The Gospel Drives Our Ethics

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The Gospel Drives Our Ethics

If you have a Bible, and I hope you do, let me invite you to open with me to Genesis chapter one. It is always pure joy and total honor to be here at Southern. I have the deepest respect and affection for Dr. Mohler and for the faculty, staff, and students on this campus.

I praise God as I walk on this campus this morning, just praise God for his grace in this place and the way his grace is resounding from this place among all nations. I want to preach God’s word this morning out of the overflow of particular personal and pastoral burdens that are heavy on my heart pertaining to the church and social issues in our culture.

So in one sense, my heart is encouraged. I see particularly among younger evangelicals, I sense opposition to injustice regarding the poor and orphan and the enslaved. I am deeply grateful for increased awareness of issues like sex trafficking, and starvation in the world, and I’m zealous to see the power of the gospel in the lives of Christians fueling long-term commitments to address issues like this.

So I’m encouraged. At the same time, I’m concerned by lack of zeal, again, not exclusively, but particularly among younger evangelicals on social issues that are just as if not in some ways much more important like abortion and sexual immorality.

And so-called same-sex Marriage on some of these issues, younger evangelical Christians, and prominent church leaders are often strangely quiet. So we live in a day where we can be passionate and stand against poverty and slavery injustice that we need to stand passionately against, but issues that don’t bring us into conflict with the culture around us yet issues as abortion or same-sex marriage issues that are much more contentious in the culture around us, we are less likely to be passionate and more likely to be passive.

And in this way, our supposed social injustice sometimes looks a lot more like a selective social injustice. And I’m zealous to show that followers of Christ do not have the option of picking and choosing which social issues we are going to apply biblical truths to.

I’m zealous to show that the same gospel that compels us to combat poverty compels us to defend marriage. And the same gospel that compels us to war against sex trafficking compels us to war against sexual immorality in all of its forms, brothers and sisters, there are battles raging rapidly on the front lines of our culture and we do not have the option of deciding which battles we’re going to fight and which battles we’re going to Flout.

Elizabeth Rundel charged with commenting on Martin Luther’s confrontation of key issues in his day said it is the truth that is assailed in any age which tests our fidelity. It is to confess we are called not merely to profess.

And if I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ. However boldly I may be professing Christianity where the battle rages there, the loyalty of the soldier is proven and to be steady on all the battle fronts beside is mere flight and disgrace.

If he flinches at that point, if we were going to lead the church in our culture, we must engage in the battles that are being fought. And for far too long we have flinched on a multiplicity of battle fronts.

Francis Schaeffer wrote these prophetic words years ago that are surely all the more applicable today. He said we must ask where we as evangelicals have been in the battle for truth and morality in our culture.

Have we as evangelicals been on the front lines contending for the faith and confronting the moral breakdown over the last 40 to 60 years, most of the evangelical world has not been active in the battle or even been able to see that we are in a battle. The last 60 years, Schaeffer said, have given birth to a moral disaster and what have we done?

Sadly, we must say that the evangelical world has been part of the disaster more than this. The evangelical response itself has been a disaster. Where is the clear voice speaking to the crucial issues of the day with distinctively biblical Christian answers with tears?

We must say it’s not there and that a large segment of the evangelical world has become seduced by the world spirit of this present age and more than this, we can expect the future to be a further disaster if the evangelical world does not take a stand for biblical truth and morality and the full spectrum of life. I want to call you this morning from the word of God to contrite, compassionate, courageous battle on the front lines of our culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I want to do that by taking us back to the beginning, to the start of scripture. I want to remind us, what I want to do is I want to remind us of four biblical foundations, gospel foundations that we all know, and then with those foundations before us, I want to call us to engage with the world. So based on those four biblical foundations, I want to put before you four cultural implications for the church today.

God Created Us as a Demonstration of His Glory

So let’s start by reading Genesis chapter one, verse 26 where we pick up on the sixth day of creation and the Bible says, God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, over the livestock and over all the earth and over everything creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image and the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them and God bless them.

And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, behold, I’ve given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit.

You shall have them for food and to every beast of the earth and every bird of the heavens and everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so and God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good and there was evening and there was mourning.

The sixth day, okay, four biblical foundations. Number one, God creates us as a demonstration of his glory. God creates us as a demonstration of his glory. So Genesis One is a glorious tribute to the greatness of God as a creator.

So you just consider the first words of the Bible in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That sentence alone is breathtaking when you pause to think about it in the beginning, God, he was in the beginning.

He has no creator. God was and is always will be and he speaks. When He speaks, all he has to say is let there be and things come to be. And the world literally fashioned by the word of God, sustained by the power of God.

The stars are held in their place by his sovereign strength. The oceans stop and are held at bay by his omnipotent hand. The sun and moon rise and fall according to his divine command. Animals eat according to the providence of God, not natural selection, or supernatural provision.

If God were to withdraw his power from creation for a split second, the universe and all that is in it, including you and me, would cease to exist in that same split. Second, he sustains it all and it’s all good.

After every day he saw that it was good, he saw that it was good. All leading the sixth day when God said, let us make a man. At the end of that day, God thought it was very good. So what was very good about the man here was one who was created in the image of God with the unique capacity to know God, to walk with God, and to worship God as a reflection of the character of God.

Oh, you think about it, when people look at my blonde-haired one-year-old baby boy and they say to me, he’s your spitting image. To think that in some way, in some sense you are the spitting image of God himself.

And in this way, God created us as a demonstration of his glory. So the first command God gives to man is to be fruitful and fill the earth with his image for his glory. God wants his image.

God wants the reflection of his glory multiplied throughout the earth. This is why God created us. John Piper did not come up with this. God came up with this. He creates us as a demonstration of his glory.

God Designed Us to Display the Gospel

Biblical foundation, number one, biblical foundation. Number two, from the beginning God designs us. He designs us for the display of his gospel. God designs us for the display of his gospel.

So it’s not just man in general that God creates. Verse 27 tells us that male and female, he created them. Then we turn the page to chapter two where the story behind this reality is told. Starting in verse 18, the Lord God said it’s not good that man should be alone.

I’ll make him a helper fit for him. Now out of the ground, the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought to the man to see what he would call them. And whenever the man called every living creature that was its name, the man gave names to all livestock and the birds of the heavens and every beast of the field.

But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh and the rib that the Lord had God, the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

And the man said this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called a woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh and the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

So here we have man and woman both created with equal dignity, equal value, equal importance before God and each other, both made in the image of God, both made to resemble God, both made to relate to God, yet clearly designed with different roles. Genesis two goes out of the way to show that God has made man and woman in a way that compliments one another in wonderfully beautiful ways, physically man and woman were designed by God to complement one another, literally to fit together sexually to find their deepest unity with one another at the point where they’re most different.

But it’s more than just physical complementarity. Here, God designs man as the head of the woman and the use head here the way that Paul uses it later in One Corinthians chapter 11 when he says the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

In chapter one Corinthians 11, Paul points back to this chapter, Genesis 2, and says, for man was not made from woman but woman from man. Now clearly this is not male domination or superiority, female subjugation or inferiority.

The Bible does not address dignity or value here, but the role of man created to be the head woman created to be the helper. A word that’s used twice in Genesis 2, verse 18, I’ll make amen helper fit for him.

There was not a helper fit for him. Verse 20, and this was not good after everything else in all creation has been called good. This is the only thing that was not good man was in need of a helper that would be like him made in the image of God but different from him and God we know design these differences for a reason.

In Ephesians Five, Paul again talks about the husband as the head of the wife, just as Christ as the head of the church. Then he quotes Genesis 2:24 to describe marriage, this one-flesh union of a man and a woman coming together as head and helper, loving authority, glad submission.

And Paul says all of this is referring to Christ and his church. So see it. Remember this, God has designed man and woman equally valuable yet sexually different so that through their union and marriage with one another, he might show the world the relationship between Christ and his church and he might show Christ as the loving authority who lays down his life for his bride the church and that he might show the church in glad submission to the groom who died to save our creation.

As men and women are part of an ever overarching drama unfolding on the pages of human history where we are uniquely designed to come together in marriages that display the gospel throughout the world. God literally physically designs us for the display of his gospel, creates us as a demonstration of his glory, and designs us for the display of his gospel.

God Judges Us By His Righteous Law

Third biblical foundation, God judges us. So this is number three. God judges us by his righteous law. God judges us by his righteous law. So we come to chapter three and the man and woman created for the glory of God to display the gospel of God, turn from the grace of God the question God’s word.

The first question of the Bible appears on the pages of Genesis three, as Satan asked, did God actually say, and for the first time, the most deadly spiritual force on earth was covertly smuggled into the world? The assumption is that what God has said is subject to human judgment.

Eve, let’s talk about what God has said and see what we feel about it. After all, you’re a better arbiter of truth than God. Certainly, you know what is better for your life than he does. Questioning God’s word then leads to doubting God’s character.

Eve subtly transfers her trust from God to herself and she stops believing that God has good all leading her to spur God’s authority in sin. She and her husband who sits passively by abdicating his responsibility to lead, eat a piece of fruit, and assert their independence from God only immediately to find themselves standing in condemnation before God, full of guilt, full of shame, full of fear.

The man and the woman cover themselves as they cower before God because God is their judge. His righteous law was resolutely clear. In verses 16 and 17 of chapter two, the Lord God commanded the man saying You may surely eat of every tree of the garden but at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

And so by the end of chapter three, men and women are cast out of God’s presence now slaves to sin destined for death. And it’s not just them, we know it’s all of us. Romans five makes clear that from this one sin came condemnation to all men because all have sin.

This is our story. All of us in this room, have questioned God’s word doubted God’s character spurned God’s authority. This is the God who speaks and light and darkness obey. He speaks and mountains are formed, he speaks and all of creation responds to his bidding until you get to you and me and we have the audacity to look at him in the face and say no, we have rebelled against him and we now experience the consequences of that rebellion all around us in a world of sin and suffering, disease and death, injustice abounding on every level, economically, ethnically, socially, spiritually, every one of our hearts, every one of us in this room prone to center on ourselves instead of others and need and instead of the God we most need.

And one day we will stand before this God to be judged by him according to his righteous law and in and of ourselves we will all be guilty. God judges by his righteous law. Thankfully, however, it’s not the end of the story for the stage is now set for the God of the universe to do the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the shocking, and scandalous.

He comes to the man and the woman. He doesn’t wait for them to take the initiative he takes the initiative himself. He seeks after the guilty, he does what we will see him do throughout the rest of scripture seeking.

After an idolater named Abraham, a deceiver named Jacob, a fugitive in mind named Moses, and scores of other sinful men and women, Arthur Pink writes that we might appreciate more deeply the marvelous condescension of deity and swooping so low as to care for and seek out such poor worms of the dust. And not only does he swoop stoop to seek sinners, but he covers them in their shame.

And you’re in Genesis three, takes an innocent animal, guilty of nothing, uses its sacrificial death to provide a covering for his guilty creation. And on this day, literally the worst day in all the world, God gives the greatest news in all the world saying right in the heart of chapter three, verse 15, I will put in imagery between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

The proto Gallion, the first gospel in which Martin Luther said this one verse embraces and comprehends within itself everything noble and glorious that is be found anywhere in the scriptures for God promises to send a man born of woman Christ himself, clothed in human flesh to conquer sin and defeat Satan through his death on the cross and resurrection from the dead so that through faith and this promised son who will crush the evil serpent, everyone who stands before God condemned can be acquitted by God as savior fourth biblical foundation. Yes, God judges us by his righteous law.

God Pursues Us with Redeeming Love

Yet at the same time, God pursues us with his redeeming love. God pursues, God pursues you and me with his redeeming love. These four truths, if you look at them, form the essence of the gospel, the holy God who’s created us as a demonstration of his glory, who has designed us for the display of his grace.

We have rebelled against him, sinned against him, turned away from him and he will judge us according to his righteous law. In our sin we stand condemned but God, God stoops to seek us, God bends to bless us and through the sacrifice of his one and only son on the cross, he pursues us with his redeeming love.

I don’t want to assume even in this place this morning that every one of you has believed in these truths, and applied them to your hearts. And so I invite you today, this morning to see yourself in this story created by God, designed by God, yet a sinner against God in desperate need of salvation from God.

See this God in his loving pursuit of your life, see this God bringing you even to this place at this time on this day for you to hear this good news, his love for you, so that today, right now, right where you are sitting, you might turn from your sin in yourself. Put all your trust, and your hope in this God that you today might be spared his righteous judgment and saved by his redeeming love.

And then when you do for all who have for all who hold these biblical foundations, these gospel truths that form the bedrock of our faith, consider then the cultural implications. Consider the massive ramifications for these truths as they’re applied to the battlefronts In our day, God creates us as a demonstration of his glory.

We Must Fight Abortion

And so what do we do? Here’s what we must do. We do not have a choice. Cultural indication number one is based on biblical foundation. Number one, we fight abortion as an assault on God’s creation and an affront to God’s glory.

We fight abortion as an assault on God’s creation and an affront to God’s glory. We live in a country where over a million babies are aborted every year, 3000 every day. It’s one baby being aborted every 20 to 25 seconds and that’s just our country.

We live in a world where 130,000 abortions occur every day. 130,000 babies. Do not believe it is an overstatement to call abortion a modern holocaust. That is an understatement. Every month we surpassed that number of people systematically slaughtered in the world and just as German Christians did not need to hide from the reality of what was happening in concentration camps, we in this room cannot hide, must not hide from the reality of what is happening in abortion clinics all around our country and all around the world.

Why not? Why can’t we hide because of the gospel? Because of the biblical foundations we’ve just seen abortion is a clear affront to God’s glory as our creator an assault on his work in creation.

We remember what David writes later in Psalm 1:39 For you, form my inward parts you together in my mother’s room. I praise you from fearfully, wonderfully made wonderful in your works. My soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. David says, the way you form my in reports the way you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

This work is a demonstration of your glory and it is, isn’t it? David says that, but he doesn’t even know what we know now. God takes a little egg and sperm and brings ’em together and how two weeks later a human heart is beating, circulating its own blood.

Now within a few more weeks, fingers are forming on hands and brainwaves are detectable. After just six and a half weeks these inward parts are moving. Two weeks later there’s discernible fingerprints, there’s discernible sexuality, kidneys forming, functioning, then a gallbladder.

By the 12th week, all the organs of a baby’s body are functional and the baby can cry all of that within three months, In one trimester heart, organs, brain, sexuality, movement, reaction, and God on high is doing every bit of it as a demonstration of his glory. So to imagine at that moment during that time period, inserting a tool, taking a pill, undergoing an operation that takes the life God is designing and it’s without question an assault on God’s glorious work in creating a person in his image people say abortion is such a complex issue, there’s just no easy answers.

But if that which is in the womb is a person formed by God, this issue is not complex at all, this is a person created by God, then no justification for abortion is adequate. You cannot believe God’s word and deny this and you cannot believe God’s word and stay silent on this.

Yet so many Christians and pastors sit back and do hardly anything. So many members of our churches and maybe many of us say, well I wouldn’t have an abortion, but I don’t think we should take someone’s right to choose away from them.

It’s not our place and it’s not the government’s place, but that’s a sham argument and we all know it is government exists under the authority of God for the good of people, and part of that good is accomplished by limiting people’s right to choose. People can’t just choose to steal whatever they want, drive as fast as they want, and do whatever they want with no consequences that were the case. We live in anarchy.

It’s moral silliness, and cultural suicide to say that everyone should have the right to do whatever they choose to do. Thankfully we take people’s right to choose evil, evil away from them every day in our society and that’s good for all of us.

Christian leader, this is where I want to call us out of a muddled middle road that masks the magnitude of what kind of choice we’re talking about to say we are pro-choice, pro-choice about what? Whether you have Mexican or Chinese food, where you live, what kind of car you drive of course, but you are not pro-choice about rape, you’re not pro-choice about kidnapping, you’re not pro-choice about burglary.

So are you pro-choice about killing children, brothers, and sisters? Moral or political neutrality here is not an option for those who believe this gospel. There’s a battle raging in our culture and if you and I sit idly by while millions of children, individuals in the image of God around us are dismembered and destroyed, then we are denying basic biblical truth that forms the foundation for the gospel.

We claim to believe we fight abortion as an assault on God’s creation as an affront to God’s glory. Second cultural implication. So this one linked to the second biblical foundation. Remember God designs us for the display of his gospel.

So then culturally we flee sexual immorality in our lives and we defend sexual complementarity in marriage for the sake of the gospel in the world. That’s long. Lemme say it again. We flee. We flee sexual immorality in our lives and we defend sexual complementarity in marriage for the sake of the gospel.

I’ve been so helped here by Daniel Heinbach’s book on sexual morality and I was particularly struck when I read these words that he wrote. He said The stakes in the current conflict over sex are more critical, more central, and more essential than any controversy the church has ever known.

This is a momentous statement, but I make it soberly without exaggeration. Conflict over sex these days is not just challenging traditional orthodoxy and respect for authority in areas such as ordination, marriage, and gender roles. And it doesn’t just affect critically important doctrines like the sanctity of human life, the authority and trustworthiness of scripture, the Trinity, and the incarnation of Christ rather war over sex among Christians is now raging over absolutely essential matters of faith without which no one can truly be a Christian in the first place.

Matters such as sin, salvation, the gospel, and the identity of God himself. I agree. What do you think about it? Among other things, among many other things, we have seen that God designed us sexually as men and women for a reason for the display of his gospel.

We Must Flee Sexual Immorality

The gospel is most clear in the world when a man and a woman come together in the one-flesh union of marriage and unite their lives with one another in a picture of Christ’s love for his church. So then if we want the gospel to be clear in our culture, then we must must flee sexual immorality in our lives.

We must do one Corinthians 6:18. We must run from sexual immorality. We must not reason with it or rationalize it. We must run from it so, so much. We know so much sexual immorality in this culture and there’s so much sexual immorality in the church, there’s so much sexual immorality in this room.

Run from it. God has sovereignly brought some of you to this place to hear this one clear word that today flee. Flee the sexual immorality that you’re toying with, flirting within your life, engaging in your life.

It’s pornography, potential adultery, single brothers and sisters, I would argue any sexual activity at all with someone who’s not your husband or wife. Flee, flee any and all sexual looking, thinking, desiring, touching, watching, speaking, acting outside of marriage between a man and woman.

Flee sexual immorality in our lives and we defend sexual complementarity in marriage, particularly in light of the current climate concerning so-called same-sex marriage. We defend sexual complementarity with God’s word.

Brothers and sisters, this is one of those areas in our day when the word of God comes up totally against the patterns of our culture and we’re forced to make a decision. Are we going to believe the Bible or not?

Are we going to trust a culture of feminism that says personal worth and personal role are inextricably linked together and if you have a different role and clearly that diminishes your worth, are we going to trust a God who says we all have personal worth made in this image, that we each have different roles in a way that doesn’t devalue worth but actually exalts worth? Who are we going to trust?

Either the word is our authority or the ideas of our culture or our authority. Let us defend sexual complementarity with God’s word. Let’s defend sexual complementarity in our lives and our marriages through pictures of husbands as heads and wives as helpers loving authority, glad submission in the context of beautiful relationships.

And let’s do this for the sake of the gospel and the world. Don’t miss it. There’s no question that today’s cultural climate presents a huge opportunity for gospel witness.

This spiritual darkness engulfs the picture of marriage in our culture. Spiritual light is going to shine all the brighter in the picture of a husband who lays down his life for his wife and a wife who joyfully follows her husband’s loving leadership.

God’s design for marriage is far more breathtaking and far more satisfying than anything we can create on our own. So let’s give ourselves to his design. Let’s let this moment drive us to revive our marriages across the church.

So the gospel of God on display in marriage might be all the more clear in and through his church in the middle of this culture. Third, cultural implication, responding to the so corresponding to the third biblical foundation. So God judges us by his righteous law. Third cultural implication.

We Must Work for Justice

Therefore we work, work for justice in the world as we speak about the judge of the world. We work for justice in the world as we speak about the judge of the world. Justice is important to God.

So justice must be important to us. God is the defender of the weak, the Father to the fatherless, the healer of the sick, the helper of the needy, the provider for those in poverty, and the rescuer of those in slavery.

So we must reflect God’s character in a world that is filled with the weak and the fatherless, the sick and the needy, the impoverished and the enslaved. People say, well you need to be careful not to lose sight of the gospel as you’re doing social ministry and that’s a good warning, a needed warning in light of theological liberalism that often comes on the wings of social ministry.

However, I’m convinced that most of us as Christians in our culture and most of the churches that we are a part of and are pastoring lost sight of the gospel a long time ago and our lack of social ministry and we desperately need to open our eyes to the desperate poverty that surrounds us in the world. I just came back from the short-term trip to Nepal where we helicoptered into this village in the height of the Himalayas, right at the border of Nepal and Tibet, basically as high as you can sustain human life.

That’s where we stopped and that’s where we went into. Over the next six days, we hiked about 90 miles out through the mountains going through village after village after village which give definition to desperate poverty.

So some research was done not long on these villages that we were in and they found that half of the children in these villages weren’t making it to see their eighth birthday. Half one mom, 14 kids, two made it to adulthood and they’re dying of things like diarrhea.

There’s one village we passed by that recently experienced an outbreak of cholera, this stomach infection, a simple stomach infection, 60 people died, and poverty just everywhere. I remember this, sum it up or walking through this one village and the partners we were working with we’ve worked with in these mountains encouraged us, okay, well one we weren’t carrying much with us at all.

And they said, people will come up and just ask you for food and this or that and you can’t just start giving it out. I mean it’ll be gone in a second and then I have all this crowd around you just so don’t, don’t just give out. There’s long-term processor we’ve got in place to try to address poverty here.

We walk to this one village and this little girl, this little girl comes running up to me and I can’t tell what she’s saying exactly, but she’s reaching to my pack, give me something, give me something, give me some food. And I’m just kind of smiling and she grabs onto my hand and I’m like, okay, well I can hold her hand.

This is ahead. And so I’m walking with her hand and then we get near the end of her village and we’ve got to keep going. And so I try to pull away and she grabs on tight and she starts reaching in my pack for something and I get to the point where I just have to pull away real quick and she looks at me with this desperate angry face and she tries to spit on.

She’s not able to. It just goes. All her mouth just saw the eyes of people and pictures of poverty personified. And the most heinous reality I saw was the way sex traffickers are preying on the poverty of these people.

I never heard about sex traffick, but I walked in these villages and I saw these people traffickers would go up to meet with their families and promise their daughters a better life if they went with them into the city, even giving the family money. All it takes is about a hundred dollars to convince a starving family that it’s worth selling her daughter off besides she’s going to be better off.

So they give her away. The traffickers take little girls, 15, 10 as young as five years old, they take ’em to cat mandu or they’ll put these little girls in a brothel and they’ll break them, drug them and rape them repeatedly and then require them to do whatever the men who come into these brothels want them to do.

Some of these little girls have 15 adjoining customers a day and this is their life. Shamed, abused, can’t get out, police corrupt because they’re paid off by the traffickers. Traffickers threaten the girls that if they leave, the traffickers will go back up and harm their families.

Some of these girls stay in Katmandu, and others are taken to India, the Middle East, or down in North Africa. We’re talking thousands and thousands and thousands of girls taken from impoverished villages that I was in.

So I’m trekking and I’m reading in my Bible reading I’m reading in Luke and I come across Luke 10 and I’m seeing that the greatest commandment is the love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And I’m thinking as myself this is happening to my daughter and my little girl. I do something.

And what if this’s for our girls? What if it’s for our kids dying? It changed the way we live. It’s changed the way we live. We loved our neighbors as ourselves. So what are we doing? Let’s be honest with each other. We are throwing scraps to the poor in our churches, in our lives

And something drastic needs to change. We live in a relative affluence that cares little for the poor. We give little thought to children like our own being sold in traffic for sex and we can live. Here’s the frightening reality.

We can live our entire Christian lives in the context of churches here in this culture while turning a blind eye to brothers and sisters around the world. And that must not be The gospel compels us

The generous justice of God constrains us to do something. Mike six eight to do justice now to stop with just doing, to speak as we do, to work for justice in the world as we speak about the judge of the world to give a cup of clean water.

Better yet build a well with clean water while we proclaim the gospel of living water to provide a home for the orphan on the earth while we declare the love of the Father in heaven to work on behalf of the enslaved while proclaiming the freedom that comes in Christ as savior. We work for justice in the world as we speak about the judge of the world, which leads right back to the last biblical foundation, the last cultural invocation.

We Must Pursue the Unreached

We must, here it is. We must give our lives and lead our churches to pursue people still unreached by God’s redeeming love. We must give our lives and lead our churches to pursue peoples still unreached by God’s redeeming love.

Surely the greatest injustice in our day without question is the reality that 6,000 people groups spanning 2 billion people have yet to even hear of God’s redeeming love in Christ. Just think of 2 billion people who sinned against God living in guilt, shame, and fear of sin and they’ve never even heard of God’s promise and provision of Savior.

Haven’t even heard about this region we were in. Nepal is the birthplace of Hinduism and Buddhism. This is where these world religions and all their deception were born for centuries where we were working specifically among 24 Tibetan Buddhist people, groups that are totally unreached with the gospel and have been for generations.

I saw in one ritual people taking dead bodies to a river and the custom was within 24 hours of the body of someone dying. They bring this body to the river and they burn the body over the river and this is helpful for them spiritually.

So I’m looking out over the street or river and I’m seeing funeral buyers everywhere and I’m seeing flames and engulfing bodies. I’m watching this physically. I’m watching bodies burn it and I’m realizing this is a picture of a spiritual reality right now.

And most if not all of these people died and they never even heard the gospel. What is it going to take for us to get to the point where unreached, the whole concept of unreached people groups is totally intolerable to this commission we read earlier that was just formality at the beginning of worship.

This is a command. Jesus said, make disciples of all these people groups with that commission given to us here with so much need and unreached there, then wouldn’t it make sense that the majority of us should be going there?

And that’s just a couple here and there, but this is the default harvest plentiful. I’m reading in Luke 10 works reading in Luke 15. As I’m watching this, God the Father is running after the lost. He desires their salvation. And here I was in the middle of the Himalayas. I mean just majestic mountains everywhere.

But to realize you know what all the majesty of God and creation has brought about in those villages, total idolatry. They have enough knowledge of God to turn away from him more than the majesty of mountains.

They need the beauty of the gospel and you’ve got that. I’ve got that. So let’s give our lives to lead our churches to pursue people still unreached by God’s redeeming love. There’s a battle raging in the nations among 6,000 people groups and up until this point, Satan is kept from hearing this good news.

This gospel uses that quote regarding Luther’s brothers and sisters were the battle rage. They’re the loyalty of the soldier is proven. So based upon biblical gospel foundations clearly laid on the opening pages of human history.

I want to challenge you today to engage in the battle on the front lines of culture, from abortion to poverty, slavery, to sexual immorality. Refuse to pick and choose which battles you’re going to stand up and speak out on and which battles you’re going to sit down and stay quiet on.

Obviously, we’re limited in our time and resources. I’m not saying it’s wrong to even devote time, and resources to one of these issues more than another, but in our belief, let’s be consistent in our proclamation.

Let’s be complete in our leadership. Let’s be clear. This gospel of Christ compels, contrite, compassionate, courageous action on a multiplicity of cultural issues and to engage with the gospel on battlefronts across our culture as we give our lives to taking the gospel across cultures.

In the end, when our time is done, may it be said of us that we loved our Lord and we led his church for the demonstration of his glory and the display of his gospel amidst the most pressing issues of our day. Let’s pray.

Oh God. Oh God, may it be so. May it be so. Take us as an army of your people fill us with the power of your spirit and use us to engage the battle that you have put us in. May it be said of us that we were faithful in the day in which you put us as we long for the day when this world of sin and suffering will be no more.

And we will see your face and we will give you the glory you are due from every nation, tribe, tongue, and people. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.