Text: Matthew 28:18–20
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
What Even is this Thing?
If you would, please turn with me to Matthew 28. This morning, we will be finishing out the fourth and final installment on our short series on local church membership. So far, we’ve answered three questions:
What is local church membership?
What are the duties of the leaders in the church?
What are the duties of the congregation?
This morning, we conclude by asking simply: What is this local church? Because the goal of this sermon series isn’t an abstraction; I want you to join this local church as a member. So this morning, my goal is to tell you about this local church in such a way that you would be eager to join in with what it is that we are all about.
I’ll say up front that this is not a sermon primarily about the statement of faith we hold. As an elder team, we broadly subscribe to one of the great historic Reformed confessions of faith. We’d be happy to give you a copy, walk you through it, and I will briefly hit on issues related to our statement of faith in this sermon.
But this sermon is more focused on answering the questions like: Where is our prow pointed? What coordinates are plugged into the GPS? Or to put it in a cooler way: What cluster of values function as our pole star, our true north? What do we believe to be the mission of this church and what means and values do we believe the Lord has given us to see that mission through?
To that end, I’m going to frame this sermon around five sentences that—should you understand them—you’d understand what makes us tick. You’d understand the magnetic north pulling on our compass needle.
Make Ogden a Christian City
We want to make Ogden a Christian city. Take a look at Matthew 28:18–20 with me:
“And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
-Matthew 28:18–20
Listen: The Lord is with us. Do you believe that? He is with us. And he has given us his orders—right their in the text, there they are. What are those orders?
To herald the gospel of the Kingdom of God. To pronounce the death, burial, resurrection, and reign of the Lord Jesus Christ—his blood-bought amnesty for sin; his cosmic, redeeming love; his all-surpassing, humanity-satisfying glory.
We have a task to see through, and it is a glorious task. Our task is to go out into a world in the way of judgment and say that the Lord God—who could smash the nations like clay pottery!—has come rather to save the nations. The Judge seated in the holy places came down, and glory of glories, he did not come to condemn the world, but to save it.
This salvation is not merely the forgiveness of sin—though there is no salvation for sinners apart from that—but also the establishment and expansion of an all-encompassing Kingdom. This theme of the Kingdom of God is shot through the gospels.
John the Baptist preached, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” in Matthew 3.
In the very next chapter, the Lord Jesus agreed, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” And then “…he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the Kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.”
To his people, he preached in the Sermon on the Mount, this Kingdom belongs, and he taught us to pray that this Kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven, to seek this Kingdom first, and that in light of his utter dominion of the demonic realm, the Kingdom of God had indeed come upon the earth with the coming of the Lord Jesus.
And this Kingdom, he teaches us, “is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” And that the Kingdom of Heaven “is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”
So what is our task? It is to make Ogden a Christian town, because it is to make the nations Christian nations and the world a Christian world. We are charged with evangelizing, baptizing, and instructing the nations to obey the Lord Jesus Christ.
Our task—the task of this local church, is to invade and colonize the world like leaven in a lump of dough—to earnestly pray and seek the Kingdom of God and its coming on earth as it is in heaven.
This precludes any kind of walled off, spiritualized ghetto of a mission. We are not merely seeking to see Ogden get more spiritual. We are not merely seeking to exert a “Christian influence” in the community. We are not going to settle for bargaining with the Kingdom of Darkness over the nations.
No, we are here to bargain, but to baptize. We are here to see them kneel with joy at the feet of the Lord Jesus and his throne. Secondly:
Theological Maximalism
We refuse to live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Another way we could put this is to say that we are a church in pursuit of robust, theological maximalism, not mile-wide-inch-deep theological minimalism. Our aim, therefore, is to open the Bible, make it our daily food, do the hard work of understanding it to the bottom, and believing everything we find there.
This means no problem passages.
This means no shallow, doctrinal minimalism.
This means no mile wide, inch deep church.
We would aim together to be like that blessed man in Psalm 1, the Lord Jesus Christ, whose delight is in the law of God, on which he meditates day and night. He is therefore like a mighty oak, planted beside living waters, who bears his fruit in season and out of season.
We believe that we cannot prosper in the mission that the Lord has given us with halfhearted love for the Scriptures.
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
-Hebrews 4:12
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
-1 Timothy 3:16–17
“How can a young man keep his way pure?
By guarding it according to your word…
Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.”-Psalm 119:9, 105
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.”-Isaiah 40:8
This is why we teach verse-by-verse through whole books of the Bible nearly every Sunday that we gather. It’s why we have Sunday School classes that are highly doctrinal. It’s why you will hear sharp, clear teaching on matters of important doctrinal issues, even if those issues are secondary in nature.
It is so essential that we pursue a rigorous, theological maximalism, because the issue of theology is one of those not-whether-but-which sort of issues: It is not a question of whether or not you will be a theologian, but rather which kind of theologian you will be.
Will you be a good one or a bad one, a fool or a sage, an arrogant or humble man, a law unto yourself or a self under God’s laws? So we would open the Bible, do our work in its words, believe everything we find there, and refuse to have problem passages.
However: We don’t just want to know the Scriptures; we would live them as well. As the Lord Jesus promised in Matthew 7:24,
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.”
-Matthew 7:24
And so, the third sentence you need to know to understand this local church is this:
Cultural Maximalism
We believe that our doctrine is to come out of our fingertips.
We are a church in pursuit of cultural maximalism, meaning we want to have all of Christ for all of life. We believe that the gospel of God is the power of God to produce sons of God who obey the words of God. Again,
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” -1 Timothy 3:16–17
What that means is that are emphatically not antinomians. We know that every culture is the outworking of some cultus. We know that all cultures, as Henry Van Til put it, are merely the religion of that people, externalized. Of culture, he wrote,
“Man was to belabor the good earth so that under the blessing of God it might bring forth its fruit. This was called agriculture. We also speak of the tending of bees as api-culture, that of birds as avi-culture and of horses equi-culture. This list could be extended indefinitely, inasmuch as man has brought the world of created things under cultivation . . . Today we use the word “culture” of any human labor bestowed on God’s creation in its widest sense, including man himself (voice culture, physical culture, etc.), by which it receives historical forms and is refined to a higher level of productivity for the enjoyment of man. Culture, then, is any and all human effort and labor expended upon the cosmos, to unearth its treasures and its riches and bring them into the service of man for the enrichment of human existence unto the glory of God.”
-Henry Van Til (The Calvinistic Concept of Culture Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, [1959] 2001), 29-30)
The error in vogue amongst our secularist society is, to paraphrase Gary DeMar, that they want to conceive of religious worship as a part of culture—alongside theatre, music, art, literature, the culinary arts, etc.—rather than what it actually is: the very basis of all human culture. Culture just is the worship of a people, writ large and worked out into all areas of human life.
So we don’t want to be hypocrites, nor do have any interest in being Christians with some glorious, shiny collections of doctrine, card-catalogued in alphabetical order and meticulously footnoted—who never actually obey those doctrines. We believe, as the great theologian Abraham Kuyper wrote,
“…no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
-Abraham Kuyper
If that is true—and if the Lord Jesus came to remake a new humanity in his own image (and he did!)—then there is not a single part of what it means to be human that is not to be touched by the saving, transforming, renovating work of God.
Our mental selves, emotional selves, physical selves, rational selves, social selves, political selves, familial selves—all of it is to be brought into alignment to the Son of God. We present ourselves as living sacrifices to God in Christ.
This transforms the way we think and act with respect to the everything of life, right? We are to be Christian men and Christian women building Christian households for the sake of Christ. We can’t seal off any portion of our lives—from education to vocation to politics to marriage to sex to homemaking to childrearing—from the sovereignty and help of God. Fourth sentence:
Reform, Not Revolution
We would do all of the above as irrepressibly jovial, patient reformers, not bitter, impatient revolutionaries.
“Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. Reformation of culture is either a species of salvation or sanctification, and you can’t have either one of those without Jesus. Secular conservatism will sometimes buy you some time, but that is about all it can do—that and lure you into the complacent notion that it can do more than that. Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This is why individual heart transformation, not legislation, is fundamental to national reformation. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.”
-Douglas Wilson (Rules for Reformers, 2)
We know that it is God’s kindness that leads to repentance. We know that his work is unfolding not just on the scale of days and weeks and years, but also on the scale of centuries and ages and aeons—human history is his domain.
So we are patient reformers, not bitter revolutionaries. We know that we are playing the long game, and so we can afford patience. We would cultivate a jovial spirit in the mold of Philippians 4,
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
-Philippians 4:4–7
We would be the kind of Christians who, like our brothers Paul and Silas, could pray and sing hymns to God, even as they sat in a prison cell at midnight, persecuted for the faith.
We aren’t looking merely to be a strange and peculiar people—which we certainly will be if we do the first three things I listed today—but also a jovial people. Why? Well, Hebrews 10:34 tells us why, even in face of hatred, reviling, opposition, persecution, and plundering:
“…you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.”
-Hebrews 10:34
We reform with a smile, full of joy, guarded in thanksgiving, even through opposition, because we are going to inherit the earth. Because, as Paul teaches us in Romans, we are more than conquerors through our Lord—he is even making death and persecution and hardship serve us.
So we win by dying, as our Lord did—dying to our own glory, our own preferences, our own flesh, our own treasures—for the sake even of our enemies. We would be a people who have what Peter called “joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of [our] faith, the salvation of [our] souls.”
Finally, related to this sentence…
Legacy
We’re not trying to build merely for the next 20 years, but for the next 20 generations. Listen to the Scriptures, beginning with Psalm 78,
“Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth!
I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.
We will not hide them from their children,
but tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might,
and the wonders that he has done.He established a testimony in Jacob
and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our fathers
to teach to their children,
that the next generation might know them,
the children yet unborn,
and arise and tell them to their children,
so that they should set their hope in God
and not forget the works of God,
but keep his commandments;
and that they should not be like their fathers,
a stubborn and rebellious generation,
a generation whose heart was not steadfast,
whose spirit was not faithful to God.”-Psalm 78:1–8
“One generation shall commend your works to another,
and shall declare your mighty acts.”
-Psalm 145:4
“…showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
-Exodus 20:6
“And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”
-Acts 2:38–39
“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
-Ephesians 6:4
The Bible speak so often about the ordering of the household, about husbands and wives and children and instruction because these promises—the glorious promises of the gospel of the Kingdom—are not just for us here and now, but for our children and for all who are far off.
So we know that as we gather in this sanctuary and sing the Psalms and open the Bible and worship together with three or four generations all present together, we are strengthening and forming a people to send downstream in history.
We know that the Lord our God delights to show his steadfast love to our children, and so we would have and keep our kids, right? We would raise them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord Jesus Christ, not blithely surrender them to Caesar to be raised in Caesar’s discipline and instruction.
So we would catechize them and love them and discipline them and bring them into the worship of God’s people.
So we would preach the gospel of adoption, that all who are far off may come through repentance and faith into the family of the Father, join this household, and begin to participate in the leavening of the world.
So we pursue productive households in quiet, industrious, faith-filled lives, leaving the inheritance of faith to the next generation, that we might see the faith pushed downstream in history as it multiplies.
“But we urge you, brothers … to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.”
-1 Thessalonians 4:10b–12
So much of the modern American church is obsessed with chasing ephemeral market trends and innovating and staying relevant to the culture. So much of the modern church seems bent on microwaving success and measuring success in big budgets, big auditoriums, fast growth, and popular podcasts.
We want nothing to do with that. Instead, we want to build a culture that is better, and see that culture grow like leaven through the generations. My highest aspiration, and one I hope will become yours, is to give my life to this place and see my children and their children carry it on into the 22nd and 23rd and 24th century and beyond.
I pray that the Lord would make us a church where people are born and buried, that he would make us a people who put down deep roots, start business, make Christian culture, raise children, build houses, and buy burial plots with every intention of climbing into them at the end of their race to await the resurrection.
To do that, we need embrace a theology of slow, plodding, faithful, boring obedience to the Lord. We need to make the winning of our kids and raising of our kids a high priority. And we need to make the legacy of faith the most central thing we could possibly build.
So, summing it up:
We want to make Ogden a Christian city.
We refuse to live on bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
We believe that our doctrine is to come out of our fingertips.
We would do all of the above as irrepressibly jovial, patient reformers, not bitter, impatient revolutionaries.
We’re not trying to build merely for the next 20 years, but for the next 20 generations.
And you’re invited.