Recharge | The Global Church: Only What the Father is Doing

So, um, how many of you ever learned how to tie a fishing knot?

You know what a fishing knot is?

So when I was a kid, my dad took my brother and I fishing, at the time we had a Volkswagen pop-up van.

Do you guys remember those vehicles?

I think it was like in 1968 or something, but we would go camping and you could pop the top up, and my brothers and I would sleep up in the top of it, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

Well, one day we were camping in that thing, and my dad was trying to teach us how to tie a fishing knot.

My dad was a mechanic, so he had this like uh, I don't know, 12-inch crescent wrench, it's a big old heavy wrench, and he had this big white piece of rope and he fed it in the hole at the back, and he's like, here's how you do it.

You spin it around and you go through the little eye, and then you go back through the big loop, and then you pull it tight.

And uh and so you can imagine we were little boys, we were trying to figure that out, and every time we messed it up, and what would dad do?

He'd pull the rope out, he'd show us again.

This is how you do it.

You go through here, you spin it around, you go through, pull it.

Well, if you've never if you've ever tied knots, it's a little complicated.

I mean, it's not very complicated, but it's a little complicated.

But after a little while, guess what?

We know how to tie fishing knots.

Right?

And and the way we did it is dad wouldn't let us stop.

He would keep saying to me, just do it the way I'm doing it, right?

Do what I'm doing.

Have you ever done anything like that?

Have you ever said to somebody, just do what I'm showing you to do.

And it takes him a little bit of a while, but what happens?

In the end, typically, they're able to do exactly what it is you're showing.

We we call that apprenticeship, right?

Uh we might talk about different ways to use models like that.

But we've been talking about God's mission in the world.

That's what this whole semester's been focusing on.

And we would talk about what God's been trying to do since the beginning.

He he called a people to be his people, to represent him to all the peoples of the earth.

But this is picture where God's been drawing the nations to himself since the very beginning.

And so we've looked at all these different verses, Old Testament verses, and we've we're leading up to the life and person of Jesus.

And I want to ask you, if you know what the mission of God is, to bring glory to himself from all of his creation, then I want to ask you, what is the mission of Jesus?

Does it differ from the mission of the Father?

I don't think it does.

And so if you think about this story, we're gonna go a couple slides back here.

Um what we have is this beautiful verse found in John chapter 5, verse 19.

John 5:19

So it's a little past where Mark was.

And it says this, as Jesus gave them this answer, very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself.

He can only do what he sees his father doing.

Because whatever the Father does, the Son also does.

So if you were to say, What is the mission of God?

and we start talking about bringing glory to himself from among the nations, and then we say, What is the mission of Jesus?

You have to see the mission of God embedded in the life of his son.

Do you see what I'm talking about?

Do you understand what I'm saying?

So as we start looking at the life of Christ, and I can think about all these different stories from Jesus' life and the way that he showed the magnificent authority of Jesus, laid out, that God was in him by this incredible authority, showing him all these different ways that God cared about the people around him.

What he was doing was the very will of the Father in everything that he did.

What an incredible picture that is.

So if Jesus says that he can only do what the father does, I want to ask you, what was the father doing?

So if we go to this next slide, I uh I threw a bunch of things into Chat GPT and asked it to give me a graphic, and it's kind of small.

You can't see all these things probably from where you're sitting.

It's actually pretty big.

I can read it really well from here.

I can't read it over there.

Can you guys read that?

Good.

We'll go to the next slide because this is a better way of seeing it.

If you're looking at what the Father is doing, this is a better way.

This is just a graphic representation of how God was showing his love to the world.

Are there any verses that talk of the life of Jesus that talk about God's incredible love for the world?

You might have heard of one, John 3.16.

Have you heard that one before?

For God so loved the world that he did what?

He sent his one and only Son.

That whosoever would believe in him would not perish but everlasting life.

Do you guys know that before?

So, what was the Father doing by sending the Son?

He was showing his love to the world.

If you keep going, what was he doing?

He's he's drawing people to seek him.

He's drawing people to himself, the life of Jesus.

So many people are turning to God as they see Jesus performing miracles.

The Father is giving life.

If you keep walking through, he's restoring what was broken at the fall.

He's showing his hope and livelihood to the world in so many different ways, and Jesus is the best representation.

Right?

He's speaking.

The father is reminding his people of the things he'd been saying to them for thousands of years.

And of course, he sent the Son.

He sent the Son, and by sending the Son, He sent Himself.

Do you see that?

The Son is the perfect representation of the Father.

So in seeing Christ, people are seeing God and they don't even know it.

Could you imagine, just imagine for a second, that you happened to be in Galilee one of those days when you heard that this rabbi Jesus was coming to town?

You wanted to go see him because every the super popular, everybody wants to see him.

He's doing crazy things, healing the sick and giving out free bread and juice and some fish on occasion.

You want to go check this guy out, right?

But if you found out later that he was God Himself, what kind of thing would that do to you?

God in the flesh.

There were a bunch of people that interacted with God right then and there, and they had no real idea what it was.

What he was.

And then, of course, this this big picture is God is bringing glory to himself through the Son.

So as people are interacting with Jesus, they see, you might think of Paul's words, they see his good works and glorify the Father, right?

They're seeing the good things that Jesus is doing, and they're giving God the glory.

So the mission of Jesus is completely intertwined in the mission of the Father.

You can't separate the two, and if you tried, you'd find out that you've separated something that is inseparable.

We sometimes do this.

Sometimes we we kind of look at the Trinity in these three separate categories, like those charismatics like the Spirit more, and those Old Testament guys really focus on the Father, but we're the Jesus people.

Well, you can't separate the three, they're one and the same.

And they represent different parts of God that help us understand him fully as we know them.

So we know him.

And so we have this full picture of who Jesus is.

He's the Father, the Son, and the Spirit embodied in the flesh, and we get to see him at work in these ways.

So then where does it go from here?

If the mission of Jesus is the very mission of the Father, then what does Jesus give to his followers?

What is their mission?

Well, look, we'll go to the next slide.

Jesus actually works really hard to show these verses.

So this is similar again to what Mark was reading.

As the Father loved me, so I have loved you.

Remain in my love.

The verse a little earlier says, Abide in me.

If you keep my commands, you'll remain in my love, just as I've kept my Father's commands and remain in his love.

So you get the connection?

Jesus says, I'm connected to the Father.

You're connected to me in that way that we're connected to each other.

I've told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.

My command is this love each other as I have loved you.

Guys, we've got a whole bunch here.

We could spend some weeks unpacking all of this.

Because God's connecting not only the love of the Father through the Son and the love of the Son for his followers, but the love for each other through each other.

Do you get that?

The way that we care for one another reflects on how God loves the Son.

It's all interconnected, and the way that we love each other reflects on how God loves us.

And what we get is this beautiful thing that God has created us in his image, and in that way, when we care for each other well, we're reflecting the very love of God.

Isn't that incredible?

Do you know within every single human being on the planet is the dignity and image of God, and they are made to reflect him.

To him, to give him glory, and to one another, to love each other in the way that only God can.

But if we keep going, you take that chart we made a few minutes ago and you look at it again.

So, uh, what is the mission of the disciples?

Well, it's the same kind of thing here.

We have that God has revealed himself and the Father, that he loved the people that he was sent to, that he proclaimed the good news, that he made disciples who could do the same things that he was doing, that they served the least and the hurting and the broken, that they healed those who were hurting around them, and that Jesus went to the world to bring the glory and salvation of his father to the whole world.

And if you go to John 20, 21, he commissions his followers in John, and we're going to talk about the Great Commission next week where this is really fleshed out a little better, but in this verse he says, Peace be with you, as the Father has sent me, so I send you.

And so here's the question.

If the mission of God was to call the nations to himself, and the mission of the Son is to do only what the Father is doing, and the mission of the disciples is to do what the Son has called them to do, then what is the mission of our church?

Can it be any different?

The continuity of the call of the Lord has not changed.

He's calling us to be his people, to represent him to all the peoples of the earth.

To be the reflections of what God looks like in a healthy, godly person who's reflecting the glory of God in the way that we relate to him and the way that we relate to each other.

This is our mission.

This is who we are.

So we can unpack it in lots of ways, and we can put a whole bunch of different things out there on are we abiding in faith?

Are we being faithful to his commands?

Are we being fruitful in the way that we act to others?

We can start putting lists together, and all those lists might help us be more faithful to the things he's calling us to.

But the real question remains the same is are we living in a way that reflects God's image in our lives, in our hearts?

Are we reflecting him to the people that we're around?

Obviously, within the church, that should be easy.

Among other believers, that should be easy.

But the larger the church gets, the more messy we become, and the more difficult that can be.

But outside the church, it's even more important because it says that the way we love each other will make the lost world see whether we really believe the things we say we believe.

It says that they will know Him by our love for one another.

So, church, our mission.

I hope it's really clear, our mission as a community of faith right here is to love God with all that we are and to love each other really well.

And it takes a lot of work.

It takes the setting down of our pride.

It's putting our personal preference aside.

In a time when we're shaking everything up, and you guys are probably irritated sometimes when you walk on our campus and you try to figure out where you're supposed to walk and when you're not allowed to walk.

And then we tell you this week the normal jumble's not enough.

Next week we're gonna send you to a whole nother building.

Like, all of that can be annoying.

We know that.

But why do we do it?

It's because eight or nine hundred students are gonna be joining us on this campus.

Some of them are gonna hear the gospel for the first time.

They're gonna worship God on the sea with the pole, right here in this sanctuary, and they might mess up our new chairs.

They might spill something on our new carpet.

But you know what?

That's not why these chairs are here, so we can protect them and keep them safe and pretty for as long as possible.

It's because this is the kingdom.

This is where we come together for what he's doing among us.

Right?

If this was all just about our comfort, then we've wasted a lot of time and money.

There's not many amens on that one, Jason.

Church, we have a mission.

And that mission is to reflect God to the world that he's put us in.

That's to one another and everyone outside these walls.

So as we go, as we walk out these doors, we continue to talk about these one Wednesday after the next for the next several weeks.

We talk about what God's been doing since the beginning.

He's been drawing the laws to himself.

He's trying to redeem what was broken, to restore those who are broken and far from God, and he's given them, you and I.

Uh, David Platt said something like, He is, you are plan A and there is no plan B.

Right?

This is what God's done.

He's called a people to represent him to the peoples.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you so much for your word.

And we pray, God, that we would reflect your glory to the world around us.

God, that this light on a hill would truly be a light that reflects your kingdom, your glory, the things that are matters and the things that turn people's hearts towards you.

God, the love and the grace and the forgiveness that God, all of it would point to you.

And that you would be famous because of all that we do in this place.

God, we pray that your mission would be our mission.

We love you in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

God bless you.