Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS 28 Feb & 07Mar 2010
· As we start into our church’s fifth year of existence, I want to take the opportunity to review the four core values of our church and expound on two unique ways we seek to do these things through Christ the Redeemer Church: The four values we have agreed to emphasize in Christ the Redeemer Church are:
1. Exalting our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ: As a community of believers in fellowship with one another, we seek to glorify God in all that we do. We worship, in spirit and truth, the triune God as revealed through His inerrant Word which gives us all that we need for life and godliness and is the final authority in all doctrinal matters. The church is the pillar and buttress of truth, standing fast for the glory of God’s name.
2. Equipping the saints: We are committed as a community of believers to encourage and equip one another to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. By God’s grace we seek to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age and be a people who are zealous to do good works. We believe that every saint has one or more spiritual gifts that are useful and necessary for building up the body of Christ. We seek to help the saints identify their gifts and use them for the edification of the Church and the performing of good works that God has prepared for His saints to do. By living individually and corporately in obedience to God’s Word, we seek to be salt and light to the world, loving our neighbors as ourselves and transforming culture in order to bring all things under the submission of Jesus Christ.
3. Evangelizing the world: We believe God is redeeming a people for Himself and that He reaches them through the proclamation of the Gospel. We believe God’s truth in salvation is most accurately represented by the historic Reformed doctrines of grace. We believe that man is dead in his sins and unable to save himself. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone in Christ alone. We are committed as a community of believers in obedience to the Lord’s Great Commission to be His witnesses and to make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all of God’s commands.
4. Encouraging godly households. We believe that God works in covenant with His people mainly through households and we seek to develop godly households to the glory of God. We believe that households are most strengthened through age integrated worship and activities. We seek to encourage husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the Church, to encourage wives to submit to their husbands as to the Lord, to encourage fathers to bring up their children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, and to encourage children to honor and obey their parents in the Lord. We believe all Christians are adopted as children of God and we welcome all believers to the household of God. We are committed as a community of believers in fellowship with one another to enhance the solidarity of one another’s households and the larger household of faith.
· The two ways we live out these values as a church community are unique among modern American churches, and if you do not grasp these two things, there’s a lot in our church that will not make sense, so I want to expound on these two things so that our church can walk together effectively. These two ways we do church are:
1. Synagogic
2. Domocentric
I think I made those two words up, so let me unpack them.
o Greek: sun + agw
o Translit: syn + ago
o Meaning:together + lead
o Sunago-gic = gathering people together
§ As much as our culture idealizes unity, in practice the world around us seems to emphasize our differences.
§ In our jobs, specialization is prized – the further out on a branch of a branch of a branch of knowledge you are, the more secure your job is. For instance, I know a guy with a Ph.D. in Wheat Diseases!
§ Socially, America is an extremely balkanized nation with socially-enforced separations between old people, middle-aged people, young professionals, teenagers, children, and babies.
§ If you look at social networking sites on the Internet, you’ll see how people are trying to find identity in specialized groups.
§ The church needs to be a place that brings God’s people together under our common identity as sons and daughters of God rather than on the basis of our age group or spiritual gifts or ethnicity or profession, or you-name-it. Why? Because…
§ It is part of the nature of God to bring people together.
a. In Genesis 2, we see God joining together two different genders, male and female. “What God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mat 19:6).
b. In Psalm 148, we see everybody called to praise God together “11) Kings of the earth and all peoples; Princes and all judges of the earth; 12) Both young men and virgins; Old men and children: 13 Let them praise the name of Jehovah”
c. This carries over into the church of the New Testament: Gal 3:26 “For you are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus… There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
d. This is certainly the message of the book of 1 Corinthians despite the disagreements over who was the preeminent apostle and whether or not they had to freedom to eat at pagan temples and who had the greatest spiritual gift. Paul wrote: “ exactly as the body is a unit and has many members, yet all the members of the body, being many, are one body” (1 Cor 12: 12).
e. When God said, “Come out from among them and be separate,” (2Cor 6:17), He wasn’t talking about separating from other Christians; He was talking about breaking ties with the world. The wall between God’s people and the world is where a Biblical distinction comes in, not between one group of believers and another.
§
Sunagw
is used to speak of God’s work in gathering His people to believe in His Son
and then of Jesus gathering these people together to heaven when He returns:
a. Mat 13:47 “the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was cast into the sea, and gathered in [just the trout?] every kind:”
b. Mat 22:10 “the servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was filled with guests.”
c. John 4:36 “The reaper is receiving wages and gathering fruit unto life eternal...”
d. John 11:52b “that He might also gather together into one the children of God that are scattered abroad.” (See also Mat 12:30/ Luk 11:23)
e. Mat 13:30 “Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather up first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn.”
f. Mat 25:32 “and before Him [Jesus] shall be gathered all the nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats;”
g. Mat 3:12 “He will thoroughly clean His threshing-floor; and He
will gather His wheat into the garner, but the chaff He will burn up
with unquenchable fire.” (cf Luk 3:17)
So you see that this action of gathering all kinds together to be with Him
is what God does.
§ Sunagw is also used to speak of Christian believers gathering together
a.
Initially to describe the Israelites who began
following Jesus during His earthly ministry:
Mark 4:1 “…He began to teach by the sea-side, and there gathered
to Him a really big crowd, so that He entered into a boat and sat in the sea,
and all the multitude were by the sea on the land.” (cf. Mat 13:2, see also Mar
2:2, 5:21)
b.
Then of the church following His ascension to
heaven:
Mat 18:20 “For where 2 or 3 are gathered together in
my name, there I am in the midst of them.”
c. Mat 25:35 “for I was hungry, and you fed me; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you gathered me in;”
d. Acts 4:31 “And when they [the disciples] had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness.”
e. Acts 11:26 “for a whole year they [Paul and Barnabas] were gathered (synagogued) together with the church, and taught many people, and the disciples were first called ‘Christians’ in Antioch.”
f. Acts 13:44 “the next Sabbath, almost the whole city [of Pisidian Antioch] was gathered together (synagogued) to hear the word of God.”
g. Acts 14:27 “And when they [Paul and Barnabus] had arrived [back in Syrian Antioch] and had gathered the church together, they rehearsed all things that God had done with them…”
h. Then they “synagogued” with the elders in Jerusalem to talk about Gentiles in the church, and the Apostle James wrote a letter for Paul and Barnabus to read back in Antioch and at the other Gentile churches they had planted. So, in Acts 15:30 “they… returned to Antioch; and having gathered the multitude together, they delivered the epistle.”
i. Acts 20:7 “And upon the first day of the week, when we [that’s the church in Ephesus] were gathered together to break bread, Paul discoursed with them…” (see also v.8)
j. And again, sunagw is used of the church meetings in Corinth across the ocean from Ephesus: 1Cor 5:4 “…you have been gathered together in the name of our Lord Jesus…”
§ When we look at passages that explicitly describe who was there when God’s people gathered together, we see all sorts of people gathering together, not a bunch of different age groups and special-interest groups meeting separately:
a. In Exodus 10, Pharoah insisted that only the men go to worship, but Moses insisted that they, "go with our young and our old; with our sons and our daughters…”
b. Then when Moses wrote the law, he commanded it to be read regularly by the priests to all the people: Deuteronomy 31:11 “you shall read this law in front of all Israel in their hearing. 12 Assemble the people, the men and the women and children and the alien who is in your town, so that they may hear and learn and fear the LORD your God, and be careful to observe all the words of this law. 13 Their children, who have not known, will hear and learn to fear the LORD your God..."
c. In 2 Chronicles 20, when the Syrian army started coming against Judah and king Jehosaphat, it says, “Judah gathered together (sunagw) to seek help from the LORD; they even came from all the cities of Judah to seek the LORD. 5 Then Jehoshaphat stood in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem, in the house of the LORD before the new court, 6 and [it records his prayer, and then concludes with this statement about who all was in the temple that day,] 13 All Judah was standing before the LORD, with their infants, their wives and their children.”
d. The prophet Joel, likewise in his 2nd chapter, calling the people to get right with God said, “16 Gather (sunagw) the people, sanctify the congregation, Assemble the elders, Gather (sunagw) the children and the nursing infants.
§ Some 400 years later, the Jews finally heeded the call, and Ezra 10 records that, “while Ezra was praying and making confession, weeping and prostrating himself before the house of God, a very large assembly (ekklhsia), men, women and children, gathered (sunagw) to him from Israel; for the people wept bitterly. 2 Shecaniah… said to Ezra, ‘We have been unfaithful to our God… yet now there is hope for Israel...’”
e. Later on, when Jesus taught on the earth as a man, He gathered all ages together when He taught in the open air and in the temple:
§ Matthew 14 specifically mentions that there were women and children present at the feeding of the 5,000, and it was one of those little children who provided the fish and bread that Jesus used to feed the whole crowd as they sat on the green grass by family units.
§ Children were standing around as He taught outdoors on other occasions too, such as Matt 18, when He said, “Whoever humbles himself like this child will be greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
§ And, in the temple, Jesus taught with elders and little children present because in Matthew 21 we have the story of the elders telling Jesus to make the kids be quiet because they were yelling “Hosanna” in the temple!
f. And all ages and social statuses were apparently present in gatherings of the N.T. churches, too.
i. John specifically addresses children, young men, and fathers in his first letter which was read aloud in churches for the children, young men, and fathers to hear (1 John 2:12-14). He didn’t write a separate epistle for the children.
ii. And James, in the 2nd chapter of his book describes a worship meeting that has both wealthy and poor people together.
g. This does not mean, however, that every meeting of the church has to have everybody in it. There is plenty of scriptural basis for special meetings for elders and other segments of the church, such as the elders who met together in the Jerusalem council in Acts 15 to decide the matter of Gentiles joining the church.
§ (Viz: Acts 4:26, 15:6, Mat 22:34, 41, 26:3, 57, 27:17,27, Mark 6:30, 7:1 John 11:47, 18:2)
h.
But the principle of focusing on meetings of the
church that are inclusive of all ages, ethnicities, and status is one
that we want to uphold in our church.
We want to be a church that brings people together.
So, how does that work out practically?
§ We must strive to gather together with those in our church who are different from us:
o This means taking the time to get to know other people
who are different from you and asking questions so that you can understand
where they are coming from.
ILLUSTRATION: Growing up next to in class-conscious Mtn. Brook, then getting to
know some “hicks” when I went to college, eventually marrying one and deciding
that her forthright style of communication was more Biblical than the indirect
communication of high society.
o This means walking together as brothers and sisters in Christ, even if you disagree over the Bible’s teaching in practical areas,
o Even if you have different cultures, not excluding them unless they actually reject Jesus & the Bible. ILLUSTRATION: Again, growing up around upper class Southerners, there wasn’t much opportunity to get to know African Americans. When one black lady actually stepped across that social barrier and applied for membership at our church, there were some white folks who left our church. But I tell you, I came to love that dear old lady, as have many others; we call her “Mama Lois.”
o This will take careful thought and effort to show solidarity with fellow Christians and avoid offense while still practicing what you believe.
o This means “working out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil
2:12) and developing Biblical reasons for why you do what you do so
that you can know where you can be flexible enough to try other cultural
traditions that are foreign to you because you have established that
there is no Biblical reason to object to them.
ILLUSTRATION: When I’m singing worship songs with other groups of
Christians, sometimes I have to drop out, much as I love singing, because the
words are contrary to what I understand the Bible teaches. I’ve done that on
the song that repeats the line “Holy Spirit come” over and over again
because I don’t believe I have to ask the Holy Spirit to come; I believe He’s
right with me always. I’ll sing as much as I can with them, though. Same with praying
with other Christians: say ‘Amen’ to what you can, and just pray a corrective
prayer between you and God if your brother prays something that’s really
off base. Sometimes, however, when I’m praying with a Christian from a
different tradition, that person will start praying things I’ve never heard before,
but as I listen, I’m startled to see how clearly it lines up with Scripture and
how limited my own prayers have been.
o This also means being willing to step across lines that have historically divided some Christian denominations in order to demonstrate to the world that “Christ is not divided” (1 Cor 1:13).
§ We must strive to hold the different ages within our church together:
o Worship leaders (and I point the finger at myself here), we need to work hard at connecting with the entire range of ages, intellect, and experiences in the congregation in our music and teaching. For instance, we’re trying to chose some hymns that are real meaty in their words for all the intellectual folks here, and other songs that have a repetitive chorus so the little kids can catch on.
o Gathering together different age groups also means preparing our children to worship with everybody else:
a. This includes training children at home to memorize and understand the creeds we use and the Lord’s Prayer and other things that are a regular part of the worship service.
b. This includes teaching children to read the Bible (and to read music) so they can participate with God’s people in worship.
c. It includes discipline to build in your children the self-discipline to sit still and to follow the main points of the sermon. Homeschoolers who wouldn’t otherwise have their little boys sitting at a desk for very long particularly may need to have training sessions of sitting and listening to sermon audio during the week.
d. It means everybody else supporting those parents by not casting exasperated looks at screaming babies in the worship service. Just be gracious and put up with a little extra noise.
e. We also need to offer child care that helps children grow in their ability to worship God in the church and helps parents that need it.
f. And, of course, there are practical things we can do to make it easier, such as going to bed early enough Saturday night, Doing special things on Sunday so that everybody looks forward to the Lord’s Day, and bringing a water bottle or pacifier or cushion or whatever.
g. I know how much work it is to raise children, but I believe it will be worth the effort even if it is difficult right now.
Now, there is one other very counter-cultural distinctive of our church, and that is our view of our homes as centers of ministry rather than a single church building being the center of ministry in the church:
• Definition: Latin: domo = home (Domestic, Domicile)
We want to be a church where ministry is centered in the home rather
than in a centralized building.
• Freedom and dominion:
o Domocentric does not mean domesticated – lazily sitting around in your house.
o I do not think it a coincidence that this word domo/home is so closely related to words like domain and dominion.
o Our home is a place where we should have freedom - no other authority besides God Himself should set the agenda for what happens in the home.
o Our homes should be a place where a husband and his wife can map out what the Bible says life should look like and then experiment with fleshing out the best ways to realize God’s ideals on earth.
o Our homes should be a base from which we should fulfill:
§ the Creation Mandate to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and exercise dominion over … every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen 1:28),
§ as well as the Great Commission (Matt 28:18ff) to “go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations…”
Is this the vision for the home you grew up with? If you’re a parent in this congregation, you probably didn’t grow up with this vision for the home.
1. GK chesterton
§ Although I have many bones to pick with G.K. Chesterton, not the least of which are his religious Humanism, his ecclesiastical Roman Catholicism, and his social egalitarianism, some of his ideas on the traditional family resonate with me.
§ In his publication entitled The Thing, he said that the ideal of the family “cannot be equated with the industrialized consumer family, where the family members leave the home each morning by the clock and on a strict schedule to pursue careers, education, recreation, and so on. Chesterton's ideal was the productive home with its creative kitchen, its busy workshop, its fruitful garden, and its central role in entertainment, education, and livelihood. (From the American Chesterton Society Website www.chesterton.com)
§ In another publication entitled “What’s wrong with the World” he wrote, “It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life. Some experience of modern movements of the sort called ‘advanced’ has led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love… the success with which nuptial estrangements are depicted in modern ‘problem plays’ [or movies] is due to the fact that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict--that is a hard day's work. For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase ‘Why should woman be economically dependent upon man?’ The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn't; except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her… of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say) is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety… For the truth is… the home is the only place of liberty… The decisions and choices of beggars do not seem very momentous to us. We are conditioned to believe that the lives of presidents and dictators, business tycoons and financiers, newscasters and even entertainers, are more important, more influential, more significant than the lives of nameless hobos and panhandlers. Not so… ‘we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry.’ The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else.” (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/whatwrong.html)
2. Most of us grew up in a culture led by people in active rebellion against God, and one of those ways that they expressed their rebellion against God was to systematically marginalize marriage and the home.
o Over the last century there has been systematic and orchestrated pressure to have fewer children,
o Systematic and orchestrated pressure to change the role of the wife from being a mother and homemaker to being a business executive,
o Children of all ages used to grow up at home, but now most children spend most of their waking hours in day cares, schools, and sports programs away from their parents,
o Entertainment used to be provided almost exclusively by homes as families sang together, played instruments together, read books aloud together, acted dramas together, played games together, or just sat on the porch and watched God’s creation or the toddler’s antics,
o Food has also moved outside the domain of the home as very little comes anymore to the table from garden plots, and, more and more, food preparation is delegated to corporations who skin and pick and cook our chickens for us and wrap their meals in cellophane for us to microwave because we are too busy with work and other things to cook,
o
When we went to school, we were introduced to a
different model which was intentionally designed by anti-christian men to
replace the home: the corporate institution which had one building to sleep in
(run by professional janitors), one building to eat in (run by professional
food service personnel), one building to study in (run by professional teachers),
one building to get books from (run by librarians), and other buildings to play
and exercise in (run by recreational professionals).
You were removed from your family and put together with members of the opposite
sex and exposed to anti-marriage media at the height of your interest in
marriage so as to make fornication almost irresistible and so as to make a good
marriage an uphill battle.
3. Please don’t misunderstand me:
o I am not saying that any one of these trends in isolation is necessarily sinful and anti-Christian. I am saying that we need to look at the Bible and respond to the tremendous shift has occurred in the last century toward marginalizing the home, because if we unthinkingly go along with the flow of our culture (which is systematically removing value from home life), we will lose that place of freedom from which to exercise dominion and discipleship of all the earth to which God has called us.
o Again, I’m not saying that it is necessarily wrong for a wife to have a job or for children to go to an institutional school or to watch professional entertainment, but I am calling you to make every one of those choices purposefully as part of your strategy for fulfilling God’s call on your life.
o This doesn’t mean we all have to go live in caves and grow all our food from scratch, but it does mean to purposefully gain as much freedom as you can and in order to take captive to Christ every aspect that you can of life on earth using your home as a base of operations, and this will mean making some choices that are different from the world around us.
o It means realizing that most people are looking at the wrong side of the tapestry because they don’t know God’s word and don’t understand His design.
o By the way, I also do not want you to come away equating being domocentric with being amateur.
a. Women, to organize your life calling around being a wife and keeper of the home according to Paul’s instructions to Titus (ch. 2) does not mean looking unattractively homely. There are aspects of homemaking that God has gifted you to hone to a level of professional precision that can put the rest of the world to shame.
b. Men, taking dominion of your home does not mean doing shoddy, haphazard work to make your house look like an old farm building. What it means is understanding what you’re good at and honing it to a fine, professional level that demonstrates the excellence of the God who called you to take over the world and disciple it in the things you know about God (you don’t have to know everything – you’re part of a body that can fill in the holes in your knowledge).
o So, we are in a culture that is consistently marginalizing marriage and the home and we need to exercise Biblical wisdom to respond appropriately to this situation with excellence to reclaim the dominion of Christ over every nation and creature on this earth.
• Since we don’t have a building or a big staff, we must operate in a decentralized manner with each household acting as a center for ministry.
• Our homes need to be the place from which the Gospel spreads. Our homes need to be the place where the world sees Christ the Redeemer Church in action throughout the week.
• Although we try to be all together and focus on our common unity in our synagogical meetings, it is in our homes that our differences can shine, as each household crafts a unique expression of the Christian faith based on our different spiritual gifts, our different life histories, our different ethnic and family backgrounds, our different jobs, and different personalities.
As we survey the situation we find ourselves in, what does the Bible say to us?
• When God divided the nations of the earth at the tower of Babel, He chose to advance His agenda of redemption through a family. In Genesis 18:18 God said, “…Abraham will surely become a great and mighty nation, and in him all the nations of the earth will be blessed; 19 For I have chosen him, so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring upon Abraham what He has spoken about him.” The family has always been God’s modus operandi.
• In April 2008, I preached a two-part sermon on every instance in the ESV Bible of the words “dwell,” “house,” “home,” “tent,” and “family.” There were some 2,000 verses, and as I read through them, I tried to categorize them to show scriptural uses of the home. Here are the highlights of that study:
o a house must be built intentionally; it must be built upon the foundation of faith and obedience to Jesus Christ. Men who have thus invested in their own house are qualified to help lead the church (1Tim 3:4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? … 12 Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well.)
o a household can be more than just a husband and wife and children; it can include parents and employees. God intends for His people to spread their houses out and take over the world
o The house is a place for industrious work (Proverbs 31)
o a household is a place to be defended and kept clean from evil influences,
o a house is a place to rest and to eat and to invite other people over to eat, and
o a house is a place for instructing a wife, children, and others, and it is a place to worship God from day to day.
o Throughout the Bible there is an interchange between the house of God and the houses of people. God has a house; He wants us to bring ourselves into His house, and then He promises to dwell with us in our house.
• Wisdom (a feminine noun in Hebrew, but personified in Jesus) has a house and calls people to come in to it: Pro 9:1 Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars… 3 She has sent out her maidens, she calls From the tops of the heights of the city: 4 "Whoever is naive, let him turn in here!" To him who lacks understanding she says, 5 "Come, eat of my food And drink of the wine I have mixed. 6 "Forsake your folly and live, And proceed in the way of understanding."
• John 14:23 Jesus answered, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”
• 1Tim 3:15 says that “the household of God… is the church of the living God...”
• 1Peter 2:5 explains further: “you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
• Psalm 23:6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
o In the New Testament, when Christians were kicked out of the temple and synagogue, they used their houses for church meetings:
• John Mark’s Mom’s house was a central point for believers in Jerusalem: It was the house the disciples were gathered in when the Holy Spirit fell upon them at Pentecost (Acts 2:2) and it was the house where the church was praying when the angel released Peter from prison (12:12)
• Col 4:15 Give my greetings to the brothers at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church in her house.
• Phlm 1:2 Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier, and the church in your house:
• Rom 16: 3 Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, 4 who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks but all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks as well. 5 Greet also the church in their house… (cf 1Co 16:19)
• Act 18:7 And he [Paul] left there [the Synagogue in Corinth] and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. His house was next door to the synagogue. 8 Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized.
• Archaeologists have found no evidence of Christians building church buildings until over a hundred years later. This does not prove that Christians should never use church buildings, but it does prove that you don’t have to have a building in order to have a church that lasts for a hundred years. A church building is an optional resource.
o Because God has invited us undeserving offenders into His house, we follow His example in using our homes as centers for ministry to those who are needy. The Bible specifically mentions using our homes to minister to the sick and the poor and the spiritually lost:
• 1Tim 5:9 indicates this should be a norm as it sets the standards for who qualifies for financial support from the church: “Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband, 10 and having a reputation for good works: if she has brought up children, has shown hospitality, has washed the feet of the saints, has cared for the afflicted, and has devoted herself to every good work…
• Jesus told many of the people He healed to “Go Home” Mark 5:19, Luke 8:39, Mark 8:26, Mat 9:6b he then said to the paralytic--"Rise, pick up your bed and go home." Why send them home? Because their families needed to hear the Gospel first.
• Jesus got to know new people by visiting the houses of friends and sharing His message there in his friends’ homes:
• Luke 5:29 And Levi made him [Jesus] a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them.
• Luke 19:5 And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today."… 9 And Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham.
• Jesus instructed His disciples to base their ministry out of other people’s homes: Luke 9:4 And whatever house you enter, stay there, and from there depart… 10:5 Whatever house you enter, first say, 'Peace be to this house!' 7 And remain in the same house, eating and drinking what they provide, for the laborer deserves his wages. Do not go from house to house… 9 Heal the sick in it and say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you.' (cf. Mar 6:10; Mat 10:12-14)
• And the Apostles Practiced this consistently: Act 5:42 And every day, in the temple and from house to house, they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ.
• “One of the most important methods of spreading the gospel in antiquity was the use of homes… The sheer informality and relaxed atmosphere of the home, not to mention the hospitality which must often have gone with it, all helped to make this form of evangelism particularly successful.” (Michael Green. Evangelism in the Early Church. p. 318)
• Mike Acquilina, in an article which he wrote for Touchstone magazine entitled “Salt of the Empire” on Christianity during Roman times, wrote, “Christian charity, which usually began in the home, brought church growth. I cannot emphasize enough that this charitable activity was not so much the work of institutions as of families. The family was then, as it is now, the fundamental unit of the church.”
• Howard Vanderwell, in his book, The Church of All Ages, concludes that, “Even though missions and outreach are a key part of the church’s ministry, we must acknowledge that more people have been brought into the Christian church by way of the Christian family and the instruction received there than through any other means.”
• Jarrod Michael, in his Denver Seminary thesis entitled Household Approach to Ministry, commented on this, “[A]ncient Israelites and early Christians… saw their mission work carried out in their own homes, through their entire families and households… The modern church in America has strayed so significantly from the vision of the ancient Israelites and early Christians… [P]arents must once again take complete responsibility for creating a home that, by its existence and daily life, instills knowledge and understanding in the things of God and Faith… The Church is not the only ambassador for Christ; the person with evangelistic gifts is not the only ambassador for Christ; the trained missionary is not the only ambassador for Christ! Rather, each family, each home, is viewed as an ambassador for Christ, as well as each of the individuals who are a part of it.” He goes on to identify three essential elements of household ministry:
1. Communicating the Gospel
2. Leadership from the head of the household, and
3. Hospitality.
So what is the role of the church leadership in a domocentric church?
§ When we look at the role of the priests and Levites in the O.T., we see men not only instructed to take care of the temple and oversee the sacrifices (Num 8:19), we see men instructed to tell the people what God’s word said so that the people could implement God’s principles in all of life. The principles were fleshed out in the home as they were learned from the priests who preserved God’s word and read it out to the people.
Deut. 17:9 “Go to the priests the Levites, and to the judge that shall be in those days: and inquire, and they will show you the sentence of judgment… So, observe to do according to all that they teach you: 11 Do according to the tenor of the law which they will teach you, and according to the judgment which they shall tell you...
§ When we look at what God commands the elders of a church to do, you can see that it does not require the kind of institutions and professional culture that we associate with churches in America today. The officers in the church are generally told to lead and teach in the Christian community:
a. Be “apt to teach” (1 Tim 3:2)
b. 1Thess 5:12 “But we request of you, brethren, that you appreciate those who diligently labor among you, and lead (προΐ́στημι) you in the Lord and give you instruction” (νουθετέω)
c. 1Tim. 5:17 “The elders who rule well are to be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching.”
d. Titus 1:7 “the overseer must be above reproach as God's steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of sordid gain, 8) but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, self-controlled, 9) holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.”
• Each of us is building a house. We need to build it with faith in the Lord Jesus Christ to give it a firm foundation. He will dwell with us when we do this.
• We need to look for the expansion of our house to embrace children, parents, employees, and others.
• We need to vigilantly defend the purity of our homes.
• We need to eat meals and live in our homes and create a culture in our homes that reflects the nature of God.
• God shows us in scripture to use our homes as ministry centers where hospitality is offered, the sick and poor are cared for, the Gospel is proclaimed, and above all, God is worshipped.
• If you are able to bring leadership to a household, determine to lead your household in Godliness. Be like Joshua, who said (24:15) “as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
• Many of you are already using your house or apartment or dorm room for ministry purposes. I want to encourage that, and I want to do everything I can to equip you to be successful!
• Each household will look different in the way it acts as a ministry center, because each household is composed of different people with different gifts. A dorm room with one person living in it will develop ministry differently from a large house with a large family living in it, and a family with a formal culture and a passion for hospitality and teaching is going to organize things differently than a household with a more informal culture and a passion for helping and counseling – and that’s fine.
• This is where the specialization should come out in the church. In your homes is where your differences should shine.
• But wouldn’t it be more efficient to centralize the ministries of the church under a professional staff? Sure. And it would be more efficient to centralize reproduction like Aldus Huxley suggested, with drones who are specialized in having babies, large childcare facilities which specialize in raising children, and the abolition of the private kitchen and the house. But that is not the way God designed us. He designed all the redundancies of millions of families that build their own houses, have their own children, and feed themselves. Efficiency isn’t the ultimate priority in God’s eyes.
•
Now, you may be
saying, “We aren’t much of a family. We don’t have what it takes to take dominion
and disciple the world.” This is looking at the wrong side of the tapestry. Do
you think Noah felt up to starting civilization from scratch after the flood
when he was 100 years old?
If modern man wanted to wipe out mankind with a flood and start over from
scratch like God did back in the days of Noah, we would have chosen an elite
team of young professionals, none of them over 40 years old, with perfect
physical fitness, one of them maybe with a Ph.D. in metallurgy, one with a
Ph.D. in carpentry and boat-building, one with a Ph.D. in zoology, and maybe a
couple of beautiful women thrown in there, and they would form a super-team to
rebuild the world. But that’s not what God did. He chose a family, Noah and his
wife and kids, to start humanity over from scratch. That’s God’s way is to
choose households and use them beyond their wildest dreams.
• I was just listening to Geoff Botkin talk about his 200-year plan and I’m fired up for making one for my own family. Have you ever though of dreaming what God could do through your family 200 years from now? Seven generations later? Botkin is talking about bringing Christian transformation to every aspect of society in the USA, New Zealand, and Japan through the next seven generations of his family. What could God use seven generations of your family to do? Realize that in 7 generations of descendents making 12 disciples each, you could be the patriarch or matriarch of almost 100,000 souls, so dream big!
• Your home, your apartment, your barracks, your dorm room is the place to start making disciples. If God gives you children, disciple those children. If you can adopt children, disciple those children. If you can bring students or others to live in your home, disciple those temporary residents. If you can invite neighbors and peers into your space for food, conversation, and even a Bible study, make disciples of your guests. If you can welcome international students, those are the “aliens and strangers” to whom God commands us to show hospitality (Lev. 19:34).
• No one household is likely to be able to do all of these things, so don’t feel inferior if you can only do one; between all the households of our church, we can do all of these things as a church!