Father in heaven, we're thankful that we can gather together. Together together as your people looking ahead to a new year, knowing that you will be with us. We pray that we would know how to live as your people, and to be obedient and loving the kinds of Christians that honor the name of Christ. We pray in his name, amen.
I have emailed it to the fact that we have children with us here this morning. Being a grandfather twice over, it doesn't throw me off in the least. When I give thanks for the Christmas meal, if there's some squealing in the room, or if during the meal one of the other little ones throws some food across the room, it does not phase me in the least, having raised four children as well. I'm reminded that my son, who was playing the bass a moment ago, was kind of a birthday present to my wife.
His birthday is tomorrow, and hers is today. So Phoebe turns 39 again today. And I'll never forget Phoebe's reaction, because she had gone for a routine blood test. And she was on the cordless phone in the dining room on Goswell Drive, the first home that we had, listening to the results over the phone.
And she's like this. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
What? And I went, really? And when Nick was smaller, and Lydia was already going to school, Phoebe would say, would you like me to invite someone over to play with you? No, I'll wait for Lydia to get home.
They were very good friends. From the very beginning, I'm glad that Alice's parents-in-law are here today, Drago and Maggie. And granddaughter Samantha looks like Drago, and Drago always says, don't say that. She's beautiful.
Drago is of Croatian extraction. We were looking at scenery of Croatia yesterday on the big screen TV, and Drago is a very strong individual, and Samantha is a very strong little girl. And Drago has a bit of Eastern European gravel in his voice, and my daughter, my granddaughter Samantha, has a little bit of gravel in her laugh. Ha-ha-ha.
So it's great. I love having the family around. I love, you know, the pleasure of seeing my children and seeing my grandchildren. The children of God.
What a topic. What a big topic. The things that I'm sharing this morning are just images. You know, it's the kind of thing that we actually do, learn in Sunday school.
And there's a certain beauty to the simplicity of these images. And they're not merely images, actually. They are historical incidences. These are points in time of the earthly children of God.
These are not sort of allegorical imaginary things that sort of just have a spiritualization that is not at all what these are, in that they are historical events. And that makes them all the more powerful, that makes them all the more real, because they happened. They actually happened. And I think that sometimes we need, that's the subject of my sermon, we need to be more like children.
We need to look at some of these things from a big picture point of view. We need to look at the images of the Old Testament almost in a childlike way and not focus too much as they say on the trees. But look at the big picture. Look at the forest.
I'm going to try, at least for the first four parts of this, the four images that I want to talk about to stay at the forest level. And I think we should all try to do that. We should all try not to go into too awfully much detail and ask ourselves, what are the big messages from these historical events? And then we'll move to the New Testament and look at three paradigms.
So I have four images and three paradigms. When we look at the first picture of the beginning of the children of God on earth, the Jews, we see that they had to make a decision one night. And that decision was to follow the instructions, follow the instructions. Sacrifice a lamb, take the blood of the lamb, put it on the lintel and on the doorposts.
In order to escape death, blood. Blood in order to avoid death. A simple picture, isn't it? It speaks volumes.
Of course, it speaks of a future day when there would be blood shed by our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And if we are under that blood, we do not suffer eternal death. What a simple picture. Do you think that every last one of those people had a complete and full understanding of what they were doing?
I rather doubt it. They obeyed. They obeyed. The Apostle Paul talked about obeying the gospel.
There's a real sense of that. There is a sense in which God commands you to put yourself under the blood of Christ, to believe in the efficacy of the blood of Christ, to go there, to be there, to obey. That is an image for you to meditate upon in 2020. Here's a very good one.
I love this. I love this partly because I think it has some very interesting hydraulics in it. We can actually set up a one-sided wall of water in the lab. It's part of the third year course in hydraulics.
You see a bore, a standing bore. And there are equations that actually define the relative heights. But this isn't exactly that, although God may have used natural phenomenon to achieve it. This is a path of water through the Red Sea, through Yam's Suf.
And we can only imagine what it was like to be there. I wonder if you can imagine knowing what was behind and that you have left it. We have left Egypt. We decided to leave Egypt.
Egypt, I think, is a symbol for us of the world, its prosperity and its system of thinking and its kind of worldly sophistication. And they have decided we are leaving. And they're faced with this body of water. And I wonder how it happened.
I wonder how it was that the first person said, I'm doing it. We are being instructed to go forward, to move ahead. Do we know what's ahead? We don't.
We are permanently turning our backs on what is behind. That is an aspect. It is almost a picture of repentance. I put myself under the blood, and I go through an experience which has no turning back.
And I understand that. And I don't actually know what's ahead. It's a very good image for us to take with us. We need to be obedient.
First, we need to be obedient to the gospel. We need to understand our need to be under the blood. And we need to leave behind what must be left behind, which is everything, everything. We, as an assembly, I think when looking at this image, can also be reminded that we have the ability to encourage each other.
Just look at that little word, encourage. Do you need courage? I do. Where can I get encouragement?
Well, sometimes it comes from my brother Gabriel. Sometimes it comes from my brother Kent. I get encouragement for myself, from my brothers in the Lord, and my sisters in the Lord, and my mothers in the Lord. And so I'm willing to, yep, do it.
We are in this together. It sounds almost like a cliche or something. And it's true. We are in this together.
We can't sort of have an isolationist mentality. If we do, we do so at our own peril. You think you're going to go on in the Christian life irrespective and without consideration of your need for fellowship, for your need for encouragement? I think you must be a rather proud, maybe a tiny bit arrogant.
Because I see those things in myself. I think in Canada, we tend to be quite individualistic. I can do it. I can do it.
Actually, you need encouragement. We all need each other. We are in this together. Let's not forget it.
And now we come out of the book of Exodus, into the book of Leviticus in the Pentateuch. Look at that. Isn't that interesting? This lengthy book teaches the children of God how to approach God.
And there's two aspects to it. One is the reminder of the role of the blood, which speaks of Christ. And the other aspect of it is simply worship, those two aspects together. It was highly structured.
It was highly detailed. And when you read the book of Hebrews, you understand even more that it was actually quite onerous. It was actually, in a sense, burdensome. If you try to read that whole book at a sitting, you'll understand better what I mean by the onarousness of that old system of sacrifices.
They looked forward toward Christ, but it was also their corporate way of approaching God. You come to the book of Numbers. Is this a good laser beam? Not bad.
So I'm not a good Photoshop guy, but look what I did. I took that previous image and I tucked it in there. And for 40 years, they had it there. This is literally a picture of the Sinai wilderness.
And then it was over there, and then it was here. And then maybe it went over there. In other words, there is the ability, which I think is even just as true today, is that we can worship God anywhere. Simple big picture message.
Is this carpet that we try to put so much effort in, and Taylor Floring and so on? Is there anything sacrosanct about these carpet tiles? There are sacrosanctes, the ones that went out in the bin, which were not tiles that was red carpet. We do not, at the end of the day, focus on the structure, or consider that once we pass through the front door, something happening.
This is something religious and spiritual, and now, and we're inside the wall. No, no. If the government came down with its fist and smashed this assembly, which may happen one day, it would be like little groups of people, and somebody's going to go over and worship the Lord and Bruce de Molotr's garage, and another group of people are going to come over to my house and worship in my garage. And we don't care.
We love the Lord the same. We worship the Lord the same. The actual venue, the location, is not important. Simple big picture message.
Another big picture message here is that, which came first? The redemption, or the worship? The redemption came before the worship. Which came first?
The worship, or the service? Numbers is a book of service, did you know? The worship comes before the service. This actually changes the entire culture and ethic of an assembly.
Are we going to be program oriented? Does the board sit in that room and try to invent new programs? This is our job, thinking up new programs. We do not.
We must focus on what is the most important thing, the most central thing, that is the worship of our Savior. That is central. That is the most important thing. Anything else is actually an offshoot or outgrowth or an overflowing of the cup that comes from that worship.
If the worship of the Lord has its place, it's remarkable how everything else falls into place. That is God's order. That is God's order. Then we come to, I forgot my verse.
I forgot, I knew I'd do that. Fill in the blank. Everybody plays trivial pursuit around this time of year, or at least they used to, maybe I'm very dated. What does it say?
Through him then, let us continuously, continually offer up a sacrifice of something to God, the fruit of lips that give thanks to his name. This was a sacrificial system that's happening there, a sacrificial system, a sacrificial system. So after 13 chapters of talking about the meaning of that in the book of Hebrews, about the meaning of the Levitical sacrifices, he comes and he drops a bombshell on us. And he says, guess what our sacrifice is?
What is it? Praise, praise. The New Testament sacrifice is praise. This is most interesting.
The fifth book of the Penta took is Deuteronomy. That's a Greek word that means second law. It means a review of the principles. Where did this take place?
It took place overlooking the Promised Land. Isn't that interesting? The Christian kind of, I think, needs a vista. You need to see that this is rich.
You need to see that there is abundance to be had. There is enjoyment to be had. That it is actually not without difficulties, but that God is bigger than the difficulties. Very simple message to understand a vista, to take in the vista.
Now this is modern day Israel. It looks rather dried out and perched. But 3,500 years ago, the Jordan River was not, not, something you could wait across. Today, most of the time you can.
It's really not much of a river. This was a lush green landscape 3,500 years ago. And it in fact took the intervention of God to cross the Jordan River. It backed up.
Must have been a very big hydraulic jump that went back up to Adma. So you can stand on this hill and overlook, and you can see how well so far to that, and so far to that, and so far to that. That's a good thing to kind of keep as one of your four images this morning and in the coming year. Is there any kind of Christian vista in your mind as you look forward?
Do you look forward to the abundance of God? Are you confident in God's ability to bring you into that place of abundance and rest and victory? Think about it. Your vista, your inheritance, your Christian inheritance.
So those are four good images about the children of God. How can I perhaps summarize some of these things? Well, Exodus is about becoming the children of God. It's about redemption.
Leviticus is about approaching God. The number is about serving God. And Deuteronomy about the means of continuing in obedience to God. Notice that all of these things are corporate.
All of these things are presented to us as happening in the corporate sense. They're all under the blood. All of us need to be under the blood. They all pass through the sea.
We all have to pass through the sea. They all wandered and we all wander. They all saw the vista with a reminder of the principles of success that you can read about in the book of Deuteronomy. A vista with the principles of success being laid out to those earthly children of God.
Together, corporate, the blood, the blood, our greatest need is the same. We come here and we are so teerologically leveled. I need it in adverb. I can't help it.
I need it in adverb to go in front of the word leveled. If you go to seminary, you will probably study so teeriology, the study of salvation. What is salvation all about? We are all under the blood.
No difference. Doesn't matter how much money in the bank, how much education you have, how many kids you have, it doesn't matter. None of those things matter. None of those things matter.
We are leveled so teerologically by the blood. The need is exactly the same. We have to all submit ourselves to the fact of the need of being under the blood. We've all passed through the sea.
We've all been saved. We've all repented. We all have received the Holy Spirit. We actually share a joint experience.
This is to me apologetically one of the things that is actually mentioned sometimes in some of the books, but in my mind, it's a huge thing. You think about non-Christians looking at Christianity. And think about the Chinese people in the Chinese Bible study, and we get into apologetics sometimes. And it was read this morning from 1 Corinthians 15.
You know, and my boss once said to me something along these lines, and 1 Corinthians 15 came to my mind. Look, if these things are not true, we are not, we are kuku and pathetic. We're so pathetic. We're a bunch of pathetic people.
I am pathetic. I believe in nonsense. Do you really think I believe in nonsense and that all of this experience that I've had as a Christian is pure nonsense? Well, here's a question.
How come Ken knows all about that experience? How come Clyde knows all about that experience? How come believers in China know exactly what I'm talking about when we speak of the leading of the Holy Spirit? No, exactly what I'm talking about.
Because they have the Holy Spirit just as I do. It's a worldwide truth that we have all been saved. We have all learned of belief and repentance and receiving of the Holy Spirit all over the world. Are we all crazy?
Of course we are not all crazy. People from all walks of life, all levels of education. And where are they now? All under the blood.
All repent and all having received the Holy Spirit. This is not fake. This is real. This is real.
Wandering and worshiping? Well, you go through life and to some extent you endure things. And we endure things corporately. And we learn things together.
This assembly, as an assembly, has learned many things in the past 20 years that I've been here. And the vista. There's a sense of fellowship. Here's something interesting.
Did you ever think that you rarely meet? I've traveled extensively all over the world. How often do Phoebe and I meet people that say, yeah, I'm here all by myself. I'm in Israel.
I'm in Shaq al-Sawakhi. I'm in Costa Rica, whatever. I'm here all by myself. Yeah, I'm just enjoying the trip.
How often do you meet such people? Just about never. Why is that? Because people like to enjoy the vista with other people.
They like to look out over things and say, isn't that wonderful? That is amazing. Look at that. Would you look at that?
That's a steaming volcano that's giving me asthma. That's a look at the colors of the sulfur. Isn't it marvelous? You know, Phoebe's right there beside me.
And I'm so thankful to have a wife of 37 years that we share these experiences together. And we love each other. And in our loving of each other, we have many things that we enjoy together. People like to enjoy things together.
There is much in the Christian life that we should enjoy corporately and marvel at together. Now we come to at 12 o'clock, the New Testament. Oh, dear. I know that there are children in the audience.
I spoke about the fact that it is the real true actual Christian experience of salvation to receive the Holy Spirit. That actually had a historical starting point in Acts chapter two. And as per the promise of the Lord Jesus Christ found in John 14, it continued on when people were saved, although not with an actual tongue of fire. But it did have a beginning noted down by a historian named Luke.
That's very interesting. And what was the context of that? Oops. Birch helped me with this.
You know that you see that Birch's name is spelled B-E-R-C. It's actually not a pure C. It needs the tail. And the pronunciation of the modern location of Ephesus is cell chuck.
It's birch and it's cell chuck. Birch and Margaret are from Turkey. So that is what is left of the Library of Celsus. It looks rather well ventilated to me.
In fact, it is only the facade of the Library of Celsus, who was the proconsulvasia. And it was completed by Emperor Hadrian about 138 AD. So the Lord Jesus would have died in around 33. And in about the next 100 years, the church grew and grew and grew extended into Ephesus and Corinth and Thessalonica and Rome and kept growing and growing.
As the Lord said, it would. And you know that empire that it expanded into, the Roman Empire, had all of these wonderful edifices. I think of the, how many hundred millions of dollars was spent on the Library on Spring Garden Road. And at one architectural award, maybe the Library of Celsus in today was greatly praised as a beautiful building.
And if you get off the ship in Smyrna, which we did, you can take a little jaunt down to modern cell chuck and back again and still get on the ship. And people go, wow, look at that Roman Library filled with Greek ideas in the day. Many of which were totally pagan, even though they were very sophisticated. Just like today, just like today.
Libraries filled with sophisticated and godless ideas. That is the kind of culture that we find ourselves in 2000 years, not quite later. So what are my New Testament paradigms this morning? Three, body, family, and polity.
It is a word, I assure you, I will explain. You would be familiar with these New Testament paradigms. You would be familiar with the fact that Paul Todd in 1 Corinthians 12, that we should think of ourselves as a body. And to paraphrase the scripture that is there, what's the use of that quadricep and that hamstring being marathon grade if the eyes don't work and the guy doesn't know where to run?
What's the use of having eyes like an eagle and no legs to carry you anywhere? No use. We are, this is the teaching of Paul the Apostle under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We are interdependent.
Sometimes I don't even like that. There's a confession. Ah, but such is the reality. This is the reality.
Get used to it. Accept it. We do need each other when something requires a strength in the figurative sense. What I have seen as being part of the leadership of this church and very often having nothing to do with the leadership as such is that when there is a need, the need is met by the people who have the strength to meet the need.
I'm so thankful for that. I see how this body works all the time. Sometimes in spite of us, sometimes in spite of me, we are a body. We need each other.
The fittingness of the function to the task is something that the Holy Spirit guides and directs. It is a marvel, and it happens over and over. I can assure you. It's a wonderful thing to observe.
In 2020, I hope that I can be more part of it, more promoting of it. The next one that Paul uses frequently is the paradigm of a family, which I have already alluded to. In some cultures, such as the East Indian culture, my sister-in-law in Edmonton is Bengali, and speaks Hindi and Bengali. And we have very dear friends in Tampa, Florida, who are very devout Hindus.
And when you're dealing with the Indian culture, I don't know if Nigerian's like this. I think it is. When I come into an East Indian house, and those kids are not my true nephew and more my true niece, how are their parents telling them to address me? In Canada, I don't even like it.
Oh, dear. Oh, dear. I bite my tongue. Here's a six-year-old calling me David.
I'm sorry. David Uncle. I'm David Uncle. And that's even true with my Hindu friends in Tampa.
I'm David Uncle. I love that. We are brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and mothers and fathers and brothers and sons. And you know why?
Because we're all children. Same father. Same father. And so it is easy to find examples in the New Testament that emphasize the reality of our relationship.
I have brothers here that are closer to me than any of my brothers, my brothers ever have been. I have two living blood brothers, one has passed away, and I have four sisters. My brothers and sisters in this room, I know better. And I am closer to than my blood brothers and sisters.
And that can easily happen within the family of God. There's a transitional idea in the New Testament. And that transitional idea is the idea of a household. I have two slides left.
The Greek word is oikos. And you can appreciate that in our interactions, within our family of interactions, we can, figuratively speaking, build each other up. We can build each other up. Or we can tear each other down.
It may haven't prevent us from tearing each other down. Sometimes you would be shocked at how Christians decide that it's time to tear somebody down. I don't know where they got that from. Between the idea of a family and a polity, you have the New Testament oikos.
And it's an accident of language that when you see Ephesians 4.29 in terms of interacting with each other. And it says, let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth. But that which is good to the use of edifying, it derives from the household word. It derives from that word.
That it may minister grace unto the hearers. There's a good criteria for what comes out of your mouth in 2020. Is it edifying? Does it build up?
We aren't interested in this kind of edifice. We are interested in edification. Is it edifying? That's a kind of a Christian concept and a Christian word.
Is that edifying? Does that build up? This edifice isn't very important. Edification is very important.
That's where our focus should be. We now come to what is probably the most difficult concept in the New Testament. And people have gone crazy with it. I don't want to maybe disrespect some of the groups that exist and have historically existed.
But let me use one as an example. I don't disrespect them. But this is an example of how you can go too far. In Pennsylvania and near Guelph, where I live for three years, you have Amish people.
And Amish people have become their own politic and their own society. And they are separated from the world. And they basically want nothing to do with the rest of the world. They are a polity which has become a pseudo-political entity, which has absolutely no interaction with the world around them.
Do you think that is the right model? That we should become so isolated that we actually have no further interaction with the world around us that is in need of the gospel? I think not. I think not.
We have in the New Testament a word that's hard to translate. It is sin-poverty. So if I say, let's synchronize our watches, that's the SIN, S-Y-N in English together, synchronize, work together, work from the same principles. And a polity is some form of what you might call organized culture.
And even there, it is a great danger. Do we want to be like the Amish and form, a subculture, that the world goes, well, from what I can tell, being a Christian means either being over there or not. No, I don't think I want to become a Christian because I don't want to join that subculture. That is not good.
That kind of separation and sort of formation of such a hard-edged polity is not our goal. It is not our goal. What is our goal? Well, to be more like a household, people say, well, what's the difference between a house and a home?
A house, as I have learned all too well, needs an electrician and a plumber and a carpenter. And I don't know, the list to keep it from falling down and to keep it functioning. What happens inside the house makes it a home? Is there love inside that building?
Is there the love of family inside that building? Is there the love of family inside this building, this high maintenance building? I hope so. It's much more important.
The boundaries of the walls are not very important, are they? They are not. Now, do we have a board? Do we have some kind of leadership?
We do. We have a polity. But the danger is to define our polity so clearly and in such a hard way that we end up forming a subculture that the world wants nothing to do with. Isn't it interesting that wherever the gospel goes, it can result in saved souls and people meeting together around the Lord's table?
It can happen in Erem, Jaya. It can happen in Costa Rica. It happens and can happen everywhere. In all of these places all over the world, is it just like this?
Is it just like this format? I mean, you'd be amazed how little the New Testament has to say about what your 11 o'clock service is supposed to be. Good luck on trying to find the format of an 11 o'clock service. So what happens at Costa Rica?
Does it have to be like here? Of course not. We're not shipping out. We're not exporting culture.
We are spreading the gospel. The gospel is what is important. We're shipping the Lord Jesus Christ. That is what is important.
So when the Lord Jesus said this, do you think that he meant that? It's sort of a super obvious statement that if you build a city, we're looking at castles on the top of Croatian hills and towns built on the top of beautiful La Coration landscape yesterday on the big screen TV. Yeah. If you build a town on top of a hill, there it is.
Is that literally what the Lord was teaching us? Do you seriously think that? It is not. It is not.
Paulus is a Greek word meaning your godly culture. When you have a godly culture, you can't hide it. You couldn't hide it if you tried. That is what the Lord Jesus wants us to be.
A godly culture that isn't one. We should not form a subculture, but we should form a testimony. That is what John 14 is about. He's about the testimony of the Holy Spirit, the Martirian of the Holy Spirit, and that Martirian of the Holy Spirit, that testimony cannot help but overflow to the world.
That is what God wants. This is not very important. Whether we have love within our family is very important. So I trust that with these few thoughts for 2020, that we would be strengthened in the Lord, that we would be conscious of our brotherhood, sisterhood, anti-hood, unclehood, and so on, and that we would remember that we are all under the blood, regardless of our background, and that we need each other, just as one part of a body needs the other parts of the body, shall we pray?
Father in heaven, we pray that as we are looking at a new year, a year that is closer to your return, that Lord, you would strengthen us, help us to remember the principles, that Lord, we would encourage each other, just as we receive encouragement and comfort from you through your spirit, we pray, Lord, that 2020 would be a year of rejoicing. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for your attention.