Listen to Sunday’s message by Pastor Phil Olsen
This week we heard from our own Pastor Phil, whose one prayer for the church is Father, make us impactful. How much does God desire His church to make impact? We can look at the behavior of Jesus during His ministry to get a sense of that. On one hand Jesus was tender and caring, on the the other he’s aggressive and angry. One instance He’s forgiving a woman caught sleeping with a married man, letting her off, and in another He’s cursing the religious leaders. Is Jesus schizophrenic? Why is this?
God made a covenant with the nation of Israel through Abraham to bless them so that they would be a blessing to the world, and that His name would be praised because of them. But, instead the Israelites were disobedient and were not faithful to God and therefore God’s name was tarnished on the earth and blasphemed among the other nations. Israel intended for blessing, yet produced blasphemy. This is what Jesus’ anger was directed at. People who knew the truth and were supposed to reveal God were making it about themselves and keeping people from knowing God! People designed for impact squandering the truth in selfishness. For this reason Jesus said “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.”
Are we a conduit of His grace as He designed us to be or a cause for people to reject Him like the Pharisees were? The same plans God had for Israel, He has for the Church. He has given us control of the course of history. We have been given the authority and power to change the world. The Church is His only plan. We are the hope of the world. He has created us for impact. We may think God is crazy…that He needs another plan, but thats for us to determine. He’s already chosen us, not to be the Savior - that’s Jesus - but to be the conduits of the power and message of the Savior.
The church needs to exist for more than itself, for more than its own transformation, not squandering the truth in selfishness like the Pharisees that Jesus cursed. It was created to have cultural and world impact. What are we here for if all we’re gonna do is talk about how awful the world is and how its going to hell, yet do nothing about it when we have the one real Answer, the one true Hope. To not share the truth; to not be a part of this incredible plan would be the biggest blunder, the greatest error.
We are God’s love letter to the world. Paul says is like this: “You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.” So what makes the existence of mere religion so distasteful for to our God? Because it is truth written on stone instead of hearts, and that coldness kills. But the warmth of God’s letter written on our hearts gives life.
If we are to be a church of impact, then we have to be people who display God’s grace written in our hearts in our daily activities, bringing life to those around us.
