Mountainview International Church

I once heard about a little girl that that taken by her grandmother to see the Christmas lights in their local town. They came upon a lovely nativity scene. “Would you look at that,” said the Grandmother, “Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus!” “Yes,” said the little girl, “It’s lovely. But there’s just one thing I don’t understand!? Jesus is the same size as he was last year! He never seems to grow up!”

Advent is a time when we remember the birth of Christ. But it’s also a time when we remember that Jesus did indeed grow up!

The Gospel accounts announce His birth in detail. Then for 3 decades Jesus slips off the biblical radar screen (except for a mention in Luke 2 that when he was 12 years old – an important age for Jews, his parents found Him in the temple, amazing the leadership with His wisdom). It’s at about 30 years of age (Luke 3:23) that the story of the incarnation resumes! Jesus is baptised by John and begins a short ministry ending 3 years later with his death and resurrection. And only a matter of days later, Jesus commissions us, His followers, to go, preach the good news to the world!

Advent is about God beginning a short journey on earth that ends with the Him asking us, His followers, to take His light to the world. An Advent series on light is not complete without getting to the end of the incarnation story and the call placed upon us to take His light to our world. The shepherds in the Christmas story become our example to follow. They heard the good news. They hurried to see the good news for themselves! Then we are told they handed-on, they spread the word about the child to all who would listen (Luke 2:17).

Normally when we hear the word “evangelism” some of us can’t concentrate because of fear! Some of us switch off and have a nap! Some of us frantically take notes and by 11 am on Monday morning we’ve managed to irritate most of our neighbours with our evangelistic zeal. Before we have any one of these reactions I want us to listen carefully. We’re talking a different tack to the subject of shining our light than might be expected.

Before we dive in lets read our short passage for today.

Matthew 5: 13-16

13You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

14You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. 15Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

I want to develop our thoughts around “breathing” and “hiding”.

Breathing:

If you remember from the Stockebrand’s great talk last week, if we put a candle under a bowl it not only blocks the light, it starves the candle of oxygen and it goes out. For a candle to burn brightly it must breathe! Using very crude terminology God wants us to breathe in His divine life and exhale His light into our communities.

Surely one of the great mysteries of the incarnation must be how the glorious God, who created our vast universe, masked his brilliance in human flesh and largely without notice resided in a small village, called Nazareth, for 30 years. He so embedded himself in our humanity that when Jesus started His ministry the people who knew him were shocked. “Is that not the son of Joseph, the carpenter? I went to school with him! We did some fishing together down by the lake! I used to enjoy a good beer and chat with him on a warm summers evening!”

This long, unassuming presence of the triune God in an obscure Galilean village makes the “doers” amongst us uncomfortable! It makes us all uncomfortable! That’s why we dress Jesus up like the picture on the screen! That’s why the Christ legends (writings outside of the bible) have the boy Jesus doing funky stuff; like slaying the village bully behind the bike shed before raising him to life, and making some clay pigeons for a school project and then breathing life back at home when no one’s looking.

It got me thinking! Why was God hiding His light when he would later tell his followers to go shine theirs? Isn’t that just a bit unfair? A double standard! What’s going on?

I think Jesus was spiritually breathing. Breathing in his Divine calling for 30 years! Preparing Himself for 3 years of ministry! For a time when he would shine out, until he would give His very breath for the salvation of the world. He was not ignorant of his Divine nature. Remember, Luke suggested he was very conscious of His calling from a young age! Even during His earthy ministry we find that when the crowds gather and things get busy Jesus heads off to the hills to breathe in the presence of the Father.

I think that a big part of us shining the light involves us following the example of Christ our God. Taking plenty of time to breathe in God’s divine life! Drinking deeply of Jesus! Allowing Him to fill our thoughts and passions and actions and spirit!

Let me give you a practical example.

If you were here in the summer you might remember Rick, Hilary’s dad, spoke at Mountainview. He was the tall hairy bloke from New Zealand. He used to be a successful pastor in a city church. He gave it up for a more contemplative life. He moved to a very rural part of New Zealand and makes his living from spending the summer sailing and then for the rest of the year painting pictures that display the majesty of God in the varied reflections of light off water. (Show some examples). For extra inspiration he does things like sailing for 2 weeks with friends up to Fiji. The casual observer probably looks on and thinks what a waste to the Kingdom of God, giving up a successful ministry for painting!

He stayed with us and I tell you, he was full of Christ. Jesus oozed out of him! I told him that I wanted him to move to Madrid so he could be my mentor. We joked at Mountainview that he looked like John the Baptist. Later in the week he told me, “Funny you should mention John the Baptist”! You see q while back Christ had given Him a word that he should ‘build a highway in the desert’. At first he didn’t know what God meant because there are no deserts in New Zealand, just jungle. But then he began to notice that his community was cut off from the next community by the jungle. So he started going out with his machete and cutting a path through the jungle to the next community. They began to hear what Rick was doing and they also began to cut a path to connect their community to his. Pretty soon everyone in the local area was starting to cut paths between their communities. Somehow, the Prime Minister of New Zealand heard about what was going on and he flew down from Auckland to have a look. He was so impressed that he went and announced to New Zealand that paths connecting communities should be built across the whole nation.

Rick, living in his house in the jungle at the top of the South Island, breathed in God deeply. Then God asked him to breathe out and bless a whole nation.

I have these challenge as much for me as for you.

Are we breathing in enough of God? Are we allowing the life of Christ to fill us? Are we uniting ourselves with the true vine – the source of all fruitfulness? The example of Christ and the story of Rick remind us that breathing in God is an essential part to shining out the light brightly. Reading the scriptures, prayer, a good Christian book, reading sermons on line, listening to Christian talks on your IPod, being part of a small group, even attending Mountainview services, are important ways we breathe in God in order that we might go and breathe out his light into our communities.

Maybe we are not breathing out enough? Is God telling us, “Enough breathing me in now get out there to the Calles of Madrid and start shining me out!”

Have we stopped breathing? Are we flat lining in our faith? The alarm bless are ringing out in heaven. The angles are scurrying. Spiritual CPR needs to be administered. God is tweaking the sermons so they hammer on your chest. God wants to revive you in 2010 so that you might breathe normally. Breathing in Christ and exhaling his light into the community.

Hiding:

There is a well-known sermon about the pain of Good Friday turning into the joy of Easter, called "Sunday’s comin´!" The refrain occurs over and over, "It’s Friday, but Sunday’s comin´!" I want to suggest another refrain that should be chanted each week. "It’s Sunday, but Monday’s comin’!" Does our attendance at Sunday services produce an attendant passion for the works of God on a Monday morning?

We need to remind ourselves that on this point Scripture is clear. We are not just saved from sin we are also saved to do the good works for God. As Christ followers we should not be known for what we don’t do, but for what we do, do!

For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10)

Mostly when we come to talk about shining our light we talk about how we aren’t shining bright enough, or we lay out some technique that we sincerely promise (but in reality never really works) that will help you win souls for Christ! We tend to overlook that the emphasis in the passage for today is not how do we get more light, but how do we stop hiding it.

If we invite Jesus to play a central role in our lives, then we have the light within us. We need to somehow get our minds round the New Testament truth that the Spirit, the triune God indwells believers. A light, brighter than the trillions of stars in our universe, lives within us! We don’t need more light we need to figure out how to stop hiding the light. We need to allow God to shine out brightly through us.

We might feel weak and inadequate, but God can do amazing things through us. When a group of us from the city gathered to brainstorm Spanish ministry to young professionals I shared how I believed that if we will just let Him, God will do amazing things through every believer. The Incarnation alone is a testimony to God’s desire to save the world from a position of weakness. Rick’s story reminds us that God can shine though us and change the course of a nation if we will only let him.

We tend to take a couple of wrong approaches to shining the light. We leave the service and put on a Harry Potter invisibility clock! We go into the world and no one even knows that we are Christ follower. Or we put on the flashers mac. We go around frightening people and embarrassing ourselves (because it’s still about us). Jesus wants to clothe ourselves in him. To get out of the way and allow his life to shine through us.

One of the greatest ways that we can shine Christ is through our story. Simply to tell people how Christ has been at work in us. Next week we will have a chance to share who God has been at work. Kary put me onto a video called Cardboard testimonies. It’s a good example of just how simple and yet profound shining the light can be.

Cardboard testimonies

Conclusion:

Gustavo gave me this little book for Christmas (thanks Gustavo). It’s an older, weighty number by J.I. Packer called, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God.

Packer discusses the antimony between God’s sovereignty in saving people and our responsibility to preach the Gospel message. Antimonies are irreconcilable facts. For example light acts as both a wave and a particle. We cannot resolve the 2. We have to hold both as equally true!

Scripture asserts that it is God who is the one who draws people to himself and saves them, yet it also asserts that we have a God given responsibility to proclaim salvation. Spurgeon was once asked if he could reconcile these 2 great truths of Scripture. “I wouldn’t try” he replied, “I never reconcile friends!”

Packer’s words bring us back to where we started. Shining the light is like breathing.

It means that we breathe in deeply of the sovereignty of God. God is the one who draws people to himself and saves them. As we pray fervently for the salvation of our family and friends we acknowledge with bended knees that God is ultimately in control and working out his divine plan to save the world. It means that we ask Christ to fill us and to shine his light through us

But it also means that go out into the world and breathe out His light and life into our communities. We ask God to use us is the preaching of His Gospel. We remind ourselves daily as Packer puts it that:

We are under orders to devote ourselves to the spreading of the good news, and to use all of our ingenuity and enterprise to bring it to the notice of the whole world…this is our responsibility and it cannot be shrugged off.

Let us go forth in 2010 and breathe. Breathe in deeply of Christ's Divine life in order that that we may breathe out Christ’s light into our world.

[Let us pray]