Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

So our last psalm we sang is a wonderful introduction really to our sermon text today in Psalm 133. Beautiful verses we just sang of God fulfilling all the desires of his people. God blesses us with blessings untold and that connected then to the defeat of our enemies. We are increasingly in our country, you know, more and more in the context of those that are enemies against us. And yet in the midst of this, we remind ourselves that Zion is the place where God sends forth his spirit upon us and causes us to be blessed.

And we can trust in that, that will provide us deliverance from our enemies as well. Let’s stand as I read Psalm 133. On the handout I have a version I’ll be reading and it’s structured the way I want to talk about it. We’ll be singing Psalm 133, the version we learned at camp the next few weeks. And so as we sing it, this will give us understanding of what we sing. Next week I’ll be speaking on the same psalm.

Today is kind of just an introduction to it as well as sort of a very brief picture of what’s given to us here. A brief and important one I think and my topic will be unity through service. Psalm 133, a song of ascents of David. Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. It is like the precious oil upon the head, running down on the beard, the beard of Aaron, running down on the edge of his garments.

It is like the dew of Hermon descending upon the mountains of Zion for there the Lord commanded the blessing life forevermore. Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for commanding blessing to your people. We are gathered together as those who sing your praises as they did at Mount Zion at the tabernacle of David. And for those we are gathered as those who no longer have to present blood sacrifices. And again, this was pictured to us at Zion.

We’re gathered, Lord God, as your people. And we know that in the context of this gathering that your blessing will flow upon us from on high. We pray for heavenly blessings through this text today to us, Lord God. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

Joseph was at Dave Herb’s music camp, vacation music camp, I guess. I’m not sure what they call it. The Trinity Church, which used to be East Side Evangelical Fellowship, EF. Dave Herb’s church has a week-long music festival and we sent Joseph up to sort of see if maybe we could do something like that down here. Maybe even bring Mr. Herb down to do it for us for a week next summer. Myself, Matt D., Elijah, my son, went with me. We went up for a day, went up one day and came back the next, got a chance to look at what he was doing.

And in the context of one of the classes I sat in on, Dave Herb said that he gave advice to the young people, this is like 150 12th graders down to, I don’t know, maybe first or second or third graders or something. And he was teaching older kids Bible. They taught the psalms they’d be singing at the end of the week throughout the week so they could have understanding of what they’re singing and his advice was—it was great advice to you—know throughout the rest of your life read the Bible quickly and read the Bible slowly. So read it quickly and get the sense of what’s going on in an overview but then also slow down and think about it.

And that’s what we’re going to do with Psalm 133. We’re going to do a quick look at it today connected to some other scriptures. And next week I’ll get into more of an exposition or exegesis of the text as we continue to mature in our understanding of the text that we’ll be singing the next few weeks in the version that Mr. Herb gave us.

This imagery we just sang of the blessings of God flowing upon his people from Zion and then the defeat of his enemies in connection to that was kind of beautifully put in the particular psalm settings that Mr. Herb chose to have the choir—all these children—sing by the end of the week. That what he did was he had them sing the Chichester Psalms, which were commissioned and Leonard Bernstein put together a composition. You remember Bernstein, not a good man but an interesting musician. And what he did is he put together portions of the Hebrew Psalms into these musical settings that are quite dramatic.

And at one place he takes the first couple of verses of Psalm 2 and he has the men singing that, those few verses in kind of a loud threatening manner. And at the same time, Bernstein has the other part of the choir, the women, singing lines from Psalm 23, how God prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies. So you have this very dramatic—the enemies represented by the men, Psalm 2, “let’s break the bands, ascend, you know, against the Lord and his anointed,” this kind of thing. And then the beautiful singing of the women, in the midst of all that, we gather together and God prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies.

And those things are not unrelated. It’s not just that we’re protected from our enemies, but we have the assurance given to us in the psalm we just read and sang that from this table goes forth victory for God over our enemies as well.

Kind of interesting, by the way, the particular music that he put the Psalm 2 section to was some of the score he wrote for West Side Story that didn’t actually make the final cut of the movie. And I don’t remember the words exactly. I should look them up. But the words he originally had written that music for was “We hate them. Let’s kill them. Let’s, you know, attack them.” You know, West Side Story was about gang warfare. And so this was about the people that wanted to kill the Irish gangs. And so it was very appropriate to use that music setting for the enemies represented in Psalm 2 who are attacking the church.

So anyway, today we want to talk about this blessing flowing to us as Psalm 133 says in the context of Zion and you know overall—it’s, you know, what we’ve got is we’ve got this wonderful blessing and it is coming from God of course. So it’s kind of got a beginning and an end that talks about blessing and the unity of brothers and then the end is “for there the Lord command the blessing life forevermore.”

So that’s like all blessings encompass together and those match up and then there’s two, you know, lights in the middle of it, two points of comparison.

My desire for each and every person that hears this here is that you have a life filled with blessing, abundance, wonderful experience of the blessings of God in your life spiritually, materially, etc., and you know, that’s what we all want. Joni Mitchell had a song, and again, I’m not commending her, but it was called “The Line” over and over again: “all we ever wanted was to come in from the cold.”

So this is what we want. The world is a cold place. As a result of Adam’s sin, it kind of became a wilderness. And we want a place of warmth, family, fellowship, friends, blessing. That’s what everybody wants. We want life. We want that rejoicing life that God gives us in symbolic form and in real form here at the table. You all want that and I want that so badly for each and every one of you to be able to put the problems in their proper context of the wonderful experienced blessings of God pouring to you.

And that’s what this psalm talks about. That’s the culmination. That’s where it begins and ends is how beautiful this is when we experience it. And in the middle of it, it has this picture. Well, it’s like Aaron the high priest. And at the back of the outline today for the little kids or the big kids that like to color, we’ve got Aaron there and he’s offering up prayers, you know, the oil the sacrifice, the incense sacrifice is like prayers ascending.

So we’ve got Aaron. We couldn’t find one of oil on his head. So Aaron’s the high priest and his garments that are spoken of here are high priestly garments. And the oil is very likely the anointing oil, the consecration oil for the high priest. It’s given to us in Exodus and Leviticus. So Aaron and his sons had to be cleansed, a new birth, anointed, the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and then they were ready to perform service and work.

So the garments are garments of glory, but they’re garments of labor and ministry in which Aaron will serve. So we have this picture of Aaron and the oil starts on his head and goes down to his beard. I can’t wait next week to talk about beards. I don’t think Aaron could cut his off. Anyway, so and then it goes down to the King James’s “skirts.” I think the word means opening—means the collar of his garment, the top of the garment. There was specifically commanded in Exodus to have this opening at the top of the garment. I think that’s what’s referred to here.

And so the oil starts up here on his head and goes down to his beard and down to the opening of his garment. And so the whole image is we’ve got this servant, this priest, household servant of God, blessed by God and empowered for work and ministry. And he’s one representation of this wonderful unity and blessing from God.

And the other representation is Mount Hermon. Mount Hermon was the tallest peak. It was about a little over 9,000 feet. Hood’s a little over 11,000, my son Elijah tells me. So it’s just a little less tall than Hood, but it was a big tall peak to the north. It was the northernmost part of Joshua’s conquering of the land. So it signifies the northern border of the land and the uppermost peak in all of Israel.

Now, some people say, “Well, how could the dew from Hermon go down to Mount Zion? Literally, this is impossible because they’re like, I don’t know, 200 miles apart or they’re a long way apart.” Well, you missed the point. This is not about literal geography. I mean, we could just as well say, well, how do those drops of oil get from his head onto his face without going onto his beard? We’ll talk about that next week. But that’s not the point.

We have a representation of the people of God and Jesus ultimately, right? Melchizedek is a high priest, but Jesus is also like Aaron, the book of Hebrews tells us he’s like Aaron. He’s the greater Aaron. And so we have a representation of Jesus and Aaron. We saw last week this wonderful journey where the death and resurrection of Aaron, the death and resurrection of the high priest is how we get from oppression to pleasantness.

And so it’s a representation of Christ in the gospel. So we got Jesus represented by Aaron and his priestly ministry or service represented by his garments. And we have the work of the Holy Spirit blessing all of that and producing this wonderful experience of the blessings of God. And so as we have the body sacramental or the body priestly, the next imagery is of the body geographically. The whole of the nation of Israel is represented by Hermon in the north and Zion in the south, Mount Zion, a small mountain in right in Jerusalem hill more.

But it the point is not how does it get from here to there. And maybe it does. Maybe the dew condenses in Hermon and runs down the streams and waters the southern parts and then it condenses into the sky and falls. That’s not the point. The imagery is that all of the land is also anointed with this heavenly blessing of dew from heaven from God. And it’s a representation of the body politic the way that Aaron is a representation we could say of the body ecclesiastical perhaps or you know the imagery.

So you know the people in the land are the same. What’s Israel? If I say Israel, what do you think? Well, you might think of the land over there, right? And it’s used that way in the Bible. Or you might think of all the people, or you might think of Jacob, the individual who was named Israel. And it’s all true. It’s all aspects of the same thing.

So the idea here is that the wonderful experience at the end of these wonderful blessings of God, “life forevermore.” That’s what you want. And this text tells us that those wonderful blessings are heavenly blessings that come to us as Aaron or as Christ as the body of Christ and they come to us as the body politic, the nation, the land, the people—it’s a representation of the people. And so the blessings are found here as represented in this way. And I think that what we can infer from this is a couple of things.

One, those blessings are tied to unity because at the beginning, you know what it says is “how good and how pleasant it is.” That’s eternal life forevermore. What we want is life forevermore. Goodness and pleasantness in everything that we experience. That’s what we want. That’s what God has in store. But “the Lord commanding the blessing,” I think, matches up with “brethren dwelling together in unity.” And even if you don’t buy the matchup part, the thing is rather obvious that the flow of the blessings of God, life forevermore, good and pleasantness is connected to the unity of brothers, not physical lineage brothers, but brothers in the sense of brothers and sisters in the Lord.

So you cannot have, you cannot experience life forevermore, goodness and pleasantness if you’re not doing that in the context of the unity of the brothers. And then the imagery takes on a little more meaning for us. The unity that’s required to experience this, the mechanism by which it’s experienced—we could say mechanism, but the way it’s experienced, it has to be in community. And so this is why we have the representation of the corporate body in the high priest, Jesus or Aaron. And we have the representation of the corporate body politic in the land.

And so the whole thing is teaching us the same thing. The imagery, the explicit teaching is that if this is what you want—I know you do. It’s what I want. I want blessing. I want to experience the life of God. I want to rejoice in that blessing. I want goodness and pleasantness in my life. Now, if you don’t want that, I don’t have anything for you today. But if you do want that, then the text tells us that is found in relationship to the unity of the church, the unity of the body of Christ, the unity of the people of God, the unity of brothers and sisters. It’s inextricably tied to it.

But secondly, the text tells us that Aaron is not just Aaron. He is a priest. He is in garbs of service. He’s a representation of Jesus. Jesus came not to be served, but to serve. Aaron was ordained not to be served, but to serve. Aaron wasn’t ordained to receive gifts. He was ordained to give gifts. God is a God who doesn’t primarily start by demanding gifts. He gives you gifts.

Last week we talked about this transition from wrath to grace. That all of Deuteronomy 6-11, the exposition of the first commandment—Rossi’s sermon on first commandment, whole bunch of history going on, why? Because the whole point is gift response. God gives them. You know, we talk about the prelude to the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord the God that led thee out of the house of bondage, out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

And we look at it as a historical prelude to the law: “Thou shalt love no other gods before me, more important to you than me.” But I don’t think it is. In Moses’ exposition at least, he takes the history of God’s gift of deliverance as the thing that’s to motivate us to respond with loyalty. Okay.

So we have Aaron is this representation of service, gift, laying down his life for other people because he’s a representation of Christ. So it tells us that you want goodness and pleasantness and life forevermore. You want the blessing like the dew that flows and all that stuff and the oil, the gracious, you know, the oil is a representation of the Holy Spirit. We’re having a great time. We’re really basking in delightedness. We got oil flowing over our head to our beards and the top of our garments. That’s what we want. We’re not going to get it in isolation. And we’re not going to get it in demanding to be served.

This unity, this life forevermore is found in the context of unity through service. And as you think about the life of a particular church, it’s kind of obvious—this is what happens. How do you get unity? Well, you get everybody together and force them to have unity. No. More often than not, what happens is people put their shoulder to the task. That’s how they get unified. They’re all doing something together.

It’s ministry and service emblematic of Aaron and his priestly garments here that produces the unity which is essential to the goodness, pleasantness and life forevermore. That’s the big picture. That’s the quick read, you know, of Psalm 133. We’ll look at it more slowly next week and glean more out of it exegetically, but that’s the picture. You want the book ends. It’s found at the middle and it’s found, you know, in the description of unity—unity through service.

And I want so badly for each and every person here, young person, older person, to have goodness and pleasantness in your life. My heart aches. I mean, it does. My heart aches, you know, that this would be your experience of the realization of God’s blessing upon you. My heart aches for that. And so I tell you today, speaking the words of Christ, I believe faithfully, that for me to point you to that is to point you to service and to point you to community.

This psalm, tremendous psalm of blessing, I think tells us just that. Now, other parts of the Bible do too. We have, for instance—well, let me just mention briefly why I have Article 17 of the Canons of Dort here. This great big rabbit trail now from Effectual Calling. But you know, we have this line down there if you have your outline. So even today it’s out of the question that the teachers of those taught in the church should presume to test God by separating what he and his good pleasure has wished to be closely joined together.

And now they’re talking about secondary means and calling people through the proclamation of the gospel. So it’s not you’re not a Calvinist and we all should be Calvinists. You’re not a Calvinist if you say God’s predestined so many and I’m going to sit on my hands. That’s not a Calvinist. A Calvinist believes the Bible and the Bible says secondary means and the result of those means are tied together.

We don’t want to separate what God has chosen to be closely joined together. And in the context of today what that means is I know you want goodness, pleasantness and life but you cannot separate that from what God in Psalm 133 has closely tied it together with. Okay? You can’t separate that—it is tied to unity through service.

Now if you don’t believe that today I want you to talk to me this week because I am 100% convinced of it and if you walk away from here saying I don’t think that’s what the Bible teaches, I want to know about it. I want to help. I want to be corrected if need be. But if I’m right, you’re going to walk away from here on a path not of goodness, pleasantness, and life forevermore.

If you doubt that, if you don’t apply yourself to unity through service, you’re going to separate what God has closely joined together, and you’re going to end up with a life that isn’t goodness, pleasantness, and life forevermore. You’re going to experience death, difficulties, and troubles.

Now, I should say quickly that trials and tribulations—you either experience this blessing in the midst of trials and tribulations. These blessings, goodness, pleasantness, life eternal are not contingent upon finances, upon material blessings in the sense of getting a lot of money. Not at all. No matter what your financial state, no matter what your state of physical health, you can still, I believe this text says you should expect, you should desire goodness, pleasantness, and life eternal. It’s not tied to those things in the scriptures, but what it is tied to is unity through service.

Now, there’s other places where this has told us as well. I mentioned again last week this journey. We’re all journeying. We’re all moving from oppression to pleasantness. We’re moving from stopped up wells to rivers of water flowing out. We get there through the death and resurrection of Christ. And we get there corporately. We can make application individually. I did last week. You know, these are literal truths. This isn’t some little story God made up. These are the names of the places that we talked about last week that the children of Israel actually went to. It’s historical fact.

But beyond the historical fact, it’s pointing to something about Christ rather obviously. Death and resurrection, death, burial, and resurrection at the middle. It’s pointing to something about the church. She goes through times of rending apart. We’re probably starting that now after 450, 500 years of the Protestant Reformation and the blessings. God tears things in two to put them back together to better form, right? He does it every Lord’s day.

Hopefully, I’ve convicted a few of you about unity service. Hopefully, when you read this Psalm 15, and I’ll put it here what I’m saying, you see the devastation that occurs in people’s lives through slander and gossip. You see why it’s put in that laundry list in Psalm 15 of entrance requirements? You see where the low-level disagreements or lack of unity I talked about last week is such a stench to the church because it plugs up goodness, pleasantness, life forevermore. It’s all premised on unity.

So hopefully we’ve been cut a little bit in two and God puts us back together more whole at the end of the service, brings us to life, all that stuff brings us back to life, etc. But that’s true of the church corporately as well. I believe that’s what Deuteronomy 10 is about as a corporate group of people. And we can make application individually, but we want to look at it corporate because it says that. Now it says, you know, this guy and that guy went here and there. No, it doesn’t say that in chapter 10:6 of Deuteronomy. He says, “Now the children of Israel journeyed.”

If you’re going to make the journey and come to increasing levels of goodness, pleasantness, life eternal, if you’re going to move from oppression to pleasantness, right, you’re going to journey corporately. You can’t do it on your own. God says that the good news is he’s brought you into this corporate reality of his blessings. Baptism does that.

1 Corinthians 12 says this. As the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body being many are one body, so also is Christ. Now, the context of this, which I’ll read in a couple of minutes, is the whole picture in Corinthians about unity. You know that you have a function in the church. There’s one body. You’re not a whole body by yourself. You’re an eye or a hand or a foot or a liver or a heart or whatever it is. You’re some kind of part of the body, but you’re part of one body. You see, and that’s the context.

And then he says in verse 13, “For by one spirit, oil spirit is connected to the oil. By one spirit we were all baptized, the dew, the oil came upon you in your baptism. We were all baptized into one body. Baptism, and then it says, ‘Whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and have all been made to drink into one spirit.’”

Isn’t that an odd verse, by the way? I don’t want to talk about it a lot, but you know, we’ve been all made to drink into one spirit. Well, we can’t get into that. But what we can say is that this text that is so significant about baptism is also significant about the Lord’s supper. It’s kind of talking about those two elements, right? Drink representing food and drink representing baptism.

In any event, the point is this is a text that tells us that we join the corporate journey. We participate in goodness, pleasantness, and life everlasting by being joined to the one body. We’re baptized into Aaron. Now, I know the Bible doesn’t say that. It does say we were baptized into Moses. The Old Testament church was. And I think we could legitimately imply that Aaron being a type of Jesus were kind of baptized into Aaron. We became Aaron, one body. That’s where you’re going to find goodness, pleasantness, life eternal.

If you’re in that body of Aaron that the spirit of God is flowing down to and those blessings and the oil, sweet smelling, lifegiving oil is flowing down on you. You don’t get that on your own. You get that through being baptized into the one body. That’s what the text says pretty clearly. That’s gospel. The gospel is you have been moved from a perception of rugged individualism, a perception of that to a realization of your need to be part of a corporate body and to serve in the unity of brothers to attain unity in the context of service.

That’s the only path to blessing. You’ve been moved from being apart to being brought into the corporate body. And it is in that body where blessing is found, in that baptized body, right? That’s what it says.

Now, I say illusion or perception of your individualism because if you start pressing on the definitions of that, well, it’s—well, let me just say this. A baby hears second person to become a first person. In terms of language, a baby hears you. A baby doesn’t start by asserting its individuality. A baby, even in the womb hears its mother speak, hears its father speak. A baby when it’s born isn’t some kind of individual ball bearing that starts out as I. A baby starts out as part of a corporate reality. Its parents speak to it in the second person: you, you, you. And as it does that, the baby gets a sense of its own identity as I.

Second person is primary to first person. I think as an illustration, in terms of how we live, I think that’s reality. That’s why I say it’s a delusion of individuality, complete individuality that we have prior to the baptism into the corporate body of Christ. I’m not, you know, don’t get all, you know, wigged out here. I’m not saying we’re not individuals. In some sense, we are, but I think the scriptures tell us quite clearly that, you know, the corporate entity is where our true self is found, where blessings flow. We are an ear or an eye by ourselves. We’re not a full body. Okay.

I say illusion because, you know, it was this individuality that Satan sort of tempted Adam and Eve with and they were under the conviction of their sin and broke relationship with God and with one another. But really, they still—you always have relationship. It’s either going to be blessing or cursing. You are transferred from the old body to the new body, the body where insanity of absolute individualism is taught and that’s the body that is our body politic in America today. That’s what we all believe. That’s what we are all raised to think of. That insanity—that we’re somehow complete isolated individuals, little ball bearings rolling around that might bump into each other but have no impact from one another.

Where the Bible says that reality is you’re always in the context of corporate. As a baby, you’re born into a family, a caregiver, and who you are is a response to gift. You’re gifted with life. You’re gifted with relationship. And you respond to mom or dad.

Well, anyway, not to make too big a deal out of this, but the point is this is gospel. This is beautiful stuff. We’ve been united in the place in the greater Aaron at which goodness, pleasant, life forevermore is going to flow into us. In the context of this is a great thing. We’ve been baptized into one body. So there’s a corporate nature of baptism. Baptism is the definitive mark, the physical action that God uses. Nothing magic in it, but it’s what he’s decided to use to move you from this illusion of individuality and bring you into full functioning corporate blessing, which is the place of the greater Aaron, baptized into Aaron, Moses, baptized into Christ. You’re one body.

We’re all one body now. And it’s in that unity that you’re going to find goodness, pleasantness, and life eternal. And if all that means to you is you have some kind of, you know, judicial connectedness to everybody here and maybe you sign the church covenant or grew up on the church covenant and that’s the end of your connection, you’ve missed the whole thing. You’ve missed the whole thing. You’ve been baptized into a body.

In Romans 6 it says that we were baptized together with Jesus. We were buried with him that the body of sin might be taken away. I don’t want to get into this much, but it’s interesting to reread Romans 6. And you know, it has this admonition at the end to not present the members of your body for sin anymore, but for righteousness. And if the transition is unity with Christ, then what it means is using all the things that God has gifted you with to serve the body of Christ, not yourself.

It’s service to others. And so individually, I think Romans 6 is individually addressing each of us individually. We’ve been grafted into this body and we’re supposed to use the members of our own individual bodies to serve the body. But I think it’s you could also say these things are true of the corporate body since the Bible and New Testament says that we’re Aaron or Jesus, right? Then when we read things like “therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lust. Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness to God,” I think we can think that there’s application of that to our church.

We have a corporate responsibility to not allow individual members of the body of Christ here to present themselves to wickedness and unrighteousness and to call them back. So the member body thing is set up first and foremost in terms of us being baptized into the one body and individual members of it. And service is how we manifest that unity. And in the unity through service that we engage in, we experience goodness, pleasantness, and life forevermore.

1 Peter 4:7-11 says the same thing. It says, “The ends of all things is near. Judgment’s coming.” And there’s a sense in which judgment’s always coming. He was talking about AD 70. But AD 70 set up the pattern. There comes a time at which judgments are happening and I think that there’s a judgment that’s kind of rolling through America right now.

But in any event, “therefore, be serious and watchful in your prayers. Starts with prayer. Okay? Starts with prayers. And above all things, primary thing to experience blessing and not curse in the judgment. Above all things, have fervent love for one another. Serve each other. He says that’s where the blessings flow. Love will cover a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without grumbling. Commanded. It’s commanded to us because it’s hard to do. It is hard to do. But it’s the path of blessing, goodness, pleasantness.

Be hospitable. As each one has received a gift, minister it to one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. The great blessing is again that God has gifted you and placed you in the body. That’s to receive the giftedness of your servants. And if you—this is how God has blessed us. He’s blessed us in unity and service combined together.

So you know we’ve been joined into this one body. And this body we are urged to use the gifts that God has given to us not for ourselves. Any gift you have from God is not for yourself. It’s to be ministered to somebody else. That’s what it says. “Each as each one has received the gift, minister it to one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” So wonderful gospel is that God has given us wonderful gifts. That’s the gospel. And these gifts are for our contribution to unity and service leading then—this is where blessing, goodness and pleasantness is found.

Ephesians 4: “He himself gave some to be apostles. Here’s some of those gifts are coming. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, the we should no longer be children.”

All right. What’s he saying? Well, he’s saying now on the corporate level what he had just told us on the individual level. You’re gifted individually. The gift is for the purpose of service and in serving you’ll come to increase unity and that unity of brothers dwelling together is gentleness or is goodness, pleasantness and life eternal individually. Now he’s saying the same thing has this idea of corporate dimensionality.

God has gifted the church. I’m a gift to you. You said, “I asked for a bread and he gave me well gave me hard bread.” You—I don’t think it says that, you know, we’re going to ask for bread and it won’t look like he’s giving us a stone. Seems like it looks like that a lot to us. But our faith is that it’s not a stone. It’s a good gift. Your elders, your deacons are gifts to you. Particularly here, apostles, pastors, evangelists, pastors are gifts and to what end? That the corporate body might engage in service.

I think that’s the proper way to look at this. So that you might engage in service and the end result of the engagement in the work of the ministry is for the edifying of the body corporate so that we all come to the unity of faith where the blessing is. Gives you gifts corporate gifts. My gift to you is you is blessing goodness life eternal is found by service. That service will increase unity. And in that unity, we grow together into a mature body. And this is blessing. We experience blessing.

And it says that if you don’t do this, then you’re like some stupid little kid. So if you don’t think that the key to the experience of goodness, pleasantness, and life eternal is serving others, and as a result of the service growing in unity, you’re stupid like a kid. That’s what I think the text tells us. You might disagree, but I’d like to hear about it if you do.

Because as I said, this is my gift to you today. That’s why anybody wanting to do at the end of this is go serve someplace in this church. Go serve in the community of this church and the broader community. Serve. Get more unity. Get blessed. That’s where goodness, pleasant eternal life is experienced.

Wonderful text. Psalm 133. This makes me want to smile every time I think about it. But that’s where it is. “Christ is the head from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of the saints in love.”

First Corinthians, we could go there. We could spend some time. I don’t think there’s really need to, but you want to read it. Of course, it talks about diversities of gifts but the same spirit, one spirit poured over, you know, the diversity of gifts to one body. You’ve been given these gifts, these activities to use in the context of the body and what does he go on to so 1 Corinthians 12 this is what he talks about and after that he says I’ll show you a great way now and he talks about love—1 Corinthians 13, right?

So if you have gifts, he says you can do really good sermons but you don’t have love. You don’t minister those gifts to other people in love, then it counts for nothing. It’s worse than nothing. It’s a clanging gong. So, you know, it’s kind of like the manna. You can only use it for other, you know, for the way it’s intended to be used by God or it turns into a bad thing. It rots and becomes bitterness to your soul.

So in the same way, he’s saying, you know, that these gifts have to be ministered in love. Love in usefulness. That’s what love is. Patience and usefulness. Kindness is usefulness. It doesn’t mean having a kind thought towards something. He’s being useful toward them. All the gifts useful toward the body. And if you do that, this is where love is. This is where goodness, pleasantness, life eternal is.

So it’s all the same thing in the Bible. It says these great things that really are exegetically drawn out in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 6 and Ephesians 4 rather and first Corinthians 12, baptized into all that stuff. It’s kind of taught exegetically more, but it’s saying the same thing over and over again that this cool image of the body of Aaron and the blessing from above and the body politic unified together, everybody joined together through the dew, the Holy Spirit. The whole thing is goodness, pleasant life, life everlasting, that experience coming as a result of unity through service.

So that’s the imagery. That’s the didactic teaching of scripture in the epistles. We didn’t look at it much. We looked at it a little, but they all reinforce the same thing. That’s the message. That’s what I want to tell you today. I want to tell you that I love each of you more deeply than you can know. And that in that love, I want you to experience goodness, pleasantness, life everlasting. Not positionally, but experience it.

And that the way you’re going to do that is through serving others in unity. And so that’s the message. That’s the gospel. That’s what Christ has done. He’s baptized you into this body. He’s gifted you for that service. You’re going to use that, those gifts of service and unity will enhance. We’ll come to a mature man. We’ll experience more and more goodness, pleasantness, and life everlasting. That’s the gospel. That’s what it is. And your response to that is to commit yourself to unity through service.

And I got two ways to do it. At my request, my wife has produced a list of different things that could be done around here. Lots of stuff. Decorating the sanctuary for different events, you know, doing this, that, and the other thing. All kinds of things to be done. Helping out the library, whatever it is. And these signup sheets and these boards are going to go up someplace today. I’m not sure where yet. When they go up over the next few weeks, look at them. If you’re not serving, if you haven’t aren’t doing something in terms of serving the corporate body here, look at the list. Where can I do? And maybe I can just sharpen pencils. Maybe that’s all you can do. Maybe you’re an eight-year-old kid and you think, “Well, gee, Pastor Tuuri says that’s where I’m going to get really blessed. I want to be blessed. I got to serve and that’ll bring me together with other people I’m serving with and it’ll build unity.” It is a great thing.

And the only thing you can figure out on the list is you can sharpen pencils. Do it. Do it. It’s that simple. From that up to more complicated things. So please take a look at those boards. Please think about how you, you know, we’re always kind of last minute. You know, we’re just in time, ti—and you know, we’re doing Ash Wednesday and all of a sudden we got to get something and now we’re doing Good Friday. Where’s that candle arbor? Yada yada. It’d be really nice if some folks took it upon themselves to organize something that simple. Making sure that candle arbor is pulled out and the candles are ready and it’s cleaned up after the end of the service for next Good Friday and for the use of it. That simple. See, service.

And as you take on these aspects of service, you’ll be doing things with other people, people outside of your normal comfort range perhaps like the force fellowships were doing, right? So building unity and cooperation that way to the end that you would have goodness, pleasantness, life eternal. That’s one way.

The second the second response you can give to this wonderful truth is found in the second one of the pages from the handout. Hebrews 13:1-4 in September’s marriage seminar. Hebrews 13, remember it gets to the application, the response section to the gospel. What’s the response? Well, begins with “let brotherly love continue. Don’t forget to entertain strangers. Just what we read before, brotherly love, ministering to each other, showing hospitality, exercising unity through service. This is the path of blessing,” he’s saying. “Remember the prisoners as if changed with them. Now listen, remember the prisoners as if chained with them, those who are mistreated since you yourselves are in the body also.”

Well, if we take this imagery, you see, you’re in the same body. You’re suffering even as they’re suffering. That’s what he’s saying. Your identity is found in community. You’re part of the same body. And it’s illusion to think that you’re not. And so care for those that are in prison and suffering, you’re having health problems or whatever it is, unity and service to one another.

And then he says “marriage is honorable among all the among all the bed done to father.” When we exposited this, we said that what it’s actually saying is marriage should be held honorably. Christian marriage should be protected and defended and encouraged in the culture. And based on that, this congregation and all kinds of other Christians saw our obligation to serve in the context of the corporate body here to defend marriage against homosexuals marriage and we all got involved and myself and a guy named Kent Walton were the two chief petitioners. Got measure 36 on the ballot, got it passed.

We obeyed Hebrews 13:4 because we want to serve the body. And now in the providence of God, I’m sitting at prayer meeting Friday morning every morning 9:00 to 9:30 Tuesday to Friday. Come if you can. We have prayer now. So I’m sitting at the half hour prayer meeting with of course you know Angie, but Matt L. is there cuz we’re going to have a meeting at 9:30 with Matt L., head of the marriage seminar group.

Matt D. is doing promotion. And Kent Walton, the same guy who really was the one that got the anti-gay marriage thing on the ballot. Kent was the guy. And now he’s in Oregon City. He pastors at Hilltop Community Church. And now we’re praying about his involvement. He’s our church rep coordinator. So it’s his job to talk to the other pastors, get people in each of the other Oregon City churches who will coordinate registration for the marriage seminar and promote it. That’s his job.

And as we’re praying about this, I’m thinking, Lord God, thank you so much that you join Kent and I together, unity and service, to defend Christian marriage against homosexual marriage. And thank you so much that we’re not just putting off something bad. We’re putting on joint efforts now to promote and encourage Christian marriage through the marriage seminar we got coming up. Ain’t that neat, Mike? That’s cool. That’s the oil of the Holy Spirit. That’s goodness, pleasantness, and life eternal working together with this guy and all of a sudden realizing that nobody planned it this way. But the spirit of God is having us work jointly on this same thing.

And you’re all part of that. I represent you in these things and I want you to be visibly part of it. If unity and service is stressed in Hebrews 13 corporately and then in terms of the family and marriage, well, surely when we come to a peacemaking, a conflict resolution seminar giving us biblical instruction on how to increase unity and marriage, but by application, unity in all kinds of potential areas of conflict to grow to greater unity. This is right on target with this message, isn’t it? This is what we should be doing. This is what all of us should be doing.

I mean, not all of us may be necessarily, every last one, but I’m praying that an awful lot of you people want to register for this thing. Not because your marriages are messed up. Hopefully they’re not, but because you want to have better unity in your marriage and you want to be trained again on how to achieve that unity through service where blessing is found with other things as well. The peacemaking materials would be applicable directly to marriage but to all other conflicts as well.

So the response to the great gospel that Jesus has, you know, brought us through baptism into this corporate reality of the spirit blessed body of Aaron, so to speak, the spirit blessed body politic marked by Hermon in the north and Zion to the south—the response can be yeah let’s serve here. In this seminar and this seminar is particularly important because it’s one of those things that Hebrews says is right up there at the top of the list to encourage Christian marriage and to encourage unity both in the family and the corporate culture. And we have conflicts. Christian marriage is broken down so we can bring learn truths bring others peoples to it.

And this would be just perfect for service through unity, bringing us more pleasantness, goodness, and life eternal. So I want you to register for the conference. That’s what I want you to do. Most of you, I don’t know if every one of you should or not, but I think most of you should. Awful lot of you should. It’s, you know, it’s $65 for a couple, $35 for individuals prior to August 1st. I know people in this church who frequently go out to on frequently, but occasionally go to dinner and you’ll spend that much maybe on a dinner or at least on at least you go out twice even McDonald’s you’re spending close to that much.

And this is like to really work at become equipped again to be reminded again of how to increase unity in marriage and by application to the broader community. So I think it’s cool what God is doing. He’s building unity through service which is where goodness pleasantness and life everlasting is found. Not just here at RCC with this event, but with other churches in Oregon City. We want to influence them. We think we got gifts for them in terms of understanding of doctrine. We influence people through service, right? So we’re serving now as the host church, the ones that are taking all the time and effort and putting this thing together.

And L. is stepping up and Michael L. is stepping up and D. all kinds of guys stepping up and this is service to the broader church and they’re going to appreciate it. So it builds unity through service in the one church of Jesus Christ in Oregon City. That’s the way Paul talks about it in the New Testament epistles. There’s a church meeting in many places in Ephesus or wherever it might be, but it’s one church. There’s a sense in which there’s one body right here in Oregon City and this body is brought to increase unity through this marriage seminar.

And it’s a cool deal. It’s a great thing to have happen. So I want you to reg—I’ve got on the outline here some benefits of the marriage seminar help some of our married couples and relationships number one. Number three under benefits marriage seminar benefits leadership training for team members and attendees like I said last week you should be teachers and if you’re going to be a teacher you learn from good teachers and then you try to go out and teach that stuff yourself.

So registration for the marriage conference should equip you better to be a good teacher of others to help bring unity in marriages and in other relationships. How to engage in biblical peacemaking. Okay, so that’s what this—one of the benefits of this seminar. Service to other Oregon City churches is unity through service number five as I said and there’s others as well and meets our strategy map and I’ve got those on there.

Now drop down to it says service opportunities. One: Family Life is the primary sponsor of this event. They’re the ones who put it on. It’s kind of a turnkey seminar. It’s a result actually of Family Life, which is a subset of Campus Crusade with Peacemakers, which is has more reformed roots. It’s basically a Peacemaker guy that will come and present it, but it’s got the name of Family Life attached on it. We’re going to be buying radio ads, I’m pretty sure, on Family Life’s. They have a half hour radio station every morning, 9:30 to 10. Listen to it.

I use it as an encouragement to invite other people to the seminar. I think if you listen to it, you’ll like it. I had never listened to it before. Last Monday I turned it on and they had were playing an interview that Family Life had done, Bob L. and Dennis Rainey with Elizabeth Elliott and her and her and her husband from 10 years ago. It was just delightful. I think Elizabeth Elliott is such a godly example to us and more of we should be pushing her books and stuff more.

But in any event, it was a great show. Great half hour show. The next day was playing more of that interview and talking about it. So listen to the program perhaps register for the conference. Know and pray for the leadership team. Know those that you know are leaders amongst you in this matter and pray for them. John S. is going to be the prayer coordinator. Here we go. Right. Prayer is the emphasis. Lightheart decides to teach on prayer. We decide I decide to go hear this DD Duke guy talk on prayer. We start prayer up here. And now we’ve got a very coordinated effort being overseen by John S. with John working closely with him.

And now Vance and Nancy Adams have joined the prayer team. You may not be able to actually get involved, to register even or come. You may not be able to help set up tables or bring donuts or refreshments. You may not be able to convince neighbors to come with you, but you can pray. Every one of you can pray. And you know, volunteer. We’re putting together a prayer team. And this will include people from other churches.

Tell John S. today. He’s going to be overwhelmed, I hope. I want to be part of that prayer team. I want to get together with you guys. I want to help, you know, encourage the congregation to pray about this. I want to do that. I want unity through service. I want goodness, pleasantness, life eternal. And one way I can do that is by engaging in this particular ministry, being with John S., and helping him to build this prayer team, and then praying effectively. Volunteer to be part of the team. Pray for him if nothing else. Pray for the team. Pray for this event.

Matt D., Matt’s the promotional director. He’s got the biggest jobs. And Matt’s here, I assume. He had a deadline of Wednesday. The pastor’s monthly pastor’s prayer meeting is this was going to be this Wednesday, first Wednesday of the month. Sorry, Matt, but it’s Tuesday because of the 4th of July. So Matt has now an even harder job to get registration forms ready to hand out at that meeting. So the next day and a half, pray hard for Matt. Lots of work for him to do to provide nice registration for flyers, etc.

So pray for Matt. Maybe if you’re really good at desktop publishing, ask him today, can I come in and help tomorrow put it together for you? Can I maybe come in, Matt, and take your masters and run them to Kinkos for you or up to Office Depot. You know, get involved. Unity through service, the way to life eternal pleasantness and goodness.

Pray for other promotional ideas. Maybe you got some ways to promote the event that Matt hasn’t thought of. Talk to him. Pray for Matt and myself as we do the ads on KPDQ. And then Ken Walton, as I said, pray that he might be effectively reaching—get by next end of next week 10 pastors who’ll have key contact people in Oregon City churches to promote this event so that we all can move together in unity through service.

Thank God for Kent Walton, by the way. I just—I don’t know what God’s doing. You know, Kent’s strongly Arminian and all that stuff, but he’s the same guy that took the worship memorial that, you know, I mostly wrote and CRC adopted and is trying to encourage all the other churches in Oregon City to do it. I don’t know. It’s, you know, the Holy Spirit works that way and you just think this is, this is good and pleasant. I like this, you know.

So anyway, thank God for Kent that he’s—he agreed to be the church coordinator. Michael L. needs to raise, you know, a couple thousand bucks or more. I don’t know how much he’s going to raise. We’re going to get corporate sponsors for the radio ads and of the event. Pray for Michael. If you’re a businessman, tell him today, “Hey man, I’ll kick in some money. You bet. I’ll help make Mike’s work easy. Be part of this effort.” Unity through service.

Dave H. is going to be the facility coordinator sort of guy. Tell Dave today. I hope he’s, you know, got lots of people around him this afternoon saying, “I’ll bring some cookies. I’ll bring some punch for the breaks. I’ll bring, you know, veggies. I don’t like cookies and nugget. All that sweet stuff. You bring the veggies. Okay, great. Some people bring vegetables. Some people bring cookies. Bring stuff. Tell Dave, I’ll help set up tables. Tell Eli, I’ll set help set up the book table for you. I may even be there and help promote your books. Right. Help out. Tell Dave, ‘Yeah, I want to be part of this event.’” Pray for Dave if nothing else. And tell him what you can do to help.

Pray for me for wisdom for follow-up Bible studies. We want to start with this seminar but then have some maybe meetings and Bible studies following up and then pray for Matt particularly. Matt L. is the one overseeing all these things.

So there you go. The good news is that God has brought us into the sacramental body of Aaron. He’s brought us into the corporate body, the body politic. This is a place where the spirit of God is poured upon us where he has given us gifts to use to serve one another. And as we serve each other, we increase in unity. And this is the place indeed where goodness, pleasantness, and life eternal is found. All of this is the command of God. He commanded the blessing. This is the blessing he’s commanded on your head today.

Praise God. And may you, as you come forward with your tithes and offerings, come forward in response, saying, “I’m going to look at those sheets Christine’s putting up today. I’m going to try to find some place to do something here. Or I’m going to talk to Dave H. I’m going to talk to Matt. I’m going to talk to Michael. I’m doing something today. Maybe I’m doing two or three things today in response to this because I want a life of goodness and pleasantness. You’re going to find it no place else than through service and the unity of the church of Jesus Christ.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the wonderful blessings you poured upon us. Thank you for your Holy Spirit binding and working together in such mysterious ways, in such beautiful and effectual ways to bind us together and to cause us to have joy and pleasantness. I pray that this congregation may delight today in the wonderful blessings you have commanded for us and out of that delight might be loyal to you and to your church and minister the gifts you’ve given to them. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.