Sermon Notes from September 10

Sermon Text: Galatians 4:3-7

This last Sunday was our official launch as a church!  We are so excited to see what the Lord is going to do in and through Christ Central Church.  During the sermon, Scott talked about what he hopes will be one of our defining cultural values:  a culture of family.

To create a culture of family as the church, we must first remember how we became a family.  The verses we looked at showed us that Christ came to redeem us from our enslavement to sin, so that the Father would adopt us into His family. We did nothing to deserve our redemption or our adoption. Being adopted into the family of God shows the great love our Father in heaven has for us.

In our adoption from God the Father, we looked at three ways this affects who we are as we relate to God.

1. We have a new identity.  We are now sons and daughters of the King.  And God sent His Spirit to live inside of us to speak to our hearts and minds and to remind us that we are His children.  

2. We have a new intimacy.  As the Spirit lives in us, He cries out to God calling Him, "Abba, Father!"  This is a deep, intimate cry from our hearts to our Father who hears us.  This new intimacy means that we can be known deeply by God the Father, and as He sees us for who we really are, He loves us deeply as well.  We don't have to pretend to be someone we are not as we approach God, because He already knows and still loves us nonetheless, because of Jesus and His reconciling us to the Father through His life, death, and resurrection.

3. We have a new inheritance.  Galatians 4:7 stated that because we are no longer slaves, we are sons, and if we are sons, then we are heirs.  Because we have been adopted into God's family, all that is His is now ours.  We get to enjoy all that is His because we are His heirs.  We receive the glorious inheritance of eternal life in the presence of our Father.

To have a culture of family in the church, we must remember these three things.  But being adopted by God doesn't just affect how we relate to God, but also how we relate to one another. 

We have a new identity, not just as sons and daughters, but also as brothers and sisters.  This is the main term, the apostle Paul uses to address the churches he was writing to.  He would call them his brothers and sisters, which a sibing was the closest relationship one would have with another in that day.  This means that to be a church is to be a family.  We are either a good representation of what it means to be the family of God or we are a poor one.  

We also have a new intimacy, not just with the Father but with the church.  We are to love and serve one another as a close intimate family does.  Jesus said that the world will know we are His disciples by the way we love one another (John 13:35).  So the way we interact as a family with love should be noticeable.  There are 59 "one anothers" in the New Testament, speaking to the importance of how we treat each other as a family.  And the same way that we can be known deeply by the Father and yet still be loved for who we are, this should be how we approach one another.  We should be known deeply by others in the church and yet still be loved deeply, even as we see each other for who we really are.  Church is not the place to put on your false self and try and convince everyone you're ok.  If church is a family, then this is the place where you can be your true self and still find love and compassion.

We also have a new inheritance that is not only personal but also corporate.  And this means that what we do together as we gather to worship God as a family is a glimpse of our inheritance: that we belong to a people who receive the blessing of eternal joy as we experience His presence and worship Him for eternity.  So we are not alone.  We have a family.  Life is not meaningless.  We have a purpose.  This is not all there is.  We have eternity with Him.  Thanks be to God that He has adopted us into His family!

And my prayer for our church is that God would truly knit our hearts together as His family, where we can be known deeply and loved deeply, in such a way that it stands out to a world that is lonely and searching.