Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS 07 Mar 2010 and 08 Dec 2019
As we start into our church’s fifteenth 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:
Exalting our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Equipping the saints with the Bible.
Evangelizing the world.
Encouraging godly households.
· The two ways we live out these values as a church community are Synagogically and Domocentricly.
In my last sermon I unpacked what it meant to be Synagogic: gathering people together of all ages and even across cultures.
In this sermon, I want to unpack what it means to be Domocentric: This is the 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. G.K. Chesterton’s Assessment
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.
Over the last century there has been systematic and orchestrated pressure to have fewer children,
Systematic and orchestrated pressure to change the role of the wife from being a mother and homemaker to being a business executive,
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,
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,
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,
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
By the way, I also do not want you to come away equating being domocentric with being amateur.
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.
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).
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.
4. Another important aspect of our situation is that Christ the Redeemer Church does not have a building.
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:
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.)
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
The house is a place for industrious work (Proverbs 31)
A household is a place to be defended and kept clean from evil influences,
Ahouse is a place to rest and to eat and to invite other people over to eat, and
A house is a place for instructing a wife, children, and others, and it is a place to worship God from day to day.
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.”
1 Tim 3:15 says that “the household of God… is the church of the living God...”
1 Peter 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.
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 1 Cor. 16:19)
Acts 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.
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:
1 Tim. 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:
Be “apt to teach” (1 Tim 3:2)
1 Thess. 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)
1 Tim. 5:17 “The elders who rule well are to be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching.”
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!