Dennis Tuuri

Matthew 28:16-20

Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them. And when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Amen. Let’s pray. Father, as we look forward to this year that opens up in front of us, we pray, Lord God, that your word would form the basis for all the councils and plans that we make individually and corporately. We pray to that end, Father, that your spirit would take this word now. Help us to understand the implications of it. Help us not simply to come to this text for an intellectual understanding of what you teach us here.

Help us, Lord God, to come to this text with our heart’s desire being to serve you in response to it. To acknowledge your love for us mediated through it, and to be empowered to the end of our service to be effectual for the purposes of your kingdom. In Jesus name we ask this. Amen. Please be seated.

In Isaiah 32:8, we read, “But the noble man devises noble plans, and by noble plans he stands.” We come to the beginning of this year. This is the 20th year of the existence of Reformation Covenant Church. Twenty years—as we’ve had discussions in the last year in terms of our constitution and what it means to be a head of a household—twenty is the age of enrollment in the Old Testament, sort of the threshold over which a person enters into maturity and manhood, leaving behind childish things and taking up things of adult life. As a church, Reformation Covenant Church matures as well.

We are a corporate entity. That means that we are a corpus, a body that extends the life of the membership beyond the life of the individual membership. That’s the basis for modern day incorporation. An entity that exists apart from the individual members. The whole is more than the sum of the parts, and it has longevity into the future. So we’re a corporate entity that was birthed in 1983, and we can see ourselves, I think legitimately then, entering into an adult phase of our church. And this scripture before us, Isaiah 32:8, tells us that it is proper and good to make plans, to devise noble, liberal, gracious plans, and then to ask the Lord God for direction in the context of those plans.

For the last six months, some of the men of Reformation Covenant Church—her officers and other men—have been involved in this process. We have sought to make some plans, and the purpose of this message is to talk about the great commission as the basis for the plans that we ended up developing with much prayer, much thought, and much discussion in a series of meetings amongst some of the key men in our church.

Now Psalm 33:10-11 says, “The Lord nullifies the council of the nations. He frustrates the plans of the peoples, but the council of the Lord stands forever. The plans of his heart from generation to generation.” We can make all the plans we want, but they are not noble or gracious unless they comport to God’s plans for his people. And as we developed the vision statement that’s before you as the outline for today’s talk, it seemed clearly that our plans were in accord with Matthew 28:19-20.

We didn’t start there. The process began with a series of meetings, and the first meeting was writing down all the specific things that each of the individual men thought were important—that we currently do and should continue to do or to do better in the future. These plans were then summarized, put into particular groups, and as we work through a process of trying to organize what we have done and what we’d like to do in the future, it was rather remarkable that it seemed to fall out in accord with the great commission that’s given to us in Matthew 28:19-20.

So I come to you today confident that the plan, the basic ideas and the plans that we’ve set forth and are now going to develop with full implementation as we move into our 20th year, our adult year of life here at Reformation Covenant Church, are consistent with God’s word. And because they’re consistent with God’s word, they are spirit empowered. The spirit works in the context of the word.

Proverbs 15:22 says that without consultation, plans are frustrated, but with many counselors, they succeed. The plans that have been developed here have been done so in the context of many counselors. Proverbs 16:3 says, “Commit your works to the Lord and your plans will be established.” Prayer was an important part of our meetings and is an important part of laying forth the vision of our church as we look forward into the next hundred years of ministry here where God has planted us. We commit our ways to the Lord.

Our plans must be done in submission to his wisdom and must understand that our plans may be made, but the Lord God is to direct our steps. That’s what Proverbs 16:9 says: “The mind of man plans his ways, but the Lord directs his steps.” The idea clearly is not that it’s wrong to plan. The idea clearly is that it’s wrong to plan and then insist that the steps that are taken to fulfill those plans are according to our mind or understanding.

The Lord God—we’re praying at the beginning of this year as we lay this vision before the congregation—that the Lord God would direct our steps, and where our plans are in error or fall short or overshoot, that the Lord God would by his providence, by his word and spirit, and by his people cause us to continue to mature in our development of these plans and their implementation.

Proverbs 20:18 says, “Prepare plans by consultation. Make war by wise guidance.” We’re the army of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Lord of hosts. The word host refers to a military force. We are his military force going into the world to win the world, not through combat, not through physical force, but through the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and through deeds of love and kindness. So if we’re going to wage war in the context of this world as we see the Lord Jesus do away with the old creation increasingly and make manifest the new creation, as we prepare for this war, we should do so with consultation and by plans. And that has been the desire and intent of the elders of this church overseeing the process of the development and implementation of this vision.

Proverbs 21:5 says that the plans of the diligent lead surely to advantage, but everyone who is hasty comes surely to poverty. Diligence is a required component according to the scriptures of seeing plans succeed.

We have songs today: “Marching to Zion” and other songs. The opening song is really sort of geared at children and younger people coming of age. And that’s what this church is. The final song is a call to commitment. The worship service is peppered through today with songs of commitment, devotion, courageous and spirited commitment to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. The goal of this plan is not simply to lay forth a vision before you, but to encourage you to look for ways in which you can participate in the implementation of these specific initiatives that will meet the objectives that lie before you.

These objectives approved by the elders of your church. So we’re calling for diligence on the part of the congregation. We’re calling for diligence on the part of the officers. And we’re calling on everyone who is a member at Reformation Covenant Church to try to pray and receive counsel from the officers and your friends and your wives and husbands and children as to how you can be part of the implementation of specific initiatives to accomplish what we believe the Lord God has set before us.

Isaiah 25:1 says, “Oh Lord, thou art my God. I will exalt thee. I will give thanks to thy name for thou hast worked wonders, plans formed long ago with perfect faithfulness.” We’re image bearers of God. God is working out his decree. He has formed plans long ago and he brings those plans to pass through his work, his diligence, his providence. He effects his decree. We’re made in his image. It’s our job to think through plans.

I’m doing various premarital counseling with people these days. And you know, one of the particular steps that I do with every couple is the establishment of goals for themselves as a couple, for them individually, for their finances. Goals are part of what God calls us to think through and make plans, being image bearers of his. So we come to you today—we the elders, through my presentation of this and the proclamation of the great commission—to encourage you to understand and then see how you can be part of the implementation of the specific strategy map that we’ve given you as the outline for the talk today.

You’ll see at the top of the page that there is a vision statement. And again, in terms of the process, that was the last thing we did. We began with what God had already clearly had us do as a church for a number of years—things we thought he was laying upon our hearts. We categorized those, and as that developed, we saw the relationship of that to the great commission. And then the end result of that was trying to understand or come up with a vision statement that met specifically what these objectives were that we had laid out, that sort of captured the essence of the flow of these objectives placed before you and of this particular strategy map.

And you know, it’s interesting in the providence of God again how we’ve been in John 15 for several weeks at the end of last year and the beginning of this year. And you can see John 15 in this vision statement, and that’s significant. You know, we would think that if we’ve come up with visions, objectives, and initiatives that are going to be used by the spirit of God to affect ministry through this church, we would think that we would see increasingly correlations between these statements and the word of God. And indeed, this vision statement—developed long before I got close to John 15—finds itself reflecting the truths of John 15. Now, that’s significant because, as you know, if you’ve been here the last couple of weeks, I believe John 15 is the center of the upper room discourse. And the upper room discourse is the section of John’s gospel where our savior gives instructions to his church in terms of what they will do now that he is departing.

And so I think that John 15 is central to the task of the Christian church, and it finds itself reflected in our vision statement. Our vision statement begins with the phrase “loving the triune God.” Jesus said to abide in the Father’s love. Jesus says to abide in his word and commandments. And Jesus says that we’re to abide and continue bearing fruit of love one for the other. The spirit is the mechanism by which this love is communicated in the context of the church. The spirit of God is described in Romans as outpouring God’s love into us and through us his love to other people. So we have this trinitarian idea at the center of John’s discourse to the disciples. We have this intertrinitarian model of abiding in the Father’s love, knowing the Son’s word, and exhibiting the Spirit’s love in the context of the church. And that’s what we have before us.

Our vision is indeed to empower one another, to strengthen each other, to the end that we would indeed love the triune God. Many false religions have gone forth and been promulgated in the last hundred years across the globe as Christianity has taken sort of a backseat after its dominant role for two centuries. These various cults and anti-Christian world systems—none of them are trinitarian. The triune God is absolutely essential to the outworking of any vision of the church properly understood, the Christian church and a local church thereof.

And you’ll see that again—that while we didn’t start trying to reflect this trinitarian nature of the mission that we’ve established for a church—our strategy, our vision is clearly reflected in the document before you. You see that as this document moves down from the vision statement, we then have a series of objectives here in worship. So we’re making a statement there—which I’ll get to in a little bit—that we think that the corporate worship of the church is absolutely central to accomplishing her mission. But that worship empowers three specific elements that are reflected in Matthew 28. Jesus says to go. Now Jesus calls them up to a mountain. And if that wasn’t enough, the text then tells us that they worshiped him on a mountain. We’ve got it from the beginning of the scriptures to the end: God calling his people together to a garden, to the holy city, both of which are mountains. Rivers flow out from them. Corporate worship of the church—God calls us into that corporate worship. And Jesus then gives them the command to take into the world.

Isaiah doesn’t go to heaven just to see an image of God and think, “Isn’t that neat? My spiritual life is enhanced.” He’s drawn to heaven, confesses his sin, is cleansed through the altar work of the Lord Jesus Christ. The coals upon his lips making his confession pure—this is a complete picture. This is for the purpose of sending him back with a message to transform the world. It’s not some mantra that we say simply “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is the purpose for why we’re gathered together this Lord’s day: to be given the heavenly vision, to be given heavenly gifts to accomplish that vision, and to go into the world. Jesus says that part of worship, the result of worship, is mission.

Now, you remember, as we’ve gone through John’s gospel, Jesus will pray this again in John 17: “As you sent me, I send them.” The Father gives the Son a mission. The Son recruits us into his people, his body, that we might obey that Father’s mission into the world. Remember that Jesus applies mud, goes to the pool of Siloam to heal the blind man. Siloam is “sent one.” Jesus is the one sent of the Father, and he commissions us. He brings us to spiritual sight—not so that we’re now fit for heaven and just wait around for that, but to send us forward as his people.

We must have a sense of the corporate mission of the church. If our worship does not result in a sense of mission as we leave this place and go into the rest of our lives, we have failed in our worship. Because Jesus gathers the disciples together, and the first part of the great commission is a reminder that they are to go. And if we looked at Mark, “Go into all the world.” This reflects the trinitarian nature. The Father sent the Son, and he sends us as well. The Son sends us. We’re sent ones to accomplish the Father’s mission.

Jesus doesn’t end there. He says, “Go and make disciples of all the nations.” And as we move down our vision chart, that’s following what the worship flows into. We have the idea of discipleship. If you look at the left-hand corner, we move from worship and the development of these three specific areas of objectives: first, mission, as I’ve talked about; then discipleship; and then community. Jesus says to go, and every one of us should go tomorrow with a sense of mission to the world. And in that going, we’re to make disciples of all the nations. And the next two clauses in the great commission are a description of what discipleship is. Make disciples how? By baptizing them and teaching them to obey all things I have commanded you.

So the word of God—Jesus Christ who is the word—discipleship and the content of the scriptures, its application to life, forming us up into the people of God that go forth. This is an essential part of the worship of the church and the mission of the church: discipleship through baptism administration, and through teaching the commandments of Jesus Christ. So here, while the trinity is never completely isolated from one another, here the second person of the trinity—the word, Jesus—who is the word and who forms us up as his church seems to be dominant in this second wave of what Jesus says the great commission is. It is mission and it is discipleship.

And then finally, he guarantees us that his presence will be with us: “And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.” Jesus creates community bound together as community in the person and work of him. So the third aspect of the great commission is community.

Now, community is the knitting together, the outworking of that requirement that we have to love one another that we spoke of last week, and that is accomplished primarily in the context of the trinitarian relationship by the Spirit. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Jesus works in the context of the Spirit and glorifies the Father. The Father sends the Spirit to Jesus. Jesus sends the Spirit to his church. The Spirit is the mechanism by which Father and Son operate in the context of love. So the Spirit is the mechanism—so to speak, the person—who knits us together as a community of Jesus Christ, and as that community wedded to our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

So community is the specific work of the Holy Spirit knitting us together. The presence of Christ—Jesus says that he’s going away, but he sends the Spirit right in the upper room discourse so that he is present to us through the work of the Holy Spirit. So when he says “I am with you always,” he is—if we understand what the gospels say—with us through the mechanism of the Spirit. The Spirit creates community between us and Jesus and between us and one another.

And so this outworking of worship is loving the triune God. We come together to express our love for him, to be built up in that love. And if it’s biblical love, it has three components: it has mission, discipleship, and community. And each of these three components reflect to a certain degree the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, it’s one God existing in three persons. There are elements of each in each one of these areas. But you see, it seems to be that our mission statement is effectual in manifesting our trinitarian faith the way that the great commission itself manifests it when seen in light, for instance, of John 15—the abiding in divine discourse.

And so this seems to work its way through. We’re to abide in the love of the Father who sends us out to mission. We’re to abide in the commandments of Jesus Christ, equipping us, discipling us, and helping us to disciple others. And we’re to love one another by the power of the Holy Spirit as the community of Jesus Christ. And so we think that this mission statement accurately reflects the flow of the great commission, accurately reflects the flow of the upper room discourse, and specifically the heart of it in John 15.

And so we are confident that this is what God has laid before us as a church: this specific movement where we’re loving the triune God. That love manifests itself in our corporate worship, which focuses and has the result of three particular elements—or ways. We can connect these three things as well to the flow of our worship. We confess our sins and are restored to proper glory and personhood so that we can affect the mission of the Father. We recognize that apart from ourselves, we’re incapably and irretrievably corrupt. But God forgives us of our sins and makes us whole people again, glorious people. He gives us Aaron’s rod to exercise authority as we conduct the Father’s mission.

We come into worship and say we don’t know anything. We can’t figure anything out by ourselves. And he gives us his word. The Lord Jesus Christ divulges his word to us. And we are discipled in the context of the worship service so that we can go and disciple the nations. And we come to the table saying, “We’re hungry and thirsty. We can’t feed ourselves. We can’t come together as a community. We sin against each other all too often.” And God gives us the community of the Holy Spirit binding us together with that third phase of our worship at the Lord’s supper.

So this outworking of mission, discipleship, and community—you know, it’s real easy to memorize this strategy map and its big broad outlines because it’s what we do and have done every Lord’s day, maybe with a little more focus hopefully. Now, when you walk forward and give your tithes and offerings to God, perhaps you commit yourself afresh in each of these areas: mission, discipleship, and community. But it’s what we practice, it’s what we do every Lord’s day. And that’s because there’s one word from God. The scriptures are a unity. The scriptures are one word. And no matter where we turn in the scriptures, we’re going to see this model because it flows out of the very nature of the Godhead itself—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existing in eternity. And that’s the fellowship, that’s the life that we have been brought into.

And our lives will reflect those aspects of Father, Son, and Spirit. It’ll reflect, if we’re doing our job correctly, to the degree that God blesses us, to the degree that our councils and plans have been with submission to God’s word and spirit, and to the degree that we’re diligent to implement them—our lives will reflect mission, discipleship, and community. And that’s what we lay before you today.

So loving the triune God. But then we know that the word of God tells us that the end result of loving the triune God is an effect upon the world. When we abide in the Father’s love, and when we take the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, and when we exist as true community through the power of the Spirit, the end result is a transformation of the fallen world. We’ve seen this repeatedly in the Gospel of John. What is what’s going on in the Gospel of John? A new creation is what’s going on. God says that there is a new world, a new humanity, a new creation that began 2,000 years ago and is making itself more and more manifest as history proceeds. The old world is going away. The new world is being developed.

How do we do it? By figuring out how best to transform the world? Well, not really. We do it best by knowing how to live in the context of intertrinitarian relationships. We do it best by modeling the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, by entering into the life of the trinity and living that life as we go forth from this place. But the end result of that—God says—will be a transformation of the fallen world. Our job is to go into all the world.

Let me read a couple of documents. We circulated several documents in preparation for our planning meetings this last year. One was “The Christian Mission,” produced in Tyler, Texas some 20 to 25 years ago. Another was a paper by a fellow named Rich Lusk, who is now—was not at the time but is now—the assistant pastor to Steve Wilkins at Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church in Louisiana. His paper was called “Visionary Ecclesiology,” and as we developed our mission statement and our vision, that was really Lusk’s paper that informed us in terms of how that would develop. And it was amazing to see how what we do really falls into Lusk’s categories. So I’ll be talking about his paper a little as well today. And then we also looked at the mission statement for Biblical Horizons.

But let me read a couple of statements here from “The Christian Mission,” produced by a very small transformationalist denomination centered in Tyler, Texas some 20 years ago.

“Just as the rebellion of man against God disrupted the whole fabric of earthly life, bringing personal death and disintegration, social conflict and cosmic curse, so the mission of God’s salvation wrought by Christ entails the restoration of the whole fabric of earthly life. To this end, Christ, taking upon himself the form of a servant to accomplish redemption and vengeance, has been enthroned by God the Father as Lord over heaven and earth. He tells us in the great commission, ‘All authority in heaven and earth have been given unto him.’ He alone is the author and sustainer of the Christian mission.

And then line number three from this mission statement: ‘Upon the resurrection and enthronement of Christ, the Holy Spirit was sent forth to usher in the fullness of time which had been anticipated by the faithful remnant. The Spirit has been given to reify the kingdom of God in all nations according to God’s sovereign and gracious disposition. Kingdom reification entails both the restoration and the consummation of the garden of Eden in the universal city garden, New Jerusalem. To accomplish these two ends, God has given three institutions: the church, the state, and the family.’”

So now there’s a comprehensiveness. The whole world fell in Adam. And the same comprehensiveness—the Second Adam, Jesus Christ—is affecting nothing short of a restoration and a new creation. A new world is what Jesus came to affect. Worldwide implications. And as we said, the “go” in Matthew 28—the fuller statement in Mark is “Go into all the world.” And that’s implicit in the great commission: “Disciple some nations, some out of every nation”? No. Disciple the nations, baptizing them, bringing them under the jurisdiction of the church of Jesus Christ, and teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you. So there is a comprehensiveness to the mission of the Christian church in the world, and that’s reflected in our vision statement. We’re to love the triune God, and the end result of that is the transformation of the fallen world. Nothing short of that is our vision and goal for the future. Nothing short.

We do not desire a part of the earth, a little part of culture, a little ghetto that we can be segmented off in. No, our goal is to see Jesus Christ praised from pole to pole by every nation, every tribe, every tongue. And that’s our goal—not because it would seem good to us, but because that’s what Jesus commands us to in Matthew 28. And that’s what all of the scriptures is about. All of John’s gospel says there’s a new creation in place. We’re not called together to live lives that are somehow isolated in the old world. We are called together on the Lord’s day in worship services that we might be empowered in mission, discipleship, and community to go forward and live life the way it’s supposed to be lived in the new creation.

And by living our lives the way things are supposed to be lived in that new creation, we reify the kingdom of God. What does that mean? Well, reify in its technical sense means to make tangible, to make practical, an abstract concept. Now, it doesn’t really quite work for what we’re talking about. The kingdom of God is not an abstract concept, but it is a truth that Jesus has communicated to us. It’s a reality that’s been established by his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. And it is a reality. It is true. And what history is about is its reification—in other words, its manifestation, the visible external evidence of what Christ has already accomplished in the new creation.

As he raises up after his death and breathes the Holy Spirit into his new humanity—the disciples—we see this new creation affected. It doesn’t look that way outside to us. It doesn’t seem like there’s old things that are connected to the old world and things that are part of the new life. But that’s what Jesus says reality is. Jesus, as their mission statement said, brings redemption, and he brings vengeance. He shakes whatever can be shaken. We talked about this last week. We’re abiding. What we abide in—the Father’s love, the word of the Lord Jesus Christ, the community of the saints through the self-sacrificial love we have for one another—these things are eternal. They’re what dominate the future of the world. That’s what the world looks like more and more. Our job is to come together in worship to focus on a day in which we really train ourselves and submit to the reality of the Christian mission—that it involves mission, discipleship, and community.

To live our lives in this way in the new world today, and then take this into the world tomorrow. So our goal is the transformation of the fallen world. We think that one of the most important truths that we can focus on as we look into this year of our adulthood is the reality that the church of Jesus Christ is vitally important for the accomplishing of this mission.

In 1 Thessalonians 3:14-16, Paul says, “These things write I unto thee, hoping to come unto thee shortly. But if I tarry long, that you may know how you ought to behave yourselves in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. And without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God is manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.”

Paul says that the church—the three institutions are the state, the family, and the church. The church is distinctively proclaimed here to be the house of God. The church is the church of the living God. The church is the pillar and ground of the truth. Probably there’s no more important thing I think—maybe—to communicate in the context of being able to fulfill the mission that we have placed before us by the great commission is to recognize the great importance of the institutional church in its worship.

The vision, the strategy map that you have before you moves from loving the triune God and transforming the fallen world to specific applications of mission, discipleship, and community by way of worship—top line. That’s a statement by the elders of this church that we think this is the most important thing we do: to come together as the corporate church and worship God.

You remember when we talked about tabernacle of David worship? How in Ezekiel, Zion was referred to as the navel of the world—the center of the world was Zion, and the tabernacle of David worship that goes on there. You see, the idea in those thought forms was that everything is spun out of the navel. Everything that comes forth from the center, everything comes down from the mountain of Eden into the rest of the world. Everything comes down from the city-state of Jerusalem. In the New Testament, all the world is affected, and all the nations are called to go to it. You see, everything flows from the worship of the church. And First Timothy says the church is the household of God and the pillar and ground of the truth.

It’s interesting. We’re going to sing, of course, again today the Nicene Creed. And I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it. I have recently—because Mr. Jordan is doing a translation, doing some teaching on it at the church he attends. And it was wonderful just to put aside all the technical, complicated reading I do during the week about the different controversies in the reformed world right now—in terms of justification and the new perspective on Paul and various things—and to just read the Nicene Creed and think about it and meditate on it a little bit.

And it’s interesting because, you know, it’s a series of statements of belief. But Mr. Jordan is arguing for the translation of “I trust” instead of “I believe.” We come to think today in our world that belief is an intellectual assent to a set of propositions. “I believe in Jesus” the way I believe this microphone is here, or that if I put steak in a grinder, I’ll get hamburger at the end. I believe that’ll happen because it’s a law of nature. But in the original languages, believe is not intellectual assent. It is a trust with all of our lives.

So when we sing the Nicene Creed, when we say “believe,” understand that you’re saying, “I trust in the Father. I trust in the Son, and I trust in the Holy Spirit.” You’re being asked to renew your commitment that only in the person and work of the triune God is there life, and only he can take care of your problems. You’ve been created to live in the context of intertrinitarian life. So a trust in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

But then it doesn’t stop there, does it? As the creed moves to its conclusion, “I believe one holy catholic, apostolic church, the remission of sins, right? And baptism for the remission of sins.” Now that’s significant. Again, this is not mental assent being talked about. What it says is that we’re called upon—have been for the last 1,700 years—to confess the trinitarian faith of the scriptures by saying that we trust in the church of Jesus Christ.

Now clearly there’s a difference between trusting in the church and trusting in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The church must exhibit itself in conformity to Christ’s word. But the point here is that the reason the creed is set up that way is because the only thing you really know about the Father, Son, and Spirit is mediated to you by a group of people—the church that Jesus Christ died for.

Martin Luther said the entire purpose of Christ’s ministry was to create the church. That’s why he died. He didn’t die to affect individual salvation apart from church. What’s going on right now with the people that we are in the context of learning—with people like Steve Wilkins, Doug Wilson, and others at the last conference last week at Auburn Avenue—the controversies that are happening in the context of the groups that we have affiliation and friendship with is really a controversy over what is the nature of the church? What is the nature of the objective signs and seals of the covenant? Is baptism just an outward sign of an inward reality, or does baptism bring you into the church—the historic church—and you’re to be regarded as part of that church?

You know, we have suffered in this culture. The reason why the culture is the way it is, I think one main reason is because Christianity has devolved into a “me and Jesus” kind of a deal. Just me and my church? Yeah, it’s good to go to church and get your spiritual batteries boosted up, you know? But at the end of the day, it’s just kind of me and Jesus hanging out together. It’s all personal relationship stuff. God says, “No.” God says the church is the pillar and ground of the truth. The church is the household of God. What you do here is not an adjunct to your Christian faith.

Rich Lusk in his paper “Visionary Ecclesiology” says that salvation is found in the church. That doesn’t mean that the church has bled and died for you—Christ has. And what it means is if we understand salvation as being this comprehensive renewal of who we are in the new man and walking in the context of the intertrinitarian life, that salvation is found as the church empowers us.

You remember when we looked at Jesus saying that the lambs hear his voice? Remember we preached a sermon or two on that? Remember last week Jesus says, “You are clean because of the word that I spoke to you”? See, Jesus speaks to us through the preaching of the word in a special sense in corporate worship. And that corporate worship is the voice of Jesus Christ cleansing his people, purging them of sins, giving them newness of life. We don’t come here to rehearse a set of external actions that remind us about something that’s real somewhere else.

We’ve talked about the distribution of gifts in worship, right? God gives us glory through the forgiveness of our sins. He gives us knowledge through the preaching of his word and our consecration to it. He gives us life—rejoicing life in communion together. He gives us mission, discipleship, and community. And you know, we sort of think that’s somehow real someplace else in my personal relationship to Jesus. But that’s not what’s going on. Jesus says you get these gifts here in the context of worship. It is real. Worship is the most real thing we do.

Worship is the place we come together to celebrate in a heightened sense this new creation. Worship is going up to Eden, from where the image-bearer is supposed to go into all the world. Why is it that the judgment on Adam happens during worship? That’s what it is. End of the week, God comes to make his weekly visit to Adam, and judgments are dispensed. Things happen. Things change. Cain and Abel—in the fullness of time, at the end of the week, at the end of the cycle when it was time to go in corporate worship—that’s where the controversy starts to happen between Cain and Abel, right there in worship.

You see, why is it that Israel is put into captivity? Because she’s got a lot of morality problems going on? Well, yes, she ends up with that. But the beginning of that is the disintegration of corporate worship in the north. Because in the north they wedded the worship of Yahweh to golden calf worship. That’s why the northern kingdoms were judged. That’s why they were taken into captivity for worship issues. Beginning of the Bible to the end—worship. The corporate worship of the church is stressed as being the most important thing we do.

That doesn’t mean it’s not important—going to go into the week tomorrow and live out what we’ve done here. But this is where God has decided to meet with his people. This is where he calls us to go and meet with him. This is where the vision of the new creation is given to us. This is where the gifts of the new life—glory, knowledge, and rejoicing life in community—are given to us. This is where the power and strength to walk in the new creation is dispensed. This is the gospel today.

And a gospel-shaped liturgy that focuses on the proclamation that Jesus has affected salvation and ushered in a new creation—a gospel-shaped liturgy creates a gospel-shaped people. If we come here confessing our inability apart from the righteousness of Christ and our sinfulness, and receive that grace of God, we become grace dispensers to those outside of the church. If we come here and recognize there’s no knowledge anywhere except the word of Jesus Christ as it underpins all of what we know, but when we go forward we don’t point people to this or that philosophy or our ideas—we end up teaching people about the word of Christ.

And if we come here recognizing that he graciously gives us life, we become those who give food and drink. We give clothing to people. We’re clothed with the righteousness of Christ. We give food and drink to people. We’re fed with the heavenly banquet. You see, a gospel-shaped liturgy recognizing that God is not primarily in the process of judging the world—God is in the process of saving the world and ushering in the totality of the salvation of the world. A gospel-shaped liturgy that focuses on those things creates a people who are empowered in mission, discipleship, and community.

And our problem is that the church has become unimportant to us as a culture. Baptism isn’t really the deal. It’s whether you believe in Jesus in your heart. Taking the Lord’s supper is not the means of grace. It’s really having a good devotional life with Jesus, meditating, thinking internally apart from all the people around you—whether you really love God or not. And the problem with that is you have no idea. You can’t know yourself. And what you can know about your love for God—First John makes it quite clear—is demonstrated in how well you love the people that sit around you in the corporate services of the church.

This is where you are revealed by God, where you’re humbled by God. And then when you’re empowered by God is in the corporate worship of the church. And this worship flows out, if it’s done correctly, into these areas that we’ve placed before you on this vision or strategy map today. It all flows out from the corporate worship of the church.

Now, we think another example of this primacy of corporate worship is the way the Ten Commandments flow. The first four commandments explicitly talk about a relationship to God, and then flowing out of that is a relationship to our fellow man. How do we know these things? Well, we know as we relate to Father, Son, and Spirit by the fourth, summing commandment—of those things—Sabbath day worship. That’s how we know how we’re related to God and to one another. It’s the pivot point that moves from God to the culture. This is the place where all that is discerned.

I could go on, but the point I hope is quite clear—and I’m just sort of preaching to the choir here—but the corporate worship of the church is what we think empowers the body of Christ. The kingdom is broader than the church. But the kingdom—the nursery of the kingdom—is the corporate worship of the church on the Lord’s day, and how we exhibit mission, discipleship, and community in the context of our life together, okay?

And so that’s why this mission statement, or vision statement, flows from this focus on loving the triune God and transforming the world through worship. And then the end result of correct Lord’s Day worship that empowers people in discipleship, community, and mission is indeed the renewing of the world.

So if that’s true, then what we have to do—and what we’ve done on this strategy map—is to say: is our worship really accomplishing the goals of the great commission? Does our worship prepare you to go? And what should we do to our worship to better prepare you to have a sense of mission, whether it’s foreign missions, domestic missions, just the mission of going out and providing vocational integrity, etc.? Does our worship do that or not?

Does our worship inspire mission? In other words, does our worship bring discipleship and empower the congregation in their discipleship of people as they go into the rest of the week? And does our worship result in community?

And so at the first level of our vision and strategy map are statements about the worship of the church. One of our objectives as a church is to strengthen the biblical ministry of the word, prayer, and sacraments because that’s what produces mission, discipleship, and community. The word, prayer, and sacraments.

One of our objectives in our worship—we think that worship will do these things as we have biblical music that’s developed, that exalts God and unifies and motivates the church. You know, we’re singing songs of commitment at the end of the sermon and at the end of the service. And those songs of commitment are geared to providing a commitment on the part of you, the body of Christ here, to engage in the mission statement of the church and to go forth loving the triune God, seeking to transform the fallen world by going forth empowered to mission, discipleship, and community.

And the music of the church is absolutely critical to affect that. Music moves people. The spirit uses the music of the church to empower her, to exalt God rather, and to exhort and motivate the church.

And then, third, we’ve said that we have an objective of beautifying the worship services of the church by beautifying the physical environment, to beautify the church, to enhance the worship environment. You know, we’re not just talking about a series of propositions ultimately. We’re talking about a trust and worship of the personal God—God who is three persons, the triune God. And what we surround ourselves with in terms of our structure of worship has an effect upon how we worship God. Clearly, the scriptures teach us that as well. God had great detail in the context of the tabernacle or temple. And so we know we’re not Greeks. We know that our bodies are good and proper. We know that the created order is a good thing from God. And so what we do with that window up there—one way or the other—has an effect upon the worship of the church.

And so these are the objectives we’ve laid out in terms of the worship as elements of how to achieve this vision. This vision of loving the triune God will be impacted as we strengthen the ministry of word, prayer, and sacraments. This vision of loving the triune God will be impacted as we develop biblical music that exalts God and unifies and motivates the church. And this idea of loving the triune God with its result and effect on the world will be enhanced as we beautify the church to enhance the worship environment that we have.

And so this vision statement flows from the top down, and it flows through the conduit of worship.

And then the next thing that’s down—then all these next three items all relate to our work in worship. We’re to develop worship that results in mission, practice worship that produces discipleship, and cultivate worship that inspires local and extended community.

So you see, it’s our goal to look at what we do here in the corporate worship of the church to see how well it assists the congregation in mission, discipleship, and community. So the worship service should look like a service that’s equipping people for mission, calling them to community, and entering them into the discipleship of Christ.

What that means is if we’re not implementing that in the context of the other six days of the week as a corporate body, as a series of people involved in kingdom work, then we want to go back to the worship service and say, “How are we not empowering people in mission? How are we not empowering people in discipleship or community?” And so we think that the navel of the world, the corporate worship of the church, Zion worship that we’re called to in Hebrews, is worship that has this effect upon our culture.

All right. So we’re to develop worship that results in mission. And here we’ve got several subsets of that: evangelize and plant churches locally, evangelize and plant churches globally, extend God’s mercy to those outside RCC, and promote the application of God’s law in our nation. And we’ll have more specifics on this at the head of household meeting. But the basic idea here is our mission is a mission that has a global understanding to it. And we’ve seen that develop in our church more and more in the last five or six years.

But our mission doesn’t extend just to foreign missions. It extends to the community in which we’ve been placed. And this mission is accomplished by the benevolent actions of God’s people. In other words, Jesus tells us that two things accomplish the transformation of the world: the proclamation of his word and the works of the father. When we read the psalms or sing them, we’re singing about God’s word and God’s works in the context of history. We don’t come here just to get information about God’s word. We come here, and God’s works are to extend grace and mercy toward us.

So mission involves this idea of the extension of the benevolences of the church to the community round about us—to extend God’s mercy to those outside RCC. And that’s linked inevitably to the mission of the church.

And then, fourth, as we said, promote the application of God’s law in our nation. We read Psalm 138 twice in the last two weeks, at the end of the year. “The kings of the earth shall praise you, oh Lord, when they hear the words of your mouth.” We have an obligation to speak the word of God into the political arena as well. And so the mission of the church involves certainly the planting of other churches and discipling. Of course, it involves the extension of the grace of God’s benevolences to us to others, but it also involves the proclamation and the application of God’s word to the rest of the nation.

Deuteronomy 4, God tells us in verses 5-8: “See, I have taught you statutes and judgments, just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do this in the land where you’re going to possess it. Keep and do them, for they are your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who will hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ What great nation is there that has a God so near to it as is the Lord our God, whomever, whenever we call on him? Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am sending before you today?”

And then in 1 Timothy 3:1-2, in the context of giving instruction on how to abide in the household of God—the church—Paul says that the very first priority of the church is to pray for all kinds of people and particularly for kings and for rulers. The church must have as part of its mission the application of God’s law in the civil arena. That’s part of the evangelization process of the church—the bringing of men to praise God.

So worship has to produce mission, and those are the specific objectives we laid out for that.

Secondly, worship has to produce discipleship. We want to practice biblical worship that produces discipleship. And here we’ve got two boxes because, as Jesus in the great commission instructs us, discipleship is a two-fold process. One: it’s bringing people into the administrative oversight of the church. There is an order, there is an organization that’s formed in the context of the church that is the church. And then secondly, discipleship involves instruction.

Now, very importantly, the way this works is Jesus doesn’t say, “Teach them first, then eventually baptize them.” He says, “Baptize people as they come to the faith,” of course, “and then teach them.” And so the submission of people first in the waters of baptism is what provides the basis for the instruction and the discipleship in the word of Christ. So discipleship is an imposition of external authority—the Lord Jesus Christ—over each and every one of us as we come together in community. That’s what discipleship is. And discipleship is also then instruction in the commandments of the Savior.

Now, in reformed churches, they’ve thought about this in terms of ruling and teaching elders. And we don’t want to make that distinction, but it is a distinction that you can sort of see these two functions of the oversight of the church as people are brought into it for discipleship. There’s an exertion of administrative authority, so to speak, ruling, and then there’s an exertion of doctrinal authority through the teaching ministry of the church.

And so discipleship—our goals, our objectives rather—are to improve biblical stewardship over time, material, and money. If we’re to exercise what baptism is a picture of—the administration of the church, the correct discipleship or discipline in an administrative fashion—that means that we have to have an objective to improve our stewardship over our time, our material, and our money.

We’re to exercise administrative and judicial discipline. That’s an objective for us.

We have an objective to enhance the consistent ministry of prayer. Prayer is a way to form people up in the administrative discipline of the church to accomplish the purposes of transforming the world.

To develop a perspective on kingdom work that extends to future generations. We recite the Nicene Creed. We look to the traditions of the church, and we look to a God who is faithful to a thousand generations. And we look for tasks to put our hand to that extend our lifetime—that’s more than what we can accomplish in the context of our particular period of time here, 20 years or whatever it is. We look at our children and multigenerational tasks and priorities take a great significance for us as we look at the mission of the church.

So there is this administrative work of the church that is part of the discipleship—the discipline, or the discipleship rather—that God calls us to.

And then on the other side of the equation, of course, is the objective of discipling people through knowledge of the word of Christ. And our objectives here are to improve the congregation’s knowledge of the Bible and doctrine, to empower households through application of biblical truth, and to extend the teaching ministry of RCC to the broader body of Christ.

So here there are specific objectives in terms of instruction to people in the commandments of our Savior.

So he wants us to have a sense of mission to go. He wants us to disciple people through the administration of baptism and all that it entails—the organizational structure of the church—and to disciple people through the training in the word of God and its application to our homes.

So discipleship. And then finally, community. We want, in the context of Christian community, we want to also develop worship or cultivate worship that inspires local and extended community.

And so the agape of our church, the festivals of our church, the extension of that ministry of the church into the broader body is what we have in mind in this particular part of our document: to strengthen fellowship and brotherly kindness, to promote joyful celebrations, and cultivate a community of prayer.

Now, these are objectives that were carefully arrived at. We think are consistent with the great commission and reflect the intertrinitarian nature of the God whom we serve and have been called into fellowship and life with.

But these are objectives. The next stage in the development of this strategy map for our church is to take each one of these specific objectives and to write a series of initiatives for those objectives. And we’ll be sharing more specifics on what initiatives we’re writing to accomplish these objectives at the head of household meeting a week from Friday. But let me just give you an example of what an initiative is.

We take our particular objective—to empower households, for instance, in the context of discipleship—and then we say, “What is it about our Lord’s day worship service that we could do specifically that would have the effect of discipling by empowering households in their particular tasks?” And a specific initiative would be something that has a way to measure or gauge whether we met it or not and has specific ownership—who’s going to accomplish it.

So an initiative would be: Every year our church, or during the next 52 weeks, we will have two sermons on husband-wife and parent-child relationships, specifically oriented to that part of family management. That may be a particular initiative. At the end of the year we can look back and say, “Well, did we preach two sermons—one on family and one on…one on husbands and wives and one on parents and children?” Either yes or no. That initiative is given to a particular person: “Who’s going to be responsible for it? Elder Tuuri. He does most the sermons. He’ll be responsible for making sure that in the pulpit this year, those two things are met.”

Our goal is to empower households, not just in terms of parental relationships, but that fathers may know how to engage in biblical economics, may be trained in vocation. So a specific initiative we may develop for this coming year would be that we would have a Sunday school class for 13 weeks going over how the Proverbs relate to one’s vocation in business. And that’s an initiative that helps the leaders of the church determine whether they’ve met that goal of discipleship—preparing the head of the household to engage in vocation from a biblical perspective. So there’s a specific initiative. We’ll know at the end of the year: Did we do it? Did we not do it? It’ll be assigned to a particular person: “Well, it’s your job to make sure this class comes off.”

Another initiative in terms of the music of the church may be to learn six new psalms for the coming year. Assign that to Brad and John. We can decide whether it’s been met or not at the end of the year.

So initiatives that were discussed—we haven’t written them up yet, but some issues that were discussed in terms of music is to establish a committee of men to investigate what it would take, or should we have a music minister here to assist the worship of the church? Should we hire a music person? The initiative is: Has the committee met during this year? Have they brought back a recommendation to the elders? Have they analyzed to see what costs this would require? Have they judged those costs in terms of the long-term effects? What would it cost long term? And so that’s a specific initiative.

Another initiative—we think teaching our children music is important. Well, then let’s put real deal to that. Let’s set an initiative of instructing our children in basic vocal singing. Maybe a Sunday school class, maybe a midweek class, maybe family camp becomes a focal point. We can bring the children together and teach them how to read music.

So we want to write a series of initiatives geared to achieve these specific objectives. And these initiatives are very specific items. They’re delegated to particular people. They have a specific time frame to them. Now, some of them might be more than a year, but they have a specific time frame, and we can measure whether they’ve been accomplished or not.

So an initiative isn’t just, you know, “Well, when somebody’s interested in doing a VBS, we’ll do that.” You can’t measure that. There’s no implementation, there’s no ownership, and there’s no budget. We’re entering into a process here at RCC of making use of wise stewardship of time, money, and materials at the church. This vision statement becomes the beginning basis, and the specific initiatives that will flow out of it determine—when we come to budgeting—”Well, what’s more important? Should we remodel a bathroom? Should we get a sign? Should we put money in a music minister account? Should we buy a stained glass window? What should we do with that money?”

It all folds into the vision of the church so that we know that we’re self-consciously trying to organize the affairs of the church to accomplish the great commission by engaging in Lord’s day services that promote missions, that produce discipleship, and that create Christian community.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, our objective is to come together on the Lord’s day and live out the new creation life that we’ve been given through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Everything that we do in the context of this vision statement, all the many initiatives that we’ll write and put our hands to, at the end of the day will be: will we live life the way it should be lived? Will we focus in what we do—particularly in Lord’s day worship—that we make sure that we have done what God requires of us to do, so that this becomes and enhances the great commission that our Savior gives us in Matthew 28?

He begins the great commission by saying that all authority has been given to him in heaven and on earth. Huge task. We’re talking about big work. But it’s all accomplished through the implementation of small initiatives—easily discernable whether they’ve been accomplished or not—given to particular men and women, maybe young people of our church, for ownership and for development, folded into this great plan of accomplishing and enhancing the great commission in the context of our lives.

Jesus says that he’s given us the gifts to do this. He says that he’s got the power and authority to accomplish this. And he says that he’s brought us together to this mountain today to worship him and to be instructed by him. That this is the task that he has called us together to receive from him. May we understand that great, amazing love and mercy that he has for us and respond with commitment to him.

Now, this song we’re going to sing is kind of a young people’s song, but all of us are young in this church. We’re almost a full-blown adult. We will become that this fall. We’re 19 going on 20. This is the 20th year. We’re not quite there. May God enable each one of you to think through, to pray about, a specific part of this vision statement of the church that you think you can be a part of engaging in—committing to some degree of time and effort to help us accomplish this.

And may we all be in great prayer about the meeting a week from Friday as we think more about the specifics of this particular strategy map to accomplish this great vision of loving the triune God and transforming a fallen world. Let’s pray.

Father, we do pray that as we sing this song and as we sing the latter song as well of commitment and dedication to our Savior, that you would move in our hearts. We thank you, Father, for the great blessing we have of like-minded people here who know that we’re living in the context of that new creation. Help us, Father, then to focus ourselves and to commit ourselves afresh to mission, discipleship, and community as we come forward, offering all that we have to you. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.