CONFIRMATION SUNDAY: The Whole Mission of the Church
Christo Möller
Transcribed by PulpitAI (with edits)
Covenant Affirmations
This morning I want to explain a little bit on the affirmations that the Covenant Church, the denomination, is built on, and we’re gonna focus on one specific one of those. So, the Covenant affirmations, there are six of them.
The first one is the centrality of the Word of God. The centrality of the Word of God—basically what this means is that, as the Covenant, we believe that the Word of God has to be the center of our lives and also the center of our community. We have a great saying in the Covenant, that I had a really rough time learning, is, “Where is it written?” Right? When we share the Word, or we encourage someone, or we share biblical truths, then we get to ask, “Where is this written?” And it doesn’t just mean, “Where in the Bible does it say that?” It also means, “How do we interpret the Bible?” So we want to make sure that we are all on the same page and the Word of God is the center of our lives, individually, and also as a community—the center of our community.
The next one is the necessity of the new birth. In the Covenant, we believe that, to be a child of God, you have to be reborn. Paul writes, and he says, before you meet Jesus, or hear of Jesus, your spirit is dormant, is asleep, or not alive yet. And then when you hear of Jesus, and you say, “Oh, well I believe this, Jesus died for me and rose from the dead,” then your spirit becomes alive, and we say you are reborn. To be in the Covenant Church and a member, we believe that it’s necessary to be reborn.
The third one we have is a commitment to the whole mission of the church. I’m not gonna explain that one right now because I’m gonna try and speak on that one, so we’re gonna skip over that one to the next.
The fourth one is the Church as a fellowship of believers. We believe that we should be one fellowship, one body, right? Although we have different personalities, different views, different opinions, Paul says if one part of the body hurts, the whole body hurts. So we should be treating each other with care and love and supporting one another within the body. We believe we are a body of fellowship of believers.
Then a conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is part of the Holy Trinity, and Paul says in the Bible that when we give our lives to God, that the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling inside of us. He’s our helper, our counselor, our comforter, and he is with us wherever we go. So we’re constantly depending on him to guide us, to lead us in whatever we do, whatever we say, how we treat each other—we consciously depend on the Holy Spirit.
And then the reality of freedom in Christ. When Jesus came, he said that he did not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill the Law. And so when we believe in Jesus, we have freedom in Christ. That means for me, I like putting it this way—the Ten Commandments changes a little bit. It doesn’t say, “You must do this, you mustn’t do this, you must do this.” It says, “Hey, because you have Jesus and you know how much He loves you, you want to do this thing, and you want to do that thing,” because our salvation is not based on what we do or do not do. Our salvation is based on Jesus dying on the cross, rising from the dead for us, taking our place. So we have freedom in Christ.
And those are the six affirmations that the Covenant Church is built upon, the six pillars that we build the Church upon.
Do We Do That?
And so at the Confirmation Retreat, I get to take the kids away for one night, usually to Covenant Park, and we work through these six affirmations. And then I get their questions and views and thoughts on, “What does this mean? What does that mean? But why this?” And very quickly—I don’t know if you’ve really worked with teenagers a lot—you’ll get some good questions. And the first thing is, “Well, what about our church? If you say this is the way, where does our church do this?”
And sometimes those are tough questions. “Umm, we do do that. I’m gonna get back to you on exactly how and where, but we do do that. This is us. We do this.”
And so one that really stood out is the one that I want to talk about today, because there were two boys at the Confirmation Retreat that really got passionate about this one point. They were very excited about our commitment to the whole mission of the Church, because I was explaining how we should be helping others around us. We should be helping the homeless, helping the widows, helping the orphans. We should be reaching out. We should be loving. We should... And immediately they looked at me, and they looked at each other, and they said, “Okay, where is the church actually doing that?”
I said, “Well, I don’t know the actual individuals who do that, but as a church, as an organization, yes, we have outreaches, and we give financially to organizations who do that. And sometimes we’re not, like, directly involved, but we try and help.” And immediately I kind of threw—that’s what you do with teenagers. You throw the ball back, right? It’s a whole game. You just, “Well what do you think?” And I said to him, “Well, if you guys feel so passionately about it, why don’t you guys start something?”
He said, “Well, we’re kind of young. We don’t know…”
I said, “Well, it’s not about age.” I said, “Maybe...” It’s the only answer I had. I said, “Maybe there’s some older people in the church who God is laying it on their hearts, but they’re not doing it. Maybe it’s time for you guys to step up and do it. Why don’t you guys organize something? Why don’t you get out? Why don’t you…”
Like, there was a group of teenagers a couple of years ago who used to sign me up for everything at Mission & Outreach. I would get random emails, “Oh, you should be at this place.”
“Why? Why am I going to this place?”
“Because these kids signed you up to be at this outreach, to do this, to do that.”
I said to the boys, “Why don’t you guys start something? Start a group. Start a fundraiser. Get connected to Mission & Outreach. Organize outreaches. Do something. If God is laying that on your heart, do something, because maybe there’s other people who’s not listening.”
The Whole Mission of the Church
And so this morning I wanted to talk to you guys about a commitment to the whole mission of the church and what that looks like and what that means for us.
A commitment to the whole mission of the church is basically where the Great Commission, that we find in Matthew 28, and the Great Commandment, that we find in Matthew 22, meet. Where those two come together, that is our mission as a church, as an organization, as a denomination. And I’m gonna tell you guys a little bit about both of them.
The Great Commission
The Great Commission—if you want to, we can turn our Bibles there. It’s Matthew… what did I say? Matthew 28, if you want to read it with me.
Every time I preach, my wife runs out and grabs me some water, and this morning she said, “I have your water ready. Don’t go on stage without it!” And here I am. Thank the Lord for a good and faithful wife, amen?
So Matthew 28, verse 18. This is Jesus speaking. He’s speaking to the disciples. Some commentaries and some scholars believe that there were more than just the Eleven, but he’s speaking to the disciples. And so he says:
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
So this is after he died on the cross, he rose from the dead. At this point, he has all authority on earth and in heaven, right? He is absolutely recognized as God. And then he says, “Therefore.” So I teach the kids too, if there’s a “therefore,” you have to look at the sentence before. Because he has all authority on heaven and on earth, because of that:
“Therefore,” [he says,] “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
The first question I had to myself was, “How? How do I go and disciple? How? What does this look like?”
And so the two points I want to emphasize is, number one, we have to baptize them. But when Jesus speaks here, he—it’s so interesting. It’s not—so we have to take note—it’s not, “Baptize them in the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” He’s emphasizing the Trinity, the Holy Trinity. We believe in one God, one Trinity, right? Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He says, “Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Greek there is not “in,” but “into,” which changes it a little bit. We’re not just baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; we’re baptized into the name. There was a previous time where Jesus spoke to the disciples and he sent them out to go and tell people about him, but Jesus said, “Go only to the Jews.” This time he says, “Go all over the earth. You might meet people who don’t believe in God, who don’t know about the Holy Spirit. I need you to baptize them into the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” And there’s a sense of adoption happening here.
Because baptism works like this—in those days, being saved or reborn and baptized went very closely together. We don’t believe that you have to be baptized to be saved. There’s many examples in the Bible where that doesn’t happen. People got saved, they weren’t necessarily baptized. But in their going, what would happen is they would preach and they would tell people, and people would say, “Yeah, I believe! I’ve seen Jesus. I’ve seen the miracles. I believe. Can I get baptized?” Because baptism meant you leave everything behind. You die to yourself, to your family, to everything else. You only now live for Jesus. So the idea of going under the water—I always tell the kids, remember you don’t just get dunked. Like, that would be fun, just, tch-tshh, you know. You don’t just get dunked. You get baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So when you go under the water, we are symbolically dying with Christ like he died for us, and we leave everything behind in the water, and we rise up from the water a new person in a new life, now being adopted into the Kingdom. Now you are a child of God. You are an heir. You’re not the old self; you’re the new self. That is baptism that we see here. So Jesus says, “Go out into all the earth and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
I had a good friend who used to come up to me a lot, and he would explain to me how he is—I can’t remember how he put it—an eighth, or a 64th, or I don’t know, something, of Native, and he would always explain to me how, like, his genealogy worked.
I said, “Well, I did the Ancestry test, and I can legally say I’m African American because I have one percent Nigerian in my blood, and I’ve got some South African native also in my blood—that’s also one percent. So besides the other ninety-eight of German and English and everything else, I have some Nigerian. So that’s cool.”
And he said to me, “But the point is for me is that...” (Only you and I got it.) The point is that, he said, “A lot of my Native family gets upset with me because I’m a Christian.” And he said, “But they don’t get it. They don’t get it because first above everything else, above everything, I’m a child of God. And then I’m a husband and a father. And then I’m so much of this, so much of that, so much of this.”
See, when you get baptized into, your identity changes. We are now children of God. That’s why Paul says there’s no more master and slave, and this and that, and these groups, and these dividing walls. We are children of God.
Then Jesus goes on to say, “Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you.”
I have to move a little bit faster. I thought it was gonna be short. I’m sorry. I apologize for everyone who I told in the week, “It’s gonna be short.” Okay.
So, “Teach them to obey all that I’ve commanded you.” So how it worked in those days is you had a teacher and you had students. A lot like now, but they called them rabbis and disciples. See, teachers and students. And the idea with a rabbi was—the student, the disciple, had to do everything that the rabbi did. They had this idea or the saying that “the dust of the rabbi falls on the disciple,” on the student. So if the rabbi was walking this way and he went this way, then the disciple had to also walk this way and go this way, because the disciple does everything exactly like the rabbi, like the teacher, so that when people would meet the disciples, they would recognize them by the way they live their life, because it’s just like the teacher, the rabbi. So they would be, “Oh, that guy is Jesus’ disciple. I can see, like he does what Jesus does. He looks like Jesus. He does what he does.” Right?
So Jesus says, “Go and baptize them, and then show them everything I showed you. Show them how to follow you and do the things that you did following me.” That’s what Jesus is saying. That is the Great Commission. We are called to fulfill the Great Commission. Do you know that? Do you know that that’s on us too? Okay, cool. We’ll have some people baptizing each other at Covenant Park this year.
The Great Commandment
Then it goes on to the Great Commandment. Now, the Great Commandment—this is so interesting. If you read that whole portion in Matthew, the Pharisees and Sadducees were trying to trick Jesus, so they’re giving him question after question after question. “What about this? What do you say about that?” And every time Jesus has a good answer. Every time he can answer them well. He knows exactly what’s happening. He knows the Scriptures, right? We know that. We see that.
And then there was a lot of debate because we—I don’t know if there’s anyone here—but we cannot uphold the Commandments. And because the Pharisees and Sadducees, they were working really hard to uphold all the Commandments and do everything right—because they didn’t know how to uphold everything, they were trying to figure out which one would be the best. There was a lot of talk among themselves, like, “Okay, I actually, I haven’t killed someone, and I haven’t committed adultery, and so—but I’m still struggling with this one. So I wonder if I do the one that’s the greatest, if that’s okay, because I can’t do these other ones. So which one is the greatest? Which one is the one I should focus on?” That’s what they’re asking. And they know there are so many that—what is Jesus gonna say? How do you answer this?
So Jesus answers them. He answers them, and he gives them two commandments. But it’s—I love this—it’s very interesting. He quotes two scriptures. And as he starts with the one—it’s in Deuteronomy 6 verse 4 if you want to turn there. I guess I’m fast because I prepared this and I’ve got the little *whistle*, so I can just jump there real quick. I’ll read it for you.
So verse 4, it says, “Hear, O Israel…” Now this is in the Old Testament, okay? This isn’t Jesus speaking. It says:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
That’s verse 4. Very important here—in the Hebrew, it says, “Yahweh Elohim, Yahweh echad.” Echad is “one” or “unified” or “together.” What’s really cool is Elohim. He says: Yahweh (the Lord), your God (Elohim), the Lord (Yahweh) is one (echad). Elohim is actually plural. It’s not singular. It’s plural. Whenever in the Hebrew there’s the singular, then it’s elohad. And it actually refers to the pagan gods. It’s not to our God because our God is the Holy Trinity. He’s saying, “The Lord your God (Elohim in plural) is actually one God. And this one God,” he goes on, “This one God—you should love the Lord your God (this one God Elohim) with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength.” Jesus adds, “With all your mind.”
The idea about this is like, “Lord, how do I do it with my heart? Where is my heart? Is it my—like, what part? What am I…? How do I…?” The idea is with your whole being. With everything that you do, love the Lord your God. With everything you say, everywhere you go, anyone you see, love the Lord with your whole being. That’s actually what he’s saying.
And then Jesus quotes the second one from Leviticus 19. And I’m gonna be faster than you again. Okay, Leviticus 19, verse 18. He says:
Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.
So Jesus says these two things are together the greatest. And I always wondered why. Why these two? Why does he put these two together as being the greatest?
He basically—I’ve checked this out. I need to put the mic down for a second because I don’t know where the other note is. There it is.
He’s summing up the Ten Commandments. Look here. He says the first four of the Ten Commandments is “Love God.” So, “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, do not have any idols,” right? That’s the first four. The second six really is “Love others.” It’s “do not steal, do not commit murder, do not commit adultery, do not…” Jesus says to them, “Which one is the greatest? All of them. You have to uphold all of them. You can’t pick which one. You have to uphold all the commandments,” which puts us in a bad place. It’s a problem for us because, if we look at the Law, Paul says that the Law is there to show us that we need a Savior. That’s why we have the Law. It’s not for us to uphold the law. We’re not trying to keep the Greatest Commandment because, we said, we just… you can’t. You can try. It’s good, it’s helpful, but in your strength, just us—we can’t do it.
And then James, he says this other crazy thing. He says if you’ve broken one of the laws, just one, you’ve broken them all. So now we can say, “Who loves the Lord your God with all their heart, with all their…” Not one of us can really raise our hands because I’ve broken some of them. And if I’ve broken one of them, I didn’t love the Lord with my everything. It puts us in a real bad position.
A New Command
And what makes things even worse than that is that when Jesus speaks to his disciples and he tells them what to do, he doesn’t give them these laws. When he meets with his disciples, he doesn’t say, “Hey, you guys, by the way, when I go away, remember to keep these.” He doesn’t say, “Remember to keep the Greatest Commandment: Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.” No, because Jesus came to fulfill the Law. He didn’t take it away; he fulfilled it for us. He took our place. We cannot uphold this. Instead, he gives us a new command. The new one is—I want to say crazier or harder, but if you do it the right way, it’s possible. We can do the new one if we rely on Jesus.
See, with this old one, it’s all about yourself. It says, “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your strength, with all your might.” You should do this. And by the way, you should love your neighbor. How? Like yourself. It actually refers to, “Do to someone else what you want them to do to you.” Don’t know how real that love is. Do to someone else what you would like them to do to you. You want a sandwich? I want a sandwich. Can I give you a sandwich? Like, is that really the love that God talks about? No, this is all about me relying on myself.
But if we rely on Jesus, now things start to change. And he gives us this new command.
Next page. No, wrong one. Here. Sorry, I’m always so amazed on Steven’s notes and, like, preparation, so I’m trying to up my game. So I did the whole slide—the cheat sheet thing with slides.
Jesus gives us a new command in John 13. He says:
A new command I give you: Love one another.
The Pharisees believed that the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments, where it says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” they believed that their “neighbor” was only the Israelites, because they were at war with everyone else. They didn’t, like, love the Philistine. They believed that it was just them. And then Jesus corrects them in Luke, right? He says, “No, no, no, no. If you think it’s just your nation, you should love your enemies. Let’s change this up because you’re not getting it.”
Now he says, “Love one another.” How? As I love myself? No. “The way I [Jesus] have loved you.” That changes things. Now you’re not just trying to love God above everything and love your neighbor as yourself. No. Now you have to do for the person next to you what God would do for them. That’s different. That’s sounds harder, but it is easy if you can understand how much God loves you.
And maybe that’s the problem, guys. Maybe that’s where we get stuck. We’re trying to uphold some of these things, but we don’t realize how much he loves us. Because if you realize how much he loves you, then all these other things becomes a result of how much he loves you. That’s different. That changes things.
In first John 3, verse 23 and 24, it says:
And this is his command: to believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.
Again, the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is inside of you. If you rely on the Holy Spirit inside of you and you can focus on how much God loves you, then suddenly your view of other people change. Because number one, the law is given to show you that you are a sinner, and not one sinner is better than another sinner. We were all sinners. We all need Jesus. And if you see how much you are forgiven, then you can start forgiving other people around you. Then you can start loving other people around you. See, we’re called to be baptized into the family, into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, to teach and to show others what it’s like to be loved, what it’s like to be a child of God, and to love others as he loves us.
An Illustration of God’s Love
I want to show you this final example because I was wondering how do I show you how much God loves us? A lot of kids have this question with me, or for me, where they go, “If God loves you so much, why does he send people to hell?” And I’m like, “Ugh, Brandon! Help!” He’s my go-to. It’s like, “Google!” It’s like, “My phone’s dead. Brandon!” Okay.
Anyway, this is the best example I could come up with. The Bible says the wages of sin is death. Those of you—that’s everyone probably—those of you who work, or who has a business, or who has employees, you know that there’s—you do work, and you have a wage, and you get paid, right? The wages is, “You’ve earned this.” You earn it. It’s yours. The wages of sin is death. Anyone here who was born without sin? Not got saved later, born without, 100%, born without? We have a sinful nature. Right? The wages of that sin is death. You earned it. It’s yours. You got the ticket. Here. You’ve got the ticket. It’s yours. And there’s a ride waiting for you. This is a—if you can’t see it, this is a boarding pass. There’s a ride waiting for you. You’re on your way. You’ve got the ticket. You’ve earned it.
And some of us are holding onto this, and like, “I’m on my way. I’m getting on the plane.”
But Jesus is standing at the gate, and he’s saying, “Hey, don’t go! I made a way for you. Don’t get on that plane! If you get on it, it’s gonna crash and burn. Don’t go. All you get there is death. I don’t want you to go. Instead, I have a different ticket for you. I have life. And I make a way for you, but you have to take the ticket and give me yours, because I’ll take your place. Get on this plane. Go this way.”
Some of us hold onto it. “No way. I earned this. This is mine! I paid for this—the wages of my sin. I paid for this.”
Really, this is all we’ve earned. We haven’t earned life in any way. There’s no way that we can earn life. But Jesus did it for you. Because you’re good? No. Because you uphold some of the commandments? No. Because he loves you. Because he loves you, he paid the full price. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done; it doesn’t matter what you’re going to do; it doesn’t matter what’s been done to you; he says, “Hey, all you need to do is trust me. Just take the ticket. Trust me. It’s all you need to do. I died for you. I’ll take your place. You don’t have to earn it. You get life.”
The question today, for all of us, is this: Do you know how much God loves you? Because if we do—this is gonna be real hard—but if we do, then our kids won’t ask us, “Who’s out there loving people?” You’ve got to ask yourself, do you understand, do you know how much God loves you? Are we showing it to everyone around us? Does the person next to you know that you know how much God loves you? This is how we’re gonna see change in our city. This is how we’re gonna see change in our community. Not by trying to uphold something that we cannot. By relying on Jesus, understanding how much he loves us, and starting to love each other in that same way.
