In a week in which we have received yet another wake up call from those who suffer racism and prejudice we pause and pray
a prayer from the Sisters of Mercy
Good and gracious God,
Who loves and delights in all people,
we stand in awe before You,
knowing that the spark of life within each person on earth is the spark of your divine life.
Differences among cultures and races are multicolored manifestations of Your Light.
May our hearts and minds be open to celebrate similarities and differences among our sisters and brothers.
We place our hopes for racial harmony in our committed action and in Your Presence in our Neighbor.
May all peoples live in Peace.
AMEN.
Living in the Supernatural Community
1. What is the Supernatural Community?
1 Peter 2:4-12
Last week we looked at the events of Pentecost. The coming of the Holy Spirit, filling God’s people and flooding God’s church. Wonderful, extra-ordinary, supernatural events!
I also reminded you last week of the verse I wrote on Christmas cards this year – ‘His name is Wonderful’ I sensed the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Wonderful is not so much an adjatiave – Wonderfull Counsellor but Wonder-Full’.
When people wonder they are not far from Worship!
We worship a Supernatural God. Therefore we should expect to see the Supernatural occur in God’s people and in God’s church.
When the Holy Spirit has control over your life you become a supernatural person. This is a promise John 14:12 “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father”.
I have therefore been planning a series on the Supernatural Community since Christmas, but I never imagined it would be in this video format.
I had in mind a series aimed at my local church but my prayer is that if for whatever reason you are watching this that the Holy Spirit will confirm for you that this series is for you and your church. And if not already, you would become part of God’s supernatural community by accepting Jesus by His Spirit into your life and get yourself involved in an expression of that supernatural community near you.
Supernatural Community – That’s what the church is! so this series is about the nature of God’s church.
We need to be as informed and equipped as necessary to get God’s will done on earth and make no mistake, it is through the church that He has chosen to do it. It is about how we can be and do church and it is about using all the resources that are available to us through the Holy Spirit.
I am conscious that these messages are coming at a time when the church buildings are closed. So at first I thought perhaps I better leave it until we are open again! But I have come to realise that unless we realise who we are and what we do as God’s Supernatural Community outside of our buildings then are buildings in themselves have little point.
So some preliminary statements.
1. Christ died that we might be a supernatural community.
Jesus continues to establish His Kingdom, His rule, reign and purpose through His Church, His Supernatural Community. I would be the first to put up my hand and say I am so sorry when we don’t look like we are meant to.
Just a few years after I started out in church ministry, the church where I was the minister, just like thousands of churches around the world, experienced a fresh outpouring of the power of the Holy Spirit, known unfortunately as the ‘Toronto Blessing’. There have been many of these ‘outpourings’ in church history and a few since.
Those times were incredibly exciting and amazing, phenomenal things took place in so many people but I came out of that whole experience a little disappointed. Not in God, but in us the church. Disappointed in our ability to be, in an ongoing way, a vessel that the Holy Spirit would Blow along carrying out His purposes here on earth.
I do want to see a fresh spirituality in church life, I do want to see personal renewal and the revival of congregations, but it has to result in transformed communities.
The Supernatural community is the place where lives are changed and through which the world is changed. That’s what I believe! Whenever that is not clearly happening we need a check up. Often the problem lies in what we enjoy, Certainly I know that to be the case with my stomach. Why is it that things we enjoy can cause us harm? There is a warm comfort in the friendships we build in church and in the worship that we enjoy together, but Jesus didn’t come to this earth for that! Jesus did not come so that we might have good home groups. He did not come so that we might have exciting worship meetings. He certainly did not come so we might have our needs endlessly ministered to by our friends, nor just to give us ‘times of refreshing’, new experiences, or manifestations of His power. Jesus came so that we might have eternal life, life in all its fullness (John 10:10).
Jesus came to earth, suffered, died and rose again not just to deal with our past and bring us into friendship with God, but also to turn us around from destructive self-orientation to a people living for others – and if necessary dying for them (2 Cor 5:15, Jn 15:12f, 1Jn 3:16). Jesus came to tell us that the key to finding our true selves was to lay down our lives, our rights, our privileges, our comforts, so that others might find the life of God, feel his love and see His power for themselves. And find themselves being grafted into a new wholesome body with solid foundations. Peter describes it as a spiritual house 1 Peter 2.5, that such people were chosen people, part of a holy nation, a people belonging to God 1 Peter 2.9.
It was Jesus that had called Peter a stone or a rock, now Peter is getting his own back, in the best possible way, and is referring to Jesus as Cornerstone (Capstone). He calls Him a living stone; Jesus is alive from the dead! God set His Cornerstone in place by the Resurrection. The first stone on which many others would be built as Christ’s church is built up one stone on top of another to be a building that will direct people to God. That’s the express purpose of the church make no mistake about it.
In verse seven Peter quotes Psalm 118:22. I’m sure Peter knew the Psalm well, he’d heard Jesus quote it after his parable about the wicked tenants. Though Peter may have been a little confused when he first heard it by his Pentecost sermon he understood it’s meaning because he confronted those very builders and challenged them with the words of the psalm adding Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.
Clearly, to belong to the new community, we need to be new people who have a living relationship with God. We need to have received the mercy of God (v10b). A community where its members are not fully devoted followers of Christ is not a church, it is a club!
2. This new Community must be supernatural
Community life is the character of the Kingdom.
Peter spells out the wonder of Salvation: The Father delights in His Son, this should not surprise us, but the Father also delights in us, that is staggering. As Christ is the cornerstone of God’s temple, so we are stones in that house of God. He is the living stone; we, too, are ‘living stones’ (5). 1 Pet 1:3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. We are therefore honoured by God because of what Christ has done, that’s the real meaning of v7. Don’t ask me why the NIV translates it that Jesus is honoured or precious of course he is but the literal translation is to you therefore that believe is honour and naturally follows Peter’s quote that because of Christ we will never be put to shame.
Something so incredible something quite literally ‘so out of this world’ happened when you put your faith in Christ, God looks at you differently. You are now part of his Spiritual House (2.5). You have been placed in a holy nation (2:9). You have become part of God’s people (2.10). God’ architecture is biological and supernatural.
You remember that in the wilderness there was a tent, God’s tent pitched in the middle of the Israelite camp. When they came into their own land God was seen to dwell in the temple at Jerusalem. God was there, among his people; they belonged to Him and He to them.
When the word became flesh the symbol became a reality. The God of glory came to live among us, and once risen and ascended on high he came to live in us and enable us to live in Him. The true temple is Christ’s body. We are united to Christ; the living stones are joined to the cornerstone, so the church becomes the true house of God. Peter’s language is corporate. He thinks of the spiritual temple, not as the body of an individual believer, but as the body of believers, the company of those that are joined to Christ.
It is because the community is about belonging to one another and to God that it is unlike other communities because it is supernatural. This means that the supernatural will occur within the community. There will be conversions! There will be healings! There will be freedom from addictions! There will be worship which touches God, There will be lives turned around. The church becomes the most exciting place to be on earth!!!!
3. The new Community will have Supernatural Characteristics
Jesus came and announced the Kingdom. If you begin your ministry with words like this Luke 4:18f “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” You know that this ministry is going to actively demonstrate something.
When John the Baptist was having doubts, Jesus said to John’s disciples Go back and tell John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Mat 11:5.
When Jesus’ own disciples were having problem’s understanding who he was he said Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. John 14:11.
When Paul spoke about his ministry in Christ’s name he said My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 1 Cor 2:4.
We have a message of power. It is a supernatural message, the element of the supernatural should be evident in the church, that is it should be evident in the way that we as God’s people live our lives.
In this series I want to look at some characteristics which mark out the true community of God’s people from weak and cheap imitations: These are celebratory worship, personal spiritual maturity that can only come from ‘following hard after the heart of God’ the exercise in service of spiritual gifts, numerical growth, and the repairing of hurting damaged people.
Those of you that are part of Stanwell Road Baptist Church – I want us to be a Supernatural Community. Some of you watching and hearing this are local to us. I would love for you to join us or if not already, join in a Supernatural Community near you.
For some of you, you realise that in order for this to happen you need to respond to this Supernatural God, you need to respond to His Love for you and ask Him to come into your life and fill you with His Holy Spirit Power.
Do that right now, use these words if you want to:
Jesus I want to be part of your Supernatural Community.
Jesus please come into my life and change it.
Fill me with your Holy Sprit and transform me,
heal me, set me free, forgive me.
Lead me in your way with your people,
your Supernatural People. Amen.