‘The people of God’ – four words, familiar,
well known, and over the last twenty or thirty years, used time and time again
as a name for the Church…. ‘the people of God’
and
rightly so, for you could say that the whole Bible is about ‘the people of
God’….
God calling, creating a people
…..
the people of God…..
A famous preacher, Martin
Lloyd Jones once said
Our trouble is that we always start with ourselves instead of starting
with God. Instead of going to the Bible
and looking at what it says and discovering what is written there, I start with
myself. The things that I want…. I want forgiveness, I
want peace of …..mind; I want enjoyment and happiness;
I want guidance; I want this and that;
But, he goes on, the thing
that should astound me ... is that I am a child of God, one of God's people.
That’s what we are thinking
about this morning…….
being
God’s people, that to be one of God’s people should astound us……..
So – we look this morning at
how God calls, shapes, and creates His people in the Old Testament,
how
He builds us together in Jesus,
How, deeper still, He shares
His life with us through Jesus………..
How
God creates His people in the Old Testament………
Here we have the people of
and food when hungry……
But the even greater miracle is, that the men and
women gathered at the foot of
But here is the founding miracle of
God called them to be His own people….
God called these slaves, a people without shape or
direction,
a people living and working
under the dark power of imperial
to be His own !
Through His servant Moses, God brings these slaves out
from slavery, breaks their chains, their shackles, their fetters, frees them from
the tyranny of endless work and leads them out.
And more than this, in His covenant with them, gives them
the law, a way to worship Him, and will give them a land to call home…………
God, declared the prophet Isaiah, created
in faithfulness and love
commited himself to this frail, inadequate, often ungrateful people. He called
them into being, into life and
that’s
why are they here, now, at
waiting for what God has to say to them…..
But that’s the miracle – the men and women gathered at the foot of
That’s the thing that should
astound us too ...
that
we are God's people
only because the living God has called us to Himself.
and
though we may be weak or afraid, surrounded by pressures and difficulties of
all kinds,
yet
He watches over us, and in Him we find new strength
though we are sinful and often failing, yet we find forgiveness and we are restored because we are His people ! called by Him, receiving all the blessings He gives.
Now to turn to the New
Testament, is to discover that
the
Lord has done even more for us……….
He has done a new thing………..
Peter declares that God is at
work among us, building us, together in the Church, like the stones in a
building are put together……...
How
God builds us
together in Jesus
Earl Palmer, a Christian
writer, writes this, “If you're making a
trip to
Every bit of concrete, the road surfaces, the pavement, and every bit
of steel in that entire bridge--all of it……..is connected and holds together.
Every piece….in that bridge is connected to two giant cables……..that go down into
bedrock, …..
every single piece of metal, every single piece of concrete, is connected
with those two giant, strong cables………
That’s exactly what Peter is
saying in His letter….
each
of us, as men and women, every single one of us is connected
anchored,
to Jesus Christ the living cornerstone.
In Him all of us are held together.
We are, as Peter says, stones,
living stones, spiritual stones,
and
God is building us together in Jesus
making us one.
I think we need especially to
be reminded about that in 2006,
as
the Church of Scotland faces difficult decisions about the number of buildings
we have up and down the land………………
If we listen to what Peter is saying, it’s not the building that is Church,
but
our very selves, our living selves, our own lives…. Come as living stones, we read, and
let yourselves
be used in building the spiritual temple……
and
so, the Church is not bricks and mortar,
but the
lives of men and women, like ourselves,
built
together in Jesus Christ………
Which brings
us to John chapter 15
How
God shares His life with us through Jesus……
We read these words of Jesus
in John 15
We read in the Old Testament
how God calls us, shapes us as a people
in
Peter, how God builds us together,
now
here, in the words of Jesus,
we
read how God shares His life with us in Jesus….
Here it is in John 15.5 Jesus
says
I am the vine, and you are the branches…whoever remains in me and I in him, will bear much fruit…………
To put it at its very simplest, and most sublime
Jesus is saying here – that His life is ours.
The life we draw on is His life,
and
just as the rich fruit grows on the vine,
if we
rest in Him, trust in Him, abide in Him
if we
remain in Him, we will be fruitful, we will live fruitful lives.
As Roy Hession once wrote,
Victorious living and faithful service don’t come about through our hard work and good characters, but are the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
We are not called upon to
produce the fruit, but simply to bear it.
The best and richest of vines
with the best and richest of fruit,
don’t
just grow wild, any good gardener knows that roses, need careful pruning……..,
and it’s just the same with the vine……….
to become the person that God wishes us to be we do not simply grow, grow wild. Instead, He is at work in our lives, cutting back, cutting out the less fruitful parts of our lives…. often in painful ways……
why ?
Well, the word of Jesus is
this…
“He prunes every branch that
does bear fruit, so that it will be clean
and bear more fruit”
Let us give thanks to God for
His patient care and love for us,
and
may we know that glad fruitfulness
that is the result of His work in us.
AMEN.