Notes

Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Treasured Possession (segullah) - "royal property"

UP. Growing.
Identity
Defined by their Maker.

Holy Nation

IN. Connecting.
Community
Set apart for a purpose

Kingdom of Priests

OUT. Serving.
Vocation
Sacramental presence of God among the nations.

International implications
Bring about God's worldwide plan

Parallel with 1 Peter 2:9

  • Not just belong to God in a private sense, but in order to be used for a special purpose.
  • There is no such thing as a "private faith."
  • Purpose restated in Isaiah 49:6, what their purpose would be after the exile
  • The church has union with Christ, therefore it becomes the light to the world
  • "God's intent in raising Christ from the dead is not merely to get us into heaven, but to use us to raise others up from death."

INTRODUCTION

  • Christianity is the fastest growing religion in the world: nearly 80,000 new Christians per day. But the majority of that growth is in places that are not the U.S. or Europe. It happens in China and India, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America.
    • In fact everywhere in the world where we do church like we do it in the U.S., Christianity struggles to grow.
  • The U.S. supposedly has the best churches in the world, but we have the worst conversion rates ever.
    • We buy into the lie that if we could "do church better" more people would show up and get saved. But it's just not true; we've never done church better or slicker. And people still aren't showing up. In fact, fewer people are showing up than ever.
    • We've all said things like this: "If only we had more programs or slicker programs, if we could put more money towards our children's ministry, towards our worship ministry. If only we were more slick with our small groups. If only we had a nicer building, higher production levels. If only we had a staff dedicated to marketing and communication. If only we had a billboard. Or a television studio. Or more radio spots. Then thousands would get saved. Then lives would be changed."
    • But the past 40 or so years have been one giant experiment on America on if this true. And the statistics don't lie: it just doesn't work.
  • Why? Because most of us couldn't give a sensible answer to this question: "What is the church?"
    • Our language betrays us when we say things like "Let's go to church," or "Come to my church," or "I want to try a different church."
    • That makes the church sound like places and programs, distributers of religious goods and services.
      • Language like that makes sense in a country of Walmarts and McDonalds.
    • But it doesn't make sense in the context of Scripture and what God desires us to be.

Today I want to give you an answer to that question: What is the church? I'll give you a hint. It's not a What. It's not a place or a program. No, it's a Who: It's a people.

The church is the people of God
on the mission of God
with the power of God.

BACKGROUND

Turn on your Bibles and go to Exodus 19. (Mention YouVersion live event)

  • This begins in Genesis 12 with Abraham. Blessed to be a blessing.
    • Abraham carried the blessing of God to the world! Many of us are presented with Christianity as a merely personal way of being blessed. But it is so much more. God saves/blesses/redeems us for the purpose of carrying God's blessing to the world.
  • In Exodus we explored that Moses was called by God to do: to bring the Israelites out of Egypt and into the promised land. The book of Exodus tells that story: a burning bush, 10 plagues, a red sea, 2 movies, a musical, and an animated film later, Israel finds themselves at the foot of the mountain of God, Mt. Sinai.
  • God calls Moses up to the mountain, up into God's glory to hear what God is going to say.
    • Illustration: Have you ever had some sort of authority figure call you out of what you were doing so they could have a talk with you? A parent, a boss, a wife? Anthony Paul Parrott, you get in here right now! Those moments--when you don't know what's going to be said--can be nerve-wracking. What did I do wrong? What's going to happen to me?
    • God calls Moses up to the mountain and is about to give Israel a message, and this is what it is:

THE TEXT

Out of all nations
you will be my treasured possession.
Although the whole earth is mine,
you will be for me a kingdom of priests
and a holy nation.

EXPLAIN THE TEXT

Whew! What a relief, right?

There are three phrases that I want to highlight this morning that will help us answer the question "What is the church?" And we'll talk about them in this order:

Treasured Possession.
Holy Nation.
Kingdom of Priests.

Treasured Possession

First, Treasured Possession. Segullah. It roughly means "belonging to the King." Usually this language was used for stuff. Things. And of course it was used by human kings to referred to their stuff. Things like jewels and swords and their favorite baseball cards.

But for the first time in history, segullah was being used to refer to a people; and not just by a human king. It was being used by not just a human king, but by the Most High God.

If you were an ancient Hebrew, you would know that this was not typically how gods referred to people. The mythologies of ancient peoples saw humanity as a mistake, as an accident, as an annoyance. There's a story about some old gods getting in a wrestling match. As they wrestled, they got sweaty. That sweat dripped down from the heavens onto the earth, and from that sweat humanity was born. To which the gods stopped their wrestling match and realized that they made a big mistake and now had these pesky humans to worry about that.

Compare that to our God, the real, true God, who bends down, carefully crafts Adam and Eve out of clay, breathes into their nostrils--gives divine CPR--and grants them life. On purpose. Out of the infinity of His love. Compare those old pagan deities to the God who calls Moses up to the mountain and says, "Tell my people, you are my segullah, my treasured possession."

Many of us could use that message today. We have been treated like unfortunate accidents sometimes. We find out identity in the anger, sadness, and bitterness that people send our way. We've been told in a million different ways that there is nothing to be treasured about us.

But before you listen to those voices, listen to the voice of God who calls you His treasured possession. You belong to a King, and the King treasures you! This is your identity, this is what defines who and what you are.

This, by the way, is the growing component of our mission statement. We grow UP into our identity in God. We grow not by proving to God what we could be, but by living out what God has declared that we already are: His treasured possession.

Holy Nation

Now, we start with treasured possession because it's in this foundation that the next two truths rest in. We get our identity from God's love for us. From this identity we find out our community: God tells Moses that Israel is a holy nation.

It's in this phrase that we are reminded that no man is an island. Remember, when God told Abraham that he was going to be blessed to be blessing, it was not just to Abraham that God told this, but it was to Abraham's family, his offspring, the nation that would come from his progeny. And remember that when God called Moses to ministry, it was not to be alone and work alone the rest of his life; no, it was to bring out the community of Israel into freedom.

This is how God works. He works through families and communities and groups and nations. And we shouldn't find this surprising. Remember that God Himself is a community, a Trinity. A Triune God of Father, Son, and Spirit that out of their eternal love and submission for each other desire to invite ever more people into their community.

Did you catch that? You, O Treasured Possession of God, are not only called to be God's beloved treasure. But you are also invited into the community of God, to join the divine dance of the Trinity. The Divine--perfectly sufficient and loving and kind--is continually inviting humans to be caught up in their relationship.

Jesus puts it like this:

Peter puts it like this: "Share the divine essence."

This, by the way, is the connecting part of our mission statement. We grow by living into our status as God's treasured possession. By connect by recognizing the community that God has put us in and by recognizing and pointing out the bit of the divine that God has put into each of us.

But not only does God call Israel His nation, but His holy nation. To be holy is to be set apart for a purpose. To be dedicated for a cause. To be commissioned for a mission.

So God calls Moses up on the mountain to tell him that Israel is His treasured possession, a nation caught up in the community of God, set aside--made holy--for a purpose. What is that purpose? That takes us to our third phrase.

A Kingdom of Priests

God calls Israel a Kingdom of Priests. Now from the perspective of a ancient Hebrew, this is truly bizarre. Priests were common enough. And kingdoms had been around for a long time. But a kingdom of priests? Now that is just strange.

Let's talk about what a priest does. A priest is a mediator between the human and the divine, bring people and God into unity.

So when God calls Israel to be a Kingdom of Priests, He is calling an entire nation to be the priests for all the world, the whole of creation; to bring the nations into unity with the divine.

This is what we must remember about God's people:

Election is never about isolation, it's never about seclusion, it's never about supremacy or exclusivity or shutting the world out, becoming a conclave, a ghetto, a hospice where the elect go to die and watch the world burn.

No. Election is about mission. Election is about proclamation. Election is about action. Being chosen by God is about being giving a vocation, a calling to call more people into God's loving, merciful, beautiful community, a community of God's treasured possessions called to invite even more people into becoming God's treasured possessions.

Let's talk about sacraments for a moment. A sacrament is a physical object or action that mediates a spiritual reality. So when we baptize someone, the water and the action of sprinkling or dunking communicates the reality of sins being washed away. When we take the bread and the juice at communion, it not only reminds us of Jesus' body and blood, but in some mysterious way it actually gets us into contact with it.

Faith needs something to see. Faith needs something to touch.

Jesus Himself was the sacrament of God to the world. If were were to ask the question, "What would it look like if God were to become human and start walking around the world?" we can confidently answer that question by looking at Jesus, who is in His very nature God, who grants us the deepest look at what God's character and actions is like. And you know what it looks like?

When He meets sin? He heals it. When He meets disease? He heals it. When He meets mental illness? He heals it. When Jesus meets despair and brokenness and anger and hatred and pain. He heals it. He heals it. He heals it.

And so Jesus is the sacrament of God to the world.
And Communion is the sacrament of Jesus to the church.
And the church is the sacrament of Jesus to the world.

So Moses ascends the mountain of God to hear the message of God for the people of God. And God says this: You are a treasured possession, God's beloved children, His Sons and His Daughters. You are a holy nation, a community of people, beckoned up into the Divine, Triune dance, set aside for a special purpose; and that purpose, that vocation is to be a Kingdom of Priests, the very presence of God, the sacrament of Jesus to the world, calling more and more people into relationship with God.

APPLICATION

This brings us back to our definition of church. The people of God on the mission of God with the power of God. So what does it look like to live this out? Let's explore some options.

First, what does it look like to be God's treasured possession?

  1. Stop listening to any voices that tell you that your worth is anything less than the very imago Dei. To any voice--family, friends, commercials, culture--that attempts to tell you that you aren't treasured, that God is against you, that you aren't valued: shut it down.
  2. Any action that you partake in that doesn't fit with being God's treasured possession, it's probably time to stop it. No, it's not because God thinks less of you, or that you should overly care about what anyone else thinks of you. But if the reality is that you are God's Son, God's daughter; if it's true that you have infinite worth, that the righteousness of Jesus lives in you; that you are a temple of Holy Spirit--if all that is true, wouldn't you rather live like that than as a gossip, an addict, a narcissist, a backstabber, a hedonist? CS LEWIS QUOTE.

Secondly, what does it look like to be God's Holy Nation?

  1. It looks like reorienting our lives around the community of God. We are a part of the church not for what we can get out of it, but by what we can contribute to the larger community. When we leverage our finances, our time, our creativity, our minds for the sake of the community, then we all become richer for it.
  2. It means allowing the right communities to ability to define us. Are we going to be defined by our nation? Our immediate family? Our social class? Are we going to be defined by the Divine Community and His people.

Finally, what does it look like to be a Kingdom of Priests?

  1. It means this church--our church--any church--the church--can be no longer defined by the fact that we happen to meet in such and such place or we have such and such a program. Instead, we should be defined by our sacramental presence in the world. When we go to work, do people know that they are closer to God because we're there? When we go to school, do people recognize that they are closer to God because we're there? When we go to our soccer and little league games and our PTA meetings, do coaches and refs and teachers know that they are closer to God because we're there? If we--priests, the sacraments of Jesus to the world--were to move out of our neighborhood, would anyone care or notice? Would there be a noticeable lack of God's presence in this community if this church shut down and all of us moved away? Or would no one notice?
  2. Practically, it means that this particular local body of believers is seeking to be defined by growing as apprentices of Jesus, connecting as a community of God, and serving as a people on mission together. That is why Good News has the vision of having 20 Missional Communities by the year 2020. 20 Missional Communities would be over 600 people given over to the notion that we can live like Jesus lived: coming across sin and disease and poverty and despair and--by the power of the Holy Spirit--healing it. Healing it. Healing it.

Let's pray.