The Mission

We're gonna look at the mission of the church.

And what I'm my hope is that you see throughout the text that we preach what the the mission of the church is and our role and participation in it.

And so we want to start though with this that uh sacred mission has core values that we hold to.

And the reason that we have these core values is they kind of set themselves up as guardrails on this path or this missional journey that we find ourselves in, right?

Guardrails exist so that you don't find yourself off the road and in a ditch.

And there's churches all around us that are laying in these ditches because they haven't had these guardrails to help them stay on focus and stay on mission.

And so we apply these core values uh for that end.

And one of our core values is this it's transformation, obedience, and righteousness.

Working with the Holy Spirit to restore God's image in us.

Transformation, obedience, and righteousness.

Now, all of our core values that we have at Sacred Mission, of the four that we have, are derived and are adapted from this Puritan work by Jonathan Edwards.

Jonathan Edwards wrote a book, this is the abridged title, uh, called The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God.

The distinguishing marks of a work of the Spirit of God.

So many of us have been a part of churches, we've been a part of spiritual movements, but we have to ask ourselves, how do we know when it is truly God working or when it's something that's being falsified or fabricated by the efforts of man?

Right?

We have to try to have some framework of which we're able to discern and assess is truly God moving.

Now, Jonathan Edwards, he wrote this work to establish that framework on how the church would be able to discern a true movement of God versus a false or a fabricated one.

See, during the American Enlightenment, uh Edwards played a critical role in the revival meetings that gave way to the to the great awakening of the 1730s and 40s.

These revival meetings swept gospel renewal across North America and beyond.

And they saw thousands of people come to know the joy of God's salvation in Jesus.

But with any movement, right, it doesn't just have all these celebrations, all these people that are impacted in positive ways, but it drawed with it critics.

These people who would come to these revival meetings, or people from a distance who would uh offer their critique that this wasn't really a move of God.

If it was a move of God, it would have these elements with inside the meetings.

We wouldn't see people crying out and these loud, expressive wailings of their repentance of sin.

No, there would be order and quietness or whatever it is, right?

They would kind of look at what was happening within the meetings, and they would say that, hey, this isn't a real move of God because of this.

And so Jonathan Edwards went to work and he tried to do this.

He tried to set the critics' gaze off of the things happening in the meetings, and he tried to establish it on the fruit that was being produced because of the meetings, right?

So, so what do we do in the church?

We come in, we critique, oh, this music isn't really of God, it's got a beat, and they plug their instruments in.

Um, okay, well, that I don't know if that's true.

Maybe it is.

What's the fruit of that, right?

What's the fruit of this kind of worship or this kind of preaching or this kind of expressiveness with inside the church?

And the premise of his argument was that the evidence of authenticity was discovered in the fruit, not the event.

What happened in the lives of those people, what fruit was born in them, rather than the event taking place.

If what was taking place in the revivals of the Great Awakening was truly a move of God, then we would be able to witness this fruit, this evidence, what he called these distinguishing marks.

Now at SMC, we desire to be a part of seeing revival, seeing gospel renewal sweep across northern Cincinnati and beyond.

And so we have adopted these distinguishing marks and set them before us as our own core values, to be equipped to continually assess our own health and fruitfulness of gospel work.

So we want to be able to be equipped as a leadership team, but we want to equip you as well as you're seeing us work in gospel ministry throughout time.

We should be able to have some framework that we assess the fruitfulness of our labor, that it is faithful to the end of what God has called us to, right?

So that's why we put our core values in place.

And this morning, we're going to look at the mission.

And we want to observe it from this lens of a distinguishing mark, transformation, obedience, and righteousness.

We want to discover out of Paul's letter to the church in Rome how the mission and the mark are suspended in this beautiful harmony with one another, right?

Because we don't think through that lens all the time.

We might think of what we're doing, but we rarely think about what we're becoming.

And so the mission and the mark have to be held in harmony, not in contradiction with one another.

It is not just okay for us to focus on what we do.

We have to have in mind who we're becoming in the process of it also.

So let's dive into the text.

And in the body of this, we see we are set apart for the glory of God.

We are set apart for the glory of God.

Now, woven throughout this passage, we're going to see Paul use this concept of calling, right?

He's actually going to use it three times in the opening first six verses of his letter to the church in Rome.

In verse one, Paul says that he has been called to be an apostle, right?

He comes out the gate, I'm called to be an apostle.

In verse five, he's going to refer to his calling, and he's going to help us understand that its origin is something that was received from Christ.

So it wasn't anything that he uh uh contrived or fabricated in his own strength, but he received this from Christ.

So he's called to be an apostle.

This calling has been received from Christ, and it's also for, he says in verse 6, we, we who are called to belong to Jesus.

We who are called to belong to Jesus.

So within this opening letter, we see this two-fold reality of calling.

We see the two distinctives of God's calling in us.

We are called in salvation to Jesus and we are called in service for Jesus.

We are called in salvation to Jesus and called in service for Jesus.

We are in Christ, have both been called into his salvation and into his service.

And this reality, this twofold reality of calling, establishes our understanding of how Paul communicates that he has been set apart, right?

So Paul starts, I've been set apart.

How do we understand this?

How are we supposed to build this framework of our understanding?

That he has been called into the salvation of Jesus, and he has been called into his service also.

This makes him set apart.

And he has been set apart in Christ by receiving the salvation of Jesus that has taken him out of the bondage to sin and death and brought him into the kingdom of righteousness and eternal life.

But he's also been set apart in Christ by being called to service of Jesus in his kingdom, in which he is now a citizen of, because of the salvation that he has received.

So the effect of this calling, right, that Jesus establishes on our lives, both to his salvation and to his service, is that we are set apart.

And the essence of being set apart is this we are simultaneously set apart from something, and we are set apart to something, right?

We're set apart from sin and death, we're set apart from the ways of the culture we find ourselves submersed within, and we're set apart to life and righteousness and to conformity to the kingdom culture of which Jesus rules and reigns over, right?

And so when we look at this language of being set apart, we have to realize to understand the fullness of our mission that we're called to be set apart from something and we're called to be set apart to something.

There's a negative and a positive essence to this reality.

The text shows us something critically important, though, about our identity in light of these relationships, right?

This relationship that apart from Jesus we are in service to Satan's sin, which the fruit of that relationship and work is death.

And in Jesus, we are set apart to him in service, which the fruit of that is eternal life.

And so the reality of that relationship, right?

Relationship either to Satan or to Christ, our relationship to sin or to righteousness, to death or to life, creates an identity for us.

And Paul's going to use this heavy-handed language of slaves.

This is how, if Paul was to distill down his identity, he's going to understand it as a slave.

He starts with this in the very opening of the letter in verse 1.

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus.

Literally, he's saying, a slave to this master, Christ.

But we also see that he's going to use that same language to understand himself before he came to know the salvation of Jesus.

And we see this unpacked for us in more detail in chapter 6, verses 20 through 23.

In verse 20, we're going to see this.

So if you have your Bible, we're going to work through these next three verses in pretty gritty, granular detail.

In verse 20, we see that apart from Jesus, we are slaves of sin.

This is the language Paul uses.

You were slaves of sin, but he's going to use the language of free in regard to righteousness.

So what's Paul saying there?

You're a slave to sin, but you're simultaneously free in regards to righteousness.

Well, this freedom mentioned here is disconcern.

Your freedom in sin, apart from Jesus, is that you have no concern for righteousness.

You're free to that being a burden or an obligation or fitting into some framework of your worldview where you have to do things that are right or make you right standing before God.

Because you are such a slave to sin, you are actually free in disconcern with righteousness.

This speaks to both our inability and our unwillingness to live righteous lives to the glory of God apart from Jesus.

Now you might think to yourself, apart from Jesus, I did good things.

I did some things that were right and good, but the reality is you did those things for the glory of yourself.

You see, what God calls his people to is that the totality of his law, all 600 and some aspects and parts of his commands and laws for his people are able to be understood through just two.

Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

These two fulfill the whole law.

But the first and primary one is that all of our work, all of our righteous deeds would be fueled by a deep love for God in our entire being.

Apart from Christ, we did good deeds out of a deep love for ourselves.

Because we believed that it was going to be in our own doing good, that we were going to somehow obligate God's love and affection for us.

And so we didn't do them for the glory of God.

We did them for the glory of self.

And so Paul's saying, you were disconcerned with righteousness in the ways that the scripture helps us understand where to live righteous lives for the glory of God, out of this whole being love for who He is.

We were disconcerned with these things.

We were unwilling and unable.

Our wills were enslaved by sin, and all of our being was bent toward it.

In verse 21, we see that the fruit of our enslaved service was death.

But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?

For the end, the fruit of these things is death.

Man, think of the weight of what Paul is saying.

Everything you did apart from Jesus, it was gonna earn you one thing.

Death.

It was never gonna earn you the blessing and favor and affection that you hoped it would.

It was going to earn you one thing.

Death.

And we become slaves of God.

This is what verse 23 helps us to understand in the passage.

In Jesus, our identity is transformed through his salvation.

And so is our service because we have a new master.

This is what Paul demonstrates for us at the end of verse 22, right?

So our identity transforms, and in our identity being transformed, our service transforms also.

He says this at the end of verse 22 the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.

So we are either slaves to sin or we are slaves to God, and our service to either one produces distinct fruit.

So I like to work with functional definitions, right?

If we're gonna say a word, let's make sure we understand what we're saying when we say it.

So if I was to use a functional definition for a slave, here's how I would define it for us this morning.

A slave provides service to a master to produce fruitfulness.

A slave provides service to a master to produce fruitfulness, right?

You're going to, uh if you're going to be a slave, in our understanding Western uh uh culture and ideology, we understand slavery through the lens of the the uh African slave trade, right?

So if you became you became a slave to a master to provide service for him to produce fruitfulness, right?

So you would make them rich.

And we see that in our slavery to either Satan or to Christ, we're providing service, sin or righteousness, and those lives produce fruit, right?

And so apart from Jesus, Satan is our master, and we provide the service of sin whose fruit is death.

But in Jesus, God is our master, and we provide service unto him.

But here we find and discover a unique relationship between our service to God and its fruit.

Right?

There's something distinct here that Paul helps us understand.

We discover this in reading the end of verse 22 in harmony with verse 23.

So we don't want scripture to compete against itself.

We want to read it in its context and in harmony with each other.

And so it says this, the end of verse 22, end of verse 23.

The fruit you get, listen, received, right?

Welcomed, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.

Verse 23, for the wages, let that sink in, for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift, let that sink in, of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Now, in verse 23, we discover this juxtaposition between wages and gift?

The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life.

Now we have to ask ourselves this question: why would Paul not have used the same language here in verse 23?

Why would he not say that the wages of sin is death and the wages of righteousness is eternal life?

Why would he not help us understand that it's our labor that produces the fruitfulness that we so desire in our life?

And it's in this juxtaposition that Paul puts out in this one simple verse of wages and gift that we actually see the beauty of the gospel.

We can't earn life.

We can't work righteousness to produce life.

It's a free gift given to us by God through the gospel of his son's finished work.

You can't earn life.

Jesus earns the eternal life that we never could.

It's his wages of perfect righteousness to the glory of the Father is the life that we so long for, that our soul so desperately needs.

And the beauty of the gospel is he gives it to us freely.

He gives us to us freely by grace through faith in his finished work.

This is why Paul's so adamant of using different language.

You aren't earning life through your righteousness.

What's the fruit we get?

What's the not the fruit we earn?

You see that in the verse 22?

It's not the fruit we earn.

The fruit we get, the fruit we receive, is sanctification.

And so what's he talking about?

It's that our life is about reflecting and expressing the righteousness of Jesus that has been freely given to us by grace through faith.

It's conformity to the image of Jesus the Son.

That's the fruit we get.

And we get it with joy, and its end is eternal life.

Meaning that life through the gospel of God is freely given to us before any works of righteousness are ever done by us.

Can we allow that to sink in for a moment?

The gift of eternal life is given to us before any works of righteousness are done by us.

And this is the glorious fruit of the gospel.

It's righteousness expressed sanctification.

Meaning we are in the process of being conformed to the righteousness of Jesus that has been given to us for eternal life.

So our service to God, our master, is not with the end goal of earning our wages, but it is a response-filled realization of what Jesus has earned for us and freely given to us.

We are not laboring in the kingdom of God to earn anything.

We're laboring in the kingdom of God as a response to what has already been given.

So, what is our service to God?

How would we summarize its essence?

It's the gospel.

It's the gospel.

And Paul, we're gonna bring us all the way back to verse one of the opening of the letter to the church in Rome.

He says this Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.

Man, Paul helps us understand that he's a slave to God, that has been delivered from his bondage to sin through salvation, and called into his service as an apostle, set apart for the gospel.

And likewise, we who are in Jesus are set apart for the gospel, because it's the gospel that fulfills our salvation, it's the gospel that forms our sanctification, and it's the gospel that fuels our service.

Another way to understand this is that it is by the gospel we have been saved.

In the gospel we are being sanctified, and through the gospel we are sent in service.

I believe this is why Paul didn't use the language of wages in reference to eternal life.

We're never called to earn something.

From God.

We've been called in a response to something that Jesus has earned for us.

And Paul's going to work in this threefold gospel reality of salvation, sanctification, and service in verse five.

He he calls it the obedience of faith, right?

So, so servant of Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.

Words, words, words, words, we'll go through that.

And then he says, for the obedience of faith, right?

He says this, he writes in verse five, Through whom, being Christ Jesus, we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations.

So through whom, being Jesus, and Paul says this, Jesus who was declared to be the Son of God through his resurrection.

How do we know that Jesus is the Messiah, Savior, Son of God?

We believe him to be.

We know this through his resurrection.

And he says in verse 4, uh, or he said that in verse 4, verse 5, we have received two things, he says.

Grace and calling.

Grace and calling.

He says, grace and apostleship.

We're gonna put calling in that placeholder of apostleship.

But before we dive into that, let's deal with the word grace for a moment.

What is grace?

Grace is free in undeserved favor that reconciles us.

Grace is free in undeserved favor that reconciles us.

It reconciles us to the Father through Jesus, right?

Through faith and his finished work of his death, burial, and resurrection.

It reconciles us to his people, the called of God who have received his salvation.

And it reconciles us to his mission, called into the service of our master.

Again, we we believe that we serve a God who is already on mission to see creation restored through the finished work of his son.

And when we are in Christ, we're simply called to join God in what he is already doing through the power of his gospel.

We who are in Jesus have been effectually called by the Spirit into this grace-saturated reconciliation to himself, to his people, and to his mission.

So you and I have received grace.

We've received grace, free and undeserved favor, right?

And calling.

Calling.

We see this that Paul uses actually this relationship of grace and calling as an undeserved equipping for ministry.

That they are inseparable from one another.

We have received grace and apostleship.

That's what Paul's gonna say, right?

That that he uses grace and apostleship together in what has been received.

And he articulates his distinct calling as an apostle here in the text.

But I believe faithfully and humbly that we can insert our own calling here to grasp an understanding of the ministry that we are called to in Christ.

Now, apostleship here is it's not ours.

That's Paul's, right?

Nobody in this room has physically seen the risen, resurrected Lord, and glorified flesh.

I don't think.

I'm gonna just take that as a safe bet.

Two, you haven't personally been called by the mouth of Jesus into the work of apostleship.

So Sacred Mission believes that the office of apostle has ceased.

It is no longer in function within the new church.

So none of us here can claim dibs on apostleship.

You introduce yourself to me as apostle so-and-so, I'm gonna help you discover a new church you can go to.

Um so we can't lay hold of apostleship, right?

But but I do believe, again, faithfully and with full confidence, we can declare with Paul, through Christ, I have received grace and blank.

Whatever the calling of God is in your life, we can fill in that blank.

I have received grace and uh worship leading.

I've received grace and teaching, grace in being a pastor, grace in being a mother, grace in being an entrepreneur, grace in being a business owner, grace in being a tradesman, grace in being whatever you find yourself in.

I have received grace and calling, right?

Because we are fulfilling these distinct and diverse realities of the callings of the body of Christ for the service toward a singular end.

And so, what I want us to get our minds around is that everybody in this church, you've received grace and calling.

You are actually uh purposed in this body, you are essential in this body to fulfill a distinct and diverse calling on your life that you have received grace to be able to fulfill.

And no matter what the distinctiveness or the diversity of calling in this room, what I want is to help us understand is that we're working toward a singular end, right?

Even though we might have diverse callings within this room, they're not working toward this diversified portfolio of ends, right?

They're working toward a singular one.

It's as if when Paul was talking about the body of Christ, some of you are the eye, some of you are the ear, some of you are the hand or the foot, but you're not separated, you're not dismembered, you are underneath the singular head, who is Christ Jesus our Lord.

In the same way, he has diversified our callings, graced us to be able to fulfill them that we might work toward this singular, glorious end.

And so your distinct calling, the way God has given you grace, giving you grace to be a mother, giving you grace to be a husband, giving you grace to be a father, giving you grace to be a coach, giving you grace to whatever you find yourself in, it doesn't work toward this different end.

It works toward this singular end, and this singular end is this the mission is to bring about the obedience of faith through the gospel for the glory of God.

Man, when we can connect our calling, our labor to that bigger, more glorious why and purpose, the mundane things about what we're doing, the the tasks that we have to fulfill, the cubicle with the clickety-clack keyboard becomes bigger than the data you're entering into the system.

Because you're there and you've been graced there, I believe, diversely within this body to work toward the singular end.

That you're in the cubicle to bring about the obedience of faith through the gospel for the glory of God.

You're changing that diaper so that you might bring about the obedience of faith through the gospel for the glory of God.

No matter if you're digging tunnels underground for whatever reason, I don't even know where that example came from.

But if that's what you're doing, I saw the meme of the guy popping up in New York.

If that's you, you're doing it for this singular end, for the obedience of faith through the gospel for the glory of God.

You have been given grace.

You have received Jesus' salvation, and you've been called into his service for this end.

Church, we can say it this way: Through Christ, you have received grace and calling to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations.

When you understand that what you're doing is for the for the nations to open their mouth and declare the glory of God, whatever you find your hand to do, you can do it toward that end.

You can connect every bit of your being toward that end.

There is nothing mundane about what you do, there's nothing pointless about what you do.

There's nothing that's not going to produce fruit in what you do.

It is for this end goal that the nations would gather together in every tribe, people, and tongue, and that they would declare the glory of God.

Do you see your purpose in this church?

We're not here to argue about carpet colors.

We're here to be on missions so that people's mouths are open and their tongues confessed his glory.

That's why we're here.

Now we have to ask ourselves, what is the obedience of faith, right?

That's kind of seems like something that'll be contrary to one another.

Well, I don't think obedience and faith can coexist.

Well, the Bible says that it does, so we're going to submit to that, right?

So, how does the obedience of faith work itself out?

And I believe that there's this three-part reality of the gospel that we actually see in this statement, the obedience of faith.

The first one is this salvation is obedience to the gospel.

Do we understand that the first message recorded that Jesus preached in his public ministry was repent and believe.

Repent and believe.

What is that?

It's calling for obedience.

Because the gospel demands that we are obedient to it, that we submit ourselves in this trusting faith of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection.

We repent from our sin and we turn toward righteous living in response to the gospel that we have received.

So fundamentally, there is obedience to the gospel in receiving the salvation that Jesus has given to us.

So that's the first place that we see the obedience of faith working itself out.

The second place that we see it is sanctification, right?

Obedience to Jesus' righteousness.

It's conforming to the image of Jesus and expressing his righteousness that has been freely given to us through the process of sanctification.

So we're going through salvation, sanctification, right?

We're going to obey the righteousness of Jesus in us by being conformed to his image in this process of sanctification.

That's what Paul said.

The fruit you get, the fruit you're receiving because of the gospel is sanctification.

And the third place that we see obedience is in service, obedience to his calling.

Being sent on mission to call others into receiving his salvation through the gospel, expressing his righteousness through sanctification, and being on mission through service to him, that then others may know the joy of his salvation also.

And so we see this cyclical reality to our lives that we share the gospel, people receive salvation, they understand sanctification and the fruit of obedience to Christ's righteousness in them.

They're sent on mission to declare that gospel to others.

Others are brought in, they receive that salvation, and just keeps going and going and going and going.

Till when?

Till the earth is filled with the glory of God.

That's till when.

The glory of God.

This is the end.

This is why you wake up to an alarm at 5 a.m.

This is why you check off your to-do list every day of mundane tasks.

This is why you put your hand to a lawnmower in the summertime.

This is why you do what you do.

And if you don't understand your existence in being in light of, man, do you understand the way that you just will feel vanity in the things that you do?

Of waking up, of doing the dishes, of cooking the meals, of getting in the car, of driving to work, of filling out that report, of making sure the presentation is right, of all these, if it's not connected to that end, we're gonna be see vanity in our labor.

But I can tell you, it is not disconnected from this singular purpose of the reason and the purpose that we work.

It is for the sake of his name among all the nations.

That's what Paul says here.

It's for the sake of his name among all the nations.

That through our salvation, sanctification, and service, the nations would glorify the name of God.

I mean, your calling and purpose is eternally bigger than you can imagine it to be.

It's for the sake of his name among every nation.

All of this work in us and through us, it's for the glory of God, through the obedience of faith.

And the pathway journey to that end is the gospel.

It's the gospel.

This is why we talked about last week.

We've got to fight to protect the gospel.

Because it is the gospel that saves us, right?

It is the gospel that sanctifies us, and it's the gospel that pushes us out into service so that the nations would glorify the name of God.

It is the gospel that saves us in receiving the good news of Jesus' death for our sin, his burial, and his glorious resurrection.

It's deeper trust and faith in the gospel.

Do we understand?

We sin because we don't believe the gospel.

If you're in this room this morning and you're struggling with sexual immorality, you're believing a lie about the gospel.

You're not tying your pleasure to the reality of Christ the King's monogamous covenant to one bride of whom he gave his entire life for.

You're not understanding love and sacrifice and covenant through that lens.

And you also don't believe that Christ as your groom can fully satisfy every single pleasure you would ever come across in this life.

And that we sin because we don't trust and believe the gospel.

It's not because we got to try harder, do better, make sure that we're tough enough.

No, stop.

Fall on your knees, believe the gospel.

You want to stop sinning?

Trust the gospel more.

Because that is the essence of our sanctification.

Every sin that we do, you can root it back into some disbelief or failure to trust what Christ has accomplished for you in his finished work.

But we also called into his glorious service.

This is a gospel that fuels us and propels us.

Ultimately, being set apart for the gospel of God is a service of fruitful labor for the glory of God, our master among all the nations.

Remember, we talked about what's a slave, it works for a master to produce fruitfulness.

But our the fruitfulness of the gospel, ironically, is not determined by our work.

You see, God is going to make sure that that fruit is produced because it's the glory of his name that's on the line.

You think that God is going to allow his name to be disgraced among the nations because of our inability to be faithful according to what he's called us to?

By no means.

God will get his glory in spite of us.

And so what we get to do is we get to labor and work not as earning something or as if it depends upon us, but it's a response of joy because God is going to guarantee that fruitfulness will be on the other side.

We don't have to worry if the fields that we're plowing are going to produce a crop.

No, we know that in joy, if we put our hand to the plow, fruitfulness comes on the other side because God will not allow his name to be disgraced among the nations.

That's why he's going to be faithful to you.

That's why he's going to fulfill every promise.

That's why he's going to make sure that you persevere in salvation.

That's why he's going to make sure that you uh arrive in glory and eternal fellowship with him.

It's not because of you, it's because if he failed on any one of those promises, he would cease to be God.

His name would be disgraced among the nations.

He would not be who he said that he is.

I'm glad that I'm in that.

Because I'm more secure in God's pursuit of his own glory than I am in trying to work to achieve my own.

All of this is a portrait of the faith, of the obedience of faith that Paul talks about.

The obedience of faith that is salvation and obedience to the gospel, sanctification, obedience to Christ's righteousness, and service and obedience to his calling.

This I want to put before us this morning is the mission.

Yeah, many of us fail to live in faithful service to God.

Our lives are often not marked by gospel mission, but are often marked by mere cultural engagement or retreat from the culture altogether.

Many of us, we engage with culture without being set apart for the gospel.

Here's what I mean by that.

Many of us have no problem engaging the culture around us.

We find ourselves in the company of unbelievers and skeptics, antagonists and atheists.

It's an integral part of our social life.

We tend to share our lives, right?

Our homes, our hobbies, and our interests with the culture that we have been placed within.

But we don't just share our homes and our lives.

We actually are able to share in the culture itself.

We celebrate in the ways that it celebrates.

We mourn in the ways that it mourns.

We even find joy in and grief over its highs and lows, its victories and losses.

And we have an attunement with the culture that equips us to engage with it.

And I want you to know there's a healthy part of that.

There's a healthy part of it.

If you're so disconnect from the culture that you're unable to engage with it at all, that's unhealthy.

We need to be attuned to our culture so that we can actually faithfully engage with it.

Yet we often find ourselves engaging with culture without the gospel.

Now, here we discover unhealth.

Unhealth.

In fact, little to none of our life within culture is marked by or reflects the truth that we have been set apart from it, but set apart to the gospel of God.

We disregard that our service to Jesus is to engage the culture with the gospel, not simply for the sake of cultural engagement.

We engage it with the gospel because it's the gospel alone that is actually able to provide a faithful critique of what the culture celebrates, of what it mourns, of what it finds joy in or grieves over, its victories and losses.

It is the only faithful critique that we can provide to culture to show them how they're putting their hope and trust in something that has no ability to fulfill its promises to you.

And so not only do we bring the gospel for critique, but we bring the gospel as the only source of hope.

As their eyes are open and their ears are open to understand that gospel or that the culture promises will never be fulfilled in their life.

We have to present a hope that is true and faithful to carry them through.

And that's the gospel.

If he was just trying to be cool, Jesus.

Hey, I'm the son of God, but I'm cool too.

I'll go hang out at the bar with you.

I'm rad.

No, he just tried to be nice.

Like that's what missional living has turned into.

Missional living has turned into Christians just trying to make unbelievers think they're cool.

That's pathetic, if we're honest with ourselves.

Because you're a really bad savior.

So am I.

If we're not engaging culture with the gospel, then we're not loving our neighbor.

It's really as simple as that.

I love the attunement that we should have to the culture because it should help us engage it, but we have to engage it intentionally with the gospel, because that's their only hope.

But some of us, we don't engage the culture at all.

In fact, we retreat from culture without being sent in service.

We retreat from culture without being sent in service.

Many of us, if we took an inventory of our relationships and our activities, we would find that we have enclosed ourselves within the subculture of the church.

Everybody we know and everything we do is anchored to the church.

Our lives are marked by the gospel in some sense, in the sense of salvation and sanctification.

But can I submit to you that they're missing the critical mark of service?

That they're absent of any true gospel mission?

I mean, we can't recall the name of an unbelieving person that we have an intentional and intimate relationship with for the purpose of bringing them to faith and hope of the gospel.

Nor can we recount a time when we engage culture on their turf and on their terms, where we went to them instead of continually expecting that they just come to us.

We've discovered ourselves in a retreating posture rather than an engaging one.

We've been so submersed within the subculture of the church that we have no real impact on the culture that we reside within.

Can I tell you it's a good, right, and healthy thing to have relationships and be involved in the life of the church, just like it's a good, right, and healthy thing to be attuned and engaged with the culture.

We have to hold these two things in harmony with one another instead of imagining or acting like they're in opposition.

Where does that become unhealthy?

Where you don't have any relationship with unbelieving people, where you've been so submersed within the subculture of the church that you have no impact on the culture you find yourself in.

We are exiles and sojourners within a culture that we're called to be on mission for.

You see, here in this unhealthy reality, is where the gospel begins to become dormant in its effect in our own lives because we have not been in service to see it affect the lives of those around us.

I don't know about you.

I have discovered I'm at some of my most spiritually healthy uh places when I'm more engaged with unbelieving people on mission.

Because it's as I see the effect that the gospel is having on them, it gives me a deeper beauty and gratitude and experience of what the gospel effect is on me.

And the less that I'm in mission, the less I'm on mission, the less I'm engaging with unbelieving people with the gospel, I tell you that the dormancy of the gospel's effect in my own life, man, I feel it.

And maybe, maybe you're better than me.

Like, right?

You're sitting here seeing like Justin, you're a loser.

It's like, okay, that's fine.

I can I can handle that.

But I think that's a reality for all of us in some sense.

Man, the the Christians who stop living on mission become the most, they're the people I don't want to hang out with.

I just don't want to even be around them.

They're grumpy all the time, they're just chucking bombs at culture, they're complaining, they're oh blah, blah, blah.

It's like, what the heck?

Do you have an unbelieving friend?

I've had an unbelieving friend 25 years.

Well it shows, brother.

I believe that we need to hold both of these things in harmony, cultural engagement and also healthy church life.

The gospel demands this.

It demands that we are simultaneously set apart from the culture of sin and death that we reside in and set apart to engage it with the kingdom of righteousness and life that we have been called into.

We must strive to hold this tension within our own lives, being set apart from the culture to the gospel.

A failure to live in this tension leaves the culture without any true kingdom impact.

And worse yet, it stifles the purpose of our calling and it shuts the mouths of those around us from being open to proclaim the glory of God.

In our hope church this morning, the reason why we live in gospel mission is because Jesus engaged our culture with his gospel of grace.

We have to understand the reason you're sitting in this seat, the reason you have hope or peace or joy is because Jesus, number one, he didn't retreat from us.

Can you imagine if Jesus retreated from us because of our sin?

I mean, what the scriptures help us understand is that it is in Christ we live and move and have our being.

That he holds all things together.

Literally, if Jesus was to retreat from his people because of their sin, it would be our destruction.

The very breath in our lungs would be removed from us.

Earth as we know it would cease, the rotation of it would stop.

Because apart from him, we can't have existence.

Man, it would be our doom and despair if God retreated from us.

But what if Jesus would have just engaged us without any gospel?

What if he just tried to make us believe he was cool and he could hang out with you?

Man, we would still be dead in our sin.

We would still have no hope.

And Jesus engaging our culture with the gospel of grace, this is the bedrock of our faith.

That the God the Son became incarnate, took on human flesh, and he entered into our experience with his gospel, with culture to seek and save the lost, to serve us rather than to be served by us, that we would know the joy of his salvation, experience the fruit of his sanctification, and be sent on mission through the calling of service.

We have been saved by a God who lovingly engages us, who met us on our own turf, on our own terms, who attuned himself to the celebrations and mournings that we had in our culture.

He attuned himself to our joys and griefs.

He attended weddings and funerals.

He was there in the midst of everything that we did, our victories and our losses, and he was there with his gospel.

That's why we can know his salvation.

He came near to us and he carried with him the gospel of grace.

It is in this truth, in this truth that we are sent in faithful service to the culture around us with the same saving, sanctifying, serving gospel.

He came to us that in him we would go to them.

And so close with this.

This is our hope.

That we would live on mission, or this is our vision, right?

That we would live on mission to make disciples and plant churches.

This is it.

It's not flashy, right?

I hope it makes you excited, but it might not.

I don't know.

But but this is what we're gonna be about.

We want to make disciples of all the nations.

We want to not just make disciples, but we want to teach and equip people to be disciple makers so that we have no other option but to plant churches, to continue to see gospel center churches saturate this northern Cincinnati area with the hope that the nations will declare the glory of his name.

And I hope that no matter what you find yourself doing, you can connect your labor to that glorious end.

And when you wake up tomorrow at the sound of that alarm clock, and my prayer is that it's with purpose, that it's with mission, that it's with intentionality, so that you can continue persevering, not in your own strength, but persevering in the finished work of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection for us.

Let's pray.