Lindsey Blair and Bobby Gilles recap and discuss Pastor Jonah's sermon from week two of Orientation: Our Values.
Lindsey Blair and Bobby Gilles recap and discuss Pastor Jonah's sermon from week two of Orientation: Our Values.
Lindsey: Welcome to the Midweek Checkup. My name is Lindsey Blair and my cohost is Bobby Gilles. This past Sunday, Pastor Jonah Sage preached about “What we love” in the second week of our new series called Orientation.
Bobby: Jonah said that we love truth, beauty, and goodness because they lead us to God. But if you missed the sermon or need help remembering, you’re in the right spot for the Midweek Checkup.
Lindsey: Jonah began by saying that We are creatures of desire, we are made for desire, not fear, guilt, or shame. To be made in the image of God means, in part, we are creatures made BY LOVE for the purpose of love. As a church, we would say "we love God and we love people." But what does that mean? We define what that means by the core values of our church, shared every week. The early church would have called these three words "the transcendentals”: these words are truth, beauty, and goodness.
Bobby: Jesus said he came to reveal truth. Not only does truth exist outside of us, it does not belong to us, either. Truth is something given to us. We embody the truth with conviction but also humility. Jesus was steadfast but not mean. The only people Jesus was ever forceful with was RELIGIOUS PEOPLE acting like they knew everything. So for example, we are not a Republican or Democrat church. We are a KINGDOM church.
Lindsey: And if the truth belongs to God, then we can rejoice whenever and WHEREVER God's truth shows up, even if it's from a Democrat and even if it's from a Republican. This is another reason we recite the Nicene Creed every week. These are the most important truths revealed to us, and these are the truths we will embody with conviction and humility. At Sojourn, we believe that Christianity is not a list of beliefs. At Sojourn, we believe the truth is a person, and the invitation of truth is to follow a person, Jesus. And for Jesus, truth exists in service of relationships.
Bobby: One of the ways we can understand what this means is by talking about our second value, BEAUTY. In the Psalms, King David said there was one thing he wanted.
Most powerful man in the world, had access to anything his heart desired.
And listen to the one thing he wants most of all:
I'm asking God for one thing, only one thing: to live with him in his house my whole life long. I'll contemplate his beauty; I'll study at his feet.
-Psalm 27:4
Fascinating how David puts truth and beauty together. Now, we think of beauty as physical attractiveness or ostentatious displays of wealth.
But that's not what the Bible means. Something is beautiful when it is excellent, attractive, and transforming.
Lindsey: Something is excellent when it does what it is supposed to do. It is attractive when it draws you in. And beauty is transformative because you cannot leave the presence of beauty unchanged. Beauty is excellence that draws us in and changes us, bringing deep contentment to our souls and providing us with tangible experiences of God’s presence. We all have an artist inside of us because we all bear God's image. So, whatever that might mean for you, we cultivate beauty here. We slow down and get curious about whatever it is we find beautiful. And we celebrate beauty wherever it's found.
Bobby: Just like beauty, GOODNESS is another big word that's hard to define. The prophet Micah defines goodness when he says, “Do right, love mercy, walk humbly with your God. Goodness means justice, and biblical justice means honoring the inherent rights of every human as an image bearer of God. Loving goodness means living a life of justice. The Bible uses this word almost exclusively to describe how we relate to the poor.
"Justice" means making sure the vulnerable, the oppressed, the people living subhuman lives, are treated with the dignity they deserve as God's image bearers.It means making sure everyone is treated like a human.
Lindsey: And goodness means mercy. If we all received what we deserved in this life, if all of our sins were brought to account...what a frightful, terrifying thought that would be. Justice without mercy is a cold, cruel reality, but mercy without justice is meaningless! We want both, and biblical justice requires both. And finally, goodness means humility. Without humility we will look at those suffering and wonder what they did to deserve it.
Without humility, we will look at unjust situations and, at best, feel a slight sympathy. Without humility, we will look at the good things in our lives and assume they are the fruit of our own individual efforts.
Bobby: To walk humbly with God means we acknowledge we are limited creatures who both suffer injustice and perpetuate injustice. So we rely on God to help us become a good church. Not just a good word church that prioritizes words over people, or a good works church that prioritizes people over words — you know, the people who tend to think what you believe isn't so important, what you actually do is. A GOOD CHURCH marries good words with good works by embracing a whole gospel
Lindsey: And remember what the gospel is. It’s the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand. The Kingdom of God compels us to fulfill Jesus' great prayer: God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
How will that happen? Through Christian's living lives of goodness!
The Kingdom mandate makes us a people of justice and mercy.
How is this possible? We are adopted into the Kingdom of God through the CROSS of Jesus Christ: his life, death, and resurrection. This new life is given to us. We receive it as a gift through Jesus.
Bobby: Why would God give his son's life for us? God adopts us because of his extravagant love for us. It is by GRACE that we are saved. And what would we call this kind of love if not BEAUTIFUL? What is our mission as a church? REACH. BUILD. SEND. How will we accomplish this? By rooting ourselves in our great loves: Truth, beauty, and goodness.
Lindsey: This coming Sunday, we’ll continue our series called Orientation. And in Bible Fellowship, we’ll discuss 1 Corinthians, one of Paul’s earlier letters, together. Join us, and bring a friend.