My House - Part 3 - The Church and The Nations

What does God have in mind when He builds His house? The biblical answer is much bigger than we often imagine: He has the nations in mind. In Part 3 of the My House series, Tim traces a thread through Isaiah 2, Psalm 2 and Ephesians 3 that reveals the extraordinary scope of God’s intention for His Church. Jesus declared that His house would be a house of prayer for all nations, Isaiah saw the nations eventually streaming to that house to learn the ways of God, and between those two pictures we discover a Church called to make known the manifold wisdom of God to principalities and powers. Building on the picture of Solomon from the previous message, Tim explores what that manifold wisdom looks like when it moves beyond the walls of the Church and begins solving real problems in the earth. God’s wisdom is not confined to preaching, worship services or explicitly “spiritual” activity. It is heaven’s creativity and heaven’s strategy brought into business, government, education, families, communities and every sphere of society. The house of God is meant to become an incubator of ideas, solutions and divine blueprints that demonstrate the superiority of His Kingdom. But that changes how we engage with the presence of God. What if some of the ideas, passions and solutions that begin stirring while we worship aren’t distractions from His presence, but actually something the Holy Spirit is releasing within it? Our intimacy with God is meant to produce fruit. As we bring the problems we see, the places God has positioned us, and the things that stir our hearts into His presence, He wants to release wisdom that can transform the world around us. This message challenges us to smash the fish tank of small thinking and recover the scale of the assignment Jesus gave His Church. God is not simply after people within nations; He intends His Kingdom to impact nations themselves. As the house of God becomes a people who carry His presence and manifest His wisdom in the earth, the vision of Isaiah begins to make sense: nations encounter something so far beyond what they can produce themselves that they come saying, “Teach us His ways, that we may walk in His paths.” The house of God was never meant simply to produce brilliance inside the Church. It is meant to produce brilliance in the earth.