Gathering Growing Going
‘Culture’ is ‘the way we do stuff around here’. It describes our life as a community of God’s mob. Last week, we spent time looking at that internally – intentional inter-generational relationships around the proclamation and practice of God’s good news in Jesus. This week, we are going to look at our ‘culture’ as we relate outwards, externally, to the world around us. At heart, this is a discussion of our culture of ‘evangelism’ – proclaiming and practicing the good news of Jesus so that others come to meet him. Daniel 6 gives us a snapshot in the life of one man, Daniel, doing this. It is not an explicit text on evangelism. It is not a ‘how-to’… it is ‘just’ a snapshot in the life of a man living as one of God’s people in this world. And, yet, Daniel proclaims and practices God’s good news – and this is displayed in his consistent and costly prioritising of God, his rule and reign, in all things. The result is a remarkable proclamation of God and his good news in a hostile world!
‘Culture’ is as simple as ‘the way we do stuff around here’. It covers not just what a mob of people do, but also why they do those things. It covers both what a mob proclaims (about who they are) and what they practice (how they live it out). Every mob of people has one. It is worth thinking about our culture as we start the year. And that is the purpose of this short two-week series. This week, we are looking at our ‘Titus-culture’ – the culture we have inwardly, as God’s mob, who do life together. At the heart of this culture, which we see Titus establishing in Crete, is ‘sound teaching’ – the good news of God’s salvation in Jesus, which creates a people for God that are completely transformed. This ‘sound teaching’ is preserved, nurtured, passed on across generations, as men and women meet together, talk together, and encourage each other. It is the proclamation that creates the practice that is ‘the way we do stuff around here’.
The last request that Jesus outlines in the Lord’s Prayer completes our picture of who we are as God’s children—we need his provision, we need his pardon… and we need his protection. The request for God to ‘lead us not into temptation’ sits parallel with the request for ‘the evil one’ to be kept at bay. Both are a plea for spiritual protection, for God to walk us away from the allure of sin and the work of the devil. And in both areas, we must be alert to the very great danger we face, a danger that we can often be unaware or unwilling to confront. And in both areas, because Jesus met the devil and commanded him to ‘go away’ - and then beat him at the cross—we have complete confidence that our Father hears our prayer, and can and will act on it. And in both areas we are given all that we need to resist temptation and flee the devil—just look at the suit of armour that Jesus has tried and now given us (cf. Is.59:15ff; Eph.6:10ff).
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