We are disciples that make disciples!

"...and make disciples..."

What does it take to make a disciple?

Well without getting too long winded I would like to suggest that a good place to start is by being a disciple yourself. You cannot impart to another a thing which you do not have yourself, and those people who Christ commanded to "make disciples," were themselves disciples of Christ.

So this command in many ways not only calls us to an action, but also to a state of being--we are to be disciples, so that we can make disciples!

So the question above really begs the additional question, "what does it mean to be a disciple?"

The concept of disciple can have many connotations, the most basic of which is simply a student. Now when defined in this way we, in 2010, draw up images of what we know of students. The unruly 8th grader, or the care free college student, or any other stereo type, but most likely we do not imagine the heart of what this word disciple connoted for those at the time that Christ spoke those words.

Christ was speaking to his disciples, men and women whom he had been living with for three years. They had been through many amazing things with Him, spending nearly every moment at His side. They had eaten many meals with him; laid down beside Him on the ground to sleep on countless nights. They had sat at His feet as He taught about His fathers Kingdom, and stood with Him as He demonstrated that Kingdom in action. I am sure that they had laughed raucously together, and also cried together. They were as close as any family.

And in this context the word disciple was understood. Community. Relationship.

Christ's command to make disciples was about teaching, training, doing... but it was also about living life together. That is how He made disciples, by offering himself to man kind first in relationship.

So in order to make disciples, we need to be disciples. That means so many things, but one thing it means is to be in authentic genuine and, yes, even vulnerable relationship. It is here that disciples can form and be made.

This is part of of our vision at the Vineyard Church BCS, to be disciples that make disciples!

We are an Outwardly Focused Church

"Therefore go..."

-Matthew 28:19

Jesus did not say "wait and I will send those people to you who I wish you to minister to."

Christ sent the disciples out. They were to "go." The church has been sent out into the world and we want to reflect that sentiment in our actions.

We want to be a church that has been sent.

What does this mean?

It means that we are going to be outwardly focussed--that the target of our time, energy and affection cannot terminate on ourselves, but must be constantly seeking further into the world for those unloved people for whom Christ sent us. We want to be looking outside of our body, our family-- yes even getting up out of our homes and church buildings--for people to love.

We want to be a church that sends. We want to mirror Christ by empowering those people in our midst to go. We can do this by equipping and empowering each and every member in our church community to minister, teaching them that when Christ said "go", yes, He was talking to you too. No one escapes. We are all on the move in this world looking for those lonely hearts that Christ longs to make a home in.

These ideas have a number of practical implications for us. Just like we are a church plant that has been sent out into a new community, we will also be sending people out from us into new communities, perpetuating this cycle of the sent sending. Our ministries will have an outward focus, lavishing our attentions on the needy of our community. We will have a visual presence in the community, not with media and sign-age, but with our loving actions and real tangible presence.

This is even the reason why we do Home Groups.

By meeting in each other's homes we are sending a message that this church pours out past the walls of any one building. It is out there in the world, in your homes and in your lives. And when we do have a building, it will be located in the middle of the city, not on its outskirts. We don't want to set up shop, open our doors and say "we are here, now come to us," but instead we want to communicate that we have come here to be with you.

This is part of the vision of Vineyard Church BCS, to be an outwardly focussed church.

The Authority of Christ

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me...."

-Matthew 28:18

Here Christ shows us the foundation of everything we do. We serve Him out of love. We serve Him because He knows best. We serve Him because it is good... because his plans are better than our plans. But first and foremost, before all these things, we serve Him because He is The King, and all authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to Him.

Jesus is a King, and we are citizens of His Kingdom.

This idea of Kingship is a an odd concept for us in our times. We live in a society that was born out of a rejection to the dictatorship which the rule of one represents. Culturally we are uncomfortable with any authority over our lives which might supersede our own. But that is reality--Jesus is king--and as Christians we live our lives as if that is true.

What does this mean for us?

Well it means many things, some of which I will touch on in the future. For today I would like to talk about our desire to acknowledge Christ's authority to direct our destiny.

Just moments before His arrest and execution Jesus prayed to His father , "Father, not my will, but your will be done!"

This is how we are to relate to the authority of Christ, by realizing that His will supersedes our own, and when we are faced with a choice and what we want is in contradiction to what He wants, He has the authority.

Practically this means seeking out instruction from God, listening to God's voice--in the many ways in which He speaks--and actually doing those things that He tells us to do. When we make decisions our first question is not, "what do we want?" or even "what makes sense?" Our very first question is, "what does Jesus want for us?" And once we know, we serve His pleasure faithfully, because He is King.

I think choosing a church is a great example.

Many people will ask themselves "What am I looking for in a Church? I want it to have a strong teaching pastor, and a good children's ministry. It needs a youth group and it would be nice if it were within 30 min of my house..." and the list goes on. All of these are good and practical concerns...

none of them acknowledge the Authority of Christ.

Where does He want you to go to church?

Is it going to be the perfect place for you, perfectly comfortable? Or is it just going to be the place where He can use you, or mature you? Maybe it won't be your ideal, but if its His ideal then he wins, because He is king.

This concept of Christ's authority has boundless ramification, but it is enough to say that the reason Christ began His instructions to us with an affirmation of His own authority is because it is the foundation of all we do. We move in this work because He says move, we wait when He says wait, speak when He says speak.

That is part of the vision for the Vineyard Church BCS, to be be faithful servants to the authority and kingship of Jesus Christ.

The Mission of The Vineyard Church BCS

"What does it mean to be a church?"

This is the question that kept me up almost every night a year ago. Erin and I had moved to Bryan, certain that God had asked us to begin a Church here. And if we were supposed to start a church, I wanted to know what that REALLY meant.

I was not asking about the Church Universal--the Body and Bride of Christ, which has stretched throughout time and spread across the globe--but the Church Local, the particular instantiations of The Church.

What did it look like for the Church Universal to live in Bryan/College Station.

We prayed and waited and eventually God was faithful to lead us to some answers. Not all the answers--what this church needs to look like is an ever growing vision--but a foundation out of which we can build.

God brought us to Matthew chapter 28. Here Christ is at the very end of His physical ministry on earth, he is about to be lifted off the ground and brought back to The Father. The people around Him at this moment are ALL those who believe in Him, so in a real sense it is as if the whole church is standing around Him. The bottom line is, this is a very important moment... and He says these things:

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

As we sought God and asked Him to show us what His vision was for the particular church He wanted us to start, He began taking these words and showing us what these general commands might look like in the specific surroundings we found ourselves in.

I would like to spend the next few blog post which I write on this passage. The basic commands are simple, and the passage is finite, but its content is complex and its applications are infinite.

I hope you are as excited as I am to see what living these commands might look like in Bryan/College Station!

The Raven and The Dove

I was recently asked to preach on chapter 8 of Genesis.

My first thoughts after reading the chapter was, “Man… this is RIGHT in the middle of Noah’s story. It’s not the begging, or the end, its just this middle section. But after trying to seek God out in the chapter, He was faithful to speak. I felt as if there was an image of God’s heart towards man buried in the middle of the story.
The story of Noah and his family is probably one the most well known stories in the Bible. We probably heard it firs at some vacation bible school or saw it in a coloring books. It is also one the most criticized stories in the Bible for the fantastic elements it contains. But I think that we would be doing the story an injustice if we were to be satisfied with these simplistic kinds of readings. It is a significant story. The themes in the story are rich and profound.

That certainly was the attitude which the Jewish people had towards the Noah narrative. The themes in this story—of judgment and redemption and new beginnings; the rebirth of mankind; specifically God’s use of water to wash away sin—these themes seem to repeat in Jewish history and through time they established themselves as core elements to the Jewish mindset in ancient times. This idea of the water coming and washing away sin, or of passing through the waters to safety and life and rebirth—we see these things repeating throughout the biblical narrative.

When Mosses leads the children of Israel through the waters of the Red sea, they pass through the waters, from slavery to freedom. This mirrored for them or echoed the passage through the flood from sin to righteousness. A generation later one of Israel’s war leaders, Joshua, leads the children of Israel across the Jordan—passing through the waters to victory on the other side. This idea of passing through water into God’s grace and good will became a very well formed thought in the Jewish mind; so that, thousands of years later we see in Israel a practice of ceremonial washing called baptism has developed and is held as being a significant sign of God’s cleansing.

One man, known as John the Baptist, had very significant ministry in this area. He would preach about the coming of the Kingdom of God, and the peoples need to turn from their sin, and he would ceremonially wash those who listened to him in water, signifying their acceptance of God’s desire for them to repent. For the Jews this act spoke so directly of the Noah and the flood. Peter even wrote about the waters of the flood, “this water symbolizes baptism.”

So this is the backdrop to the baptismal ministry of John. And so on the day that John baptizes Jesus, when the Holy Spirit appears to the crowed in the form of a dove and descends on Christ, there was only one place for those very Jewish minds to go: Noah! God did not choose to use the image of a dove at random; He was intentionally calling the minds of those watching to this intensely significant moment in their history in which he delivered mankind from sin through the washing of water.

We can look at it like book ends: 6 thousand years earlier God washes away the sin of the world with water, and Noah employs the dove to search out the earth for evidence of new life, and then—way over here at the other end of the Bible—we have Christ receiving a baptism meant to signify the washing of sin, and receiving the Holy Spirit from God in the form of a dove.

So what is God trying to communicate? There are two birds, the raven and the dove, and four flights. What is the significance of these four flights, that God would so obviously allude to them in this moment? I feel that God is illustrating an allegorical depiction of His own interactions with man throughout history, in judgment and in His Spirit.

First Noah sends out a raven. The raven has always been a very significant bird by virtue of the fact that it feed on death. In doing this the raven has often been used to depict or personify death and destruction. Now, who knows why Noah grabbed a raven at that moment. But the image is clear. Outside the ark there was more death and destruction then had ever been seen on the face of the earth and the first living thing to be seen is a black raven flying back and forth over the waters. The imagery is not lost on me. In a sense this bird being sent out into the world symbolically makes us think of the flood itself. The wages of sin are death, and God’s judgment had just been unleashed on the world. But the raven found no place to land and returned.

Secondly Noah sent out a dove. Now we know from the gospels that is was God who chose the dove to represent His Spirit. This dove flies around, hovering over the waters, but not resting on any one point. We see the dove behaving very much in the same way we see the Holy Spirit depicted in the earliest times in man’s history. Even at the beginning of the Bible in Genesis 1:3 we see God’s spirit depicted as, “hovering over the waters.” In fact this is consistent behavior for the Holy Spirit throughout the Old Testament. In Judges 14:6 we read that “the Spirit of God came upon Sampson in power…” and that was the pattern, we see it resting on people for a moment, but never indwelling or remaining. This was acknowledged by the Jews, in fact John the Baptist even remarked that one of the signs he is to look for in the Christ is “I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, 'The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.'

Noah sends out the dove a second time and this time it returns with an olive branch in its mouth. On a mundane level this showed Noah that the water was receding and that new life was already present on the earth. In a more profound sense this showed Noah that God’s judgment had secured peace between Him and His creation. That is why the dove with the olive branch has come to signify is peace. And in an even larger picture, that dove that we see descending on Christ in His baptism, returns with Him to heaven, bearing an olive branch for God. Jesus returns to heaven saying, “look father, I have won peace between you and your creation!” This second bird very easily depicts the Holy Spirit in Christ, walking among us, and returning to the Father with evidence of peace, victory and new life.

Finally Noah sends out the Dove a third and last time, and it makes it home in the new world which God has formed through the flood. Noah knows that the world is hospitable for him again, and he comes to make it his own home, just as God, now that Christ has secured the hearts of men and brought redemption, will now come and make His home among men. And His holy spirit was sent out a third time, on the day of Pentecost. We see the tongues of flame on their head as they are “baptized in fire,” and the Holy Spirit comes and makes its home on earth, in the hearts of men. The Holy Spirit came to the church on that day and made it His home, and He has not left us sense. We are His home.

To me this is such a beautiful picture of how God’s plans for us are so consistent and intentional, that they were written out for us in the very begging. But the significance of these things runs much deeper even than these things. Not only does this show us a picture of God’s interactions with us through mankind’s history, but in a very real sense it tells our own story, as individuals.

We are all born into sin, and begin in God’s wrath and judgment. We all need the cleansing of a flood to wash away our unrighteousness. And in that state of death and destruction, the Holy Spirit is there. Not inside of us, hovering over us, calling to us, touching us for a moment as it beckons us. And then there is the olive branch… the anointing of Christ. It is the only way forward from where we start. But that is God’s hope and desire. Just like Noah was aching for the doves’ message that the waters had receded and peace had been restored, God longs for that report that Christ has been formed in you and that there is peace between He and you. And finally He wants to send His spirit out to make His home in you, to come down and remain in you.
The story of Noah’s ark is not a story of silly impossibilities, but of God’s very real and tangible plan for your redemption. It is not a story of death and destruction, but of rebirth and new life. You have an opportunity to interact with this story in a much more active and profound way. You can make it you story. This hope for new life and rebirth is a hope for you.