Embracing God's Mission: The Timeless Message of Grace

Thanks for joining the Heights Church podcast today. We hope that you enjoy the message.

If you're in the Sydney area, be sure to join us at the Heights Church at Galston

Road, Hornsby Heights, Sydney, Australia.

G'day, thanks for joining the Heights Church podcast today. We hope you enjoy our message.

If you're in the Sydney area, be sure to join us at the Patch Church at Gloucester

Road, Hornsley Heights, Sydney, Australia.

It's not just corporations, but it's individuals these days that are encouraged

to develop a personal mission statement. I don't know whether you have a mission statement.

What are you here on this earth for? What governs your day by day?

Is it to be comfortable? Is it to get to the weekend? That's my mission,

to endure through the week and get to the weekend.

For many people, that's like that. or maybe your

mission is for something else that you make a difference in

this world because that would be kind of like a vision statement wouldn't

it because a vision statement looks towards the future but a mission statement

is in present tense which means that it's the things that's governing your day

by day now i don't know whether you've made up a mission statement or whether

you think that's kind of old hat but it's kind of not old hat because timothy produces a timeless

mission statement, and it's the mission statement of God.

And that is that we, although you can look at 1 Timothy and you can read into

it more key because it doesn't get you right with God, but one thing that you

can have, this is good and pleasing to God, which is chapter 2, verses 2 and 3.

Isaiah 2:2

This is good and pleasing to God, our Savior, who wants all people to be saved

and to come in knowledge of truth.

So Timothy is to share God's passion, his mission on the earth,

and that is that all people would come to know him and that people will grow in him in the truth.

And it's kind of like our mission statement here at our church.

I mean, if you were a church and you didn't have that mission statement,

well, I'd ask, well, what are you on about?

But our mission statement is that we might know Christ, not just know about

him. We might know Christ in a relationship with him.

We might grow in Christ and grow in his truth and the knowledge of his truth

and that we might show Christ to each other in the world.

That's our mission. Our vision is that God will be glorified in all that we do.

That's a future statement that at the end of time, when we get to heaven and

we stand before God, he will either have an evaluation of our church or not

have an evaluation of our our church, basis on whether we have glorified God or not.

If you're coming to equip, you will hear the letters of the church is on about that.

Was the church at Ephesus, the church at Lyceum, all the churches,

were they at the end of their time glorifying to God or not glorifying to God?

We can better understand this way, the mission of God, that if we share God's

passion for all people to be saved.

It will show in how we pray for all people at all time that they would come to know him.

And if we share God's passion for people to come to know the knowledge of the

truth, it will show on how we present the gospel, which is the good news of

Jesus, which is the story of Jesus and his salvation,

and will also be representative of the type of leaders that we that we appoint?

Are they able to teach the truth? Are they able to live the truth?

And also it would be receptive on what we expect leaders to do.

And we see that in chapter five.

So I hope you're excited as we go through Timothy. Let me say that if ever you

had a book of the Bible where it says, do not argue about disputable matters, this is the book.

There's a lot of stuff in there that we're going to look at and address about,

I'm going to say where I come from as far as some of the things that are in

the different letters that go for it.

But today we're looking at grace, God's grace.

And the reason why we need to look at God's grace is because in Timothy,

if you look at the circumstances of the letter, there is a crisis in Ephesus,

which is Timothy, Paul, if you want to look at it in an Anglican perspective,

it's kind of like archbishop and then Timothy's bishop.

Then he goes and he talks to the different churches and one of them is church's

Ephesus that he's organizing.

And so what happens is that he looks at Paul, Paul addresses an issue in Ephesus

that he previously warned was going to happen.

Back in Acts chapter 20, verse 29, he said there's going to be false teachers

Acts 20:29

and he called them wolves and they were coming.

And so Paul writes to that church. He says, I know that after I leave,

savage wolves will come among you and will not spare the flock.

But it's not just people that are out there who are coming in that are going to be false teachers.

He says, actually from within you, false teachers are going to arise and distort

the truth in order to draw disciples away from that truth.

And as we fast forward from Paul's farewell, everything happened,

just as he said, in the church of Ephesus.

And the exact disaster that he talked about was that they shipwrecked their

faith. Isn't that amazing?

We're seeing what that crisis is. It's all about the truth and how leaders have

arisen from their own number and we're leading people away from the truth.

And in chapter one, verse 20, we get a feel of that, like I said,

and that is people, some have shipwrecked their faith.

The conflict at Ephesus is not some obscure nitpicking, some division over irrelevant,

minuscule theological kind of distinctions. It's about how we get right with God.

It's about how to become a Christian. It's about the things that you need to

believe to be saved. It's about life and death.

The experience as a congregation of Ephesus, chilling, not only for the church

at Ephesus, but chilling for us here at the Heights and churches all throughout the world.

See, their congregation was established by Paul, which is pretty decent, isn't it?

You get like Paul himself establishing a congregation. He taught the Christian message.

Now, we've got to get our head around that because it's important for later

on chapters that the Christian message was actually, the New Testament didn't exist then.

He was writing it. But this one Timothy is part of the New Testament.

So the Christian messages at that time was the scriptures, the Old Testament

scriptures, unlocked on how they reveal Jesus.

And then Paul is writing second doctrine. It's called, some people call it,

laying the apostolic foundation,

which is before in the Old Testament was the prophetic foundation of what God

was about, who he was, and what he wanted to relay.

Lay and that was a messiah that was coming and the new testament is the apostles

laying down what that means for people then and today it's not that paul was a good preacher.

And we know that's true because sometimes he preached so long that people fell

out of the window and died.

And then he had to do a miracle then. I think it was God's grace to him that he ran down the guy.

I always wonder whether he went back up and finished his sermon. I'm not quite sure.

But it is in that light of Paul laying down and establishing people within the

church to lay the foundation of the Christian message, the New Testament Christian

message that he's on about.

And the false teachers were coming along. Now, this is a matter of debate on

whether the false teachers were people who were from different faiths,

because Ephesus was very mystical,

was very much into sort of magic and had this spirituality of Ephesus.

But we also know from the passages, early passages from from Paul that from

Jerusalem came people who were promoting the Old Testament Jewish faith rather

than the Christian faith, trying to get people to come back.

And this all depends on whether you see Timothy to be early writing,

where the mystical faiths and different religions have been established or not, or a later writing,

which means that those things were pretty much in place in the church.

They had come into the church.

We'll leave that for a bit later and we can talk about whether it's called Gnostics.

So whether the Gnostics teaching was there or whether Jewish teaching was there.

Personally, regardless of the early or late dating, I think you can read a whole

lot of that, whether it's warning them of things to come or warning them of

the things that are there. I'm not quite sure what happens in it.

Let me say, it's not just as if I haven't made up my mind about it.

No one has made up their mind about it. There's a whole lot of conversation about that.

But one thing is for sure, there was definitely Jewish-based false teachers

that Paul was addressing.

And the reason why he was addressing that is because it was the place of the law.

What happens? What's the problem? The Christian message of grace was being distorted.

And we see that in verse 7 of chapter 1. It's all about the law,

the commandments of the Old Testament, or more precisely, a misunderstanding

of the purpose of the law.

So in verses 3 to 7, Paul said that they already had false teachers,

had used the law the wrong way.

And then verses eight to 11, in this very complex and sometimes complicated passage,

he speaks about the right way of using the law and then goes to explain of what

the effect might be in the right way and the wrong way of using the law.

So we got that? It's very complicated and probably what I said.

Verses 8 to 9, we know that the law is good if one uses it properly.

We also know that the law is not made for the righteous, but for lawbreakers, the rebels.

So in a sense, God didn't give the law, the Old Testament law,

so that people would keep it, but for those who wouldn't.

We know that it's true from our own experience.

Like if you're driving down the road and you see a speed sign,

the speed sign if it's 60 is not

for everybody in here i know that go

55 it's not for the people who go 55 all the time it's for the people who go

above 60 because what it reveals is that people have not been obedient to the

street sign to the sign if i want to use an illustration connected to our new building project,

it's a plumb line that reveals a wall is crooked, isn't it?

Now, if you don't know what a plumb line is, it's just Tim in the house tonight.

So Tim probably goes, what's a plumb line? We just use lasers.

But a plumb line is a weight that goes down off a string.

And because of the nature of everything, when you hold it down,

it's going to be perfectly square.

And if you hold it down against the wall, if the wall goes in like that,

you know that the wall is crooked.

It's not there to show you the wall's straight. It's not there to show you if

the wall is crooked or not.

It reveals a crooked wall. And so, too, the law shows that we are sinners.

Sinners, when they held a plumb line against our lives, against God's righteousness

and us, we know, as the Bible says, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

We don't need really a plumb line to reveal that to us. We know it.

In fact, the Holy Spirit says he's come to convict the world of sin,

righteousness, and judgment.

So I'm absolutely convinced that when you sit here this morning,

like me, I know that I'm a sinner and I don't need anybody to tell me me about

it. I don't need a plumb line.

But that plumb line is what fixes it. And the plumb line is God's word and the law.

When we read the law, we realize we can't keep it. We haven't kept it.

We need some salvation from the fact that I haven't kept it at all.

But just as a plumb line can't fix the wall, it's people like Phil Kelshaw and

Tim that make it straight and lasers.

It only can reveal that there's a problem. And so the law can't fix us.

It reveals that there's a problem.

So what the law could not do, God has done through his son, Jesus.

He's fixed the problem, the perfect one, the one that came perfect,

has given us his perfection, his righteousness, his right relationship with

his father and given it to us.

So Paul reflected on his own life. He says the grace and kindness was shown to him.

And as a result, we see that in verse 17, he burst forth in massive thanksgiving.

Now to the King eternal, immortal and visible, the only God,

be honor and glory and forever and ever. Amen.

There's got to be an amen with that. In fact, if you were a muso,

you probably would write a song about that, wouldn't you?

God King Eternal, Lord of Visible, God Only Wise.

Paul gives us that personal illustration. He presents himself.

I want to give you an exhibit. Exhibit A, me.

Concrete evidence that God has a measurable grace is himself.

That the Holy One, the majestic one, the one full of glory, forgives even the

most undeserving, the ones who have not kept his commands, which is us, by the way.

If you want to just get down, which Jesus did, he simplified the law from a

whole lot of laws and made this, you've got to love the Lord your God with all

your heart and all your mind, all your strength. You've got to love your neighbor as yourself.

Failed. And if you want to honestly look at yourself, have you loved the Lord

your God with all of your heart, with all of your mind and all of your strength?

Let's not put examples of that.

You know that you haven't. and Paul definitely knew that he didn't.

He was a persecutor. He was a blasphemer.

He was a violent man. He actually came to eradicate, well, he didn't come,

but he made his mission statement to eradicate the Christian church and he opposed

the name of Jesus, destroying God's people.

So if there was ever anybody who God could justifiably be angry with,

it would be Paul. Paul, see, Paul misunderstood the law.

He thought the law was the way to please God.

But in his desperation to please God, he was actually doing the thing that God hated.

Paul is not only the greatest example of misusing the law, he's also the greatest

example of one who is unworthy to find God's forgiveness, his grace.

And in verse 16, he says, God deliberately made Paul an example,

forgiving sinners of what is really what God is all about.

So really the big issue at Ephesus was not necessarily whether we're going to

keep the law or not going to keep the law, it was whether we were going to believe

that God is gracious or not.

Whether I've got to measure up in some way or whether I have to accept the grace

that's freely given to me or whether I have to still keep the law.

People were being told by these false teachers, keep the law and God will accept you.

The message is not only wrong, but it's also dreadfully destructive.

And as Paul points out, it shipwrecked your faith.

You were on the rocks. You were not not sailing anymore because you were there

wailing around with no chance of rescue because it's only from you,

yourself, deep within that you were going to find rescue.

Grace is, it's not about you as John prayed. It's about God.

And he says these things. This is a trustworthy saying. Three times he says that.

Trustworthy saying is of great importance. There's a principle out there.

There's something that we need to listen to.

It's a must, we must never forget type of message. Here's a trustworthy saying,

Jesus came in the world to save sinners, you and me.

It's the fundamental foundation of our church. It is our mission.

And we are here as a demonstration of God's grace to tell others about his unbelievable grace of saving us.

Everyone's greatest need is not to find happiness and contentment in life, although that is a need.

It's a need that God, when he created everything and said, behold,

it was good, our need in happiness and contentment is to regain what is not good anymore.

That's a need, but our greatest need in life is to be right with God.

And as a church, we're not to get confused about our mission here on this earth.

On whether what we do and what's our emphasis.

There's a very well-known story about a surf club on the northern beach of Sydney,

just 150 metres from where we lived, a beach called Bungan Beach.

Sometimes they have a sticker on the back of cars on the northern beaches that

Bungan Beach, somewhere on the north coast of Australia.

And you go, because no one wants to find it.

But what happened was around, the surf club was founded around the first half

of the 20th century, and the beach was notorious for rips, as it always is,

which is good for surfers. You just got to lay there and you get out back,

but not so good for people who were swimming.

And at one time, there was a boy that disappeared while swimming and the local

people got together and they formed this group to organise a surf club to patrol the beach on weekends.

Now, Narrabeen had been going and all other beaches had been going,

but Bunga's kind of this forgotten little bit of paradise down on the northern beaches.

And so people were down there wanting to rescue people from the Drowning Surf,

and it became very successful, the surf club.

Everyone saw the need. The numbers grew. They built a clubhouse.

They ripped the clubhouse down. They built a bigger clubhouse.

The trouble is, though, is when they build a bigger clubhouse,

as sometimes happens on the northern beaches, is that all of a sudden they had

to do a fundraiser to pay for the clubhouse.

So bingo started, dances started, parties started.

They had the big burger bash that was happening, this sausage sizzle that was

going on over Wednesday night.

And in short, they tried to get the clubhouse built and paid for by all sorts of different means.

And unfortunately, what happens is they had heaps of volunteers,

not to patrol, but to organise the bingo, to organise the party,

to organise the barbie, to get the sausage sizzle happening.

And as a result of all that volunteer work that happened outside of the patrol time,

the actual numbers of patrol dropped to a point that they actually stopped the

patrols on the weekend until somebody drowned again and then they revitalized

and got back up again we're not to forget.

What our church is on about. And the church as a whole is not to forget that.

I mean, really, we couldn't really forget that we're people of grace,

that we're undeserving sinners, that we were rescued by God,

a people of grace to one another, and people holding out God's grace,

in a lost, lost world in need of rescue, could we? We know that's true.

That's kind of the false teaching of today isn't it where we lose our mission

of God so briefly as we look at our passage and we look at the nature of God's

grace and we look more closely at it we read it from this that we see God's

grace in that he came to seek people.

Undeserving people and to save them as I pointed out in verse 13 Paul admits

that he's a blasphemer He's a persecutor. He's a violent man.

He's the low life of low lives, if you really wanted to get to it.

However, Paul tells us in verse 14 that the grace of God was shown to him.

And we know that as we read Acts and we see that even in his killing Christians,

even in his persecution of Jesus, Christ came on the road to Damascus and rescued him and saved him.

Ultimately, God didn't care about how bad it was. It's true.

The saying is that it doesn't matter how bad you are.

It certainly doesn't matter how good you are. Jesus saves you regardless of who you are.

The Bible says that we've all sinned and fall short of that standard.

And Paul is an example of that. Like I mentioned, yet grace was shown to him

and grace was shown to us why we were still sinners, why we were lost.

And right throughout the New Testament, we see the great passages of the lost,

that Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost, that this good shepherd

would leave the 99 and go out and find the one who was lost,

that we're so valuable in God's sight, like the parable of the lost coin,

that they would search high and low to find a monetary coin.

And yet Jesus seeks until he finds his valuable people.

And he did that to Paul. he sought him

and he found him but as a church and as individuals we need to be careful not

to get lost in our mission we need to be careful that our mission is always

to spread that good news that grace of God and not to get messed up.

And change our focus. And you need, as a congregation, to make sure that we

don't, because we're a congregational.

We're a congregational governance as a Baptist church.

And so we're all responsible for that.

You see people over the history, I used to get into a lot of autobiographies from the presidents.

Jimmy Carter was one. He has a great book called Why why not the best?

And he talks about it and his mission to become governor.

He went out, governor of Georgia, he went out and sort of spoke to 300,000 people.

But it all rang true to him when he got invited by church.

He used to go to his local church. He got invited by church to talk about mission.

And he thought, well, what I'll do is I'll talk about the mission of outreach

because because their church had an outreach mission and he took tabs over time

about how many houses that he visited.

And it was 140 houses that he visited spreading the gospel of Jesus.

But then he kind of reflected upon the amount of the houses that he visited,

300,000 to become governor of Georgia.

And he was struck by that.

And he said this in comparison, it struck me. He said 300,000 visits for myself

in three months and 140 visits for God in 14 years of the mission of their church.

We don't want to get struck at the end of it and think to ourselves,

what have we been on about for us?

And what have we been on about for God?

If I evaluated my time and my money and my effort over over the years,

of promotion of myself compared to the promotion of Christ, I would also be convicted.

And I was convicted this week as a post came out about Athletes in Action being

50 years and a guy standing on Teen Ranch steps who was the head of Athletes

in Action, which is basically cowboy chapter,

football chapter, baseball chapter, rodeo chapter, you know,

all those things, all the chapters of all the professional sports.

And he's standing there saying, we've been here for 50 years.

And I thought, how hard is it for professional athletes not to promote themselves?

And we have this voice that goes into that professional community saying,

you're there to promote Jesus.

So not only should we pray for those people who are in that kind of setting,

whether you're in a company setting, whether you're in an athlete setting,

whatever it might be, where the temptation is to promote yourself and elevate yourself,

that we need to keep focus and elevate Jesus.

He came to seek, but he also came to save. We know that's true.

To follow Paul's personal testimony in verse 15, he says, I was the worst,

literally the number one in his own mind at least.

And it proves that God had not only unlimited patience, but he tells us in verse

16 that he couldn't hide the joy, his joy anymore. He was elated.

And as I read one that's been penned in song, You know, mortal,

invisible, God only wise, the light inaccessible, hid from my eyes,

most blessed, most glorious, the ancient of days, almighty, victorious,

the great name we praise.

And Paul put out there the great name he praises, and that is God,

the one who saves anyone, the one that doesn't give up on a person. There's still hope.

There's always hope. and in God's saving grace like Paul in his time of need. Amen.

Yet somehow, even in life, we can feel as though we don't measure up.

There's some measuring gauge in our acceptance by Christ.

Even when God pours out his immeasurable grace on us and he seeks us even when

we shouldn't really be found and he sees us as most valuable,

that he keeps on seeking us till he finds us and he saves us,

sometimes even deep down we think, are we worthy of that?

There's a guy called David Suzuki and he's very well known in Canada.

And since I lived there for 12 years, you heard a whole lot about him.

And he was one of the great campaigners for the environment.

And he was very respected and regarded as Canada, as his homeland.

Land and many people are unaware really of how painful the memories of this

David Suzuki was from childhood.

I'll read this from his autobiography.

December 7th, 1941, the Japanese Air Force bombed Pearl Harbor,

and so Japan entered into a Second World War.

People of Japanese descent were immediately suspect in Canada.

Within nine days of the bombing, they were required to register with the authorities as enemy aliens.

You believe that? Their property was confiscated. Their bank accounts were frozen.

Chosen they were told that they would have to leave their

home so david suzuki was five years old

at the time and his parents were second generation canadians

all of japanese descent says this by the time david turned six his mother and

his sisters were sent to an intern internment camp in british columbia and his

father was sent to work as a road gang rejoining his family in camp later that year.

Conditions were filthy and were cramped.

Towards the end of the war, the internees were given a choice.

The Canadian government would pay for them to move to Japan,

or they could remain in Canada, but they could only live in the Rocky Mountains.

Japanese Canadians were no longer welcome in Suzuki's hometown of Vancouver.

David's family chose to remain in Canada destitute and in poverty.

And this is the part that I want to get to.

The entire episode left a terrible legacy on David Suzuki's life.

And if you've ever read David Suzuki's life, we're talking like it's right up

there with the most incredible environmentalists of the day.

Proud to be a Canadian, he began to despise his Japanese descent and his Asian appearance.

And for years as a teenager, he saved money to have his eyes enlarged.

So he'd look more like a Western person. And his eyes and hair,

enlarged his eyes and his hair died.

He refused to walk down the street with his parents because he felt ashamed of them.

His father drummed into him that to do well with white people,

he would have to be twice as good as them.

Every day, Suzuki struggled with the past. He says, the terrible burden I have

had all my life is that I seem to be constantly trying to reaffirm to Canadians

that I'm a worthwhile human being.

It's ridiculous to be 64 at the time when 2000, when he wrote the article in

Sydney Morning Herald, it was on.

64 years old, and I still feel you've

got to prove to them that you're not somebody who should be locked up.

He believed that. And yet, all the time when pastors meet people,

there are some people who feel that even though God's grace has opened up the

heavens for them, they are now children of God.

They are respected by him. They are, as the Bible says, his prized possession.

And yet people feel as though they don't measure up.

God's grace is a gift and we have been gifted so that we would share that message

of God's grace to a lost and fallen world, that we would serve him.

And Timothy, in 1 Timothy, is reminded that his role that he's been put up for

is to pastor either a church or a series of churches and lead them and to impress upon him,

keep hold of that mission.

Even though there are false teachers that are around and are going to distort

the mission that the church is on, keep that mission,

fight the good fight because there are going to be enemies that are going to

come against you and going to try to distort the mission and veer you away and

even say that you are not worth even serving God at all.

And yet he is worth serving

God and though he was wounded by sin and

he's living in a sinful world the Holy Spirit

has equipped him and gifted him to do the job that God has called him to do

and as a church God has equipped us and gifted us to do the job that God has

called us to do. They were owners of a company.

There were three of them. Huge cosmic company, multinational,

worldwide, equal opportunity.

Incomprehensible in its riches of the company, which has an employee reward

program that reaches to the heaven itself.

And the owners, the three owners of the company approaches you and asks you

to come and work for them. Would you reply?

You don't want me because I have nothing to offer. And they say to you, we'll trade you.

We'll equip you for that. You say, no, thanks. Last time I failed.

I said, well, one of us will work with you on the job.

You say, no, thanks. I'm not worthy. I have nothing to offer.

And they say, we'll give you the ability to do what we want you to do.

Would you say, no, thanks. I have to clean out my pencil case.

For those who have been around for one girl I was going to go out with,

didn't want to go out with me.

Instead of saying I'm busy, she said, I'm cleaning out my pencil case.

And it stuck with me for years. I love it.

Sharon Spark, I hope she's listening.

The God of these universes said to you, And to us as a church,

come and follow me and serve me.

Hold my mission as your mission.

Hold my mission to share the gospel. Hold my mission to crave and hunger and thirst for the truth.

Hold my mission to serve in the way that he has gifted you, the way that he

works with you, for you, as you together go out into this world.

1 Timothy chapter 2, verses 2 and 3.

1 Timothy 2:2

This is good and it pleases God the Savior who wants all people to be saved

and to come in the knowledge of the truth. Let's pray.

Lord, I thank you for your word and I thank you, Lord, for your mission.

Help us, Lord, to understand that it's your mission, not ours.

And you walk out with us and you work in us and through us so that people might

see your incredible grace.

We also ask, Lord, that you use us to seek out those who are lost so that we

might be able to, in love.

Share the incredible need that they have to be right with you and that how you

have provided the means and the ways through Jesus to do that.

Help us, Lord, to listen to you no matter what part we play.

I listen to you and trust that you have equipped us for that task.

And I pray, Lord, that as a church here at the Heights,

that you would make us aware of any message that cuts through that so that we

might stay on track and that we might bring you glory.