whole plan of redemption applied to it. It is easy to become defensive, deflective, and dismissive on the issue of racism. Don't let that happen. One of the best ways to heal racial strife is to fellowship with Christians of different races. Let's find out African-American churches that are working well, here in our community, and let's pray for them and see if there's ways we can partner with them. We should go out of our way to befriend people of different backgrounds. We should be open to others who don't see the race issue the way we do. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to become angry. When we are in the very large majority, we do not even operate in the category of ethnicity, race. We are humans, they're the ones with the race problem. Don't think like that, that's not true. Dealing With Immigration One final word I want to say, and then I'll be done. It's the issue of immigration. What's called illegal immigrants, sometimes called undocumented immigrants. This may be the second most controversial "us versus them" issue facing us today behind racism. Lots of powerful political rhetoric going on right now from presidential candidates on this issue. I'm not saying their names, but you know who I'm talking about, saying very potent and clear things about illegal immigrants, and citing dangers of ISIS, and dangers socioeconomically to our health care system, all kinds of things, issues of fairness, etcetera. And many of those comments are finding presently a resonant chord in the evangelical community. So I know I'm probably on thin ice with some of you out there. Where are we going with this? So, help me not to fall through. I did that once when I was 11, it wasn't fun. Russell Moore, President of the Ethics and Religious Life Committee, ERLC of the SBC, said this, "There are 12 million undocumented immigrants or aliens in our country. Our approach cannot be basically saying in Spanish or any other language, 'You kids get off my lawn.' That can't be our approach. This is a Gospel issue," says Russell Moore. “Jesus was a so-called illegal alien in Egypt when He fled for His life with His parents. In that way, he patterned the Jews who were, in some ways, undocumented aliens in Egypt. So much so that God said to Moses in Deuteronomy 10, "God executes justice for the fatherless and widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing." Listen to this, “ ‘Therefore, you should love the alien, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.’" Deuteronomy 10:18-19. Jesus said in the sheep and the goats, “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty you gave me something to drink, I was naked and you clothed me." What was the next one? "I was a stranger and you invited me in." There are serious political issues, I do not deny them. Borders should be secure. Businesses should be held accountable to what they do with their undocumented workers. Some of them bully them and threaten them with deportation if they don't do what they say. The Bible has a lot to say about wages withheld from workers and issues of justice. So there are gnarly issues here, but there's also, do you not see it? An incredible ministry opportunity for us. Talk about the Hispanic community for just a minute. In our community, the numbers have risen since I've been here, in the 17 years from, I think, something like 2,000 to well over 30,000 in the year 2010, and probably far more than that now. I don't know. Estimates are about 80% of them are undocumented. They are not an issue. They are people. And the issues of legality are real. But as Richard Lan said it, “Our country is saying to the world two things: Borders closed, and open for hire.” Both of those things are going on right now. So it's not as easy as it may seem. Ministry with Undocumented Immigrants David Platt, in his book Counter Culture, spoke of a flourishing ministry a pastor friend named Tyler, and as a senior pastor in Arizona. Tons of illegal immigrants, tons of rancorous political debate, Tyler and a handful of people began just simply serving migrant workers in Arizona, giving them food, clothing. Personal relationships started to develop. They listened, they learned from the people that they were serving. He said this, "It wasn't long before people we were asking to help us began donating more than food, they began donating their lives." It led to the construction of a Community Center in a Latino neighborhood. At that Community Center, there are weekly English classes, after school programs, life skill training, Bible studies, and conversions going on, and discipleship going on. Tons of opportunities to share the Gospel and lead people to Christ. Also, tons of controversies and difficulties, too. What do we expect? And so I'm asking that some of you who have a heart for this city, who have a heart for racial reconciliation, a heart for African-American connections, a heart for the Latino community, step up and say, "How can we begin serving? How can we begin ministering?" I don't know what the answers are. To me, this is the scariest part of the whole sermon; what are we going to do about it? Is it just going to be rhetoric, or are we actually going to act?" But I know this, in the end, every elect person will be standing around the throne, they'll be in a white robe, and they will be praising God. And no one's ethnic or socioeconomic background will in any way hinder them from being there. Close with me in prayer. Prayer Father, we thank you for the Gospel, thank you for the truth that we have in Ephesians 2:11-17, how Christ has made a way for us to be reconciled to God and to one another. Help us to find ministries in this community that will be fruitful evangelistically. For the praise of your glory, in Jesus' name, amen.

Pastor Andy Davis delivers an expository sermon on Galatians 2:1-11, and the importance of guarding the truthfulness of the Gospel. I. Introduction: The Importance of Guarding the Recipe Turn in your Bibles to Galatians 2:1-10. We're looking today at that incredible passage Bill just read for us. When I was a design engineer, I worked for a number of different companies. I worked for a company that made ion implanters, which was used for making semiconductors. I worked for a company that made eye surgical equipment. I worked for a company that made coffee-brewing equipment. So that's a wide range of engineering jobs, but my job as a design engineer was to come up basically with the recipe for a product, whatever it was, a recipe that was tested in the lab and that worked, so that we could then crank out hundreds if not thousands once we got the recipe right. And it struck me as I was thinking about Galatians 2 that that's an apt analogy. Companies all over this country are working on recipes for products, and in mechanical things we don't use that word "recipe" that's more something that's cooked, but I'm sticking with that word here. For automobiles, they're working through the designs, coming up with the plans. For architects, they're working on blueprints and designs for structure and often those designs would be used again and again for the same type of house all over the country. People that work for companies that make confections or cookies or something like that, they literally are working on a recipe and chefs are trying different ingredients and they are trying for the right combination of ingredients to make a cookie or some kind of confection that's just going to melt in your mouth, and be very successful. Once the recipe is right they are going to crank out hundreds of thousands of these things and send them to the ends of the Earth, so they hope anyway. Pharmaceutical companies here in the RTP are coming up with recipes for drugs, addressing various issues like AIDS, or cancer, or MS. Once they get the recipe right, they're going to be cranking out hundreds of thousands of pills. Other companies are trying to maintain existing recipes and protect them from being changed in any way, sometimes through their own foolishness. Think about Coca-Cola, remember when they changed their recipe? You guys remember the 1980s? And they came up with the New Coke and it bombed. Everybody wanted the old Coke back. Remember that whole story? And so for a while they ran them side by side, Coke Classic, remember that? Then the New Coke kind of disappeared, remember that? And Coke Classic ran for a while and then it was just Coca-Cola again. And so they've got that special recipe somewhere in a safe, I don't know where, maybe Atlanta, Georgia, and from now on I think they're going to guard it with their lives and not change anything. And I didn't realize this but 1.7 billion servings of Coca-Cola are served worldwide everyday. Everyday. If only the Gospel could be as widespread as Coca-Cola. It's just incredible. And then in some scary ways, think about what happened in 1982 with Tylenol, how somebody got into some bottles and laced it with cyanide and seven people died, and after that the industry came up with protections, so that you knew that when you broke open that bottle that it was going be protected from a poison having been added, etcetera. These are all examples of perfecting the recipe, getting the recipe right, and protecting that recipe once it's been gotten right, so that what gets cranked out and sent to the ends of the Earth is exactly as it should be, and frankly I think that's what's going on in Galatians 2:1-10. I think the apostle Paul was raised up in a marvelous way by the sovereign hand of God to protect the recipe of human salvation that had come down from heaven to Earth, that had been crafted in the mind of God before the foundation of the world, to protect it from anything being added to it or taken away from it, for anything added to this recipe is poison, and anything taken away from that recipe is absolutely essential to it. God has crafted it as perfect – the Gospel. It is the power of salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and then for the Gentile, for in the gospel righteousness from God is revealed, righteousness, that is from faith to faith, justice is written. The righteous will live by faith. That's the Gospel. And the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, "What I received I passed on to you as of first importance. That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures." "I receive this," and we're going find out, and we've already learned, "from Heaven, from God, from Jesus himself," the apostle Paul would say, "and I passed it on to you." II. Paul and the False Brothers: Steadfast Preserving of the Gospel (Verses 1-5) God has raised this man up, apostle Paul, he raised him up to protect the recipe of the Gospel from adulteration, from being poisoned, from being changed. So let's try to understand our context. We're just kind of, to some degree, parachuting right into the midst of a flow, an argument, really a testimony that Paul has given for a point concerning him in the Gospel. Let's understand our context here in Galatians 2:1-10. Soon after the apostle Paul, who was a traveling, church-planting, evangelist and apostle had moved through modern-day Turkey, Asia Minor, Galatia. He planted some churches there through the simple preaching of the Word and through discipleship. He then left the area and other teachers came along and began contradicting or adding to the Gospel message that Paul preached, preaching a different gospel other than the one that he had preached. They were Jews. They were Jewish people who claimed to believe in Jesus, who loved (so they said), Jesus, who loved the work of Christ and the cross (so they said), but added to it the idea that the gentiles had to be circumcised. And they required Gentiles to obey the law of Moses, and said that if they weren't circumcised and if they weren't obedient to the law of Moses, they could not be saved. "God has raised this man up, [the] Apostle Paul ... to protect the recipe of the Gospel from adulteration, from being poisoned, from being changed." These teachers are commonly called Judaizers because they were really trying to make gentiles into Jews. They were establishing this new doctrine, by in some very significant ways, discrediting the apostle Paul. They weren't slamming him, but to some degree, it seems that they were calling him a second-hander, kind of a second-generation guy who came along after the fact and who got his message, like a Johnny-come-lately, got his message from the Jerusalem leaders, apostles of Jerusalem, but got it wrong. He kind of apprenticed under them for a while, hung with them for a while, but now he's out and about and he's off, he's getting it wrong and that we Judaizers, we've got it right. We've got the real gospel and you've got to be circumcised and you've got to obey the Law of Moses. Yes, Jesus is wonderful, he's great, but in addition to that, you need the law of Moses. And so this is a very serious attack on the Gospel. It's an attack on Paul but it's also an attack on the Gospel and so Paul in Galatians 1 and 2 is seeking to defend both his apostleship and his Gospel message. They go together, the man and his message go together. And so from the very beginning, if you look at Galatians 1:1, he says, "Paul an apostle." That means “sent one.” "Paul an apostle sent not from men nor by man but by Jesus Christ and by God the Father who raised him from the dead." So right away he's establishing, "My apostleship was not from human origin. It wasn't from man, it was from God, it was from Jesus." And then he adds, "Also his message was from heaven as well." Same thing. Look at verses 11 and 12, Galatians 1:11-12 he says, "I want you to know, brothers, that the Gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it. Rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ." And so he spends the rest of Galatians 1 basically proving his independence from the Church of Jerusalem. He's independent. He's independent from the Jerusalem apostles. He's every bit as authoritative as they are. His calling originates like theirs did from Jesus. He's no second-hander. He's no Johnny-come-lately. And his desire in all this is not to stoke his ego so people will think well of him, it's but so that they will understand his mission and his message are from God and he needs to be listened to. He can't be dismissed. God has opened up a conduit of blessing to the churches through Paul, and if you shut that down you're going be missing significant messages that God has to say through me, he's saying that. III. Paul and the Jerusalem Leaders: Independence, Yet Unity (Verses 2, 6-10) And you've already heard the Gospel from me [Paul] and you're going start questioning, that's the biggest problem of all. You will be receiving a gospel that's no gospel at all. But as the same time as he's seeking to distance himself and show some independence from the Jerusalem apostles he also wants to show unity with them. This is a challenge here. He's saying, "We are together and we are one in this," so that the gospel spreads from Jerusalem through Judea and Samaria on a unified, solid basis. It's built firm on a foundation that's not moving, there are no cracks in that foundation. As it says in Ephesians 2 that God's household, 2:19 and following, God's household is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. And in him, the whole building, the church is joined together and rises to become a Holy Temple in the Lord and in him, you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit.” Yeah, but if there's cracks in the foundation, if there's a rift between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles that's very, very significant. That's a problem. So that's what Paul is trying to do in Galatians 2:1-10. He is a bit walking a tightrope here, across the Niagara Falls or something like that, with danger all around, and he needs to show independence but also unity at the same time, and that's what he's trying to do here. So the issue here are some false brothers, he said, "that rose up to challenge the doctrine." So who were these false brothers and how did they attack the Gospel? Look at verse 4. It said, "This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves." Now this may seem extremely harsh: They are not true Christians. They are not real brothers in Christ, they are false brothers. In our tolerance-loving age, we need to get a sense of Paul's commitment to the truth here, we really do. And Paul is willing to speak the truth here, he's willing to tell the truth and it really makes sense. Look back at Galatians 1:6-9. There he says, "I'm astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to [What does he call it?] A different gospel which is really no gospel at all. [You see that?] Evidently, some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the Gospel of Christ. [But, verse 8] Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preach to you, let him be eternally condemned. As we have already said, so now I say again, if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than the one you received, let him be eternally condemned!" Now here's the formula. False gospels produce false brothers. It makes sense, doesn't it? You just see the consistency. He said, "It's a false Gospel, they're the ones propagating it, they must be false brothers." If you're not getting the right Gospel, then you're not a genuine believer in Christ. That's the issue, that's what's at stake here. Now these false brothers however are different than the Jews who are mentioned in 1 Thessalonians 2 who chased Paul from pillar to post, who persecuted him everywhere. They're different. They're Jews, yes, but they're not going say they hate Jesus and think of him as a deceiver of the people. They said they love Jesus. They said they follow Jesus. That they, I don't know what they said, appreciated Jesus' ministry. I don't know, how do you put it? Saying it's not enough but it's still pretty good, but they said they were in favor, or they love the work of Christ. They're false brothers because they outwardly embraced Jesus as the Messiah but inwardly their goal was to transform the gentiles into Jews, that's what they were trying to do. So Paul accuses them there of infiltrating their ranks, coming in and spying out the freedom they have in Jesus, and they want to make them slaves. That's what he's saying, the freedom is from the freedom of the oppression of the law of Moses, of thinking “I've got to meticulously keep every jot and tittle or I'm going to go to Hell, I'm gonna be condemned.” It's blessings and curses and that's a burden, it's crushing. Freedom from the law's ability to condemn us and send us to Hell. Oh, what freedom is that! And there were other freedoms too. Ceremonial laws that had served their purpose, their time was done and circumcision was part of that, the dietary regulations were part of that. They didn't need to be circumcised any more, the time of that was over. Once Jesus was identified to the world as a Jew born under the law, the time for that barrier, that dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentiles was gone. And there was no longer any need for markers of how the Jews were different than gentiles, that time has finished. Now God's working one new man out of the two, Christian. The only thing that matters is not circumcision, it's not un-circumcision, what matters is a new creation, faith in Jesus. He is doing a new work here and you're free now. You're free, free from condemnation, free from the law's regulations that separated you from one another. Perfectly free because God sent his son, Amen? Oh, you just need to revel in that freedom. How sweet is it to be free from condemnation? How sweet is it to know you're forgiven? And so these false brothers have come to come make them slaves again, spy out their freedom, subterfuge, claiming to be something they weren't. Messengers of Satan really, ultimately, endangering the Gospel itself. And they were teaching a compulsion, there was a compulsion here. Not just, "Gentiles, you might want to think about getting circumcised. If I could just give you some advice, circumcision might help you." They're not saying that, are they? No, what are they saying? Look at verse three, "Yet not even Titus who was with me was compelled to be circumcised." There's the compulsion, right? Look down to verse 14, it's not in our text today but just go ahead and look. You're allowed to do that by the way, so just jump ahead. Verse 14 it says, "But when I saw that they were deviating from the truth of the Gospel I told Cephas, [Peter] in front of everyone, if you, who are a Jew, live like a gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel gentiles to live like Jews?" Again, compulsion. Okay, what's the compulsion? Well, it's really spelled out for us in Acts 15:1 and 5, all right? Acts 15:1 and 5 tells us the compulsion. Acts 15, “some men came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the brothers ‘unless you are circumcised according to the law of Moses, you cannot be saved.’” That's pretty compelling, isn't it? That's compelling. If you don't receive this religious ritual, you're going to Hell. Wow. And then again Acts 15:5, "Some of the believers came from the party of the Pharisees and stood up and said, 'It is necessary to circumcise them and command them to keep the law of Moses.'" Necessary for what? Well, we already covered that, for salvation and then secondarily, healthy membership in the church. If you're going to be a right member, a member in good standing of this church, oh, gentiles you must become Jews. That's what's going on. So the backdrop of Galatians 2:1-10 is laid out for us plainly in Acts 15, leading to what happened in Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council. And so the Jerusalem Council happened when the Jerusalem leaders, the Apostles in Jerusalem, met together with Paul and Barnabas, and I'm sure some others, to decide this issue, to decide this circumcision question. So I think the Jerusalem Council is behind all of this, so we can address this passage now from the beginning. Look at verse 1 and 2, "14 years later, [after my first very brief visit to Jerusalem], 14 years later I went back to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along. I went in response to a revelation and set before them the Gospel that I preach among the gentiles." So he was led by God. Paul wasn't summoned by his overlords, the Jerusalem apostles, you see that? He wasn't. Why did he go to Jerusalem? God told him to go. You see that? "I was led by a revelation." Paul frequently, as an apostle, was led in ways we wouldn't be led. Like remember the vision of the man from Macedonia? Come over and help us, and so he knew that it was time to go over to Europe, heading toward Europe, so he would be frequently guided by visions and revelations and so this was one of them. "Paul, I want you to go to Jerusalem." So he is again distancing himself from the Jerusalem apostles, "They didn't command me to go, I'm not their errand boy. I went because God told me to go. I went in response to a revelation." And so they met together in the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. Why did he go? God told him to go. He wanted Paul to defend the Gospel message that he was preaching among the gentiles. He went to defend the Gospel and to explain it. He brought Barnabas along with him to testify to the truth of his assertions because every matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. So he brought Barnabas, too, Barnabas was there on their missionary journey and he could explain it, and he also brought Titus. Now that's interesting. Titus was, at that point, no significant leader in the life of the church, he was just, we could say, a run-of-the-mill gentile convert. But very strategic for Paul to bring him, very strategic. Okay, you think, you Judaizers think Gentiles, in abstraction, gentiles need to be circumcised in order to go to heaven and if they're not circumcised they're going to hell? Tell Titus, tell him. Tell him to his face. I think they were willing to do it. I get the sense there was a struggle there but there's a sense of an object lesson. This is a real man. These are real people that we're dealing with. They're filled with joy that their sins are forgiven through faith in Jesus and now you're bringing them back under the shadow of the law. This is a real individual. Also, going back to my recipe analogy or prototype or something like that, you kinda have, "Let's figure out with Titus 'cause we're about to be replicating this to the ends of the Earth. Let's figure out with this one individual 'cause we're gonna be doing this again and again for centuries." They wouldn't have known that but we know now. Are we doing this? Is this the recipe, Christ plus circumcision is salvation? Let's figure it out now. So, Titus was there as well. Now, he's concerned about the unity of the church. He says, "I went in response to a revelation and set before them the Gospel that I preach among the gentiles but [I did this privately.] I did this privately to those who seem to be leaders for fear that I was running or had run my race in vain." Now, I don't know exactly, strategically why they met alone with Peter, James, and John, but they did, they met alone and they talked about doctrine. They worked it through privately and it was just the wisdom of God to do it that way. But he was afraid, he says, that he had run or was running his race in vain. Now what is he talking about that? Well, his race is his ministry. As he goes from city to city, from town to town, from place to place preaching the Gospel, persecuted, standing up for the Gospel, standing up for the doctrine, that's his race. Acts 20 in verse 24, he says there to the Ephesian elders, he says, "However, I consider my life worth nothing to me if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me, the task of testifying to the Gospel of God's grace." So that's his race. He's running that race. That's his external journey. He's running it. But he was afraid that he had run or had run his race in vain. Now, he used this language a lot. He's afraid sometimes with the Thessalonians that because of persecution he had labored in vain there. And it has to do with having your work undone as though Paul had somehow built a sandcastle in Galatia or a bunch of sandcastles in these churches in Galatia and now the incoming tide was going to wash it all away, there'd be nothing left. If they could discredit Paul, if Paul's Gospel could be discredited, it's all undone. It's gone. All those gentiles would go back to worshipping whatever gods and goddesses they worshipped before he came and the whole thing would be in vain. So this is a key moment in redemptive history, guys, do you see that? We're trying to get the Gospel recipe right. It's just beginning to be spread to the gentiles and I would guess the absolute overwhelming majority of you folks are gentiles. You're interested. This is your moment. Paul said, "I did it for you so that the truth of the Gospel might remain with you and me." So this is long before you were born, Paul was fighting for you. Praise God for that, amen. He was your champion, he was fighting for you and God raised him up. And I think it's right for you on Thanksgiving, which is coming up soon, thank God for people who died long before you were born who gave you gifts by protecting the Gospel and preaching it clearly and accurately. And so he fought for you and so he presents this Gospel, it says to those who seem to be important." I love that. They seem to be of reputation. We'll get to all that. Peter, James, and John who were reputed to be pillars and they gave to Paul the right hand of fellowship, and what was the outcome? They agreed he was preaching the right Gospel and not even Titus was compelled to be circumcised. This is a key moment and Paul gives you a sense, a glimpse of the fight here. This wasn't a sweet little discussion. "Hey, what do you think?" "I don't know. What do you think?" Circumcision, yes, no. 51% we're in, alright. It wasn't that at all. There were convictions and passions on the part of the Judaizers, they were convinced, they were pointing chapter and verse, they were going to Genesis 17, they were going to other places and they were showing circumcision as a requirement. They're like, "What you do with that?" But notice the fight. It says here, "That these false brothers who'd infiltrated the ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus." Look at verse 5, "We did not give in to them for a moment. We stood firm." This is like, I hate to lower it to sports, but this is like a goal-line stand here. We're not going to yield for a moment or we lose, I can't yield. And so I don't sense it was pleasant, do you? Do you sense this is a pleasant conversation? He's like, "False brothers, you guys are false, you're not even Christians. You don't even seem to understand grace, you don't understand what Jesus did. No, Titus will not be circumcised, over my dead body," that kind of thing. I don't know if all that got said but things like that. We didn't yield for a moment. Why, Paul, why are you fighting? So that the truth of the Gospel, oh Galatians, might remain with you. I wanted you to have the true Gospel, that's why I didn't yield. That recipe, that's poison. Christ plus law equals salvation, that's false. That's worse than cyanide being added to Tylenol. It deals with eternal souls. No, that gospel is not true. And so he fought for the Gospel, he fought against the false teachers and he did what Jude 3 says we must do. "Dear friends, [this is Jude 3] although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation that we share, I felt I had to write and urge you, [listen] to contend, to fight for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints." Do you hear those words? We're going to fight for this thing, we're going to fight for the Gospel because it was once for all entrusted to the saints. Don't change it, don't add to it, it's poison. Don't take away from it, whatever you take is essential to it. Everything is perfect, just protect it, it was entrusted to you. And so Paul does that. Now the second aspect of what he's trying to do here is to show his relationship to the Jerusalem apostles and I've already touched on it but he wants to show independence and yet unity with them. He's walking this challenging tightrope, okay? But fundamentally, what Paul's saying is that God, Jesus, called me on the Damascus road to my ministry. It had nothing to do with these men, nothing. They didn't give me my apostleship and they didn't give me my message and they didn't add anything to my message. Neither. He doesn't say this, but neither did they take anything away from it. My message didn't come from those men and my authority didn't come from them. So he uses language that seems to be disrespectful but he's not meaning it. He says, "Those reputed to be pillars," and then he even goes beyond that, saying, "Hey, look, whatever they were doesn't matter to me. Makes no difference to me what James, Peter, and John were." That sounds a little disrespectful, doesn't it? It's like them saying, "Well, it doesn't matter to me what you are Paul, frankly." But that's not what he's doing, it's not like he doesn't have good fellowship. He actually said, "We did have good fellowship, they extended to me the right hand of fellowship. I do respect them, I do honor them, but I didn't get anything from them. They didn't change my message. They didn't give me my apostleship, I got it from Jesus absolutely. So on the one hand, I am independent from these men, the Jerusalem leaders, in my calling as an apostle and my Gospel message, but on the other hand, guess what? We're preaching the same gospel, and guess what? The same God called us to our work and isn't that encouraging? Isn't that awesome to see how God can raise up different laborers to do different works but we're all preaching the same Gospel and we're accountable to the same God?" Now that's what he's saying here. So he gives us in verse 1, “14 years later,” he's saying. "Look, they weren't teaching me anything, I didn't learn anything from them for 14 years, I wasn't even there, and I sure didn't get them on closed circuit TV or on the Web, alright? They weren't given anything to me, it was directly from God. And they seem to be leaders," he's not trying to be disrespectful. "Whatever... " verse 6, "Whatever they were makes no difference to me, God doesn't judge by external appearance." What is he doing there? He's saying, "I'm not accountable to them. I'm not going to stand before them on judgment day," that's what he's saying. Paul had an intense sense of personal accountability to God for his ministry, personal accountability. And so he says in Galatians 1:10, "I am not seeking the approval of men. That's not what I'm in it for. I'm not trying to please men because if I were doing that I would no longer be a servant of Christ." And so he says in Acts 26:19 in his testimony to King Agrippa, he said, "So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from Heaven." That's how he sees it. “Jesus appeared to me from heaven. He told me to do something, I didn't disobey him. He told me to do this, it wasn't Peter, James, and John who told me to do this.” And why is that? Why does he have that sense of accountability? 2 Corinthians 5:10, "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that each one may receive what is due him for the things done in the body, whether good or bad." You are, I am, we're all going to be standing before Jesus someday. And so therefore he says in 1 Corinthians 4:1-4, "So then men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and those entrusted with the secret things of God. Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful to the one who gave it." Listen to this, 1 Corinthians 4:3, "I care very little if I'm judged by you or by any human court." Now again, that may seem disrespectful, doesn't it? But it isn't. What he's saying is, I'm not thinking about you in reference to my accountability, in reference to my stewardship. I'm thinking about the one who gave it to me. I care very little if I'm judged by you or by any human court. Can I just pause and say, wouldn't you love to get to that place? What kind of an evangelist would that make you? How bold would you be in standing for Christ if you really lived like that? I care very little if I'm judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I don't even judge myself, my conscience is clear but that doesn't make me innocent, it is the Lord who judges me. So that's what he's saying here, he's independent and yet, praise God, praise God, united, united. They determined they had the same recipe. Christ plus nothing, sovereign grace, justification by faith alone, apart from works of the law. We're preaching the same Gospel, amen. And it's going to go to the ends of the Earth, we're going to replicate this thing again and again. It's going to make for the Lord a multitude of believers from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation. We have seen this Gospel crank out people, rescuing them from Hell and bringing them to heaven. This Gospel recipe works. It is the power of God for salvation, and praise God they got it right. But it wasn't an accident that they got it right, amen? God sovereignly ordained that they would get it right, but he just used Paul to do it, and Peter and John. And so they gave them the right hand of fellowship and said, "We're preaching the same Gospel." And beyond that he could see, it's like, "I do respect Peter. God raised Peter up and God was at work in Peter's ministry just like in mine." He's not disrespecting Peter. He knows the story, I'm sure he knows it, how in Caesarea Philippi Jesus said, "What do you think about the son of man? Who is he? Some say this, some say... What about you? Who do you say that I am?" "You are the Christ, you are the son of the living God." Peter said that. Do you remember what Jesus said to Peter? "Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man but by my Father in Heaven." He had the same revelation of Jesus by the Father. Isn't that awesome? God was at work in Peter's life. And Jesus then said to Peter, "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it." How could Paul say, "I follow Jesus but I don't care about Peter." He didn't say that at all. He says the same God is at work in Peter's ministry to the Jews as he is in my ministry to the gentiles and we have complete unity together. So where does that leave the Judaizers? On the outside. They're out in the cold, they're false teachers. The Jerusalem apostles and Paul were preaching the exact same message and they gave their right hand of fellowship but they say one more thing, one more thing. Please don't forget the poor as you do this. Look at verse 10. "All they ask was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do." VI. Paul and the Mission: Pure Doctrine and Compassion for the Poor And so there's not a lot here, he just mentions it in passing and so I'm not going to belabor it, but wherever the Gospel's needed most there's also poverty there. We see that again and again. Satan impoverishes people at every level and so when people are held in thrall by Satan they tend to be crushed in every way, and so they're not blessed materially, they're poor. You folks know missiologists have looked at where are the unreached people groups and they say most of them are in North Africa, the Middle East, going across over through Iran and heading toward India, China, Indonesia, what they call the 10/40 window. Latitude 10 to 40, that swath, that's where most of the unreached people groups are. Well, guess what? 82% of the world's three billion poorest people live there too. So if you're going to go minister the Gospel, you're going to be staring into the jaws of poverty. And so remember the poor, Paul, as you preach the gospel, remember the poor and be concerned about them. Okay, so what causes that poverty? Human sin, human sin directly and indirectly. Satan dominates peoples minds and hearts. The earth produces far more food than is needed to feed every one of the seven billion of us. Then why do people starve? Why is there poverty? Well, because of man-made religions, and cold-hearted governments, and vicious gangs, vigilante gangs that are trying to take over countries where there's anarchy, and wild-eyed insurgents, and revolutionaries, and greedy industrialists, and selfish tribal chiefs, and lazy fathers, and drug-addicted mothers, and cycles of social injustice, and all of that, and 100 other sins add up to poverty, add up to poverty. And wherever the Gospel goes, and people repent and genuinely start walking by the spirit, things change radically. So if you're going to go with the Gospel, you're going to go and minister to the poor and needy. V. Application So what application can we take from this? I want to give you three main headings. Delighting in the Gospel, defending the Gospel, and extending the Gospel, those three. Let's start with delighting in the Gospel. This is glorious. It is a joy to preach this gospel. Isn't it marvelous? To proclaim in Jesus the forgiveness of sins to all of you is a great privilege and joy. Do you know that saving love of Christ? Maybe you were invited today by a friend. I hope we're inviting people to church. I can promise you, dear church members, you invite people, they'll hear the Gospel every week, I promise you. I'm making a pledge before you, every week, at some point, I will clearly explain how lost people can be saved. So if you know you're lost, you know you're on the outside, this is for you. I just want to explain it to you, you can't save yourself by works. There's nothing you can do, no present obedience can pay for past disobedience to God's laws, it doesn't work that way. Instead what you need to do is humble yourself before Jesus and say, "You came, you're the Son of God, you died on the cross in my place, I trust in you, save me." Call on the name of the Lord and he will save you. Delight in that. Embrace it by faith. Now if you've done that, you embraced in that years ago, now I'm just asking you to be happy about it. I'm asking you to show your joy everywhere you go. Even in the midst of great sorrow still always rejoicing. Delight in this Gospel. Delight in how much it glorifies God. It's so God-centered, isn't it? Not by works but by God. That's God-honoring, God-glorifying. Delight how it humbles you. You were saved contrary to your works, not by them. Delight in how it meets all of your needs. It secures for you a place in heaven. It gives you something to look forward to that cannot be taken from me, moth and rust cannot destroy, thieves cannot break in and steal, it's waiting for you and nothing can take it from you. All of your best days are in the future, rejoice in that and be happy. Delight that the Father is not angry with you at all. He is reconciled to you. Delight in that. Your sins are forgiven. Delight in the freedom you have in Christ, freedom from the law in its power to condemn but then freedom to keep the law in its power to instruct you what a good life is. Delight in your freedom. "Delight in the freedom you have in Christ, freedom from the law in its power to condemn but then freedom to keep the law in its power to instruct you what a good life is. Delight in your freedom." Secondly, defending the Gospel. This Gospel, this recipe that God crafted or concocted before the foundation of the world is perfect. Let me say it again. The only thing that can be added to it is poison, the only things that can be taken from it are essential to its nature. We accept it as perfect just as it is, just as it is. So therefore, assume that there will be an attack on the Gospel in every generation. Satan relentlessly attacks this message and we must defend it. God raised up Paul to defend it. He has raised up us. It is entrusted once for all to the saints. It is to us to protect, to defend this Gospel message. We must contend for this faith. So let's pray, shall we, that FBC will continue to be faithful in the Gospel, don't assume it. Don't assume that 20 years from now in this building the Gospel will still be preached. We need to defend it, so pray that we would continue. Don't begrudge, let me say this gently but clearly, don't begrudge the strong doctrinal flavor of our church's ministry. Don't begrudge it, rejoice in it. If the church has some failings in fellowship or in friendliness or in outreach or other things, let's fix those according to God's word but let's not give up on precision and care about doctrine. Delight in it. It's good that this church is careful about doctrine, it's a delight. The answer isn't that we become less doctrinally pure, that's not the right answer. And so let me speak to you elders. The elders are specifically called on to be watch guards in this area. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you. Guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in you. Protect it. And church, pray for the elders to do it. I don't know what direction Satan is going to come at in reference to this Gospel but let's pray that we would be protecting it. And then thirdly, extending the Gospel. We have this perfect recipe but it needs to be out and about. We need to see it making Christians, amen. Let's get out and trade with it like the talents, like the five talents. Let's take it to the ends of the Earth. Let's go and share this. Let's say, assume that you're going to be surrounded, for the most part, at the workplace and whatever with unbelievers because that's probably generally true. And just start praying from it. God give me a chance to invite someone to church. Give me a chance to go deeper. Maybe I'm riding in a car with a coworker, maybe I'm taking a trip with them, we're going on a business trip or something, maybe it's just the two of us after hours in the office. Give me a chance to share the Gospel, I want to talk about it. So let's extend it. And then concerning ministry to the poor, Paul was zealous, he said, "I was eager to do it." Ask God to give you an eagerness to care for the poor and needy. We so easily excuse ourselves from that and say, "Oh, it's because of this or that," and we don't get involved. Educate yourself on poverty worldwide and locally, right here. Let's find out where poverty is right around this church. Now, we need to always give top priority to the ministry of the soul. The Cross Conference that I'm going to be speaking at, at the end of the year, this is their slogan, something like this, "Christians are concerned about all forms of suffering but especially eternal suffering." So that puts it very well. Let's give a top priority to the Gospel but as we minister, we're going to care for the poor and needy. And then finally, please consider, I'm urging you to consider coming to the City Outreach Conference on November 23rd. Matthew Hodges is putting this together, it's going to be fantastic. Dr. Carl Ellis is coming, he is an outstanding thinker and speaker. And the point of the conference is really for us more than anything else, that we would know how better to minister right around here. Did I get that right, brother? Is that about right? Anything else you want to say? Is that alright? But please talk to Matthew. Sacrifice some time that Friday, Saturday, and be part of that. Let me close in prayer. Father, we thank you for the joy of the Gospel. Thank you for the way you raised up Paul, really, as a hero to defend the freedom we gentiles have from the law, the crushing burden of the law. And I thank you for this time we've had to study together, in Jesus' name, amen.

sermon transcript Introduction God has set before each individual Christian and each Christian church two infinite journeys. The internal journey of sanctification or growth in holiness and godliness, little by little becoming more and more conformed to the image of Christ, imitating him in every way. The external journey of worldwide gospel advance, of making disciples to the ends of the earth. We are to glorify God by making progress in each of these journeys until the day the Lord takes us out of this world. This is what we are to do, this is what the Lord left us in this place to do. And you see both of these infinite journeys in the text, this famous text that we're looking at today. The internal journey is in the words “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Any of you that knows how comprehensive are those commands, you know that that's an infinite journey of growing more and more conformed to Christ in the pattern of his laws, in the pattern of his commands. We'll be doing that until the day we die. And then the external journey is in this Great Commission of going to the ends of the earth and preaching the gospel and making disciples of all nations. Now, you've heard all that before, you're gonna hear it again from this pulpit and from other forms of ministry in this church. This is what we are to do. For me personally, this is an exciting morning, this is my 152nd sermon in the gospel of Matthew. I wouldn't know that except that Tom Knight told me that. So thank you, Tom, for doing that calculation for me. Praise God for that. I am grateful for the journey. I began preaching in the Gospel of Matthew December 20th, 1998. Now, those of you that are newcomers to the church, no, that's not all I've been doing for the last 15 years from the pulpit. In which case, you would all be rejoicing 10 times as much that this was my last sermon in the gospel of Matthew, and excited about another biblical text coming up. But it's been an incredible journey as we have looked at this, and I think what a fitting end to this glorious gospel, ending in, I think, probably the most famous verses in the gospel of Matthew, although the Lord's Prayer is probably close, maybe better known, but certainly the most influential of all of the verses that Matthew penned, the Great Commission. All of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, end in some version of the Great Commission. The book of Acts begins with a version of the Great Commission. The Lord intends to send us, to send his church, to the ends of the earth, empowering us with his Spirit, making disciples until the end of time. And that's what we have in front of us today. My desire is to use just a careful going through this text to unleash individuals into patterns of service that the Lord has prepared for them to do. For we are his workmanship and we are created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God has prepared in advance that we should walk in them. And I want this church, FBC, to be a launching pad for world missions. I want us to be active, aggressively active, in challenging the boundaries of Satan's dark kingdom and seeing the advancement of the kingdom of the beloved Son, and I want each of us to be involved in that. I don't want any of us to have any regrets concerning the Great Commission on Judgment Day when at last we give an account for our lives. And so may God use this sermon, may God use again these incredible verses, to unleash us into patterns of ministry for his name's sake. The Foundation for the Commission: The Finished Work of Christ (vs. 16-17) Overarching Theme: The King of the Kingdom of Heaven And we begin by looking at the foundation for the Great Commission, the finished work of Christ, and we come to the end of the Gospel of Matthew. And I wanna give you a bit of an overview of the Gospel as a whole, as I generally do when I come to the end. The overarching theme of the gospel of Matthew is the King of the kingdom of heaven. We focus on Jesus, it's about Jesus, but it's also about this recurring idea of the kingdom of heaven that we have again and again. Jesus is the King of the kingdom of heaven. And so, the beginning of Jesus' preaching ministry in Matthew 4:17, it says, “From that time on, Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” And so the kingdom comes with a claim on us as human beings, as sinners, calling on us to repent and to believe the good news. The Purpose Statements The Gospel gives us, the Gospel of Matthew gives us the purpose statement for Jesus coming into the world. In Matthew 1:21, Joseph was told this by the angel: “She, Mary, will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.” That's why Jesus came into the world, to save his people from their sins. Much later in Matthew, in Matthew 20:28, Jesus said, “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” The Finished Work of Jesus Christ And so as the gospel unfolds more and more, we see Jesus Christ presented as the King of the kingdom of heaven. It begins with the shortest genealogy in the Bible. In Matthew 1:1, it says, “A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” And so right away, Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of the Davidic promises, that he is the King in the Davidic pattern, he is the fulfillment of all the promises made to David. He is the King of David's throne. He's also a son of Abraham, he is the fulfillment of all that God was doing in the Jewish people, and so he's presented that way. After that comes a longer genealogy with 42 names, not as long as Luke's genealogy, which has 76 names, but all of that's establishing the right to rule. Jesus has the right to be the King. He is presented by the angel, predicted by the angel, to Joseph. His purpose is given, as I've already given to you, then he's presented to the Magi as the King, they came to worship him as the King of the Jews, and they gave him those gifts. And then he is persecuted by Herod, as Herod unleashes the power of the state, the power of his soldiers to try to kill him, and God protects him, but many suffer and die as a result of the birth of Jesus at that time. And then he's presented and proclaimed by John the Baptist as John came baptizing and proclaiming the kingdom of heaven from the desert and getting ready for the coming of Jesus. And then he is predicted by the prophets as one prediction after another is lifted up for us again and again in Matthew's gospel. The life in the ministry of Jesus is lined up against scriptures, and it's saying, “This happened to fulfill the words spoken by the prophet Isaiah,” etcetera. Again and again, the predictions of the Old Testament. Jesus is the one that fulfills all prophecy, everything pointing toward Christ. And then he is proved by his miracles and by his teaching, the signs and wonders, a river of signs and wonders done establishing the credentials of Jesus as the King of the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 4:23 and following, it says, “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, the epileptics and the paralytics, and he healed them all.” We have these summary statements of huge populations coming to Jesus and he healed them all. There has never been a wonder worker, a miracle worker like Jesus. A river of miracles, signs and wonders pointing to the coming of the kingdom of heaven. And then we have his amazing teachings. Just no one ever taught like this man. I love it in another gospel where they send some men to arrest Jesus and they come back starstruck and dumbfounded and empty-handed. Do you remember? And his enemies said, “Where is he? Didn't you go to arrest him?” And they said, “No one ever spoke like this man.” And they're so frustrated. “What? Has he captivated you too?” “Yeah, he has, he's captivated us by his incredible teachings.” He taught them as one who had authority and not as the teachers of the law. We have the magnificent Sermon on the Mount, beginning with the Beatitudes. Most important one, right from the beginning, “Blessed are the spiritual beggars, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” You want the kingdom of heaven? Then just be a spiritual beggar. Know yourself to be destitute. You have nothing to offer. You are poor and destitute because of your sins, and God is willing to give it to you free. He's willing to give you the kingdom for free. If you'll just beg him for it, he will give it to you. And then from there, he unfolds the magnificent teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, and then we have later in the gospel the parables that Jesus taught. The parables of the kingdom, the kingdom of heaven is like, the kingdom of heaven is like... It's a man who went out to sow seed, or it's like a great net that was let down into the lake, or it's about a woman that mixes flour into a large amount of dough, all these marvelous parables that end up dividing people. Some people think he's insane, they don't make any sense of it. But others, they get it, they get the insights because God has granted it to them to understand what he is saying. Magnificent teachings. And then he began to prepare his disciples. He began to get them ready and to shape them and mold them and send them out, calling disciples to follow him. Twelve he designated to be apostles, and he trained them to preach and to heal and to drive out demons and to raise the dead. And he sent them out in Matthew 10, and they go out and they preach and they begin to advance the gospel, and they come back and he trains them and shapes them and gets them ready. And he reveals himself to them fully and they understand in the words of Peter, Simon Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus says, “Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” And then he prepares them for suffering. If they're gonna advance the Gospel, they need to be willing to suffer. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” What would it profit someone to gain the whole world and lose their soul? Or what would someone give in exchange for his soul? And so he gets them ready, and he gets them ready for the end of the world. In Matthew 24 and 25, he gets them ready for the second coming of Christ and for Judgment Day. In Matthew 25, it says, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory and all the nations will be gathered before him. And he will separate the people one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he's gonna put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. And in the end, he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ He will say to those on his right, to the sheep, ‘Welcome, you who are blessed, into the eternal kingdom prepared since the foundation of the world by your Father.” And so he gets them ready for Judgment Day and for all of these things. And then, and then he goes and pays for it. He goes up to Jerusalem and he suffers many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and then he's turned over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. And in this way, he gives his life, as we've already said, as a ransom for many. He laid down his life; he suffered in our place. As we've studied very carefully, while Jesus was up on the cross, he cried out “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which means “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” And Jesus stood in our place and he took our penalty, he took our punishment because of that great exchange that the Apostle Paul made so clear later on. God made him, Jesus who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And so he suffered and died under the wrath of God. And at the moment that he died, the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And the book of Hebrews makes it plain that by that, we have a new and living way opened up for us into the presence of a holy God. And we have a holy God now saying, “Come and draw near to me to the throne of grace, that you may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” And so as a result of his death, we now have an open way into the presence of a holy God. But God did not leave him dead, he didn't leave him in the grave. On the third day, God raised him from the dead, and we've been celebrating that in the last few weeks, the resurrection accounts. The women go early on the first day, long before it's dawn, to prepare a corpse, but they don't find a corpse. Instead an angel comes down from heaven, radiant, bright-shining like lightning, and he goes to the tomb, and he moves this boulder completely away, and he sits on it, and the guards shook with fear and became like dead men. And then he says to the women, “Fear not, for I know that you're looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; he is risen, just as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he is risen.” And as they're on their way, they have the greatest evidence of the resurrection, a personal encounter with the living Christ. And they see him and they run up and they grab hold of him. I picture them falling on the ground and grabbing hold of his feet. And he says to them, “Greetings.” Good morning, how are you? It's so good to see you. Hello. Greetings. And then he says, “Fear not, but go and tell my brothers to go ahead of me into Galilee. There they will see me.” That's the review. I would have done more, but you can listen to the 152 sermons if you'd like, they're online. The Eleven Disciples: Humanly Speaking, the Foundation of the Church But we come now to the actual final words in this gospel. “Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. And when they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.” So we have the eleven apostles. Now, of course, Judas has committed suicide, so he is dead. The eleven that are left obey and they go to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. They are, humanly speaking, going to be the foundation of the church that Jesus Christ will build. As it says in Ephesians 20, “The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.” The Trip to Galilee And so they make the trip up to Galilee, it's the very thing that Jesus had predicted would happen in Matthew 26 the night before he was crucified. He said, “This very night, you will all fall away on account of me. For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’ But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.” It's the very thing he had predicted he would do, and it's the very thing the angel told them to do. “Go to Galilee,” and there they will see Jesus. That was their home base where they were from, it's where they first met Jesus, they had their first encounters with him there. As they were fishing by the Sea of Galilee, four of them, Peter, John, James, and Andrew, and they were casting nets into the lake, for they were fishermen, and Jesus passing by said, “Follow me and I will make you to become fishers of men.” And so now the time has come, they've had their training, they've had their preparation, their sins have been paid for, they have resurrection power, they're going to receive the power of the Holy Spirit poured out on them. And now he's gonna give them his commission to do precisely that, to be fishers of men to the ends of the earth. And that's what it is. Their Encounter With Jesus: Worship Mingled with Doubt But the fundamental issue here is worship. It says, “When they saw him, they worshipped him.” And so again, they're just on their faces, they're just in awe of Jesus. And frankly, isn't that the whole point of everything anyway? It is that we can be instruments of the living God to seek true worshippers who will worship the Lord in spirit and truth, for they are the kind the Father is seeking, John 4. The Father is actively seeking people to worship him. He sent his Son into the world to seek and to save the lost, and the essence of their salvation is that they've turned away from sin and self to the living God to worship him forever. And so the purpose of the Great Commission is worship, as John Piper made it very plain in Let The Nations Be Glad. The ultimate end is not missions; it's worship. When all of God's people are worshipping up in heaven, missions will be done, we won't need it anymore, but worship is eternal. And so the point is just an advancing kingdom of worshippers, worshippers, more and more worshipers. So they go to the mountain and let's just worship now, amen, and so they worship the resurrected Christ, they worship him. And yet some doubted. Isn't that amazing? “When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.” I'm not trying to be disrespectful to us when I say this, what poor building materials the Lord uses to build his church. Amen. Poor building materials, low quality. We are the bruised reeds that he will not break, we are the smoldering wicks he will not snuff out, and yet they're there and they're worshipping and they're doubting, and they're not sure what they see. Luke's gospel speaks more about these doubts. It says, “While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ And they were startled and frightened thinking they saw a ghost. And Jesus said to them, ‘Why are you troubled and why do doubts rise up in your minds?’” You're doubting the evidence of your own eyes. And so he has to give them many convincing proofs that he's alive. As it says in Acts 1:3, he saw them over a period of 40 days and gave them many, I like the translation, “infallible proofs.” Convincing proofs. Like this one in Luke 24, “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see. A ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have. And when he said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it for joy and amazement... “ That's the quintessential, it's-too-good-to-be-true moment in the Bible. It's just too good to be true that Jesus could have defeated death, and so they couldn't believe because of joy and amazement. And while they're struggling with that, he says, “Do you have anything here to eat?” And the best they can do is broiled fish. How much better it's going to be in the kingdom of heaven. Come and talk to me about that privately afterwards. But he takes it and he eats it, proving he has an actual physical body. Many infallible proofs. Who was there at that time? I don't know. But could it be that this is the time where 500 people saw him like Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 15? Five hundred eyewitnesses. So I don't think it's just the 11 that are there, I think there might have been a mountain of people seeing him, 500 people with the evidence, and this is the foundation. This is the foundation of the Great Commission, the finished work of Jesus Christ, the death and resurrection of Christ, that is the mission. The Authority for the Commission: Overcoming All Obstacles (vs. 18) So now let's talk about the authority for the commission, overcoming all obstacles. Look at verse 18. “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.’” Now, what is authority? Authority is the right, the God-given right, to command. All true authority comes from God, as Romans 13 teaches us. So it is the right to command, that's what authority is. Now in our day and age, and frankly in every day and age, we sinners struggle against authority. We don't like it. But the fact is, it's the best news there has ever been. We are entering a kingdom and there is a King, and his laws are good, and he is good, and he is our provider and our protector, our benefactor. And it is a good thing that we are entering, we are living in a kingdom. And so he has this authority. Now, this initial message of authority should be understood in two lights. First, the overarching theme of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus is the King of the kingdom of heaven. And so we should understand that as his right to rule. More on that in a moment. He is not a usurper, he has the right to rule. Secondly, we should understand the authority of Jesus as necessary to overcome all the obstacles to the spread of his kingdom. So he has all authority to advance his kingdom. And we're going to need it. We'll talk more about that in a moment. I wanna talk briefly about five facets of Christ's authority that flow from this text. A Submissive Authority First, it is a submissive authority. It is a submissive authority. “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.” Do you see it? So Jesus doesn't speak as one who has independent authority from God the Father. There is no such thing. He received his authority from his Heavenly Father. As we saw in Gethsemane, Jesus is perfectly submissive to the will of the Father. Perfectly submissive. He said in Matthew 26, 39, “My Father, if it is possible for this cup to be taken away, may it be removed. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” That is a submissive man. He is perfectly submissive to the will of his Father. So now also Jesus' authority is a submissive authority, he is submissive to the King of the universe who is Almighty God his Father. And so he has received this authority from the Father and he's going to use it to bring everything back to the Father and make it submissive to the Father. As Paul teaches in I Corinthians 15:24-28. Paul writes this, “Then the end will come when he, Jesus, hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed all dominion authority and power. For he, Jesus, must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he ‘has put everything under his feet.’ Now, when it says that ‘everything’ has been put under him, Jesus, it is clear this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When Jesus, he, Jesus has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.” So since the fall, since Satan's rebellion and human rebellion, the universe has been like a fragmentation grenade blown out, scattered away from the Father. Jesus is bringing everything back under the authority of the Father so that God may be all in all. So this is a submissive authority that he has, he's on mission from the Father. An Absolute Authority Over Creation Secondly, it's an absolute authority over all of creation, “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.” That's everything, friends. That's everything. Every created being is under Jesus. How awesome is that? Meditate on that. “All authority in heaven and earth…” That reminds me of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Reminds me also of Colossians 1:15-16, speaking of Jesus, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things were created by him, and for him. He is before all things.” So this is comprehensive authority Jesus has. So Jesus, especially, rules over spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. He rules over Satan and his demons. He's in authority over them. Satan is called “the ruler of this age” or “the god of this world.” These kinds of titles that scripture gives to him. He has tremendous power over his slaves who are slaving him or serving him in sin and death. But by dying and rising again, Hebrews 2 tells us that Jesus has destroyed him, Satan, who held the power of death. And has freed those who, all their lives, were held in slavery by their fear of death. He set us free, and he has destroyed the king of that dark realm. Jesus also rules, not only over all heavenly forces, but he rules over all earthly forces as well. That's every government, every human institution. Jesus rules over them all. He's sovereign over every one of them. There is not a political or military or religious or educational power on earth that can stop the spread of the gospel. I love what Abraham Kuyper said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘mine!’” he owns it all. It's his by right. So we should keep in mind that every part of this planet belongs to Jesus Christ. He is not the usurper, Satan is. And his satanic puppets, sitting on thrones in communist countries or Muslim countries or atheistic countries that use their power and authority to forbid the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ and make it illegal, they are the ones who are illegal. Jesus has all authority in heaven and earth, and he will take over everything. So when Saudi rulers make Christianity, the spread of Christianity, illegal in Riyadh or in Mecca or Medina, it is not Jesus who is the usurper there. We should not have any pangs of conscience about these things. Now, there's obviously a lot of suffering that has to go in reclaiming some of these dark places, but we are not the usurpers. When a communist government in Asia makes house churches illegal, we should have no pangs of conscience concerning this. The usurpers are those who would stop the spread of the gospel, they are the puppets. We should not say, “Well, it's their country. They can make the rules.” When an educational institution sets up policies and threatens lawsuits and makes it difficult for Christian workers to spread the gospel on their campus, it's not Christianity that's the usurper, they are the usurpers. Oddly enough, most of those institutions were begun as seminaries. So who's the usurper there? Just know history friends. Just look them up. Go and find out why Harvard was started, or Yale was started, or Princeton was started, or Duke was started. Just find out why and you'll know. “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me,” said Jesus. Reasons for Obedience Number three, this gives us as Christians reason for obedience concerning this Great Commission. The authority of Jesus overcomes the obstacles of the church. Psalm 110 says, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” Verse 2, “The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, you will rule in the midst of your enemies... “ Listen to Psalm 110:3, “Your troops will be willing in the day of your battle.” Are we? Are we willing in the day of Jesus' battle? Are we willing to take part in the advance of his kingdom, the spread of his scepter from Zion out? Two things we should keep in mind when we come to the Great Commission. Jesus has the right to tell us what to do with our lives. And Jesus has made a promise to be with us every step of the way. And so your stuff isn't your stuff, your life isn't your life, your money isn't your money, your education isn't yours to do with as you please. Jesus has the right to command you. So look at the link. Look at it. “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” Because of that authority. The Center of the Message Insight number four on authority: the center of the message. The center of the message is the authority of Jesus. That's the message we're bringing. We're preaching Christ as King. It's the essence of the gospel that we're preaching. And so at the core of it comes a different, perhaps slightly different, understanding of a beautiful invitation verse in Matthew 11:28-30. Jesus said, “Come unto me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” What's the next part? “Take my yoke upon you.” Take my yoke upon you. What is that yoke? It is submission to his kingly authority. He has the right to command you. He's saying, stop fighting me, stop rebelling against me, stop being stiff-necked. Take that neck and yield to my yoke. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” John said the same thing in I John, “His commands are not burdensome, they are delightful.” His commands are wonderful. Love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself, those are his commands. They are delightful. So take his kingly yoke upon you. That's the message we're taking to the ends of the earth. Guarantee of Worldwide Success And then fifthly, we have a guarantee, with this statement, “all authority in heaven and earth,” we have a guarantee of ultimate success. And we'll need it too, won't we? It's a difficult journey that's still ahead of us but we have a guarantee of worldwide success. Because all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Jesus, this Great Commission cannot possibly fail. Isaiah 14:26-27 says, “This is the plan determined for the whole world, this is the hand stretched out over all nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out and who can turn it back?” There's not a single elect person, chosen by God before the foundation of the world, who will fail to hear the gospel with faith, repent, believe, and enter the kingdom, not one. They're all going to hear, and they're all going to repent, and they're all going to come and Jesus is gonna raise them up on the last day. For he says in John Chapter 6:37-39, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me, I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day.” We're gonna succeed. We're on the winning team. We're gonna win, we're gonna win. I think that's awesome. And what it means is that Jesus, he, Revelation 3, he's one who holds the keys in his hand. And what he opens, no one can shut. What he shuts, no one can open. So when he opens the door for ministry, no one can shut it. He has that kind of power. So what does that mean? It means, it could be a town, it could be an institution of higher learning, a college, could be a university, could be a country, a closed country. The king's heart is like a watercourse in the hands of the Lord. He directs it whichever way he pleases. And so the king is gonna make decisions that will help the gospel, even though they hate the gospel. Now, you may scratch your head and say, “How could that be?” It just is, it's been going on for centuries. And he is just turning hearts whatever way he chooses to advance his gospel. We're going to win friends, we're going to win. Now, the key question is, for the church, see the kings, those hate-filled opposers of Christianity, God is turning them against their will to help Christianity. We should love and embrace this commission and do it out of joy and delight not out of obligation. Jesus said, “If you love me you'll obey what I command.” The Goal of the Commission: Make Disciples of Jesus (vs. 19-20) What is the Goal of the Great Commission? And what is the goal of the commission? It is to make disciples for Jesus. “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” So the goal of the Great Commission is to make disciples. A disciple is a dedicated follower or learner of a master. The Beginning of Discipleship: Repentance and Faith The beginning of that relationship is repentance and faith. As they repent and believe the good news, they become disciples of Jesus. And that discipleship relationship is deep and rich and full, it's more than being a pupil in a class. It's a whole life transformation. It's people leaving the tax collector's booth or the fishing nets and following Jesus and having no place to lay their head and just saying, “I wanna be like you.” And being just totally transformed by Jesus. The Command is Plain: Go Into All the World and Preach this Message of Life The command is plain for us, “Go into all the world and make disciples.” Now, the central verb here is “make disciples,” the “going” is the participle that supports it. So as you are going, make disciples. So everyday life you could be making disciples. Everyday life disciple-making is generally called evangelism. There's no cultural barrier you have to cross, there's no language you have to learn, you just have to have the courage to share your faith with other people that are of your same language and culture. And there'll always be more of that to do. And that's vital, evangelism. But there's also implied, go into all the earth: missions. And that has to do with something else. That has to do with crossing cultural barriers. Learning languages. Taking the gospel across those barriers to people who cannot understand any other way. That's what we call mission. Usually, not always, but usually you have to get on a plane to do it or some transportation to bring you to a distant place. So we have a distant vision, to the ends of the earth, for making disciples. And that's what we call missions. The Discipleship is Church-based And notice that this discipleship is church-based. I say that as a church pastor, but I think baptism implies that. Most parachurch groups do not baptize. We understand this is a church ordinance, this is how you become a member of a local church. So you make disciples and you baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And so I think parachurch ministries are phenomenal. I was brought to faith in Christ through Campus Crusade for Christ. But they didn't baptize me, a church did. And so that's something that we, I think, embrace. The International Mission Board of Southern Baptists embrace church planting. We're not just trying to make converts, we're not just trying to make people who pray a sinner's prayer or something like that. We're trying to plant churches and establish those churches in the ordinances like baptism and the Lord's supper. Notice, also, I think the Baptistic conviction of a certain chronological sequencing here, you make disciples, baptizing them, and then teaching them to obey everything. And so first they become disciples of Jesus, then they get water baptism, and then they get comprehensive life training. So we would not reverse the order, we wouldn't have baptism first and then later they become disciples of Christ. So I think first, they become believers and then they are baptized. The Discipleship Extends to the End of their Lives And then this discipleship is comprehensive. It is wrong for any mission agency to say, “We do not have time for careful meticulous Bible teaching. There are souls being lost every day.” You hear this kind of thing. You run around mission circles enough, you hear this kind of thing, “We don't have time for that. For the precision and the minutiae of doctrine. We need to save people.” Friends, they need to go back and read the Great Commission. Because part of it is a meticulous teaching of a whole life observation of everything Christ has commanded. So what all has Christ commanded? How long do you have? Is it true that all of the commands, the times that the apostle Paul or apostle Peter urges something on their readers, that Christ is commanding us? Is it Christ that's commanding us in Ephesians 4:2, “Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient, bearing with one another in love”? I think so; Paul would say so. So we've got comprehensive learning to do. Therefore, every healthy church must have a comprehensive teaching ministry. Careful preaching from the word, careful teaching of disciples, we do not shrink away from proclaiming anything that's true and helpful and Biblical. We know there are central doctrines and lesser doctrines, we understand that. So we'll preach the central ones as pillar doctrines, but we're gonna try to teach everything the Bible says. Teaching Must Be Life Transformational And notice that we're not just trying to teach for an information dump. What we wanna do is we're teaching for life transformation. We want people to obey everything Christ has commanded. And so elders must shepherd toward obedience, shepherd toward life transformation. It's not enough just that we dump the information. People need to have their lives changed or transformed. This is where I would try to maybe shrink away from the verb, “observe,” “teaching them to observe everything commanded.” English has changed some since the KJV era. “Observe” means, “I'm aware of it.” That's what it means now for us. It wasn't that way back in the 17th century, but for us, I like “obey.” “Teaching them to obey everything Christ has commanded.” The Extent of the Commission: To the End of the Earth, and the End of the Age (vs. 19-20) The Geographical Extent: All Nations … To the Ends of the Earth And what is the extent of the commission? Well we're going to the ends of the earth, and we're going to the end of the age. “Go and make disciples of all nations … and surely I will be with you always, even to the very end of the age.” Now, what I have here are three pages of Old Testament verses that talked about how God always intended to save the entire world. There you go. Come afterwards and talk to me and I'll share with you some of those things. How from the very beginning, God intended this gospel to bless all families of nations on earth. He called Abraham in Genesis 12:3, to that, he said to Jesus in Isaiah, “It is too small a thing for you to save the Jews only. I will make you a light for the Gentiles that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.” This has always been what God intended. The Chronological Extent: To the End of the Age And it's going to go to the end of time, because he says, “Surely I'll be with you always, even to the very end of the age.” This isn't just for the apostles, this is for all of us. The Power for the Commission: “I Will Be With You” (vs. 20) Linked to the Power of the Holy Spirit And what is the power of the commission? This one statement, “And surely, I will be with you. I am with you. I'll be with you every step of the way.” This is, it must certainly be linked with Acts 1:8, “You'll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you.” He is the Spirit of Christ. And by the Spirit of Christ, Jesus is with us to the end of the age. The Promise Given to Moses in His Fear It's the very promise that God gave to Moses when Moses didn't wanna go to Pharaoh, remember? Kept saying, “Oh, please send someone else.” I love it when he says, “Oh Lord, send the one you choose.” That's a Hebraism for “Someone else, not me.” Alright? I have chosen you. And he says to him, “I will be with you.” And it's a fascinating exchange there. Remember how he says, “Who am I? Who am I that I should go and speak to Pharaoh?” And the answer is, “I will be with you,” which, if you really think about it carefully, he didn't answer the question. Who is Moses that he should go to Pharaoh? Oh, he answered the question; it doesn't matter who you are. It's never mattered who you are, what matters is who I am. And I am the I am. And I will be with you. And Jesus says the same thing to us. You can look inward and say, “I can't go to a closed country, I can't go to a Muslim nation in the 10/40 window, I can't go to some hostile people group in India or in China. I can't go, I mean, who am I?” It's never been about who you are, it's been about this one thing, surely I will be with you always by the power of the Holy Spirit. So let me say something that I said to my Sunday School class, Bible for Life class. The two infinite journeys are linked, they're just, they're linked. You wanna make progress in the internal journey? Embrace the external journey. If you detach yourself from evangelism and missions, you'll stop growing very much. If you wanna really know Christ, then step up into the suffering and the labor and the sacrifice that the Great Commission calls for. The Encouragement to Paul in His Suffering Philippians Chapter 3, the apostle Paul said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Could it be that the reason we know him so little, in his resurrection power, is that we risk so little of his death on the cross? Could it be we don't know him like Paul did because we're shrinking back from suffering? The Status of the Commission: Where Do We Stand? And what is the status of the Great Commission? Where do we stand? Well, I got a bunch of statistics here, I'm gonna go to my favorite one. According to the IMB's research wing, there are 3,100 unengaged people groups. Now, a people group is defined, generally, by language, somewhat, by culture, it's the biggest group that the gospel can travel without hitting a significant barrier or a boundary, linguistically and culturally. That's a people group. There are about, either, between 11,000 and 16,000 of them in the world. There are only 3,100 un-engaged. There's nothing going on amongst them, no church being planted, no mission agency working with them, 3100. How Doable is the Remaining Task That may seem like a large number, but there are perhaps as many as 700 million evangelical Christians in the world. So that means each unengaged people group could have 250,000 Christians dedicated to reaching them. Or, I like this one: There are 4.5 million Christian congregations in the world. If you divide 4.5 million by 3,100, you get about 1,500 congregations per unreached people group. So all we have to do is go find about 1,500 other like-minded churches in North Carolina and band together to reach the Northern Bai in Central China. What do you say? Now they'll be overwhelmed by our love and interest, I think. Overwhelmed by 1,500 congregations seeking to reach them. Friends, this is doable. That number's been cut in half in the last 20 years. Now, when we get to the end of the 3,100 and Jesus still hasn't come back yet, let's find another way to define the task and keep going. What do you say? We're gonna keep reaching out until the Lord returns. But I'm telling you, we're making incredible progress and it's exciting. Applications Come to Christ Alright, what application? First, what's the point in talking about missions if it could be there's someone here that's lost right now? If there's someone here that's unregenerate? Someone here that knows, you know you're on the outside looking in? I'm just urging you, don't stay that way. Because the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory and he's going to gather everyone in front of him. And someday he's gonna separate everyone and he's gonna separate into two categories and only two, believer in Christ and non-believer. Today is the day of salvation. Flee to Christ, you've heard the gospel today. That Christ, the Son of God, Son of Man, died on the cross in the place of sinners. Repent and believe in him, come to Christ. FBC Members: Let’s Make FBC A “Launching Pad” for Career Missionaries For those who are already Christians, members of FBC, let's make FBC a launching pad for missions. Amen? Let's send them out, let's double the number of missionaries sent out and double it again. Those of you that are still young, not quite sure what God's calling you to do, go seriously before the Lord and say, “Lord, are you calling on me to be a career missionary, to reach one of those un-engaged, 3,100 un-engaged people groups?” Of course it's gonna take suffering. In the 10/40 window it's nothing but those Satanic puppets that are saying, “You will not come in here.” Yes. But Christ is sovereign. Let's make FBC a launching pad. Let's pray more diligently than ever before for unreached people groups. If any of you have smartphones, I would urge you to upload the JoshuaProject.net app, and they'll give you a people group, an unreached people group, to pray for every day. Every day. Many of them are in India and China, day after day, India and China. Not only there, but mostly there. Let's give to Lottie Moon, it's coming up soon. Let's be generous and let's meet our goal, whatever it's gonna be, 130, 140,000, whatever it is. Every year, it's amazing how faithful God is. But I'm urging you to be sacrificial in giving to missions more than ever. And let's support our career missionaries better than ever before. Each home fellowship has adopted one of those folks I prayed for. Let's enrich those relationships, let's use technology, Skype, other things. Let's use jet travel and go visit and encourage them as they think best. Whatever would be encouraging mostly to them. Practical Training Let's realize we have opportunities for practical training. We have a BFL class that Ron Halbrooks is about to start on church planting. Be part of that, learn more about church planting. Matthew Hodges is gonna talk to us about a City Outreach Conference on November 23rd, where you can learn how to reach out to people right here in our surrounding community. That's part of the Great Commission, what we're doing. Practical Opportunities We have practical opportunities through our ESL, our burgeoning ESL ministry. We have tons of people coming into our church every Wednesday learning English language, they are maxed out. Not from room, but from laborers. We need more workers. And they're bringing their children with them, and they have a focused need. And so we'd like people that would take on those ESL students’ kids and minister to them and maybe lead some of them to Christ. You have opportunities right here, right now, you don't have to get anywhere. I said usually you have to get on a plane to do cross-cultural missions, but not when it comes to ESL. And so it's happening right here in our church. Close with me if you would, in prayer. Father, we thank you for the things we've learned from Matthew's gospel as a whole. I thank you for the, just, almost 15 years on and off, that I've had, of walking through this incredible book. I thank you for the culmination here and the Great Commission. I pray that you'd help each of us to be faithful to what you have commanded us to do in Jesus name. Amen.

Introduction I constantly marvel at the providence of God as He lines out the things that I get to preach on. It’s not an accident. Today I am preaching to you from the Book of Isaiah on ministry to the poor and needy, just having returned from Haiti, the neediest country in the western hemisphere. This will be my last sermon in the Book of Isaiah until further notice. When I preach to you next, it will be from the Gospel of Matthew, God willing. What I want to do today is just preach a topical sermon from texts in the Book of Isaiah on visions of mercy ministry and ministry to the poor and needy. I want to preach it as a challenge to each one of us to give generously and to live a life of sacrificial love to others. I can’t think of a better book in the Bible to do that from than the Book of Isaiah. For me personally, I can’t think of a better time than today, this morning, having just come back from Haiti. The scenes of poverty in that country are overwhelming and devastating. Unforgettable. It’s my third trip there, and it just keeps deepening and expanding as I have visions in my mind. There’s a portion of the capital city of Port-au-Prince called the Cité Soleil. What a strange name, the city of the sun, because it’s a dark, poor place. There are all these temporary shelters built out of cardboard or wood with rusty corrugated metal roofs. There are children barely clad that are playing in puddles of muddy water or scooping some up in plastic pitchers and bringing it back into the city to do I have no idea what with. You see piles of garbage with people walking over them and picking out things that they find of some value and bringing them back into the city. The whole country isn’t that poor. But the sights are unforgettabl; the smells, the picture of poverty sitting on that community like a 900 pound gorilla and there’s nothing that they can do. I know the political history, the instability, the corruption, the wickedness of human government and of human sinfulness. You can’t put it all on the government because there’s just sin across the board that you see there, that’s brought that country to that level. The demonic element, voodoo, satanism, and darkness are pervasive. As I come back today to preach here at First Baptist Durham, my heart is moved and stirred with hope of the sense of the power of God. I have hope that God would anoint me, that He would sear my lips with a coal taken from the altar, that He’ll forgive me of my sins of selfishness, materialism, greed, loveless-ness, a lack of faith and fear, and all kinds of other sins that have hindered me from being fully useful to God and mercy ministry. You remember how Isaiah had a vision of Christ seated on His throne, high and exalted, and he felt immediately his own sinfulness. He said, “Woe is me. I am ruined.” I feel that way as I look at the holiness of God, as I look at the love of Jesus Christ, the way He left that glorious throne and came to minister to us. I look inside my own heart of darkness, my own limitations as a Christian, showing what I’m used to, what I’m accustomed to. I just ask the Lord to forgive me and to free me so that I can minister to others better the rest of my life. And I know He will. He came to save me from sin. I know He’s going to save this church from the same thing. I don’t know what the future holds for our country. We may need to band together, economically, as never before. This is a good time for us to discover what it means to reach out to somebody who’s needy, to help them, and to not be selfish. So I’m trusting in God for that. There’s one particular verse that moved me. You heard Fred powerfully read Isaiah 58:10. It says, “If you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” That’s the verse that’s going to be the focal point of our meditations together today. I believe that if we do this, God will bless this church as never before. We will be a light shining in a dark place. We will be a city built up on a hill for all the people around to see. No one lights a lamp and hides it under a bowl. God has lit a lamp in this church. He intends to put it up high in this community and to the ends of the earth that we might shine for His glory and for the alleviation of suffering. We could be a blessing in this world as Christ was. You’ve already heard the verse that Eric read, 2 Corinthians 8:9. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” That’s what moves me today. Isaiah’s Heart for the Poor Isaiah’s Message a Burning Coal from the Altar So we turn to the Book of Isaiah. I’m not going to urge that you follow along. I’m going to be moving through the book and picking out verses in which Isaiah reveals his heart for the poor and needy. You can look these verses up later. For me, this message, as I said, is like a burning coal from the altar, a coal of conviction and also of atonement, that we might be transformed by the word of God. Isaiah called on Judah and Jerusalem to deal honestly with their sinfulness, to face it head on, and so he told the truth. They were saturated in religiosity, the machinery of religion. The wheels and the gears were turning all the time in Isaiah’s day. This is what the Lord said through the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 1:13, “Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New moons, sabbaths, and convocations – I cannot bear your evil assemblies.” They did all of these religious things, but God was displeased because their hearts were far from God. He was displeased with their hypocrisy. He was displeased with their lack of compassion for the poor and needy. Through Isaiah the prophet, God called to Israel to repent. In Isaiah 1:16-17, He said, “Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” These staccato commands come from God. Seek justice, it says. That is, be certain that the weakest members of society are being fairly and justly treated. Oh, there was a lightning bolt of conviction for me this past week! I didn’t go to Haiti to be convicted of sin. I went to Haiti to minister. I went to Haiti to give them something good, that I might be a blessing. God intended, perhaps, that, but also that I might be convicted. We were in this church in Sainte-Marie. The church was filled with people that were there for the medical clinic, consultations that the doctors were doing, and for eye glasses. We divided the people up. David Eugene, the Haitian pastor that I work with, it’s just a blessing to work with him for those that needed eyeglasses and those that wanted the medical consultation. We gave them tickets with numbers on them. Everything was just engineered and perfect. It was so orderly and I loved it. That’s how it began, clean and orderly and neat. It didn’t stay that way. Pretty soon, there was a lot of chaos. There was a lot of moving. We had two men that we thought were trustworthy guarding the stairs up to the pulpit. Behind the pulpit was where the clinic was and the eyeglasses. There were the right stairs and the left stairs. One went up one side for the eyeglasses, and one went up the other side for the consultation. We had these guards that were guarding like the fox guards the hen house. It wasn’t long before corruption started coming in the system. They were allowing their friends and attractive young ladies and other people to get in ahead of these elderly women that were sitting and waiting patiently and could do nothing about it. It started to anger me. I saw this man give a ticket to one of his friends and he just put it in his pocket. And I said, “You gave him a ticket.” Now, I think the only word he understood was “ticket.” He knew that and he said, “Yeah, ticket. Ticket. Yeah, tickets. I’m taking tickets.” “No, no, you gave a ticket.” He was smiling and very, “Yeah.” Like I was born yesterday and knew nothing. But I do know some things. I studied French for six years and it served some benefit there in that Creole-speaking country. I said, “Ce n’est pas juste.” It’s not just, what you’re doing. And his countenance changed. He knew what I was saying. And we were not friendly after that. I wouldn’t mind reaching out to him, but he knew that I had caught him. Actually, I was the one that was caught. Is it just that I can walk into a Walmart and buy reading glasses in about ten minutes with a credit card, when they have to wait two or three hours to get them? Is that just? These are brothers and sisters in Christ, a lot of them. Is it just that we Americans, 5% of the world population, use 23% of the world’s energy? Is that just? It’s not just, I said. It’s not just, said the Lord to me. I’ll be wrestling with it the rest of my life. I don’t have an answer to the injustices of the world. I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know this: it is unchristian not to face the question. It’s unchristian to hide from it. It’s unchristian to remember one encounter you have with a beggar, and because of what they did with the money you gave (used it on drugs or alcohol), you are now free forever from thinking about ministering to the poor and needy. He means for us, based on Isaiah, to spend ourselves on behalf of the poor and needy. That’s what He means. It’s relentless. He means for it to overwhelm us. He means for us to go back again and again and say, “God, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s wise. I don’t know what’s best. I don’t know how to minister here in Durham. I don’t know how to minister in Haiti. I don’t know what to do, but God, please show me.” That’s what He intends. But we hide from it. We come up with clever answers that will be worthless on the day of accounting. They will not help us. The tissue-paper thin reasons we make for why we don’t have to obey the scripture on ministering to the poor and needy will not help us when we face Christ and give Him an account. They won’t help. So, seeking justice means being certain that the weakest members of society are being fairly and justly treated. “Encourage the oppressed,” says Isaiah. Find people that are crushed as if by a yoke of slavery. Encourage them by releasing them from the crushing burden that oppresses them. Defending the cause of the fatherless means being certain that the weakest, most defenseless members of society, the orphans, have their needs met. Pleading the case of the widow means standing in the courtrooms and the halls of power and acting as an advocate for their causes, as if they were your own. That’s what He’s telling us to do. Fighting the Corruption of Wicked Rulers Isaiah was fighting against the sinfulness of the human heart. He was also fighting against the corruption of wicked rulers. It’s everywhere in Haiti, and it’s all over the world. The wickedness of people who use their positions of influence for their own selfish purposes! Isaiah fought against it. In Isaiah 1:23, he says, “Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless, the widow’s case does not come before them.” Consistently, Isaiah preached against these men. They were the ones corrupting society. For example, widows, orphans, and the otherwise weak and needy were being defrauded. There were multiple blasts from Isaiah’s clear trumpet against these wicked rulers. Isaiah 3:14-15 says, “The Lord enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people: ‘It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?’ declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty.” This included unjust judges who used their positions to rob the poor and needy, to plunder the houses of widows and steal their property, to favor the rich. It included kings and princes who did the same, using their influence to do that. I’m thinking, of course, about King Ahab, who in the time of Elijah set his heart on Naboth’s vineyard and through the suggestions of his wicked wife, Queen Jezebel, orchestrated some trumped up charge against Naboth. He had him killed and then illegally confiscated his inheritance, which should have gone to his family. But he’s not the only one. This kind of thing happens again and again, and not just in Haiti. It happens in America. It happens all over the world. People use their positions of influence for themselves. Isaiah raises his trumpet to his lips and he blasts out warnings, like that in Isaiah 10:1-3. “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches?” Yet… Even the Poor and Needy are Sinners in Need of Salvation Yet, Isaiah saw that even the financially poor and needy were themselves sinners in need of salvation. He had no romantic view of the poor and needy. They were every bit as sinful as the rich oppressors. If they could have, they would have been the rich oppressors. I’m telling you from my own heart, one of the greatest obstacles to sustaining ministry to the poor and needy are the poor and needy themselves, how they live, what they do. We expect to be thanked, to be recognized for the love that we show them, okay? We expect that they might take the money and use it wisely to build themselves up. We’re not going to see that. You know why? Because they’re as sinful as we are. That’s why. Isaiah never denied this. He never denied that the poor and needy were sinners. He addressed it fully. Isaiah 9:17 says, “Therefore the Lord will take no pleasure in the young men, nor will he pity the fatherless and the widows, for everyone is ungodly and wicked, every mouth speaks vileness. Yet for all this, his anger is not turned away, his hand is still upraised.” He knew the hearts of the poor. It’s not, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” I know that’s what Luke says. But that has to do with poverty of spirit towards God, where you become a spiritual beggar and know you need a Savior. There are plenty of poor people that are going to go to hell. And there are some rich people that will go to heaven. That’s not the issue. We need to look past the sinfulness of the people we seek to reach and say, “Yes, they’re sinful. That’s why they need a physician. That’s why they need Jesus.” Yeah, it makes it complicated, very complicated, to know how to minister to them wisely. Christ the Coming King: The Only Ultimate Answer to Poverty Even the most wretched and oppressed people still need a Savior. Amen. That’s why we want to minister to them. Because they need Jesus. Isaiah knew very plainly that the only answer to poverty is Christ, the coming King. Amen! He’s it. The coming Kingdom of Jesus Christ is the only answer. I mean the eschatological, second coming of Christ’s kingdom. I’m not saying this in the sense of the liberal theologian that saw the kingdom of Christ here in this world and had the soup kitchens and the social gospel and all that. I see it when Jesus comes back and separates the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the bad fish, deals with wickedness, and sets up His eternal kingdom. That’s when it will finally be solved, and not until then. But Christ is a Savior now. He’s a Savior today, from selfishness and sin and wickedness and all that. The vision of Christ, the coming king, is in Isaiah 11:4. “With righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.” Christ is coming to establish an eternal kingdom of righteousness, justice, and holiness. He comes to judge the oppressors, the wicked. He comes to be a refuge for the poor and needy against their oppressors, a refuge, a shelter. It says in Isaiah 25:4-5, “You have been a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. For the breath of the ruthless is like a storm driving against a wall and like the heat of the desert.” Christ comes to save sinners. That’s the good news of the gospel. He comes to be a refuge for the poor and needy who know they need a refuge. Later chapters in Isaiah speak of the vindication of the poor and needy and the humbling of the arrogant, unbelieving rich. Isaiah 26:5-6 says, “He humbles those who dwell on high, he lays the lofty city low; he levels it to the ground and casts it down to the dust. Feet trample it down – the feet of the oppressed, the footsteps of the poor.” What a vision! The wicked city of the rich is cast down by the hand of God, and then the poor trample it. Isaiah 29:19 says, “Once more the humble will rejoice in the Lord; the needy will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.” That’s the future, friends. That’s a glorious future. That’s what the Lord is going to do. Now, Christ began His ministry, His preaching ministry, in His hometown, in Nazareth. What a moment that was. They’d heard some strange reports about Jesus, this boy they’d seen growing up in their streets. His father was Joseph and his mother was Mary. He was always a bit different. Well, never more than on that Sabbath when He got up and the scroll of Isaiah the Prophet was given to Him. He unrolled it and found the place in Isaiah 61, where these words are written: “The spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those grieve in Zion.” The scroll is rolled up and Jesus sat down, saying, “Today, in your hearing, this scripture is fulfilled.” Oh, how powerful is that! Wouldn’t you love to have been there? To feel the electricity in the place? Fulfilled. Fulfilled. Yes, fulfilled in the voice of the Messiah, the one who comes ministering by the power of the Spirit of God to lift the poor and needy out of the ash heap of history and save them eternally. That’s what He came to do. He went to the weakest and the neediest, the hungry, the dying, and the dead. He ministered to them. And the poor were the ones who received it most readily, most eagerly. Now, you should not imagine that Jesus had no heart or compassion for the rich. There was the rich young ruler. It says very plainly that Jesus loved him. His heart went out to him. He wanted to free him from his materialism, his selfishness, and his idolatry. That’s what He wanted. He wanted to free him. Or Zacchaeus, who made a living out of defrauding people, taking way too much tax money and becoming wealthy. Zacchaeus was saved. He was transformed by the power of the word of God. He said, “Lord, here and now I give some of my possessions to minister to the poor and needy. And if, per chance, I have defrauded anyone, I give back four-fold.” I think he probably had. Maybe he wasn’t quite ready to admit it to everyone. I don’t know. But Jesus celebrated. He said, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” Then there’s Nicodemus, who certainly was wealthy. And Joseph of Arimathea, who brought seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloe to wrap up Jesus’ dead body and give Him a burial fit for a king. Finally, they have the courage to come out and be counted when Jesus is dead. They didn’t have the courage when he was alive. But the Spirit of God, I think, moved on them and said, “You have a prophecy to fulfill.” Isaiah 53 said He was with the rich in His death. They provided the physical evidence for the resurrection by wrapping up Jesus’ body with that sticky, expensive, aromatic resin. He’s only going to be using it for three days, you know. There it would be, as physical testimony. Only the wealthy could afford that. So He has a heart of compassion for rich people. But just like with the poor, He calls on them to repent, to turn away from idolatry, to turn away from wickedness and to be used by God for the kingdom of God. That’s what He’s calling on them to do. He said it’s hard for them to listen. Very hard. In fact, without God, it’s impossible. The Call of the Lord: Spend Yourself on Behalf of the Needy Context: Addressing Israel’s Faulty Religiosity So this is the call of the Lord from Isaiah: spend yourself on behalf of the needy. Turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 58. This will take the rest of our time in Isaiah, this one passage. There, the Lord calls on Israel to repent of their selfishness and spend themselves on behalf of the needy. This is the context. He’s addressing Israel’s faulty religiosity. I’ve already mentioned that. He captures their attitude powerfully. Look at Isaiah 58:1-5. “Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion and to the house of Jacob their sins. For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?’ Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high. Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself? Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” No one had the power to strip you bare like Isaiah. Powerful words. The people seem to think that their fasting has put God in some kind of debtor’s position, that God somehow owes them something now that they’ve deprived themselves of some food for a day. “Why have we fasted,” they say, “and you have not noticed? Why are we humbling ourselves and you’re not giving us what we asked for?” As though a single day of fasting obligates God to answer from on high and do whatever they want. In the midst of their fasting, they display their wickedness, their rebellion, and their sin. Their eagerness to know God’s ways was merely a façade. They claimed to know God, but by their lives they denied Him. “They seemed eager to know my ways,” said Isaiah, “as if they were a nation that does what is right. But they’re not. They seemed eager for God to draw near. But they really don’t want me because I’m a consuming fire.” Even the fasting itself was polluted by their sinfulness. Look at verses 3-4. “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists.” I’ve done that. No, I haven’t had the brawling, fighting thing. But I’ve fasted and gotten irritable as the day went on. Has that ever happened to you? I don’t know if you want to admit it. But it’s like, “Rawr,” snarling like a junkyard dog. Somebody just throw me a bone; I’d gnaw on it. I’m not behaving very much like Jesus. It’s hard to be with me on days like that. Oh, what a holy day to the Lord! He said, “Put oil on your head and wash your face with it. No one will know that you’re fasting.” My family has known when I’m fasting. It’s been obvious later in the day. Beating each other up, that I’ve never done. Deeper Issue: Exploitation of the Poor But you notice that he zeros in on the social issue. “On the day of your fasting, you do as you please and deprive your workers of their just wages.” He zeros in on the social issue of their treatment of the poor and needy, and so God rejects this fast entirely. Verse 4 says, “You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.” Isaiah’s Call: A True Fast of Ministry to the Poor Instead, he gives them a true, fast ministry to the poor. Look at verses 6-10. “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter – when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away form your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: ‘Here am I.’ If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and the malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” God is saying what truly moves Him. “When I see these things,” says the Lord, “it moves me. This is the fast I’ve chosen. This is what I’m looking for.” Look what he talks about: to loose the chains of injustice, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free, to break every yoke. Each of these refers to unjust laws and legal circumstances that are binding the poor so they can’t escape from oppressive circumstances. Then he says, “to share your food with the hungry and provide the poor wanderer with shelter and to clothe the naked.” These refer to basic physical ministries: food, clothing, and shelter. I was hungry; I was a stranger; you invited me in. I was hungry, and you fed me. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. These basic physical ministries, that’s the fast that the Lord is seeking. He also says “And not to turn away from your own flesh.” Now, God intended this ministry to go on, not just to native Jews, but to all human beings. The NIV adds, I think wrongly, “own flesh and blood.” Blood tends to connect with your race, the Jews. It doesn’t say that in the Hebrew. Do not turn away from your own flesh means these are other human beings. You’re just like them. There’s no difference. They are human beings. We’re all descended from one father. From one man, He made every nation of men. We’re of the same kindred. “To not turn away from your own flesh,” He says. The whole human race has basic physical needs in common. When you see someone hungry, naked, or homeless, something should move inside you to want to alleviate their suffering. Key Phrase: Spend Yourself on Behalf of the Hungry We come to this key phrase in verse 10. “If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry.” “Spend yourself” is the NIV translation. It’s a beautiful translation. I love it. It makes you uncomfortable. It causes you to live differently than you were living before. It changes you. It affects you. It’s not a life given out of surplus and out of the extra. It’s not “if you spend some of your money”, it’s “if you spend yourselves.” There are different ways that preachers can belabor a point. I’m going to do it this way. I’m going to do it by reading different translations of this verse. King James says, “And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, so draw out thy soul to the hungry.” NAU gives us Isaiah 58:10 as, “If you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted.” The ESV has, “If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted.” The New King James has, “If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul.” All of these speak to the issue of self-sacrifice on behalf of the poor and needy. Now, I think spending yourself is the next step after a previous one, which is to deny yourself. Right? Jesus called on us as His disciples to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. I fit “spend yourself on behalf of the needy” right into the following Jesus part. Deny yourself. Say no to yourself. Pick up your cross and follow Jesus. You will spend yourself on behalf of the poor and needy the rest of your life, because that’s what He does. To me, that’s the Christian lifestyle. I find myself wanting in it. I lack it. I’m not doing it the way I should. I mean, there are glimmers here and there, like sparks before the fire. But I want the fire. I want the bonfire. I would like to be on fire for this. We need our hearts to go out to the poor and needy. We won’t do it otherwise. Jesus, in Luke 7, saw a widow from Nain. She was in the process of burying her only son. She was weeping with a lamentation we can hardly imagine. In that society, that was a desperate situation. It says in Luke 7:13, “When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, ‘Don’t cry.’” We will not obey the Lord until our heart goes out to people and knits with them in their suffering. I think it starts with sight. You have to see them. Look at what it says in Isaiah 58:7. “When you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh.” You have to see them. If you don’t want to do this, never go where they are. Then you never have to see them. And if you don’t see them, then you don’t have to help them. Beggars, if you have ever noticed, they try to catch your eye. When they have your eye, they’ve got a better chance. What do you do if you don’t want to help them? You don’t look them in the face. The Result of the True Fast: Glory! So I think the text is saying, “See them. Look at them. Look at their eyes. Look at their faces. Then, care for them.” And what is the result of this true fast? What is the result of this ministry? Glory. Glory for God. Glory for us. “The righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” Matthew 13:43. In Isaiah 58:10-11, it says, “If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You’ll be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.” Do you have any idea what kind of economic times are coming to us? I don’t. I don’t know. We may need to be this for each other. We may need to be an incredible community of sacrificial love, like we have never been before, to help the poor and needy even in our own congregation. God is making this promise. If we live like this, we will have everything we need. He will take care of us. We will know the righteousness of God. We will know the happiness of God’s pure light shining in our souls. We will have a clarity and a purpose in our lives that we have never had before. We will know God. We will see His hand, His activity and sacrificial service. We will see Him. We will get to know Him better. The Lord will guide us always. He will meet our needs. He will strengthen our bodies. We will be fruitful like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. I think it was Tuesday morning of this past week. I was about to go out. I was standing at this pavilion where there was a group of Haitian people. Every morning, David Eugene and I went out and preached the gospel to them before they got ready to come into the clinic. And I just had nothing. I had nothing to give. I was weary. I was empty. I stood off to the side and they hadn’t seen us yet, David and I. I prayed. I said, “God, fill me up. I have nothing to give. I don’t want to be here. I want to be home. Please help me say something to them about the Gospel of Christ.” And He did for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next day. He continued to fill me, continued to strengthen me, to give me the power to minister. It wasn’t just me. Other brothers and sisters that were there, I saw Him do that for them, too. He has promised that if we will spend ourselves, He will replenish us and give us everything we need. Who Are We? Where Do We Live? We are an Urban Church So who are we? Where do we live? We are an urban church. We worship every week adjacent to the poorest part of Durham, northeast central Durham. Here, the standard of living is the lowest in the Triangle Region. Here, the crime rate is the highest. Right near us, gang activity is pronounced. Here are single parent homes, drug deals, and prostitution. Now, I can tell you that there is no poverty here in Durham that even remotely compares with that in the Cité Soleil. It’s not even close. There’s no poverty in America that compares with that. But it is poverty nonetheless. There is suffering here, nonetheless. And we are called to minister to the poor and needy here, even though they are not at the level of those in Haiti. We are an urban church. We Are a Commuter Church Secondly, we are a commuter church. Most of us, I would not say all of us, but most of us, drive a distance to get here. We live in more comfortable and more affluent communities than the people surrounding this church building. We drive to get here. Hardly any of us live in this community. Hardly any of us would choose to live in this community. Hardly any of us have ever lived in anything like this community. We are affluent, well-educated, and unfamiliar with the kinds of struggles that characterize daily life in northeast central Durham. The real issue is that we don’t necessarily want that to change. We may want to keep the sufferings of these neighbors of ours at arm’s length. We Are a Blessed Church Thirdly, we are a blessed church. We have been lavishly blessed by God. He has given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. Through faith in Jesus Christ, the one who shed His blood on the cross, all of our sins are forgiven. If you came here today and your sins are not forgiven through faith in Christ, you don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to go anywhere. All you need to do is look to Jesus. He will forgive all of your sins and you will be adopted into the family of God as we have been. We are children of the living God. We have a glorious future. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. And the earth we’re going to inherit is better than this one. It’s going to be greatly fixed up, okay? It’s really going to be beautiful, a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness. We are completely set for eternity. All of our needs are met, indwelt by the Spirit of God. We are materially blessed as well. That’s what we are. A Call to Pray and Act Present Your Heart to God An urban church, a commuter church, and a blessed church. What then shall we do? How shall we live? Well, I’m calling on us to pray and act. I want you to start with this. I love what Michael Card said in that concert that you folks so beautifully arranged for me and for all of you guys that came. It was such a blessing. I remember one thing Michael Card said. “It makes no sense to try to hide something from an omniscient God.” Amen! So if you say, “Boy, that was a disturbing sermon today,” go tell God. He already knows how you think about ministry to the poor and needy. Don’t hide it from Him. Just go and pray. Say, “God, I don’t care like I should for the poor and needy. I just don’t. I don’t want to walk down that road. I don’t want to go there. There are too many unanswered questions. There are too many hard things. You already said, Jesus, that the poor will always be with us. So what can we do? But I know that You want us to change. I know You want me to change. Please change me. Make me willing to travel with You on that road.” Just start there. There is no sense in hiding something from an omniscient God. I’m going to remember that one. Tell Him the truth. See the Needy Secondly, let’s start to see the needy. Let’s see them. Let’s go where they are. You had an invitation to go out in the streets of Durham and invite people to the Health Fair. That’s a wonderful way to begin. People will understand why you’re there. They won’t think it’s weird. They may or may not come to the Health Fair, but they’ll know why you’re there. You have an entré. It’s an easy thing to do. Invite them to the Health Fair. I don’t mean to be in any way disrespectful to the actual medical care that goes on in the Health Fair, but the invitation could cut out the middle man of them coming to the Health Fair by them coming to faith in Christ right there on the streets. You can witness to them. Talk to them. See how they live. Look past their shoulder into their living room to see where they live. Talk to them. See the needy. Start with Your Family If I can urge you, start with your own family. I don’t just mean your own children. Well, I do mean that. It says in 1 Timothy 5:8, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than a nonbeliever.” There’s much poverty in the world because fathers especially have neglected their ministry to their children and their wives. So we have to start there. But then you could extend it out to extended family members: to your parents, to siblings that may be poor and needy. Care for them. I’m talking about concentric circles. Extend to the Household of Believers: FBC Then let’s talk about FBC. There are needy people here in this church already. It’s already happening. It says in Galatians 6:10, “As we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers." Acts 4:34-35 says, ”There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and so it was distributed to anyone as he had need.” Actually, the more that our urban ministry is fruitful, the more people from the community are going to become members of this church. And they’re going to need our help. So we need to minister. At the end of every Lord’s Supper, we have a Deacon Benevolence Fund offering. Plan now to give more generously to that than you’ve ever given before. We give that money out to help the needy of this church first and the community second. Already there are more and more needs of church members. There just are. So plan ahead to be very generous the next time we have the Lord’s Supper. Then extend from there to the community. Let’s reach out here in northeast central Durham. Extend to the Community I asked Matthew Hodges, the director of Urban Ministry, “I’m working on a sermon on ministry to the poor and needy. Can you give me some points of application for the church?” And he wrote out a list of them. I was reading over them this morning, and I said, “Why would I read them? Let’s have Matthew read them.” So we’re going to end our sermon. I told him he’s under strict orders just to read them. Now, he could easily preach on each of these points but he’s not permitted to do so. Right, brother? He can elaborate, and if you want to hear him elaborate, come and talk to him afterwards and he will. But he’s going to tell you some specific ways to minister here in the community. Then he’s going to close in prayer. Matthew Hodges’ Ideas for Involvement in Urban Ministry These are applications on ministering. The fourth Sunday of every month, after church from 12:30 to 1:00, commit to pray for our outreach to the community. We meet here at church in Room 246. During the greeting time, welcome men and women who do not normally attend FBC. All you need to say is, “My name is” and say your name. “Welcome to FBC. What is your name? How did you hear about FBC?” Share how long you have attended FBC, and thank the individual for coming. The visitor who looks lost (not spiritually) on Sunday, or who is by themselves, needs to be acknowledged. At the end of Bible for Life class, if you see an individual standing by themselves that does not normally attend, go to the person and introduce yourself. Ask the person if they are sitting with anyone in the service. If they are not, welcome them to sit with you. If an individual asks you for any type of assistance, direct them to the ministerial staff or a deacon. We will make that decision. Meditate on the fact that we all were needy and poor spiritually, and have been made rich through faith in Christ. There’s a need for men and women to walk the streets of Durham during the day to pray, pass out tracts, and engage men and women in conversations that prayerfully would lead to the gospel. When referring to the community, let’s say the people are “the men and women in our community” rather than “they” or “them.” This terminology will help FBC members to not think they are better than men and women in this community. Bible for Life classes can commit to serve a meal and then engage in conversation with men and women at the Durham Rescue Mission, on the men’s or women’s campus. Pray about being a part of the 2009 Summer Mission Trip right here to our community. Remember that all communities have been affected by sin. The degree of the sin problem manifests itself differently. The answer to the problem of sin in the people who live in your community is the same answer to the problem of sin in the 27701 community. FBC may not be able to meet every physical need of the poor and needy, but we can be the heartbeat to meeting the spiritual needs in this community. Talk to me about serving on the Urban Ministry Team. Invite men and women from the community to come and worship here at First Baptist. Let the men and women you invite from the community make the decision of whether or not they are going to come. We cannot make the choice for anybody, whether or not they want to come and worship here. Pray as we move forward ministering to the community. Proverbs 29:25 says, “Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe.” We need to look at the poor and needy in our community from a Biblical worldview first, not from a we-do-not-connect worldview. If the latter is what we use, we will never minister to the community. Ask yourself, “Do I look at ministering to the poor and needy in our community from a Biblical worldview?” Let’s pray.

Introduction We are looking this morning at Isaiah Chapter 18. One commentator called it one of the most obscure chapters in Isaiah. But I think the more you study and the more you understand the circumstances, not only is it not obscure, but it actually is very applicable to our present day. We are in the middle of a series of oracles that the prophet Isaiah has given to the surrounding Gentile nations. The nations of the world make up an astonishing, brilliant, beautiful mosaic to the glory of God. God has created different races, tribes, languages, and peoples all over the world. Together they make up the human race. They bring great glory to God. Some peoples are characterized by their physical strength, some by their military prowess, some by their intellectual achievements, philosophy or science, some by their exquisite artistry, and some by their skill in trade or travel. All of these proclivities, these tendencies, bring glory to God. The differences between the tribes and the peoples and the nations were built into the original genetic code of one man, Adam. The apostle Paul told us in Acts 17:26, “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth.” Actually, God did that twice because you know that He destroyed the entire world in a flood. And so again, through one man, Noah, the entire human race was developed. Now, the differences between the races have come about by the magnificent variety that God built into the genetic code of that one man, Adam, or that one man, Noah. Differences between the races therefore come from God and bring Him glory. Pride between the races comes from sin, and dishonors God. Race is from God, racism is from sin. Racism may be defined as the belief that one race is inherently superior to another, and that race is the primary determining factor of human traits. Closely linked to racism, of course, are all sorts of bad behaviors, prejudices, oppressions, violence, and discrimination that one group foists on another because of racial differences. The 20th century, I think, saw the purest form of this evil of racism in the Nazi movement and their Aryan convictions that they were the purest and best race on the face of the earth, and that everyone else was inferior to them, if not actually subhuman. They believed themselves to be genetically superior and everyone else to be genetically inferior. They took that ideology on the road through military conquest until they were finally defeated by the providence of God. But that doesn’t end the issue of racism itself. This country struggles with it. The end of slavery in the United States did not end the suffering of the African people who were stolen from their homelands. They’ve had to face racism ever since. Christian faith is diametrically opposed to racism, because racism is inherently based on pride. If we haven’t learned anything from the book of Isaiah, we can learn this: God hates pride. He hates it. Pride is the root of all sin, that me-ism. One thing I’ve noticed about racism is that people tend to celebrate the race they’re from. Have you ever noticed that? I’ve never found anyone that was racist on behalf of another race. It was always their own race that they felt was superior. Therefore, I think racism is really a form of self worship. It’s really a form of idolatry, and it is evil. Now, we Christians, we know that. We know that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. Amen? Every single one of us depends on the shed blood of Christ to have any standing at all before our creator. It is because Jesus shed His blood that we can have access to the throne of grace. Amen? In that way, all of us are together. We all need a redeemer. And praise God, that Redeemer is available! Jesus Christ is the redeemer of the whole world, of people from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation. It says in Revelation 5:9-10, “They sang a new song” up in heaven, speaking of Jesus, “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on earth.” Notice it’s a kingdom, not a multiplicity or a mosaic of kingdoms. We will be one in Jesus. Amen? We will serve the Lord forever. That’s where we’re heading, and that’s a beautiful thing. Now, Isaiah 18 is an oracle about one tribe, one nation, the Cushites. The political events with Assyria have led that distant nation from Africa to send envoys to Jerusalem to seek an alliance with, I believe, King Hezekiah and the Jews. The Cushite envoys come with a purpose, but God speaks through the prophet Isaiah concerning God’s larger purposes. God’s doing something much bigger than defeating the Assyrians. He has a bigger purpose for the Cushites, and He has a bigger purpose for the whole world. That’s what this seven verse oracle is speaking about. In this brief oracle, God reveals His delight in the Cushites. He has pleasure in them. He enjoys their uniqueness and their distinctiveness. He speaks a word as a pleased, or as a delighted Creator about them, not just concerning their little political mission, their military mission, but about, I believe, their future, bringing gifts to almighty God in Jerusalem. I think that speaks of a spiritual purpose, of God’s desire to bring them to faith in Christ through the spread of the Gospel. Ultimately, the cure for racism is to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re not going to have any of that in the new heaven and new earth. I’m looking forward to that, to being free forever from racism and frankly from every vestige of pride, to being so completely humble and immersed in a sea of worship that Jesus deserves for what He’s done at the cross. In this brief oracle, we see the delight, the pleasure of God in Cush and His plans for them. It begins with these envoys coming from Ethiopia. Now, I know that Isaiah 18 is not primarily about racism, and this sermon’s not going to be about it. I’m going to give careful exegesis to it and I’m going to describe the political situation. But I tell you this, I think we ought to take every opportunity we can to find out the evils that surround us that may still be in our own hearts, and to preach clearly the truth so that God can be glorified. Sin always brings misery. It brings misery to those who have that locked within their hearts and also to those who receive the bitter fruits of it. So, we’re going to focus on Isaiah 18 and understand the glory of God in the spread of the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Envoys from Ethiopia Context: A Rising Power in Africa The envoys are coming from Cush, Ethiopia. In modern history, we think of Ethiopia as a land of starvation and weakness. But in Isaiah’s day, the Cushites were a nation to be reckoned with. They were a rising power in Africa. After the flood, as I mentioned, Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Through them God would repopulate the entire earth. Cush was the eldest son of Ham in the table of nations in Genesis 10:7. His brother Mizraim was the Hebrew name for Egypt, probably the ancestor of the Egyptians. Cush seems to have settled farther south along the Nile River. From him came Seba, Havila, Sabta, Raamah, and Sabteca. All of them seem to have settled in Arabia. But some of his descendants seem to have crossed the Red Sea and settled in what we now know as Ethiopia. One of Cush’s descendants was Nimrod, who was a mighty warrior and who founded what became Babylon and Nineveh, two centers of godless empire-building. The Babylonian Empire and the Assyrian Empire eventually came from these cities that Nimrod, Cush’s descendant, planted. According to Ezekiel 29:10, the southern border of Egypt was its common boundary with Cush. This was the land of the Nile River, stretching almost 2,500 miles by air. But because of its twisting and meandering course, the Nile River is over 4,000 miles long, the longest river on the face of the earth. The Nile Valley was formed as water cut its way through the sandstone and limestone. It made cataracts, or waterfalls, which interfere with navigation and section off portions of the river. In those various valleys and basins, peoples formed. The Cushites were among them. Cushites settled the region of the fourth cataract, or waterfall, and there they flourished. Some commentators believe that the Queen of Sheba, or the Queen of the South in the NIV, was actually a Cushite who came from this very region. She heard of Solomon’s fame and came to see all that Solomon had done. There formed a link, then, between the Cushites and what God was doing in Jerusalem, the glory He was spreading through the Davidic kingships of David and Solomon. She was overwhelmed. As the Old Testament era ended, there is a tradition, perhaps a myth, that it was the Cushites that rescued the Ark of the Covenant. No matter what Indiana Jones thinks, there are some Ethiopians that say they’ve got it. It’s in an Orthodox temple. You can’t see it, but they take care of it. I don’t know what good it would do to see it. God is not in the business of leaving us physical artifacts for us to focus our worship on. He actually tends to destroy those things, like the bronze serpent that was destroyed because it had become an idol. At any rate, there is that tradition. You can follow it on the internet or however would be interesting to you. They say they rescued the lost Ark of the Covenant and that they still have it. Around the time of Isaiah, somewhere around 720 to 715 BC, the Cushites got so strong that they were able to basically conquer Egypt and take it over. They set up the 25th dynasty and they ruled until around 633 BC. So they were in charge of Egypt at this time. And now, these Ethiopian rulers were sending emissaries to Judah to organize an anti-Assyrian coalition. Palestine: the Playground and Battlefield of Egypt and Assyria Let’s set the stage in terms of the geopolitics of the region. Palestine, the ancient near east, that area of Judah and Israel and all those tiny little kingdoms, was between two mighty empires at the time: the Assyrian Empire to the north, and the Egyptian Empire to the south. The Assyrian Empire to the north was between two rivers. The Mesopotamian region literally means “between two rivers.” It was a fertile area, and because of the fertility of the soil, they were strong and powerful militarily and culturally. They sought to take that dominance on the road and build, as they did, the Assyrian Empire. In the south it was Egypt. Again, because of the fertility of the soil through the Nile River, they were strong and powerful and able to project their power as well. Between these two empires was this little region called Palestine. It was their playground, the battlefields, the chessboard between these two empires. There was always stuff going on, always intrigues, emissaries and alliances being formed. This was an opportunity for such an alliance. Isaiah 18: A Message to Ethiopia by Means of Their Emissaries During this time, the Cushites, having gained control of Egypt, wanted to link up with this Judean king. I believe it was King Hezekiah. So they sent emissaries to try to make an arrangement and an alliance against Assyria. They show up in Jerusalem, but there’s a prophet there named Isaiah, and he’s got something to say about this mission and these emissaries. He’s got a prophetic word to speak about the future. And he speaks it. Look at verses 1-2, “Woe to the land of the whirring wings along the rivers of Cush, which sends envoys by sea in papyrus boats over the water. Go, swift messengers, to a people tall and smooth-skinned, to a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers.” This is the land of whirring wings. You can almost hear them, the tsetse flies or perhaps other types of flies. There are lots of flies in Egypt along the marshes where the reeds grow. These folks come from the rivers of Cush, a land, it says, divided by rivers. So Isaiah’s oracle reaches to a land over 1,500 miles away, a land populated by people very different from the Jews, a land that God intended to conquer someday with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They send envoys. As mentioned, Cush takes control of Egypt and sends envoys to curry favor with King Hezekiah. They come in these little papyrus boats. They’re lightweight boats. If you’re going to travel through the cataracts, through the waterfalls, it’s good to have a boat that you can carry. So these are lightweight boats made of reeds, or grass, and that’s how they come. They’re designed to travel lightly and quickly. They had traveled an enormous distance to make their case to King Hezekiah, to check the power of the Assyrians, perhaps even to defeat the Assyrian Empire. The Envoys Sent Back Home with a Message But Isaiah sends the envoys back home with a message. He sends them back. “Go, swift messengers, to a people tall and smooth-skinned, to a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers.” The Lord, through Isaiah, describes the Cushites with a pleasure, the pleasure of the Creator. He delights in the Cushites. He enjoys them. He enjoys their uniqueness, their attributes. I have the sense almost of the way God, in the Book of Job, describes the different physical aspects of His creation; of the sun and the moon and the stars, the stability of the earth and different animals He’s created and their attributes. First of all, they are swift. They’re good runners. In the time of the rebellion against King David by Absalom, there was a Cushite man that wanted to run and bring the news that Absalom was dead, and the rebellion had been destroyed. Do you remember that? They’re long-distance runners. They do very well in the Olympics. Have you noticed? It’s the Ethiopians that win the 5,000 and the 10,000 and the marathon if they can. They’re great runners and have been for a long time. They’re swift, and they’re tall, and they’re smooth-skinned, and they’re a people feared far and wide. These envoys represented an unusually tall people. As a matter of fact, some research that I did listed some tribes in Ethiopia and the Sudan as the tallest people on the face of the earth, statistically. In the case of one of these tribes from that area, males can have an average height of six feet four inches tall, women six feet tall. They’re a tall people, and they’re powerful militarily. Herodotus, the first Greek historian, called the Father of History, visited Egypt around 460 to 450 BC. He wrote this about the Ethiopians, he said, “The Ethiopians to whom this embassy was sent are said to be the tallest and handsomest men in the whole world. In their customs they differ greatly from the rest of mankind, and particularly in the way they choose their kings; for they find out the man who is the tallest of all the citizens, and of strength equal to his height, and they appoint him to be ruler over them.” That’s a unique way to choose a leader. It’s the very same thing they noted about Saul, though, that he was a head taller than any of the other people. So it’s not unheard of that the tallest man, the most powerful man, is going to be the king. It says of them that they are smooth-skinned. Now, the Egyptian priests shaved themselves head to toe once every three days. But these people didn’t need to do that. They were smooth-skinned already and had no need to shave themselves. They were, as we said, a people feared far and wide. They were aggressive militarily and strong. They had already taken control of Egypt, and that was no small accomplishment. Ancient historians tell the story of some Persian messengers who went to the Cushite king to discuss a possible alliance with him. This was in the era of the Persian Empire. The Cushite king brought out a standard bow that their archers used, but the bow was unstrung. He challenged the Persian messengers to string the bow, and none of them could do it. And he said, basically, “When you’re able to send men who can string one of our bows, then we’ll talk about an alliance.” They’re powerful and strong, and, you can see, also a little prideful. A modern website speaks of the Ethiopians as the only Black nation in history never to have succumbed to slavery or colonial rule. The Italians, British, Dutch, Portuguese, Turks, Spanish, Arabs, and French tried twenty-seven times to conquer Ethiopia but failed every single time. Yet they easily defeated all other African tribes and empires to carve out a niche for themselves in the Horn of Africa. This speaks of military prowess and the power of this small nation. Because of this, and because of God’s plans for Assyria, God is issuing them a warning. “Military aggression ends in destruction. If you take what you have and you start spreading out, you start conquering other people, you’re going to come under my judgment.” That’s what the woe is at the beginning of the chapter. He’s giving them a warning. He’s going to warn them more than anything though what He’s going to do to the Assyrians. So if you have plans to conquer the world, put them aside, because God has His own plans to conquer the world. You’re just going to be running head to head with Him. The Message to the Peoples of the World Something Magnificent is About to Happen So that’s the warning that He gives to these amazing people. And what is this message? Look at verses 3-6, the message to the peoples of the world. “All you people of the world, you who live on the earth, when a banner is raised on the mountains, you will see it, and when a trumpet sounds, you will hear it. This is what the Lord says to me: ‘I will remain quiet and will look on from my dwelling place, like shimmering heat in the sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.’ For, before the harvest, when the blossom is gone and the flower becomes a ripening grape, he will cut off the shoots with pruning knives, and cut down and take away the spreading branches. They will all be left to the mountain birds of prey and to the wild animals; the birds will feed on them all summer, and the wild animals all winter.” Something magnificent, something noteworthy is about to happen, says Isaiah. The message is given to all the nations of the earth. Why? Because they all have the same ambition. They’d like to conquer the world if they could. Now, some nations find themselves in a position to try, but he’s addressing all the peoples of the earth concerning this ambition. God is going to do something dramatic. It’s as if He’s saying, “Drum roll, please. Now, pay attention to what I’m doing.” The Seemingly Silent God Speaks The nations of the world are going to sit up and take notice of what God is about to do. When a banner is raised on a bare hilltop, people from miles around can see it. When a trumpet sounds clearly and loudly, people from miles around, they can hear it. The Lord is going to communicate something to every tribe and language and people and nations about His great power. At this point, the seemingly silent God speaks at last. It seems like God isn’t even there sometimes. Is He even there in the natural disasters and with the rise and fall of the empires? People have asked that again and again when suffering and tragedy come. Is there even a God? It seems like He’s not even there. People cry out to Him and there’s no answer. It just seems like He doesn’t exist to some. But He is there. Oh, He’s there! Right from the very beginning of the book, we have these words, that God is there, and He is not silent. Isaiah 1:2 says, “Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth! For the Lord has spoken.” Here in this oracle, verse 4 says, “This is what the Lord says to me: ‘I will remain quiet and will look on from my dwelling place, like shimmering heat in the sunshine, like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.” Oh, He’s there! He is powerful, and He’s watching, it seems, very quietly. He’s like the rising heat. You wonder if He’s there, but you can perhaps occasionally see the shimmering. You think, “All right, maybe He really is there.” Now, there’s a legal maxim that says, “Silence means consent.” Well, that doesn’t work when it comes to God, let me tell you right now. Just because God is silent doesn’t mean He agrees. Not at all. It says in Psalms 50:21, “These things you have done and I kept silent; you thought I was altogether like you.” Oh, but He’s not altogether like us. And just because He’s silent doesn’t mean He agrees. Not at all. God’s silence actually is time to lead us to repentance. His patience means repentance and salvation. That’s what He’s waiting for. 2 Peter 3:15 says, “Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation.” Romans 2:4, “Do you show contempt for the riches of His kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you towards repentance?” Here, God is silent like shimmering heat and like a cloud of dew, silent, but ready to act. How unlike the tumultuous kings of the earth that we talked about last week in Isaiah 17:12, “Oh, the raging of many nations – they are like the raging sea! Oh, the uproar of the peoples – they roar like the roaring of great waters!” That’s what we’re like. We’re noisy, but it’s signifying nothing. God is silent and signifying everything, sitting on His throne. He sits serenely up there on His throne. He sits enthroned above the circle of the Earth. The people before Him, they are like grasshoppers. God’s Magnificent Plan: Judgment on the Aggressor God has a magnificent plan, and that is judgment on the aggressor. Look at verses 5-6. “For, before the harvest, when the blossom is gone and the flower becomes a ripening grape, he will cut off the shoots with pruning knives, and cut down and take away the spreading branches. They will all be left to the mountain birds of prey and to the wild animals; the birds will feed on them all summer, the wild animals all winter.” This is a bit of an agricultural analogy, perhaps like a parable. There’s a spreading vine, and it’s moving out. It’s advancing itself. Its branches are moving. We might know it as kudzu. Okay, have you ever seen that? It just grows and grows. It seems like it can’t be stopped. But here, there’s even some fruit. It’s a flowering and then a fruitful vine that seeks to move out. Notice that He doesn’t mention Assyria here directly, because it’s a message for all the nations. Right now, it’s Assyria, at the time of the oracle. But it could be the Cushites too. Maybe they have ambitions for the world. It’s anybody who wants to move out with military prowess and take over the face of the earth. God will stand and He will say, “No.” He will cut off with a pruning knife those spreading branches. And what’s going to happen to all of the fruit? The birds are going to come and eat it. It’s a picture of desolation and judgment. It’s God fighting against you. Now, the Cushite envoys have come and they’re trying to play the geopolitical game. They’re trying to make an alliance. They’re going to stop Assyria. Assyria will be thwarted. They’re so clever, they’re so wise, and they come to talk to King Hezekiah about making this kind of an alliance. God says, “I have my own plans for Assyria. I’ve already made them plain through my prophet Isaiah.” We have already read it. Isaiah 10:12 says, “When the Lord has finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, ‘I will punish the King of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes.’” This is Isaiah 10:16-17, “Therefore the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will send a wasting disease upon his sturdy warriors; under his pomp a fire will be kindled like a blazing flame. The Light of Israel will become a fire, their Holy One a flame; in a single day it will burn and consume his thorns and his briers.’” One day. Just one day. He’ll take care of Assyria. Now we know what that is. That’s when Sennacherib threatened Jerusalem, came right up against it. God sent out the Angel of the Lord, and in one night, one hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian troops were dead. “Cushite envoys, I don’t need you.” There doesn’t need to be any alliance between Judah and Egypt. It’s not necessary. As a matter of fact, it’s sin. We’ll talk about that next week. “Judah doesn’t need you, but you need Judah. A little more specifically, you need a savior coming from Judah.” That’s the message here. God knows His sovereign plan. He knows His own perfect timing. Though He is quiet, though He is silent like shimmering heat in the sunshine and like a cloud of dew, He will act when the time comes, quite boldly. It says in Isaiah 14:25-27, “’I will crush the Assyrian in my land; on my mountains I will trample him down. His yoke will be taken from my people, and his burden removed from their shoulders.’ This is the plan determined for the whole world; this is the hand stretched out over all nations. For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?” God is enough, Amen? His power is enough. What matters is what God thinks. What matters is what God is doing, not all these plans, trying something on our own, on the side. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, what is God’s will? What is He doing? That’s what matters. Gifts Sent from the Ends of the Earth The Envoys Return --- to Worship! God gives a prophecy through Isaiah. The envoys are looking for some kind of a political arrangement. Actually, let me tell you what’s going to happen with Cush. There’s going to come a time when they’re going to send gifts from the ends of the earth. They’re going to send it to Zion and they’re going to worship the Lord, the Lord Almighty. Look at verse 7, “At that time gifts will be brought to the Lord Almighty from a people tall and smooth-skinned, from a people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by the rivers – the gifts will be brought to Mount Zion, the place of the name of the Lord Almighty.” The gifts will be sent by envoys. They’re going to come back and they’re going to worship. The Cushite envoys first came to recruit for military alliance. These powerful people are described for a second time. God just can’t seem to get enough of saying these words. He enjoys the Cushites. He likes talking about them. But at that time, those Cushites are going to send gifts and they’re going to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They’re going to worship at Mount Zion. Old Testament Fulfillment: 2 Chronicles 32:23 Now, there is a physical fulfillment of this. In 2 Chronicles 32, 21-22, this is what it says: “The Lord sent an angel, who annihilated all the fighting men and the leaders in the camp of the Assyrian king. So he withdrew to his own land in disgrace.” That’s the defeat of Assyria. One angel, the Angel of the Lord, gets sent out and Assyria gets defeated. He withdraws to his own land in disgrace. “And when he went into the temple of his god, some of his sons cut him down with the sword. So the Lord saved Hezekiah and the people of Jerusalem from the hand of Sennacherib king of Assyria and from the hand of all others.” That’s the banner raised up on the bare hilltop. That’s the trumpet blast that all nations will hear. And they did hear. That was Assyria. That was Sennacherib. That was almost 200,000 troops killed in one night, while the nations sat up and took notice. He took care of them on every side. 2 Chronicles 32:23, “Many brought offerings to Jerusalem for the Lord and valuable gifts for Hezekiah king of Judah. From then on he was highly regarded by all nations.” So they’re going to physically come, after Assyria gets crushed, and the Cushites are going to bring gifts. They’re going to link up. Perhaps it’s enlightened self-interest. “It’s good to be on the good side of the Jewish God, we’ve noted.” They want to worship, so they bring gifts. That’s what Isaiah’s predicting. But I think he’s predicting far more than that. By the way, just a note about Hezekiah: at that time, when he was receiving ambassadors and people coming from all over, and they’re bringing gifts, his heart gets puffed up with pride. Can you believe it? Oh, how pestilent is human pride! And Hezekiah’s like, “Ain’t I something?” What did Hezekiah do? When he heard of an overwhelming Assyrian force, he got down on his face and pleaded with God to save the remnant that still survived. He had the good sense to know that he had no chance if God didn’t intervene. That’s all. Hezekiah receives these emissaries, and 2 Chronicles 32:25 says, “Hezekiah’s heart was proud and he did not respond to the kindness shown him; therefore the Lord’s wrath was on him and on Judah and Jerusalem.” Can I just urge you by way of application to search out pride in your life and destroy it? Wherever you find it, wherever you find it. Start looking in certain places, like when good friends give you some advice on how you can do better. For example, your spouse might have some input on how you could improve some area of your life. That’s a chance for you to find out if there’s any pride in your heart. Oh, there are many such opportunities. Look at your ambitions, look at your hopes and desires. What are you driving for? How many of them are traced back to your own pride? Search it out and destroy it, friends. I need to do the same. God’s Ultimate End: Worship by All Nations But what is God’s ultimate end for the earth? Why does He put up the banner on the bare hilltop? Why the trumpet beckoning? Because He wants to be worshipped, friends. He wants you to forget yourself. He wants you to turn away from your own petty little interest, your own empire building. He wants you to get down on your face and worship Him, and delight in Him in spirit and in truth. That’s what He’s doing. So those little gifts that are brought by the Cushite emissaries after the Assyrians die, that’s just a symbol, friends. That’s yet another prophecy, that’s all it is. It’s a prophecy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When the Gospel goes out to the ends of the earth and the true gifts come from the nations, that’s the people themselves bringing their own hearts, their own bodies prostrate before God and saying, “Here I am.” Presenting to God a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing, themselves, that’s the gift. They’re going to come from all over the earth. Regarding God’s original purpose in calling Abraham the father of the Jews, He said this in Genesis 12:3, “I bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” Now just wait till next week. Wait till next week, when in Isaiah 19 we talk about how God says this, “The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.’” Wow, that brings goosebumps, that God would actually call Egypt “His people.” Yes, He will in the new covenant, through the blood of Jesus Christ. So God has some specific purposes for the Cushites. They’re going to come and they’re going to bring gifts. They’re going to come and worship the true God. Psalm 68:29-32 says, “Because of your temple at Jerusalem kings will bring you gifts… Envoys will come from Egypt; Cush will submit herself to God. Sing to God, O kingdoms of the earth, sing praise to the Lord.” Zephaniah 3:9-10 says, “Then I will purify the lips of the peoples, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and may serve Him shoulder to shoulder.” Listen, “From beyond the rivers of Cush my worshippers, my scattered people, will bring me offerings.” Isn’t that sweet? Zephaniah 3:9-10, where God is predicting that some from the Cushites will come and worship Him forever. God’s ultimate aim, then, is worship from all nations. Isaiah 52:10 says “The Lord will lay bare his holy arm in the sight of all nations, and all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God.” Isaiah 60:11-13 says, “Your gates will always stand open, they will never be shut, day or night, so that men may bring you the wealth of the nations – their kings led in triumphal procession. For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly ruined. ‘The glory of Lebanon will come to you, the pine, the fir, and the cypress together, to adorn the place of my sanctuary; and I will glorify the place of my feet.’” And it says in Isaiah 56, “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.” That’s God’s purpose in Isaiah. That’s God’s purpose to the ends of the earth. New Testament Fulfillment: the Ethiopian Eunuch The Ethiopian Eunuch Came for the Old Covenant, Discovered the New Covenant There is a brief New Testament fulfillment to all this. Ain’t it sweet? In Acts 8, an Ethiopian eunuch has gone up to worship. He’s gone to the temple to worship. Why has he gone there? He’s heard of the fame of the Jewish God, and he wants to worship. He is an important official in charge of the treasury of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians. He’s an important man. He’s gone there for the Old Covenant worship. He’s taken part in the animal sacrifice system. He’s on his way back, riding in his chariot, and he’s reading the book of Isaiah the prophet. Oh, Isaiah has converting power, my friends! So there he is, reading Isaiah the prophet, and this is what it says in Isaiah 53:5-6, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” That’s what he was reading. You can’t choose a better portion of Isaiah to be reading, especially if you’re unconverted. So, he was reading Isaiah, and he was reading about Jesus Christ, the substitute, the Son of God who came to shed His blood. But it didn’t make any sense to him. Who is this man who died? Who is this suffering servant? Well, the Holy Spirit leads an emissary, an envoy, a messenger, a missionary named Phillip, one of the original seven. God laid on him, by an angel and by the indwelling spirit, “Go down to that desert road. I’ve got work for you to do.” And he sees the chariot, he runs up alongside it and jumps in. I think actually the Ethiopian invited him in first, all right? You need to be invited in. You need to build that connection relationally. He said, “What are you doing?” “I’m reading.” “Do you understand what you’re reading?” “How can I,” he says, “unless someone explains it to me? Please evangelize me.” Friends, don’t miss one like that. You actually ought to pray for them. If you’re not really being that fruitful in evangelism, pray for an easy one. You know what I mean? A big, slow pitch right down the center of the plate that you can knock over the fence. Ask for something. Say, “God, give me an evangelistic opportunity equal to my immaturity and lack of courage and boldness.” He’ll answer that prayer. But he’s saying, “I need someone to explain Isaiah 53 to me. Can you do it?” Oh, you need to be ready for that moment. “I can do it. God sent His son. His name is Jesus. He entered the world. He lived a sinless life. He did great miracles to prove his deity. He taught great things to prove His wisdom. But the greatest thing He did of all was He took our sins on Himself. He was our substitute. He died in our place. All we like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. He’s talking about Jesus.” The Ethiopian man was drawn in. “What do I do? What do I have to do to be saved?” “Repent and believe.” Friend, you may have come here today by the provident hand of God and you’re not saved. You don’t know the forgiveness that this Ethiopian eunuch found. Find it in Christ. It’s the same message. Then gifts will be brought by you. Not just by the Cushites, but by you, to Almighty God. Simply repent and believe in Him. Trust in Him. The Ethiopian man, he did it. He said, “Look, here’s some water, why couldn’t I be baptized?” No reason. So they stopped the chariot, and right there and then Philip baptized. When he came up out of the water, immediately the Lord took Philip away, disappeared, poof! Now that’s an exciting moment in redemptive history. “Whoa, where did he go? He’s gone!” The Beginning of the Church in Ethiopia The Lord dropped Philip at Azatus and he continued his preaching ministry there. But the Ethiopian eunuch went on his way rejoicing. He went down to Ethiopia where Irenaeus tells us that he continued in evangelistic ministry himself. We don’t anything more about this man. He drops from the pages of history. I can’t imagine, however, that he didn’t go back and lead many to Christ. See, God has plans for Ethiopia. In the fourth and fifth centuries AD, after the Gospel had already started to spread around the world, a shipwreck brought two men to the Cushite kingdom. Those two eventually led that king to faith in Christ. Athanasius sent one of them back as the first bishop, orthodox bishop. He set up the church there in Ethiopia, so the Gospel was planted in Ethiopia. But friends, that’s in the past. That’s in the past. The Future of Ethiopian Worship … the New Jerusalem What’s in the future? I’ll tell you what’s in the future, the new Jerusalem, the new heaven, and the new earth. Its gates are going to stand open night and day. It says in Revelation 21, “The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and the honor of the nations will be brought into it.” Those are the gifts that are going to be brought from a people tall and smooth-skinned, a people feared far and wide, whose land is divided by the rivers, an aggressive nation of strange speech. They’re going to bring gifts eternally into the new Jerusalem. Amen? Application Believe the Gospel Like the Ethiopian Eunuch Did So what application can we take from this? Well, let’s start with this: believe in the gospel as the Ethiopian eunuch did. Believe in it the first time today for the forgiveness of your sins, and continue to believe in Christ. He is the focus of Isaiah. He’s the focus of all scripture. Preach the Gospel Like Philip Did Secondly, be ready to preach the gospel as Philip did. Are you prepared? Suppose you were reading something a little more obscure than Isaiah 53, would you be ready? Are you ready to share the gospel? Get yourself ready. Pray that prayer. You can laugh, but pray it. Say, “Lord, make me a witness today. Give me a chance. I’m weak.” He knows you’re weak. “Lord, I’ve been fruitless.” He knows that. “Oh God, give me a chance today to witness. Help me to be ready.” And pray for the advance of the gospel, not just in Cush, in Ethiopia, but to the ends of the earth. God has plans for people from all over the world. Pray for it, and get involved in it. Delight in the Races as God Does Delight in the races as God does. I have a theory. I was talking to Matthew Hodges about it this week. I have a theory that we will have our racial distinctions up in Heaven, in the new Jerusalem. I think we’ll retain them. I think God loves variety. I think He created them for His own glory. That’s why there’s people from every tribe and language and people and nation. It says in Revelation 7:9-10, “After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’” Oh, that’s the end of racism there, friends; it’s gone. We will delight in the variety of what God has done. People will be coming from many different roads, many different places to believe in Christ. Despise Racism as God Does Finally, despise racism as God does. Be open to what God is doing through this church in the urban ministry. Get involved in it. Ask Matthew how you can get involved in the urban ministry. We have a health fair coming up, get involved. Wouldn’t it be delightful to see, as much as possible, here in this local church, the variety that we’re going to see in heaven? Close with me in prayer.