Sovereign Grace Community Church

Many Christians associate the king-priest concept with Jesus, as He is enthroned at God's right hand and interceding for His people. This isn't incorrect, but Jesus is the singular King-Priest precisely as God's true Image-Son - as True Man. For the regal-priestly function is the human vocation, as God created man to administer His rule in His creation and mediate the creation's relationship with Him. Thus Jesus' role as King-Priest is the role of all who share in His consummate human life by His Spirit, and so is fundamental to the Church's vocation in the world.

The gospel is the good news of the kingdom of God - the kingdom of God's new creation that He inaugurated through Jesus' triumph in death and resurrection. And so the crucial element in proclaiming the gospel is manifesting the new creation that has its substance in the resurrected Messiah and is present in the world in those who share in His resurrection life through the Spirit. This gospel of new creation in Christ must be the focus of the Church's witness in the world, and the very marrow of this testimony is cruciform sonship - lives that bear living witness to the meaning, purpose, and fruit of Jesus' cross.

The Church's mission is often framed in terms of "soul winning" or "kingdom building." The former focuses on the matter of personal salvation - leading people to faith in Christ, while the latter commonly emphasizes social action and improving the lives of people and communities. But the New Testament understands the gospel as the good news that God, in Christ, has inaugurated His promised kingdom and is now, through the Spirit, enlarging that kingdom. But this is the kingdom of God's rule over His redeemed and renewed creation, so that the proclamation of the "gospel of the kingdom" is the Church's witness to new creation.

Christians have long debated the Church's role and mission in the world, and in the modern era, the tendency has been to stress either the work of "soul-winning" or social action. But as commonly understood and implemented, both approaches to "mission" fall short of the Church's biblical mandate. This message examines some foundational considerations that Christians must come to grips with if they are to faithfully carry out their ordained mission in the world.

Holiness and unity are the primary qualities of Christ's Church, and they are two sides of the same coin, reflecting the truth that Christians are members of one another because they are members of Christ by His indwelling and transforming Spirit. The Spirit is the crucial focal point in any consideration of Christ's Church and its life and function in the world. And the Spirit's "gifts" - His sovereign, wise, and manifold distribution of spiritual endowments - stand at the center of His relationship with the Church and His work within its members. This message examines the matter of spiritual gifts, not in abstraction or as a distinct doctrinal topic, but as the way in which the Spirit accomplishes His work of creational renewal. That renewal presently involves human conformity to the New Adam, but with a view toward the Spirit's ultimate accomplishment of summing up everything in the created order in Jesus the Messiah.

The most obvious unity problem in the early church involved the relationship between Jewish and Gentile believers, but the New Testament writings show that unity in the church was a challenge across the board. Whether their view of their leaders, their use of spiritual gifts, their worship, their understanding of differences, or their daily practices, the early Christians struggled to live into the reality of their unity in the Messiah. This message examines a few of those challenges, even as they continue to the present day.

The problem of Jew-Gentile unity wasn't unique to Galatia and Syria, but emerged everywhere that Gentiles were coming to faith in Israel's Messiah and entering God's covenant household - the household that had always been defined in terms of Abraham and the Hebrew people. For various reasons, the unity problem among the Roman believers was distinctive, if not unique, yet Paul addressed it in the same way as he did with the Galatian churches. The remedy for Jew-Gentile divisions among Christ's people - as indeed all expressions of Christian disunity - is rightly understanding and owning the truth of justification by faith in Him.

This message concludes the examination of Paul's Galatian epistle as it addresses the problem of Jew-Gentile unity in the fledgling community of Jesus' disciples. In particular, this message interacts with Paul's understanding of the role of Israel's Torah (Law) in Israel's history, and what it means to be faithful to the Torah as disciples of Messiah Jesus.

Justification by faith was Paul's answer to the problem of Jew-Gentile unity, and he explained this to the Galatian believers by turning to Israel's scriptures and their story of Abraham as God's chosen instrument for realizing His intent to have a human family drawn from all nations and peoples.

The unity problem in the Galatian churches focused on the relationship between Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus the Messiah. Paul addressed this issue by reminding the disciples of what Jesus had accomplished and inaugurated by His death and resurrection and how this abolished the historical separation between Jews and Gentiles that Israel's covenant had established. In a word, Paul's answer to the Jew-Gentile divisions in the churches was justification by faith.

The Galatian and Roman churches provide two important case studies in Christian unity. Both struggled with Jew-Gentile issues, but from different perspectives and with different dynamics. This message examines the historical and cultural circumstances in Galatia and Rome that influenced the Jew-Gentile relations in the churches there, and also summarizes how those relations were similar and different.

The struggle to understand and achieve true unity was at the heart of the early Church's internal challenges. That struggle was exacerbated by the increasing number of Gentiles coming to faith in Israel's Messiah, until finally it seemed necessary to have the Church's leadership in Jerusalem issue a formal decision on what was required of Gentiles to become part of the restored covenant household the Spirit was building on the foundation of Jesus Himself. This message examines that episode, the specific issues the council was addressing, and the decision they reached.

The reality of a new community sharing in the life of the resurrected Messiah, while yet existing within the old order, initiated and insured conflict between Jesus' disciples and the unbelieving world, both Jewish and Gentile. But it also insured internal conflicts and challenges, not only between believers, but within the minds and hearts of individual Christians. And the marrow of that conflict, whatever particular form it might take, is the failure of unity - the unity in Christ that the Spirit initiated at Pentecost and that binds believers to their Lord and to one another.

Pentecost initiated a new community of followers of Israel's God, identified by their living union with Him through sharing in the life of His Son by His indwelling Spirit. As the beginning of God's renewed human race, this community was set in contradistinction to the rest of mankind - the people of Israel as much as the pagan Gentile world. This contradistinction couldn't go unnoticed, and it provoked confusion, fear, and derision in some, and hostility and open opposition in others. Until the consummation, Messiah's kingdom and rule would exist within the dominion and power of human kingdoms, and it was precisely this dynamic that God ordained to testify of His triumph and build His kingdom in the world.

Pentecost was the climax of the Christ event, for the outpouring and renewing work of the Spirit was the goal of Jesus' death, resurrection and enthronement. The Spirit was to be Jesus' abiding presence in the world and the power behind His kingdom and its fruitfulness. So also the Spirit would demarcate the kingdom's subjects, as Jesus, through His Spirit, was reconstituting the Abrahamic covenant household - the sons of the kingdom - around Himself.

Pentecost brought the Christ event to its completion, even as the corresponding Feast of Weeks closed out the festal season that began with Passover. And it did so as initiating mankind's actual experience of the reconciliation that Jesus secured by His atoning death. Put differently, Pentecost answered the question of the relation between Jesus' status as Man of the Spirit and His status as Last Adam; He was raised and glorified as True Man unto the end that He should become the firstborn among many brethren - the fountainhead of a new human race that shares His relationship with the Spirit, and so with the Father.

Jesus' resurrection is often viewed only in terms of demonstrating His satisfaction for the guilt of sin, but it actually has profound significance that vastly transcends this narrow consideration. The incarnation, which achieved in essence the eternal intent of perfect Creator-creature intimacy, was fully realized in Jesus' resurrection. Thus the Scriptures identify the resurrected Messiah as the first fruits of God's reconciled and renewed creation, and so also the source and first fruits of God's promised kingdom, as well as its sovereign king.

Though many limit God's work of atonement to Jesus' crucifixion, it actually had its substantial fulfillment in the phenomenon of incarnation, which was then worked out through Jesus' life of faithful sonship. His death on Calvary simply brought God's atoning work to its climax, universalizing it as His promised redemption by which He would end the creation's captivity and exile and reconcile all things to Himself. This is the scriptural context for interpreting Jesus' cross and its work, underscored by His choice of Passover as the setting for His self-offering.

Christians commonly associate Jesus' work of atonement with His crucifixion, but a truly scriptural understanding of atonement shows that the phenomenon of incarnation was actually the essential substance of God's atoning work in His Son. For it was there, in the intimate being-to-being union of God and man in Mary's womb, that divine-human reconciliation was achieved in essence. That reconciliation was then worked out and perfected in the living communion of Father and Son, finally being universalized in Jesus' substitutionary death at Calvary.

Jesus' ministry was directed toward announcing and manifesting the kingdom of God - the kingdom promised by Israel's prophets and long awaited by the Israelite people. But the ultimate goal of His coming was the inauguration of this kingdom, and that would come through His cross. Kingdom and cross are inseparable and mutually interpreting, and the doctrine of atonement stands at the center of this relationship. Therefore, a biblical understanding of atonement is vital to understanding the work of the cross and how it pertained to Yahweh's kingdom.