God's Calling On Our Lives (Afternoon)
Download MP3So, if you have a Bible, open to the book of Jeremiah chapter one. Jeremiah one is also printed in your worship guide. If you've got one with you, this is where we're to be this evening. This year, we've been studying the writers that are called the major prophets. So a prophet was someone that God kinda called and commissioned to take his words to his people.
Joseph Rhea:And the major prophets wrote, really it just means big. And so they wrote the big books we have. We spent some time early on in the prophet Ezekiel, one of the big ones. We just wrapped up the prophet Isaiah. And for the rest of this year, we're gonna look briefly through the prophet Jeremiah.
Joseph Rhea:And so we're kind of kicking that off today. We're gonna learn a little bit about who Jeremiah was and we're gonna see what god is setting up to say here from this chapter. Now, the whole chapter is printed in the worship guide but I'm just gonna read the first 10 verses for us. So Jeremiah chapter one verses one through 10. These read, the words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, one of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah, the son of Ammon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign.
Joseph Rhea:It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, and until the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the captivity of Jerusalem in the fifth month. Now, the word of the lord came to me saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations. Then I said, ah, lord god, behold, I do not know how to speak.
Joseph Rhea:For I'm only a youth. But the lord said to me, do not say I'm only a youth. For to halt all to whom I send you, you shall go. And whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them.
Joseph Rhea:For I am with you to deliver you, declares the lord. Then the lord put out his hand and touched my mouth and the lord said to me, behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Joseph Rhea:Let's pray one more time. Father, we honor just the reading of your word. This is what we need. It's not my words that we need tonight. It is your words that you gave to Jeremiah.
Joseph Rhea:And now centuries later, you're giving to us. So would you speak to us through your word this evening? Meet us and change us for your glory. In Jesus' name, amen. So if you've been at Redeemer for a few years or longer, chances are you've probably heard Alton Hardy come preach here.
Joseph Rhea:So Alton is a friend of our church, a personal friend of Joel, our lead pastor. He's a pastor in Fairfield, which is one of the poorest areas in Alabama. Fairfield has some deeply entrenched issues related to poverty, fatherlessness, drug issues, and other things. They make it a place that's it's easy to write off. To just want to get out of and get away.
Joseph Rhea:Alton grew up in deep poverty outside Selma, Alabama. So, rural poverty rather than urban. His family were able to kind of leave that world. He got an education and it could've just like left that entire world behind but he felt convicted of the need to help people experience the salvation and renewal that he did And that conviction led him back to Alabama, to Fairfield, where he's been working for over a decade to preach the word of God, to help people find life in Christ, and to see their neighborhood renewed on every front. There's a podcast called Recorded that captures and tells a story.
Joseph Rhea:I think it came out a week or so ago and the narrator says this, as they're kind of introducing it. They say, I'm not gonna tell you that the neighborhood is having a wholesale revival but I can tell you that Alton's church is growing. His ministry has been teaching kids to
Joel Brooks:read, buying and repairing houses for married couples, working to keep a grocery store open in their food desert. In other words, they're saying that the labor is hard, things are moving slowly, they've been there
Joseph Rhea:for thirteen years, but there are things happening, there are things changing. There's kingdom work taking place there in Fairfield. Now this podcast goes on to talk about how a lot of it is pretty ordinary. It's trying to keep a grocery store afloat. It's mowing people's lawns.
Joseph Rhea:It's helping kids in school. It's making it easier for couples to get married, stay married and have kids. Just providing basic education around finances and parenting things like that. It's not glamorous and it's not easy, but they are seeing God's kingdom grow in the world. So this year as we've studied the major prophets, we've seen God call men into kingdom work and women as well, but you know particularly men here who wrote these books.
Joseph Rhea:This kingdom work is often really really hard. And Jeremiah's story is gonna be no different. From the opening verses, we know that his ministry began during the reign of King Josiah who was maybe the best king that Israel ever had. David is the only one you can kind of compare him to in terms of Josiah's faithfulness to God. But Josiah came too late.
Joseph Rhea:Before him, a king called Manasseh had completely destroyed God's covenant with his people. He had set up altars to pagan gods inside the temple. He had gone so far as to sacrifice his own son to a demon and God had said, this is over. There's nothing more that can be done. This covenant is broken and this version of the kingdom, this expression of it is going to end.
Joseph Rhea:So Jeremiah starts in what seems to be a renewal or a revival that might reverse that direction. But as we're gonna see, it's it's just too late for that to change. We see in the early verses that Jeremiah is a young man. So he calls himself a youth. And in Hebrew, means a guy who's still young enough that he lives under his parents' roof.
Joseph Rhea:So maybe he's old enough to get married, but he's still living with his parents. We know later in the book that God tells him not to get married. And so he kind of gets into marriageable age along this time. He ministers for about forty years, starting ballpark like June and he sees Josiah just seemed to do so many things right. All the way into kings who just become puppets of big empires until Judah is sacked and destroyed and its people are exiled.
Joseph Rhea:Jeremiah is actually forcibly kidnapped and taken to Egypt and he dies in captivity. And so Jeremiah sees the darkest period of his people's history, over forty years. You could probably guess what kind of tone this book has by and large. He's received the nickname the weeping prophet because of how much sorrow and anger are kind of laced through this book. And that's what calls what God calls Jeremiah to do.
Joseph Rhea:He calls him to minister through judgment and exile, to warn people that it's coming, to try to call them back to God, and then to figure out how to live when their world is destroyed and ruined. So Jeremiah has an incredibly hard task. And in his forty years of ministry, we have a record of two people who we would call success stories. So two individuals in all of this forty years who actually listened to Jeremiah and turned around and took his message to heart. So from an earthly perspective, Jeremiah's kingdom work was a failure.
Joseph Rhea:It was completely fruitless. It's some of the hardest in the Bible. And in the verses that we read this morning in chapter one, God is preparing Jeremiah for tough kingdom work. Jeremiah doesn't know how this is gonna go, but he knows from the rest of chapter one that things are gonna get really tough. He sees that judgment is coming.
Joseph Rhea:He sees that God is preparing him for a hard road ahead. And so God gives Jeremiah three reminders in the passage we read this evening to sustain him through tough kingdom work. And whether you're doing kingdom work or just trying to live in God's kingdom, if you're in a place where you would say, my life is tough right now, it is harder than I thought it was gonna be, then these are God's words for you as well. So we'll look at how God prepares Jeremiah and how God prepares us for hard kingdom work. The first reminder that God gives Jeremiah is that God chose Jeremiah.
Joseph Rhea:That God chose Jeremiah for this work. If we reread verses four and five, we see, now the word of the Lord came to me saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations. So Jeremiah is a young man and God is calling him to a task that's going to overwhelm him completely.
Joseph Rhea:Jeremiah is gonna see decline and disaster that he's never seen before and experience hardship that nothing in his life to this point has prepared
Joel Brooks:him
Joseph Rhea:for. God knows that. And so he starts Jeremiah's call by reminding him, he says, let me tell you where your story begins. Your story begins before you were a child in your parents' arms. It begins before you were a baby.
Joseph Rhea:It begins even before you were conceived. God tells Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. So God tells Jeremiah first, I formed you, that God created him intentionally. And then he says, Even before that though, I knew you and I was preparing you. We opened our service with Psalm 139 which has these same kinds of truths in a different form.
Joseph Rhea:Psalm one thirty nine thirteen says this, it says, for you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. So as Christians, we believe that human life is sacred from the moment of conception because of texts like these. That God intentionally planned and created every life in the womb. But God didn't just know Jeremiah or form him.
Joseph Rhea:He says before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations. So God said, I have a job for you and I had it before you were born. To consecrate something is to set it apart for special use. My wife and I, we don't have fine China but we do have a case of plates and cups that are special dishes for special occasions that our kids are not allowed to use even though they do sneak in and use them from time to time.
Joseph Rhea:We regularly have to disappoint them by saying those are for special occasions, they're not for everyday use. In other words, they've been consecrated for a special purpose. That's what it means. So God tells Jeremiah, I have set you apart. Before your story began, I wrote it.
Joseph Rhea:I orchestrated your entire life, and I did it according to my purpose. I chose you, and I chose you for this. And we might think that sounds nice for Jeremiah. It would be nice to be told by God that I've been chosen and set apart for a special purpose. But listen to a few passages that the apostle Paul writes to a bunch of just ordinary Christians in the city of Ephesus.
Joseph Rhea:These are people whose names we don't know, who are not famous, who didn't become powerful, go on to do quote unquote special things. He writes this. He writes, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. So Paul says, God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. For us to be holy and blameless before him.
Joseph Rhea:Before the foundation of the world, God chose these nobodies in Ephesus. He chose to make them holy before him. That's another word for consecrated, for set apart. So God didn't just pick kind of the A team by name and then let the rest of the people figure things out for themselves. He picked every man, woman and child who is part of His kingdom and part of His family from eternity past.
Joseph Rhea:He has set us apart to belong to him. And in the next chapter of that same letter in Ephesians two ten, we read this. For we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. So a workmanship is almost like a masterpiece. It's a product to be proud of.
Joseph Rhea:It's something we wanna show off and display to others that we've done. So these ordinary Christians in Ephesus, they're part of God's masterpiece. They're created for good works and it says that God set those good works for them from beforehand. Before he saved them, he wrote the works that he intended for them to do. So that means that for the bunch of nobodies in this room tonight, self included, God has prepared us just like he prepared Jeremiah for a life of good works before the foundation of the world.
Joseph Rhea:For us to be set apart to him, for us to belong to him and for us to live a life of kingdom work that he has prepared for us. So kingdom work might look like sharing the good news of Jesus with a coworker. It might look like helping tutor kids through Avondale Elementary as one of our ministry partners. It might look like mowing your elderly neighbor's yard or volunteering in our nursery and cuddling babies for Jesus, which sounds like a joke. But I got to do it once this summer and it was awesome and you should all do it.
Joseph Rhea:The kids seemed like me. It's so fun. Whatever your personality, your wiring, your upbringing, your strengths and your weaknesses, God sovereignly formed you in your mother's womb. And if you're in Christ, it's because God sovereignly chose you before the foundation of the world and has a life of kingdom work prepared for you. So all you need to do is look around and ask, where does God's kingdom need to grow?
Joseph Rhea:Who needs the love of Jesus around me and what can I do to show that? That's your first step in the direction of finding kingdom work. So God chose Jeremiah for kingdom work. That's his first reminder. Let's see how Jeremiah feels about this news.
Joseph Rhea:If we look at verse six, we read Jeremiah says, then I said, ah, Lord God, behold, I don't know how to speak for I'm only a youth. Like we said already, Jeremiah is a young man, he's a teenager and he knows it. He says, I don't know how to speak. I haven't been trained in these things. I haven't been equipped or prepared for this.
Joseph Rhea:He might be old enough to get married, but he's not old enough to be God's prophet to the nations. He says, God, are you sure you're not making a mistake? I'm not enough. But if we look through the Bible at God's qualifications for kingdom work, not being enough is near the top of his list. So Moses had some kind of speech impediment that made him not confident enough to be God's prophet to Pharaoh in Egypt.
Joseph Rhea:Joshua that God called to replace and take over from Moses after Moses died felt so young and inadequate that God had to tell him three times in the first chapter of Joshua be strong and courageous which means that Joshua was quaking at the prospect. Ruth, who became the great grandmother of King David, she was a foreigner. She wasn't an Israelite, she was a Moabite. And she was a widow who had no wealth and no land, no inheritance when she followed her mother-in-law to Israel to take care of her. She wasn't privileged enough.
Joseph Rhea:David himself was this young short shepherd boy whose brothers were impressive and looked like kings and he was the, oh yeah, I guess I've got this other son, you know, and he's kind of brought before the prophet Samuel. So David wasn't impressive enough. God regularly calls people who aren't enough from a worldly perspective to be part of his kingdom and his work. They're not young enough, they're not old enough, they're not educated enough, they're not rich enough, they're not pure enough, they don't have a clean enough past. Not enough is exactly what God wants.
Joseph Rhea:There's a verse that's quoted three times in the Bible. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. That the people that God is looking for are people who know that they are inadequate to belong to his kingdom but who throw themselves on his mercy anyway. That's exactly who God is looking for. So let's look now with that lens at verses seven through nine of our passage.
Joseph Rhea:The Lord said to me, do not say I'm only a youth for to all to whom I send you, you shall go. Whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them for I'm with you to deliver you, declares the lord. Then the lord put out his hand and touched my mouth and the lord said to me, behold, I have put my words in your mouth. Let's notice first what God doesn't tell Jeremiah.
Joseph Rhea:So God doesn't say, actually, you are old enough. You just need some self confidence. You've got the gifting. You've got what it takes. He doesn't do that.
Joseph Rhea:He doesn't build up Jeremiah's self confidence. That's not what he wants from Jeremiah at all. God touches Jeremiah's mouth and he says, I've put my words in your mouth. God wants Jeremiah not to be confident in himself but in God and in what God has done for him. God is perfectly fine with Jeremiah feeling inadequate.
Joseph Rhea:That's an accurate assessment of reality. Jeremiah is not wrong in that. God wants Jeremiah to trust God more than he trusts himself. A person with that mindset is going to let God equip him rather than lean on his own natural strengths. And that's the second thing that God does for Jeremiah to prepare him for kingdom work is God equips him for something he can't do.
Joseph Rhea:See, when God calls you to kingdom work, he might use your strengths or your gifts. The apostle Paul had great learning and God used that. Barnabas in the New Testament was wealthy enough to property and some financial independence and God used that for Barnabas' ministry. But God is at least as likely to call you into a place where you know you're out of your depth. Where you know you don't have your own strengths to lean on and bring to the table.
Joseph Rhea:Because that's gonna make you depend on him and not on yourself. You're gonna have to trust him because you're at the end of your own resources and you lean on him because you look around and you've got nothing within yourself to lean on. I recently listened to an interview with an Iranian pastor named Farshid. Farshid converted from Islam to Christianity and then went on to become a pastor. In Iran, Christianity is kind of tolerated but Christians are forbidden from evangelizing, telling other people about Jesus, and Muslims aren't supposed to convert to Christianity.
Joseph Rhea:So Farshid was at kind of a retreat or a meeting with some other leaders from his church in someone's house when a sting operation got most of them arrested. Somehow the police who came kind of asked Farshid like, what are you doing here? Are you related to someone? And they actually, they let him go. And so he initially got away free and he got his kids in the car, he had a seven year old daughter, a toddler son, and he got to like drive off while everyone around him got arrested.
Joseph Rhea:But on the road as he was driving around, he felt convicted of the teaching, Jesus' teaching from John that a shepherd doesn't abandon his sheep. And so he felt like he had to turn around and return to be with them. So he took his daughter to her school, he took his son to his daycare, and then he said, that was the last time I saw my daughter for ten years. I still haven't seen my son as he was giving this podcast because he drove back to the house where he was promptly beaten and arrested, imprisoned for ten years with the first, I think he said three sixty one days in solitary confinement which is not how the other pastors in his church got treated. And so as Farshid was telling this story, he said, well there were two times that I lost hope.
Joseph Rhea:Which is like just two times you lost hope in a year of solitary confinement. But he also told of a time where God filled him with such joy that he was singing and dancing so noisily that his guards thought he was like trying to escape. And so a guard busted in and Farshid was just able to greet him like warmly and with absolute love to where the guard said, You're better than me. Like the guard told him that. And as Farshid was telling this and was telling about the other things he kind of endured in his ten years in prison, he had zero like amount of pointing to himself.
Joseph Rhea:He said, Everything that happened through me and to me was entirely the work of God in my soul that was enabling me to do this. He said, God equipped me to do something that there's no way that I could have done myself. So God equipped Farshid for that kingdom work just like he equips Jeremiah. Let's look a little more closely at what he equips Jeremiah with. So if you look at verses nine and ten, says the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth.
Joseph Rhea:The lord said to me, behold, I've put my words in your mouth. I've set you this day over nations and over kingdoms to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. So what has God given Jeremiah to equip him for this work? He's given him his words. In verse 10, God tells him what these words are going to do.
Joseph Rhea:To pluck up and to break down our expressions for fighting sin. Plucking up is like pulling up weeds out of a garden. We have aspirations to be gardeners at my house. And so we have one little garden bed that has three blueberry bushes in it. Blueberry bushes, I don't know if they grow fast or not, they grow a lot more slowly than weeds.
Joseph Rhea:And so in this garden with these three little blueberry bushes that are like maybe I've added an inch or two this year, there are a lot of weeds that grow a lot faster than that. And so to keep this a garden and not just a box of weeds, we have to regularly go in there and pluck up weeds to pull them out and get rid of them to maintain our garden. And so we have to do to have a garden. To break down referred most closely to tearing down a statue or tearing down an idol. So if there's a statue to a false God, Jeremiah's job was to preach God's Word in the hope that people would be moved to tear it down and leave it in the dirt.
Joseph Rhea:If you're a Christian, you've probably had an experience where God suddenly made you aware of something that had to be plucked up out of your life or torn down from it. Where you suddenly became convicted over pornography or drunkenness or gossip, where you realized you were making your career or a romantic relationship the center of your life, your source of meaning and purpose and comfort. And God told you, you can't have that and be part of my kingdom. You can't love both of them the same amount. You have to choose one over the other.
Joseph Rhea:You can't have blueberries and weeds growing. One's gonna kill the other. So God's words pluck up and they tear down. That brings people to repent and to turn to him. He also says that his words destroy and overthrow.
Joseph Rhea:These are descriptions of judgment. So God gives Jeremiah the specific job in this case to say Judah is going to be judged. It's going to be conquered by foreign kings. So later on through the rest of Jeremiah one, which is printed in the worship guide, we're not gonna read it, but Jeremiah sees a vision of a boiling pot coming from the North that is God's judgment flowing out over the idolatry and the greed and the oppression of the poor that have been rampant through Judah for generations now. And so the earthly kingdom Jeremiah has known, the government, the temple, the people, it's coming to an end.
Joseph Rhea:Now we live in a different stage of history and salvation, and so we don't have exactly the same message. But Jesus did tell his followers that no matter how many nations or countries or tribes there are, at the end of the day there are ultimately two kingdoms. There's the kingdom of the world that runs after worldly goods using worldly methods. So it's after wealth or power or status or comfort and pleasure. Individual lives can be built around those things.
Joseph Rhea:So can families or institutions or governments. That's the kingdom of this world. And then there's Jesus' kingdom where God is worshipped and God's way is followed. Where God alone defines truth, meaning and purpose. Where love as he defines it, triumphs over selfishness.
Joseph Rhea:Where holiness displaces sin. God's kingdom is growing amidst the kingdom of the world. It's going to win one day and the kingdom of the world and anyone who's built their hope around the kingdom of the world is going to be overthrown. So, tells Jeremiah, your own nation has joined the kingdom of the world and so you've got to tell them that it's going to be overthrown. It's not going to last in a way that they think it will.
Joseph Rhea:In the same way, our call is to in love tell our family members and neighbors this world isn't going to last. There's no political regime that's gonna put things fully and finally right. Wealth is gonna fade. Relationships are gonna end. Even if we have those things in life, death takes them from us.
Joseph Rhea:There's only one kingdom that doesn't end with death. And we're called, nobodies that we are, to join it. So God's word uproots sin brings judgment. But that's not all it does. It also says that God's words, they build and they plant.
Joseph Rhea:So that god's words aren't just destructive, they're constructive as well. His words bring life. I once worked for a church where the pastor who led the membership class told his story to every incoming group. He was actually the first person put under church discipline by that church. That decades before he had been so entrenched in alcohol addiction that he was ruining his life and his marriage and the leaders of his church had to come and say, we see no evidence that you are living as a Christian, that you have an actual Christian faith and so you've got to clean up or you can't be part of this church anymore.
Joseph Rhea:You're not even trying. And that warning led him to conviction, repentance, ultimately faith in Christ to where finally decades later, was serving that church as a pastor. So God's words had plucked up an addiction out of his life and they had planted and built a reconciled, renewed, restored one. That's the kind of thing that God's words can do. God equipped Jeremiah with the words that made their way into his book.
Joseph Rhea:Again, we might think that sounds nice. I'd love to have God audibly speaking words to me that I can live by and give to others. But the beauty of worshiping the sovereign, all powerful God that we have is that we have just that. The words that we have, not just in Jeremiah but all through the Bible, it says that these are God breathed. That while they were being written by their human authors, at the exact same time, they were being co authored by the sovereign God of the universe So that every word in them was written not just for the people who received them, but also for us as well because God is all powerful and all seeing.
Joseph Rhea:And so he knew as these words are being written down that we would be studying them here nearly three thousand years later. That when we read the Bible on our own or in community, we are reading god's words to us afresh And so in that sense, we are even more equipped than Jeremiah was. And so that's why we study God's word like we do in our Sunday services, in our home groups, and in everything else we do. These words give us life in ministry. It's not Joel's thoughts or my thoughts or any one of our personalities.
Joseph Rhea:It's God's words that do the things that need to be done. So that's what equips us for kingdom work. We'll get to our last reminder here and this is where we'll close. So in verse eight, God tells Jeremiah, do not be afraid of them, of everyone who's about to oppose you, for I am with you, declares the Lord. So he says the same thing in verse 19 at the end of this chapter, God says, everyone you know is going to fight against you.
Joseph Rhea:It says, but they shall not prevail against you for I am with you, declares the Lord, to deliver you. Our third encouragement in kingdom work is that God is with us. That God is with us. Now we're gonna go on to see through the rest of Jeremiah that God's presence, his being with Jeremiah, it doesn't make him a superhero. It doesn't give him powers to, you know, withstand and overthrow everyone.
Joseph Rhea:Again, like, his life gets way worse from a human perspective over the course of this book because he's obedient to god. It also doesn't give him like this zen like serenity to sail above his hardship. At one point, Jeremiah turns to god and he says, you deceived me. You dragged me into this and now you've, I've landed, he gets thrown into a well at one point, just like sinks down in mud and is like, God, you dragged me into this. Why?
Joseph Rhea:So God doesn't enable Jeremiah to have just like this singing joy through his life. God's presence lets him survive and endure. Now this is what Jesus' early followers were known for. They also faced incredibly hard situations. Prison, ostracism, exile, even death.
Joseph Rhea:They did it with grace and with hope. And that's because they understood this truth and they understood it in an even more powerful way on this side of Jesus' life and death and ministry than Jeremiah did. We're gonna close by looking at the end of the Gospel of Matthew In Matthew chapter 28. And so if you have a Bible, I'd encourage you to go ahead and flip over there. See, the Bible teaches that Jesus, one of his titles was Emmanuel, which means God with us.
Joseph Rhea:Jesus was God the Son, that in the eternity past in which God chose Jeremiah and God chose us, Jesus was there as the fully divine second person of the Trinity. Two thousand years ago, he became a human being while remaining God the Son. And so he became fully human and fully divine. He lived a perfect sinless life among us for thirty three years. He spent three of those teaching about God's kingdom and doing miracles to bring the kingdom into the world.
Joseph Rhea:He ended his ministry by dying on a cross which turned out to be for our sins as a sacrifice for the judgment we deserve. He was resurrected, which means that He was recreated on the third day after His death. And after these things, He gathered His disciples and He gave the message that we call the Great Commission. So in Matthew chapter 28, I'm going to read verses 18 through 20. It says, and Jesus came and said to his disciples, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Joseph Rhea:Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. Baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. Jesus tells his disciples, in other words, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Joseph Rhea:I've been crowned the king of god's kingdom which is gonna be the kingdom of everything and everyone that is. So therefore, go. Go to your neighbors. Go to the nations. Wherever people are in need, wherever people will listen and make disciples, which one Christian has described as one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.
Joseph Rhea:It says, you've got the good news of grace. Go take that to other people who need it. Baptize them into the family of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Teach them to follow my words, to live by them like you're gonna do. And he says, I am with you always even to the end of the age.
Joseph Rhea:Jesus' presence has empowered his people for kingdom work for two thousand years. The Christian kingdom, the Christian revolution has transformed life on every continent. As people have been brought to trust God's sovereignty, to lean on and be equipped by His words, to be filled with His presence, we find people preaching and loving and serving to cultivate the kingdom. And God is using that work to build a church that's reaching Fairfield and Iran and everywhere else in the world. He's bringing men and women into his kingdom and into his kingdom work.
Joseph Rhea:And he is with us, strengthening us to keep going. Let's pray. Dear God, I know just from what I know of the men and women in this room that there is so much kingdom work that is happening in and through these people. That there are young men and women being mentored. There are people being served.
Joseph Rhea:There are children being loved. There are workplaces being cultivated and developed and nurtured for your kingdom and for your glory. And God whether we are laboring and that labor feels fruitful or fruitless or whether we feel like we had the strength to labor and we're just surviving. I've been at that stage in life. I pray that you would meet each of us with the truth.
Joseph Rhea:That if we're in Christ, you chose us before the foundation of the world, that you are equipping us for life and ministry through your words and that your presence is with us. I pray that we could feel and be strengthened by that comfort. I pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
