Proclaim the Gospel: Invite Them Into His Kingdom

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We’ve been talking about proclaiming the gospel. We’ve been talking about presence-based witness. How do we share the good news of what Jesus has done? And we’ve started by saying, the presence of God is where it starts. The presence of God goes before us. It goes ahead of us. It is with us.

The Kingdom of God is at work everywhere. No matter where we are, God is already there. And so we know the premise, right? We assume we do not bring God or His kingdom or His light anywhere. It’s already there, already at work. Our job is to find our place, to plant ourselves among a people in a place, and be attentive and awake and prayerful and watchful.

How is God’s kingdom at work in this place? And we wait for that to be revealed. We don’t bring the revelation. We don’t manipulate the revelation. We don’t coerce the revelation. We don’t shove people’s faces in the revelation. God reveals it. They see, and we have eyes to see what is happening. This is God at work in your midst.

This longing that you have is God at work. And then we proclaim the gospel, the good news, and we invite people into what God is doing in the world. We invite people to bring their lives under the loving, liberating Lordship of Jesus and to partner and participate with God in His healing of all things. And we testify to a different power, the power of God that has been at work here, the power of the Kingdom that has been at work here in our midst.

And we rejoice. And so we are continuing this series as we took a break last week, and I wanted to really camp out at the gospel piece, because I think many of us have a very narrow understanding—not an untrue understanding, but a very narrow understanding. When we hear the gospel, we think of a very narrow kind of concept.

And as we just saw, the gospel is all of Scripture, the story of Israel coming to its fulfillment and climax in the story of Jesus. And it is the story that God continues to write in renewing all things, all creation, all people. It’s the restoration of the entire cosmos. This is what God has done in Jesus, and this is what He’s doing in Jesus.

The good news is better than we ever imagined. Maybe earlier this year, when we were going through the series on Colossians, we looked at a way of showing this big story. It’s called The Big Story, I think, or Four Circles. It was created by a guy from InterVarsity. Rod, you’ve probably met him… Rod and Andrea. Have you met James? Is it Chung? James Chung. He came up with this about 15, 16 years ago. Now he has put it out there, and it’s been out there for 15 or 16 years. And there’s some, I think, some things it misses. It’s beautiful. And so I presented his version, and this is still very much his version, but I want to add this idea of the whole story of Israel, this idea of the Kingdom of God being the hopes and dreams of Israel fulfilled in Jesus and unleashed on the entire cosmos and every tribe, tongue, and nation.

And I think he would agree with me and probably would not agree with how long it will take, which is probably why he didn’t include it. So he was going for a two-minute version. This is going to be about a 15-minute version. But I want us to find ourselves in this story. This isn’t necessarily something that you would draw out on a napkin and present the gospel to somebody.

Although maybe remember, we’re not trying to learn a script. We’re trying to be present to how God’s on the move and bear witness to what He’s doing. But this gives us an idea of where this evangelism, where this good news thing, how it fits and our role and what we’re inviting people into and what we’re asking people to look for.

So here is The Big Story, 12 to 15 minutes. I want you, as you think about the world and what you see on the news, we see a lot of beauty. We also see a lot of pain, right? Destruction, war, separation, division, children dying of preventable diseases, climate change changing fundamentally how we interact with the environments.

We would all agree that the world is pretty messed up, full of pain and suffering. The interesting thing is the human response to this pain and suffering. Very few people will rejoice at a child dying of a preventable disease. No one rejoices at unjust war. No one rejoices and thinks it’s a good thing that families are separated at borders or that climate change is fundamentally changing everything.

Most of us ache for a better world. And just like water, our thirst indicates the existence of water, right? And our hunger, that growl in our stomachs, indicates the existence of food. So this ache and this longing for a better world indicates a better world once existed and may one day exist. And so the story of God says a good and loving God, in the beginning, created the heavens and the earth, and everything was good, and everyone and everything was living in loving community and relationship with one another.

Humanity and creation: humanity cared for creation, and creation cared for humanity. They walked in stewardship. Humanity and humanity, relationally: we loved one another. We lived in community, a beloved community, belonging, unashamed, free to serve one another and be served. And personally, we walked with God. God’s love was present. We walked with Him. We worshiped Him as creator, and we walked in loving relationship with Him as friend.

This is a world designed for good, in great love, designed for good.

We call it Shalom. Peace. So what went wrong?

Well, God designed the world to run on love. God is in charge. All is going well. So Satan, the deceiver, the accuser, convinces humanity to reject God and reject God’s way of love, to turn and distort love inward, rejecting God’s love for them and rejecting the invitation to express love for God, one another, and creation. Instead of loving one another and serving one another, we begin to use one another and abuse one another and hide and isolate from one another.

Instead of caring for the planet and living in interdependent relationship, we begin to exploit it, consume it, and use it. And instead of walking in loving relationship with God and worshiping Him as our creator, we reject Him as King. We hide in shame and we rebel. And when this happens, literally all hell breaks loose. Systems of oppression and violence, environmental decay, enter the scene. Empire. Racism, injustice, enter the scene.

On a relational level, we use each other rather than love each other. We betray one another. We break covenant with one another, and we isolate and use and abuse. And of course, with God, we reject Him as King. And when this happens, the world is damaged. We are wounded by sin, by the sins we’ve committed and the sins committed against us.

We are entrapped and entangled by evil and evil systems.

But God, in His great love, does not give up on this entangled mess, the suffering entanglement of woundedness. And so, out of great love and the desire to redeem and restore all that was broken, first God partners with a people. He chooses a family, the family of Israel. He makes a covenant with Abraham, and He goes with them in the wilderness and redeems them and brings them out of bondage to Egypt.

He walks with them, guides them, rescues them, and calls them to be the kind of people that would bring blessing to all the world, that would be the kind of people that would live under God’s love and restore all that was damaged, to be a part of the healing in the world.

But here’s the problem. They fail to fulfill the call of God on their life to partner with Him in love. They have the same problem we do. It’s a human problem: turning and distorting love on itself. Violence, rejection of God and His way of love. And with that comes the fall of Israel, comes the fall of Jerusalem.

But God was not done. God had made a covenant with Israel and would restore the whole creation. And so He spoke to the prophets of Israel, and the prophets of Israel start speaking of the future that God would bring to restore Israel and all creation.

They see. They speak of God personally arriving in Zion, coming to redeem His people. They speak of the wolf lying with the lamb. They speak of all creation being healed. They speak of a suffering servant who would come and proclaim good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, release of the captives, and the year of the Lord’s favor.

And they called this great hope, this great expectation, the Kingdom of God. And that’s the world that Jesus enters into. He comes an Israelite, Jesus of Nazareth, and He comes with an announcement. He doesn’t come with a new religious teaching. He doesn’t come with good advice. He comes with a royal announcement as King, the promised King of Israel who would bring Israel’s story into fulfillment.

What does He say? Mark 1:15: “The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God is near. Turn around, repent and trust in the good news,” the good news of God’s redemption and restoration of all things.

So Jesus comes. He’s the King. He’s the Christ. He’s the Messiah. But He starts acting in ways that were not expected for Israel’s king to act.

What’s He doing? He starts eating with sinners and tax collectors. He starts healing people who are broken and wounded and diseased. He teaches forgiveness and even love for one’s enemies.

And the powers, the powers and principalities, those things unleashed in a world damaged by evil, sin, Satan, injustice, violence, corrupt power, and a people who have been distorting love for thousands of years, hate it. They turn on Jesus and they unleash all of their anger and rage, rejecting the King. Jesus takes it because He’s the suffering servant promised in the book of Isaiah, the Suffering Servant King.

He takes it. He is crucified on the cross. He dies. He is buried.

And all hope seems lost. But on the third day, He rises from the dead.

And with this is the dawn of new creation. With this is a vindication of His message and His way, and His claim to be the Messiah, to be the fulfillment of all that God had promised Israel for the world. And when Jesus died and rose from the dead, this would be messed up. This is still messed up. When He rose from the dead, what happens? Healing begins to break in.

All the powers and principalities, violence and injustice and racism and all that we do to destroy the world, is put on notice, saying that the true King is on the throne, that all wrong things will be made right, that all things will be renewed.

Human relationships, our relationships with one another, begin to be healed and reconciled. At the foot of the cross, there is no slave. There is no free man. There is no Jew. There is no Gentile. There is no male or female. All can experience community and belonging at the foot of the cross.

And that God that we were intended to walk in loving relationship with and worship as our creator, that relationship is restored. It says in Corinthians that in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself.

We are forgiven. We are healed. We are restored. We are taught what it looks like to love again. And so this is a restored world, restored for better.

Now, is that the end of the story? It’s not. That’s what’s so beautiful. It’s not the end of the story. Because Jesus doesn’t just win the battle against Satan, sin, and death.

He invites us to share in His victory, just like He did with Israel. He invites us to partner with Him in the healing of the world. And at the cross, as we pledge our allegiance to Jesus, as we acknowledge the ways that we have participated in the distortion of love, and we receive forgiveness and healing for the wounds that we have inflicted on the world and on one another and on God, we are healed.

And we are then sent and empowered by the Spirit, by the King, to go together to heal the world. Having been restored by God in community with one another, having been healed and forgiven, we get to be a part of the healing and restoration that God continues to work and He promises to complete. We are sent together to heal a wounded world, to reconcile relationships that are broken, to be peacemakers.

And so some among us, and some in this world, are very passionate about justice, and they want to fix the injustice in the world. They’re very passionate about climate change and environmental collapse, and they want to be part of the healing of the world. They’re passionate about racial reconciliation. But why can’t we just go from here to here?

Why can’t we just be a part of the movement of justice and peace and reconciliation? Well, here’s the problem. The change we want to be in the world has to begin in us. If we bring our woundedness and our distortion of love, if that hasn’t been dealt with and we try to participate in the healing, we just bring more damage.

We get exhausted. And so what we must do is receive the healing that only Jesus brings through His life, death, and resurrection. We receive the power of His Holy Spirit, and we receive the power of the community of faith that gives us the resources and the empowerment to bring and to partner with what God is doing in the world.

In order to be a part of the healing of the world, we have to have the resources of God, to submit ourselves to Jesus as King and to allow that healing to take place in us. That is the gospel. That is the big picture: a world designed for good, damaged and wounded, and held captive in a web of evil. Restored for better. The story of Israel fulfilled in Jesus, and healed, sent together to be a part of the healing of the world.

When we are present in a place, present to the presence of God, this is the story we’re a part of. We’re present in homes and in restaurants and in workplaces and in families, wounded and damaged and trapped in evil.

But there’s a longing and ache for what they were created for, what once existed and what will be. And we’re looking, we’re waiting for that desire to be revealed. We’re waiting for the Kingdom of God to break in. When there is healing, when there is restoration, when justice is experienced, we can point to it and say, “God is on the move. That’s what God is doing. That’s what God is doing.”

When justice is denied and relationships are falling apart, and there is a longing for those things and a grief, we can pay attention to that and proclaim what Christ has done and what God is doing in the world, His presence. That’s what we’re looking for, and that’s what we’re a part of.

Now, I want to do something a little different because this is already different, right? Let me open it up a little bit here. What are your thoughts? Questions? Concerns? What are you seeing? What are you noticing? What are you uncomfortable with? Let’s hear it. Anything?

Audience Member:  [inaudible] …In isolation.

Pastor Jesse: Say more.

Audience Member: I mean, that’s just the fear of [inaudible]

Pastor Jesse: Oh, yeah. Right. Yes. So one of the deepest aches is for community, and people alone, isolated, broken relationships, feeling shame in community and withdrawing.

Well, yes. William.

Audience Member: One of the barriers for me is when I look at the world, it seems like all the power, the apparent power, rests with the evil. And the attractiveness of the things that are evil seems so powerful. I have to remember that it’s not like state.

Pastor Jesse: One thing I think I left out because it wasn’t on my notes at all—so give me a high five—is that the way that Jesus defeats the powers of Satan, sin, and death, the way that He’s King, is actually His enthronement is not to a throne, but to a cross. The whole book of John follows a Roman enthronement ceremony, where it depicts Jesus being put on the cross. He’s crowned with a crown of thorns. He’s given a scepter. He’s given a robe, and He’s lifted up, which is the language of being enthroned, a Roman emperor being enthroned.

So the way that Jesus becomes King, the way that He’s enthroned, is through self-sacrificial love. And that changes everything.

But it looks—and this is why the cross is foolishness to the world, right? It’s foolishness that the King, the Messiah, would defeat evil not with violence, but with self-sacrificial love. That cross we wear on our necks—some of you probably have a cross on your neck—that’s ridiculous. That’s foolish. But it’s the power of God to salvation.

Pastor Jesse: Anyone else? Yeah, go ahead.

Audience Member: I’m just wondering how we overcome that feeling that I think a lot of people have, that goodness is great, but it belongs in the church. That is different in the government. You can’t be a sweet peanut farmer. You know you’re not going to be a good leader if you’re not tough. And I don’t know, it just seems like in our government it’s an eye for an eye.

And I just wonder, you know, I think of that movie that made a big, strong impression—the… Oh, no, I just forgot the name of it. That’s happening more and more. But where the people—

Pastor Jesse: The Mission.

Audience Member: Yeah. It’s like, to me, that’s Jesus. That’s what He would have done. He just got—you know, the people got mowed down. The big evil, sin, Satan, won. But really, it’s like, I guess we have to trust that it’s going to happen someday, because that’s what the Word says, that the Kingdom working the way it’s supposed to will be here.

But I often feel like justice doesn’t really come until the next life. And that’s what matters anyway. Because when you think of eternity, this is nothing. I don’t know, I guess that’s kind of a sad way to look at it, but I have a hard time knowing how you overcome, because people just shut you down.

I mean, they walk away from you and you’re isolated when you have these grand thoughts, you know, when you have the grand thoughts of—

Pastor Jesse: The grand thoughts of what?

Audience Member: Of really following Jesus.

Pastor Jesse: Yeah. Yes. And Jesus—I don’t remember. I saw The Mission many years ago, and he does get mowed down by bullets. Jesus doesn’t advocate for passivity. It’s nonviolent resistance. That’s how I read it. So the Sermon on the Mount, when it says turn the other cheek and walk the extra mile, those are all resisting evil.

And we could do a sermon. Maybe I’ll do a sermon on it. But that’s not passivity. Pacifism is not spelled passive-ism, or whatever. It’s like, at peace, pax. So yes, passive in that He wasn’t passive. He was very active. He went to the cross willingly and did battle with the powers and principalities and defeated them the only way that they could be defeated: through love, which is beautiful.

But then also, let me say what’s beautiful about this, in my opinion. And there’s open to debate here. Chris, you mentioned eternity is where justice will occur. What if by eternity you mean heaven that’s apart from this world? I think I disagree, because I think what God is doing in the promise throughout Scripture, the promise to Israel, the wolf lying with the lamb, Revelation, new heavens, new earth, is all about God’s presence coming down to be with His people, not us going away from this earth.

So the redemption of the world, the physical world. Jesus rose from the dead not as a spirit, but as a body, as a man, a different body. He can go through walls all of a sudden, but He’s the first fruits of resurrection. So our bodies, this earth, this planet, is not something that just vanishes.

It is being renewed and restored. And so, yes, when Jesus returns, He will judge the living and the dead and make all things new. But it is not—in my opinion, some people would maybe differ—it is not an escape from this earth. It’s a renewal of the earth, an opportunity for us to be in creation as we were created to be in it, cultivating the earth, stewarding the earth, being creative in the earth, walking with God, loving one another, and living in Shalom.

But if there’s thoughts on that, we can talk about it over hummus. Any other thoughts?

Yes, go ahead. Yeah. All right, I’ll throw it. I should have hired someone to read. Only today, I’m lazy.

Audience Member: Well, what occurs to me is, how do I reconcile my own inconsistency with Jesus’s consistency to heal? I mean, I don’t do that all the time. And so that’s what struck me, is how can I rely on Him for consistency?

Pastor Jesse: That’s beautiful. Yeah. And we all—I think this goes to consent. We consent to the healing of God and allow. He never forces us, zaps us, overrides our will to make us like robots of healing. It’s all about this cooperation. This participation is consent to His Lordship.

And so, just like Israel failed, we fail, right? And God is, by His Spirit, healing and redeeming us.

We are being healed. You know, there’s a sense in which we are forgiven, period, end of sentence. And there is a sense in which we’re continually being forgiven, and it’s an ellipsis, right? It’s an ongoing thing. We are healed in the final sense of the word, but we are also being healed as we cooperate with the healing.

It’s like a doctor. You go into the office, they give you a diagnosis, but you got to cooperate with the protocol he gives. We don’t heal ourselves, but He doesn’t force the healing upon us.

All right. Any other thoughts?

Okay, I know I’m looking at this. I know you can’t read it. I can’t see you—like, that’s a mess. It’s a mess.

All right. In light of that, this meal that we partake in each week, it reminds us of the foolishness of the cross. It reminds us of our victory. It reminds us of the way that Jesus is King, right?

It reminds us of the ways in which He was our suffering servant and invites us to the table, to a crucified Lord. So it’s a meal where we remember the suffering of Jesus. It’s also a meal in which we declare the victory of Jesus.

And as we do each week, He lifted up the cup of the New Covenant, right? That’s, again, that video makes all these Old Testament connections, right? The cup of the New Covenant. He lifted it up. This is the promise in Jeremiah and in Ezekiel, the valley of the dry bones, right? That bones would be those dead in the wasteland and exile of sin and trapped in this, right, would be resurrected, right?

And given flesh and bone. Jeremiah: a heart of stone, given a heart of flesh. This is the New Covenant. This is the promises to Israel opened up to the whole world in and through Jesus.

And so we come every week reminded of what kind of Savior we have. We come reminded that we have a Savior. We come reminded of how He is King, and we come reminded that we are invited to take up our cross and follow Him, sent together, empowered in the Spirit to be a part of the healing He is already at work doing in the world.

So I invite you, if you have confessed Jesus to be Lord, King, and believe in your heart that He’s risen from the dead, I invite you to come forward and take of this meal together.