Entries Tagged 'Outreach' ↓

“There is one body and one Spirit – just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4-6).

We continue to witness the fragmentation of the church in the Western world, not least in Protestant evangelicalism. The church also continues to suffer reproach for its failure to manifest to the world the kind of unity enjoyed by the Father and the Son (John 17:21). Because of this we must eagerly seek to maintain the “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3), practicing unity with other believers in light of our common faith in the Triune God of the Bible.

“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18-20).

The accomplishment of the Great Commission is not simply an ideal we pine for, but a goal we seek after, mobilize for, strategize around. God has blessed his church, like Abraham, to be a blessing for the nations (Gen. 12:1-3). Until the Lord returns, world evangelization should capture the church’s imagination and compel her into joyful, sacrificial action.

“Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2).

The mainstay of the corporate gathering of the church, and the centerpiece of our life together, should be the ministry of the word through expositional preaching. This requires that we consistently and unabashedly open the Scriptures and seek to make plain their meaning. In this way we discharge our responsibility, as Paul did while in Ephesus, to teach the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). Moreover, God’s word is honored, and his people edified, when the preacher envisions his task as to declare the “oracles of God” (1 Pet. 4:11).

This Christmas season at Calvary we’ve wanted to listen to what others are saying about what Christmas means to them. So we hung a banner on the north side of the church, facing Lake Street, and have invited people to go to a specially-designed website (christmassurvey.com) to tell us what it means to them.

Here are just a few of the several dozen responses we’ve received:

“Christmas means celebrating the birth of Christ through giving gifts, just as God gave us the gift of his son. It also means time with family and good food!”

“A time of rebirth, hope and joy.”

“What Christmas means: busyness, shopping, parties, spending too much money, decorating, baking, extra stress, spending time with family which almost always results in a huge fight on or around Christmas. This has been true of the Christmas season pretty much my entire life. What I desire Christmas to mean: Jesus- that He is enough for me. That every other activity associated with Christmas always keeps Jesus first.”

“I’m afraid I’ve become a bit of a Scrooge over the years when it comes to Christmas. It is extremely commercialized and media hyped. By the time Christmas actually arrives I’m so sick of the advertising, the crowds of shoppers (myself included), the waste of money, the stress, and the religions trying to force their own ideas of what Christmas is that I just shut myself in the kitchen and cook all day. It’s a good job I enjoy cooking so much. I also dislike the feeling of obligation that I have to family and friends to either visit them or welcome them into my home. It’s not that I don’t like them or don’t want to see them, it’s just that I don’t want to be obliged to see them. It takes some of the pleasure of seeing them away. I know, I’m a Scrooge. Bah! Humbug.”

Several weeks ago we began our sermon series listening to what Mary had to say about Christmas. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary said in response to the angel Gabriel’s announcement that she will bear a son, “May it be to me as you have said” (Luke 1:38). From these words of the mother of Jesus we learn that Christmas is a time to serve.

Two weeks ago we looked at what the angels said at Christmas from that famous passage in Luke 2. “Glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14), was what they said – or rather, what they sang. And that was the lesson learned: the angels taught us that Christmas is a time for singing and for celebrating the wonder of the Incarnation: God become man in Christ Jesus.

This past Sunday we turned our attention to another set of characters in the Christmas story: the shepherds. They’re perhaps the most unlikely characters to appear in the story of Christ’s birth. Angels we would expect. Joseph and Mary we would obviously expect. Pious and expectant Israelites like Simeon and the prophetess, Anna, we would expect. But a lowly band of working-class Palestinian shepherds! This we don’t expect, not least as those to whom the birth of the child Jesus is first reported!

What did the shepherds say at Christmas? “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (Luke 2:15). So we learn from the shepherds that Christmas is a time to see: a time to see “this thing that has happened,” the Word made flesh, the gift of the God-man, Christ Jesus.

Won’t you join us next Sunday as we continue in our series, What Does Christmas Mean to You? We’ll be taking a look at Simeon, who said, “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation” (Luke 2:29). For Simeon, Christmas is a time to . . .

At Calvary Memorial Church, we’ve been reflecting for the past several weeks on Paul’s prayer that the Colossians live a “fully pleasing” life (Col. 1:9-14). Many of us were struck by the fact that for Paul the leading aspect of a fully pleasing life is . . . good works. Paul prays that the Colossians would be “bearing fruit in every good work” (1:10).

But what might this look like in concrete, doable terms for you and me? Well, you can read about one great example (involving some Calvary folks!) in this week’s Wednesday Journal, in a piece by Abigail Cramton’s entitled, “Pouring Love, Breaking Through: Tutoring on Chicago’s West Side Benefits Tutors and Students.” As the tag-line suggests, Ms. Cramton highlights the mutual blessing and benefit of serving others through tutoring.

Her encouraging and thoughtful piece, in turn, got me to thinking about not only what bearing fruit in every good work might look, but why bearing fruit in every good work is commanded and commended in the Bible. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Good words adorn doctrine. Doctrine, or truth, is a beautiful thing, even when naked. But what’s even more beautiful is doctrine, or truth, dressed-up, as it were, in a life of good works, conviction clothed in good deeds while tutoring somewhere on the West Side. That’s why obedience is commanded and commended: “so that in every way [we] will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive” (Titus 2:10).
2. Good works encourage others to think highly of who God is. Good works point – ultimately not to themselves or to the doer, but to the One who enables and receives them. So we are told by Jesus to “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). Good works are beams of light that radiate out from a magnificent Source.
3. Good works enliven one’s own life of faith. Ms. Cramton’s article contains a wonderful line in which she points out that the tutors she featured in her article “serve out of a conviction of faith and believe that it truly is more blessed to give than to receive.” This is an allusion to one of the only statements of Jesus outside the Gospels; it’s found in Acts 20:35, where a follower of Jesus, the Apostle Paul, says that when he was with a church in the ancient city of Ephesus, “In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” More blessed to give than to receive? A truly stunning and even paradoxical thought: the one who gives actually receives more than the one who receives. And yet that’s precisely the mystery – almost, you might say, the magic – of obeying and serving in Jesus’ name: it enlivens one’s own life and faith. One finds that in the act of giving, one receive far more.
4. Good works meet real needs. Of course, good works are designed not only to showcase the greatness of God or enliven the faith and life of the one who does them; they’re also designed to meet real, practical, concrete needs in our communities. Which is itself a good in itself.
5. Good works will be met with a real reward. One of the more terrifying and yet terrific passages in all the Bible is Matthew 25. In that chapter in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus paints a rather sobering picture of when he will one day return to earth to judge humankind according to their good works – according to whether they have fed the hungry, given a drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked and needy, cared for the sick, visited the oppressed and suffering (25:34-40). And as that passage makes clear, as do innumerable other passages in both the Old and New Testaments, these good works will be met with a very real reward: the kingdom itself. “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world” (25:34).

Have you ever heard of a Leyden jar? Originally invented in 1745 by Pieter van Musschenbroek at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, it was a device used to build and store static electricity. You can find the following description (with pictures) at the Sparkmuseum website:

A Leyden jar consists of a glass jar with an outer and inner metal coating covering the bottom and sides nearly to the neck. A brass rod terminating in an external knob passes through a wooden stopper and is connected to the inner coating by a loose chain. When an electrical charge is applied to the external knob, positive and negative charges accumulate from the two metal coatings respectively, but they are unable to discharge due to the glass between them.  The result is that the charges will hold each other in equilibrium until a discharge path is provided. Leyden jars were first used to store electricity in experiments, and later as a condenser in early wireless equipment.

Why do I bring this up? Because it provides greater color to an already wonderfully colorful quote from one of my favorites, Charles Spurgeon, who had this to say about churches serving as Leyden jars.

It should be our ambition, in the power of the Holy Ghost, to work the entire church into a fine missionary condition, to make it like a Leyden jar charged to the full with divine electricity, so that whatever comes into contact with it shall feel its power (Lectures, p. 191).

The challenge, of course, is to understand, first, how to build a charge within a congregation, that is, how to preach and lead and serve and pray so that the church does indeed become filled with divine electricity; and then, secondly, how to to provide appropriate discharge paths so that this divine electricity might flow out of our life together and into the surrounding neighborhoods and beyond.