Monday Mail, 12th May 2014

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Yesterday, we started a new series at St Jude's. Recently, the leadership team have been thinking through the question "Who are we?" and we came to the conclusion that the answer can be summed up as follows:

We are a church on a hill:

  • Worshipping God and listening to his Word

  • Growing together as the family of God

  • Shining with God's love in our community.

With that in mind, we're doing a short series of three sermons in the mornings looking at different aspects of this. We started yesterday looking at Micah 4:1-7.

In the passage, God gives his people a picture of the way things will be in the end. Sometimes if a story is going badly, people flick ahead to the end to see how it all turns out – that's what God does here for his people. As we look at it, we can find confidence for the future, but also see something of God's purposes for us as a church.

The picture is that the mountain of God's temple – the hill where God's people met to worship him and to listen to his Word taught – would become the chief mountain – it would be raised up, and all the nations would stream to it.

Why? Because God's word would go out from the place where God's people meet, the nations would hear it and want to follow God. We see how it works a bit more clearly in 1 Thes 1:8-10. There God's word rings out from the church in Thessalonica because of the way their lives are transformed as they hear God's word and respond to it.

In the same way, for us as a church on a hill, we are called to be God's people who hear his word, who let it transform us and then go and live transformed lives in our world so that people are attracted to God and to his church.

That doesn't mean living in the ways the world wants us to – after all, we are God's people, and we are to be transformed. But we should be good news to the world around us. I can't find a single example of the New Testament church criticising non-Christians for living in non-Christian ways – their response to living in a pagan culture was to live differently themselves, and encourage those outside the church to turn to Christ.

Micah 4:5 shows the response we should have to God's picture of the future:

All the nations may walk
in the name of their gods,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord
our God for ever and ever.

We know that God's way will win. We know that people will stream in to the hill where God's people meet, so let's keep meeting, keep worshipping him, listening to his word, letting him transform us and then shining for him in this world!

God bless,

John

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