1 Peter 2:4-12 | I will build my church | Craig Roberts

What do you want our church to be - a cruise ship or a military hospital ship?

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do not believe the stone, the builder rejected, has become the cornerstone, and a stone that causes people to stumble, and a rock that makes people fall. They stumble because they disobey the message, which is also what they were destined for. But you are a chosen people, a holy priesthood, a holy, uh, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. God's a special procession that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans, that though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he withits us.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Friends, it's a privilege to be back with you this third week in our series looking at the promise of Jesus, I will build my church. I live just up the road at Gordon, and I'm the CEO of Sydney Anglican Youth Works, and Sean has said, keep coming back, Craig, till you get it right. So hopefully a third time I'll nail it. But I want to share with you briefly about what God is doing in all the world to build his church. I want to share with you some stories of what uh Youth Works is doing, and hopefully I'll be able to advance the slides. There we go. Uh, what Youth Works, Sydney Anglican Youth Works, is doing in all the world, as I shared last week, we are educating pastors on what good looks like in terms of effective ministry to young people, and we're equipping those who lead young people. Uh, earlier this year I went through five countries in just under four weeks, and uh, I want to tell you, I want to ask you to do two things. Uh, firstly, in Colossians chapter 4, the Apostle Paul wrote to the first century church in Colossi, pray for us too, that God may open a door for our message so that we may proclaim Christ. Friends, would you pray for me and my team that God would open a door for our message? He is already doing that. In fact, he's more than doing that, he is blowing doors off their hinges. Let me share with you some encouraging stories of how Jesus is building his church today. Uh, I spent some time in Cairo with a group of those who lead youth and children in the Anglican Church in Cairo. They've asked for my team's help to establish our three-year senior high Christian leadership pathway, leaders in training, in Cairo and Morocco, to help raise up the next generation of young church leaders. Uh here in uh that that photo on the left, that's my travelling companion, Youth Works College Principal Mike Dicker. Uh, on the right is him uh shaking hands with Daniel. Daniel works at the Urban Mission Centre in the Kybera Slum of Nairobi. I've got to say that's that other picture is of Mike walking down one of the main roads of the Kybera Slum, second biggest informal housing settlement in Africa after Soweto. And that photo was taken just minutes after, thanks to the generosity of a Sydney family, we were able to offer Daniel a full scholarship to study at Youth Works College here in Sydney. Why did we do that? I've been working with Daniel for the last three years. He reached out to me to say we've got so many youth and children in the slum. I'm working with 50 churches. Help. Well, we've been sharing resources with him in Swahili. We've translated our key resources into the heart language of the folks in the Kybera slum. And he said, over the last 18 months, as I've been working with the pastors of 50 Anglican churches, 50 out of 50 churches, every one of them, has seen their church grow as you've helped me be more effective in resourcing them for ministry to children, youth, and families. Then I met with Anglican Bishop Ben Fisher. He's from Idaho, not the slums of Africa, but middle-class white-bred America. He shared with me how he used the same youth works resource, not in Swahili but in English. He said, in the state schools of Idaho, where my parishioners who are teachers are forbidden from talking about their faith in government schools, teenagers of my churches have been given, in his words, an imagination for evangelism. They have started lunchtime Bible study groups for their mates, and he said, All my churches in Idaho are growing. From the slums of Africa in Swahili to middle class America in English, through partnership with Youth Works, churches are growing. Jesus is building his church. Principal Mike Dicker and I also spent some time at the largest Anglican theological college in Africa, in Uganda Christian University. And as a result of that visit in Q1, uh, just last sorry, we're still in August, earlier this month, my faculty at Youth Works College spent two weeks with the theological faculty at Uganda Christian University completely revising their curriculum. Because the the Vice Chancellor said, We've got a gap. We're training pastors to do ministry to adults, really important for a Bible college, but in Uganda, 70% of the population are youth and children. He said, We're not training our pastors to reach women and disciple 70% of the youngest country on earth. So for two weeks, earlier this month, the faculty in their mid-semester break completely rewrote their assessment rubrics for how they train their pastors, and we've now helped them activate the 500 theological students to train the 10,000 Christian undergraduates at UCU to activate them for mission. Very exciting. And then that lady is Lizzie, she's a youth minister in Scarborough, northeast of England, and that guy is Wilson. He works at the parish of Muswell Hill in North London. Those two in London and North East England are now embedding our three-year senior high leaders in training program to raise up the next generation of leaders for churches in their next of the wood. And if that's not enough, just on Wednesday I had a Zoom call with three men who report to the I'm not making this up, he's the primate of Uganda. In the Anglican church, primate is the name to the most senior Anglican, Archbishop Stephen Kazimba. It's I'm not making they're called primates. I spoke to the Ugandan primate and, or sorry, to his three of his direct reports in charge with youth ministry in the country. And they said we've got 39 dioceses, we've got the infrastructure, reporting lines, distribution channels, but I need your help, Craig, through Youth Works to train. We've got 4,000 youth ministers who need your training. And we've got 6,000 schools, primary schools, 600 high schools that need curriculum. Are there any SRE scripture teachers here this morning? Any anyone? Sean? YouthWorks publishes the Anglican scripture curriculum used in New South Wales schools. We have, in partnership with the Tanzanian and Ugandan ministry, created an East African version. And my new friends from the Archbishop of Ugandan's office said, we've got 1.2 million primary school kids in Anglican schools. Can you please help us bring your curriculum and distribute it among 1.2 million students? And I said, sure. So I need you to do two things, friends. I need you to pray for us. Hopefully, as you came in, you got YouthWorks current quarterly prayer guide. Please pray that the Lord will continue to open and keep open doors. And secondly, I need to fundraise $4 million a year for YouthWorks just to keep doing what we're doing. To do these other things in Uganda, I need at least a quarter of a million dollars to put on more staff. Here's a one-pager, A5. If you are able, in addition to supporting the ministry here at St. Albans, if God is putting on your heart to help build Jesus' church in Uganda and the Kybera slum of Nairobi and the churches of middle class America in Idaho, then I would crave your generous financial support and it's all fully tax deductible. Please pray, if you're able, please be generous. Jesus is building his church just as he promised. We'll get to that in a minute. But I want to tell you a story about my family holidays. I've got two adult kids and one who's doing our HSC. When they were little, uh we used to love uh going on family holidays by the beach, and um in my mind, this is what we would be doing. Building sand castles. Who's ever built a sandcastle at the beach? Yes, excellent. Um in my mind, that's what we did. In reality, it was more like this. But whether it's sand castles at the beach or anything else, when you build something, it's yours. You get to own it, you get to do with it what you want. You get to decide at the beach, do you put uh the the sand barrier um on the castle side of the moat, or do you put it on the the water side of the moat? When you build it, it's yours, you get to set the rules. You get to decide who and when jumps on the sand castles end of the day to bring it all down. When you build it, you get to set the rules. And we've been seeing over these past couple of weeks, haven't we? That Jesus is a builder. He is building his church. And because he is the one building it, it's his church. And because it's his church, I get to set the no, he gets to set the rules. And we've seen over the past two weeks, haven't we, that every church, including St. Albans, is to reflect the character of God. We've been thinking about this five-word promise of Jesus. I will build my church one word at a time, and today we're thinking about the word my. From every tribe and nation and pe people, even from the Kyberislam of Nairobi, even from Egypt, even from America, even from Linfield. We are his church. We are his people because he brought us by his death so we might be released from the grip and hold of the devil and the specter of death. We are his. Remember the Star Wars uh movie when uh Obi-Wan Kenobi saved the annoying alien Jharja Binx? Binx then followed his Savior everywhere and tried to be just like him, telling everybody, I owe him a life debt. Jesus is building his church. He promised Peter and his other disciples that that is what he would do. And 2,000 years on, that is what we're seeing him do. He is the promise-keeping God, saving people through his death. We owe him a life debt. Let's press into that promise of Jesus. And in fact, not the first promise, I will build my church, but the second promise that we touched on last week, where Jesus said to Peter, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will have been loosed in heaven, and whatever you uh loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven. The keys of the kingdom. A key, uh, like my car key, represents authority to open a door, to give entrance to a place or to a realm. And we know from Revelation chapter 1 that Jesus said, I have the keys of death in Hades. So having a key means authority to give entrance to a place. So at the very least, having the keys of the kingdom of heaven represents authority to preach the gospel of Christ and so open the door of the kingdom of heaven and allow people to come in. Now, while this promise was made to Peter and the group of Jesus' first century followers who wrote the gospel down in permanent form that we know as the New Testament part of the Bible, we have this same authority in a secondary sense because we too can preach the gospel. We've been empowered, equipped, and indeed commanded to invite people into the kingdom of heaven as we commend the Lord Jesus to them. But there's a second authority that Jesus is alluding to when he's talking about the keys of the kingdom. And there are two clues to this second authority. The first being to preach the gospel. The first clue we've got is that Jesus spoke of not a key but keys plural. So multiple keys suggest the authority to open multiple doors. And the second clue comes two chapters on when Jesus is talking about church discipline. He uses exactly the same binding and loosing phrase in the context of disciplining someone who claims to be a Christian but has sinned against someone else. And in Matthew chapter 18, Jesus sets out the way we are to respond on those occasions where we see a fellow Christian acting in ways that are inconsistent with the commands and character of God. So in Matthew 18, Jesus said, If your brother or sister sins against you, go and show him his fault just between the two of you. If he or she listens to you, you've won your brother over. But if he won't listen, take one or two others along, so that, just as the Old Testament says, every matter may be established by testimony of two or three witnesses. If he still refuses to listen, tell it to the church, and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or tax collector. So Jesus is talking about church discipline, and then he repeated what he said to Peter back in chapter 16. I tell you the truth. Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven. Now, to be clear, the you here is plural. It's use. This is not just for Peter, it's for all of Jesus' followers. It's for you and me. Now, and this is as technical as I'm going to get, so just buckle up on a Sunday morning for 30 seconds. We're going to do some English grammar. The binding and loosing words have as their object the neuter whatever, not the personal whoever. So, the focus here is on a particular sin, not on a particular person. This disciplinary authority is about maintaining purity, holiness within God's church, not announcing condemnation or forgiveness on a sinner. This is about ensuring we reflect God's character in our lives, not walking around with a big stick. Remember, last week we thought of that image of the church as being like a 45-degree angle mirror where you look at the mirror and you get to see what's above. So too, as people look at us, as God's people gathered as church, they're to see something of the character and nature of God. So the keys to the kingdom of heaven that Jesus promised to Peter in chapter 16 are given to us in chapter 18, inasmuch as we, under God, have responsibility to seek the purity of the church. Now, if we could get a really big sheet of paper and draw a line across it, and along the line plot every single local church and denomination from around the world, we could plot the churches on a continuum from true churches at one end to false churches at the other end. And somewhere along that line, we would move from true churches to false churches. Churches that conform to God's will for the church and churches that pay no regard for God's will for the church. And among the true churches, there's going to be more pure and less pure churches. And it's right that we should work and pray for greater purity or holiness within the church. But purity cannot be our only concern. If purity or holiness was our only concern, we would have a tendency, wouldn't we, to separate into increasingly tiny groups of very pure Christians and we'd kick out anyone who showed the slightest hint of impurity. We'd be like an OCD brain surgeon in charge of his operating theatre, where everyone has to scrub in to his exacting standards and the slightest failure to comply, and now that anaesthetist or that scrub nurse gets kicked out on the spot if purity is our only concern. Purity or holiness is important in the church, but so is unity. And we saw last week the need to seek unity among Christians. And Jesus' prayer at the Last Supper in John 17, if you're taking notes, was that his followers would be one. They would be united. It's Jesus' desire for us to be one, to be unified. And as we've seen over the past two weeks of this little series, it's also Jesus' desire that we, the church, reflect his character. We do that because what we bind and loose as God's church will have been bound or loosed in heaven already. In our church, we are to reflect the nature and character and glory of heaven, which in turn is a reflection of the glory and nature of God Himself. So we strive for purity, but not at the expense of unity. And neither are we to pursue unity as our greatest good. If that was the case, we'd have to cut across Jesus' instructions for church discipline. If we pursue unity as our greatest good, we won't risk preserving purity in the church. We won't risk holding anyone to account, calling anyone to more consistently and more fully live for Jesus. When we find someone who disagrees with, for example, a line in our creed, rather than risk conflicts and division, we should just delete the line. So let's take, I believe, in Jesus, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Spirit born of the Virgin Mary. I mean, come. I've done high school science. I know where babies come from. That's got to go. I believe Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried. Well, there's an argument saying, no, God the Father would not send God the Son to the cross. That is child, cosmic child abuse. So that line goes. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, a real figure of history. Well, yes, we've got the Jesus of history, but I believe in the Christ of faith. So we can't just anchor ourselves too tightly to historic details. So that goes. He rose from the dead. Well, no, we we know that dead people stay dead. Jesus Christ, his only son, oh sorry, he descended into hell. No, we we we believe in heaven. Every child wins a prize. We don't want to trouble people with the unsightly, uncomfortable notion of hell, so we'll sack that. Jesus Christ, God's only son, our Lord. Well, that's just downright offensive to good Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims, so that needs to go. God the maker of heaven and earth? Really? I've read the first couple of chapters of Genesis. That does not square with my understanding of science and the Big Bang Theory, so that needs to go. God the Father Almighty? God is Almighty? Why do bad things happen to good people? That has to go. As for God being Father, that's just a perpetuation of the patriarchal homogeny, so that needs to go. So we've got our creed. I believe in God. Amen. We end up with an emaciated faith that is no faith at all. Unity is good and right, but by itself it is not enough. It is not the greatest good. And we saw a few minutes ago how similarly bad results can come when we pursue only unity or holiness. And so this takes me back to where we concluded last week. The church following after its Saviour Jesus, looking to reflect his character, mean that we are to be like a water skier behind a boat. We can only go where the boat takes us. We can move side to side. We can let go, we can fall over, we can try and hook behind another boat going a different direction. But if we come to a fork in the river and the boat goes left, we cannot go right. There have been in sorry when you're water skiing on two skis, you need to rest your weight equally on the two skis to stay behind the boat. If you lean on one ski, you'll quickly drift outside the wake and line and direction of the boat and ultimately fall over. And there have been innumerable water skiing tragedies where the skier drifted too far outside the line of the boat towing him, and sadly it's almost always been a bloke, and they've hit a log or a tree or the riverbank and died. Going too hard on unity without purity or purity without unity is deadly in the church. Unity and purity. We are to put our weight equally on both. We won't prize purity to the extent that we schism off into ever-shrinking groups because relationships are so important, and we prize fellowship and we know how good and right unity is. But neither will we compromise on core doctrines in an attempt to make uh have unity at all costs. For that would move us along the continuum from being a true church into being a false church. What do I mean by core doctrine? Well, it's not whether we should baptize infants or not, it's not whether our church should be governed by a bishop or a council of elders. There are very fine churches that would disagree on those issues. A core doctrine is one that moves us from being a God-centered church to being a person-centered church. For example, a church that moves from prizing the reading and teaching of the Bible toward the sort of oratory that wouldn't be out of place in a self-help club or a motivational self-improvement conference. A church that does not bring people's attention to Jesus Christ on a regular basis. And by regular basis I mean every week. And I've been so encouraged by my three weeks here with you guys. Every week, Sean has brought our attention to Jesus Christ. On the sorts of issues that divert our attention down from God and onto ourselves, we are right to take a stand and risk unity. Because unity based on anything else than Jesus Christ, revealed in Scripture to be the crucified, risen, and returning King of kings, Savior and friends, is not a unity that will endure. Purity or holiness and unity. We will insist on both in our church. We will insist on both in the church of Christ. Let me show you what Peter said about the nature and purpose of the church that he promised to build. And we've finally come to our Bible reading after that 20-minute introduction. Don't worry, we're almost there. Peter wrote, As you come to him, the living stone, talking about Jesus, rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him, you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus. As you come to him, this is written by Peter, the apostle, the one to whom Jesus in person gave the keys to the kingdom, the one who said at the Last Supper to Jesus, I will never abandon you. And this is Peter, the one who buckled completely in the face of a servant girl, the one who folded his hands and fled. How do you enter Jesus' church? How do you enter a saving relationship with him? It is not through dint of your effort or through past performance. Peter wrote these words as one failure to other failures, as one beggar to other beggars. From one person he knew he was not armor-plated perfect to people just like him. How do you enter a relationship with Jesus? You just come to him. And if you've never come to Jesus and you're here today, or maybe you've come to him in your past and you've walked away, well, now it'd be a great day to come to him, to come back to him. It's so simple. How wonderful must that truth have been for Peter? And as you come to him, as we come to Jesus, like living stones, we are being placed in a wall alongside that most stupendous of stones, the precious Jesus Christ. God bricks us in to the identity of Jesus, the one who shed his blood to purchase you. No other God says, have my blood, have my death, my identity, my resurrection. We are bricked in to the identity of Jesus. That is solid, that is secure. And through that we become acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. And Peter went on in verse 9: you're a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God. Why? So that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light. This is the church. A chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging not to themselves but to God. If you are in Christ, that is who you are. That is who we are. Chosen, royal, holy, belonging to God. Why? So that you may declare his praises. Friends, we don't just have a new identity. We have a new purpose. We have a new mission. Demographers and educators talk of young people as being digital natives. They didn't grow up like us with slates or chalk or pens and paper. They're growing up with screens and tablets. The push isn't to get them to do a trade, it's to learn to code. They are digital natives. And this stuff just comes naturally to them. Our new identity as living stones, as Jesus Church, means we are praise natives. We are natives of praise in the world. Praising God should come naturally to us. This means we will be different. We will be countercultural, even subversive in society. We won't grumble and complain when we don't get what we want. We will praise God in the sunshine and in the rain. We will not accept the notion that secular atheism should hold sway in polite conversation. We will want to point to our God and what he has done in creation, in the world, in the church, and in our lives. We will articulate reasons to praise God, for we are now natives of praise. And people will notice. You will stand out. People will find that attractive and they will want to know, and so we will be ready to give a reason for the hope we have in Christ. Peter says we are a people called by God out of darkness into his wonderful light.

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We've been called.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

Because it means no one chose you. You went to the other team by default. But being chosen means that someone, the team captain no less, sees value and worth in you. Now the illustration breaks down completely and utterly because, in my experience, the team captain is only going to pick you because of something you can do for the team. In verse 9, Peter takes God's words that uh takes the words that God told Moses to speak to Israel in the Old Testament at Mount Sinai, just after he'd rescued them from Egyptian slavery and applies them to Christians. He says, You will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Out of all the nations, you'll be my treasured chosen possession. Friends, we are a chosen people. Again, the you isn't singular, it's you, it's plural, it's us. We are a chosen people. No longer the Israelites, God's chosen special people. Christians have been adopted in. We're a holy nation. It means we've been set aside for God. It means we are different to those roundabout. Because we have a different allegiance, a different home, a different set of priorities, a different set of values, because we are founded on a different cornerstone. We have been chosen. We've been called out of darkness. That means we will be done with deeds of darkness, done with vengeance and payback and grudges. I've used this photo a couple of times over the last three weeks. It's not just any church, it's the church of Owatilla, Cantene Creek, Northern Territory. To get to Cantine Creek, you hire a car at Alice and you drive for four hours up the Stuart Highway toward Tennant, and then you turn off to the east and the bitumen runs out after about a hundred metres. Then there's 180 Ks of travelling to the east, it'll take you three or four hours to get there, and then you come to Canteen Creek. It was established in the 70s when the government said to the nomadic Mick family and butcher family, you've got to stop wandering around the Barclay Tableland and settle down. And they said, Well, our sacred place is Canteen Creek. And that's where the government settled them. The Mick family and the butcher family. It's a dry community. I've been there many times. Sadly, just before you cross the cattle grid into Canteen Creek, uh, just on the left, there's an increasing amount of empty Forex cans. Because the men, again, sadly, it's almost always the men, get a couple of slabs from tenant, and before they drive in to Canteen Creek, they pull over 100 metres before the grid and they finish off their beers, and very often they drive into town completely lagered. Some 20, 25 years ago, there was a young butcher man and a young Mick man who did just that. They drove in, and the mob was around the community campfire, and they got out, and after a time they got into a bit of a scuffle, and one of them was pushed into the fire and burnt his arm. The other guy saw what he'd done, jumped into the car and in full view of the mob, drove off into the scrub where he T-boned a tree. They ran over, they found he was dead. About three or four weeks later, the coroner determined he'd died of a heart attack. But going back to that night, he was dead. And under the indigenous principle of payback, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, the family of the dead man, remember there was the two uh clans that came together to form Canteen Creek, the family of the dead man went to the sorry place for five days to do their grieving, and everybody knew that after the end of the sorry time in the sorry place, they would come back, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and they would kill that young man. And if that young man wasn't in his home when they came back, they would kill his mother or one of his family. And so the family came out of the sorry place. This is a true story, armed with rocks and clubs, like just big, thick branches. The man with the burns on his arm, he was terrified. He was sobbing, he was shaking, he was there in his house because he knew if he ran one of his family would be bludgeoned to death in a brutal, public, painful, long, bloody way. And the matriarch led the grieving mob out of the sorry place, walked up to the young man's house, and she threw her rock into the dirt and she said, We are Christians, we are done with payback. And everybody else threw their weapons into the dirt and went to their homes. News of that spread like wildfire across the Barclay Tableland. For the next year, every church was full to overflowing with people wanting to know how was the cycle of payback broken? Because they saw Christians who were reflecting the glory and character of God in a very real and costly way. Christ, who is building his church, is doing it in Central Australia, he's doing it in the slums of Africa, he's doing it in America, he's doing it in England, he's doing it here in Linfield, he is building his church in purity and unity. Christ who has bricked our identity into his own so we are safe, we are secure, we are loved, we are redeemed, we are chosen, we are royal, we are holy, we are a people belonging to God. We are his church.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

To bring people out of darkness and into his light, to live differently and to live lives that praise him. I wonder, I wonder how that story, I wonder how this truth that Jesus is building his church, how it has how it has moved you this morning, uh, inspired you, and how you can see that God is at work, even here, even here in Linfield, as he works in your life and the lives of those sitting around you as he works in our church. What is it that can change people like this and that can build Jesus' church? Purity and unity, and as Craig encouraged us, you need to hold on to both of them. And it's that message that will enable us to do that. Craig referred to the uh the Apostles' Creed, which we say regularly. What is it that you believe is one I want to ask. For it's what you believe that Jesus will use to build your church. Let's stand and declare what we believe. Please stand as we say together the Apostles' Creed.