Mark Keown: Cosmission Comission

In this sermon, Mark explores what it means to find our vocation within the great mission of God. From creation and the call to care for the world, through humanity’s brokenness, to the sending of Jesus and the Great Commission, this message invites us to see our everyday lives as part of God’s redemptive work. With warmth, depth, and personal story, Mark reminds us that we are sent people, empowered by the Holy Spirit to love, serve, make disciples, and bear witness to Jesus in the places God has planted us.

Transcript

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Thank you very much. Father God, just as I pray as I share today, Lord, I pray you'd quicken our hearts. Lord, we've sung beautiful songs to you. Beautiful Wayata, we love you, Lord. Now cut our hearts with your word, the sword of the Spirit, and bring life, Lord Jesus. Amen. Tenakoto katua, kote maonga ote atua toku maunga, kote awa ote waiora toku awa, kote iwi ote atua toku iwi, kote aka aihu toku waka, korangi toku kainga, koihu toku ariki, kotewairua toku kahu, kaha, komakiu and toku ingoa, kyorana, fakalofa atu, namihiakwe aroha. Greetings to you all. The mountain of God is my mountain. The river of the water of life is my river. The people of God are my tribe. The ark of Jesus is my vessel. Heaven is my home. Jesus is my Lord. The spirit is my strength. My cuan is my name. Greetings to you, greetings to you. Thanks to you, Aruha. You'll notice a bit of Maori and uh a bit of Cook Island, Maori and a bit of New Ain, because I lived in the Pacific Island for a long time. If I got anyone from the Pacific here, I became a Christian in the Cook Islands as a young fella, uh 13, but then I had a traumatic experience when my father was very angry, he's an atheist, and I blocked out the memories of that. But I know that I, you know, you have PTSD or whatever it's called, PD, whatever it's called. Um, I I definitely had that. And that Jesus, I met him in my 20s. When I was a young boy, I said, Lord, I'll follow you when I leave home. And the Lord honored that prayer. And uh, when I left home, I started to search, and I one day I just realized it was God. So I started going to church. Emma came along, she has her beautiful story of salvation, she has a similar one to me. She'll tell that one day to you, no doubt. So uh became a Christian at that time and been going hard ever since. And what I'm what we're really about is Christians who are full-on disciples. And you're not a full-on disciple until you're trying to be a disciple maker. Because a disciple has to mature into a teacher. Because we're not going to be students all our lives. Well, we are, but eventually we mature to the point. It might be just our children. We've got some beautiful babies here, might be our children, uh, might be uh the woman next door, uh, might be uh school if you're a teacher. Just sharing Jesus is just what we do, and we do it naturally and organically. So today I want to speak about finding our vocation in the great mission of God. So we've got some uh PowerPoints. He's my brother uh Kieran, yeah, he's gonna go with me. So are we up there? Oh, so it's up there. All right, so uh the next slide has me in a nutshell, so uh you can have a look at that. That's Monica in a nutshell, and then the next slide has my funnel. So uh on the next slide you'll see my phone now. You've got uh my daughter Esther and Vyron standing somewhere around here, actually. Uh they live in Regland. That's Emma with our granddaughter uh uh Sophia, my other daughter who lives in Mount Mongnui. She's a radiologist. If you run into a radiologist who looks like that, that's Gracie and her son Joshua, and her daughter is with my wife there, Emma, and me and the dog, Red, and our uh children, Liam and Annie, who recently got married. And on the next slide, some of my books. You can Google that later if it interests you. The one in the middle is interesting because that Jesus is the new Joshua, he even he hasn't read yet, that's coming out soon. And uh the reason I profile those is that I'm very influenced by understanding Jesus in the historical context. And that's in the first course that I did with Levi, that's what we talked about. So those are the ones that you might actually understand and want to read. Uh, the the the little one, What's God Up to on Planet Earth, is a book you can give away for Christmas. So you can order that online and you can give it to someone. On the next slide, you've got a barcode of our album if you're interested in our album. Uh, we recently brought out our first album and musicians as well. I'm going to sing you a song later at the end of the message. Now, the center of my message, getting down to more important things, is Jesus. So Jesus said to them again, Peace to you. As the Father has sent me, I also send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. Now, interestingly, in the lead-in today, someone mentioned John 1. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was God, and the Word, uh and then the Word became flesh. We'll talk about that in a minute. And this is the end of where Jesus sends us as he was sent. So today I'm talking about your vocation. So instantly I'm talking about you as a sent person. So this is in John's Gospel. If we talk about the situation, his testimony to the world about Jesus. John's Gospel is interesting. It's the last written testimony, because it's the latest of the Gospels, of who Jesus is to the Greek world and to the Jewish world. And that's why it's written in the way it is. It's John's testimony to the world. By now, Jesus is the word become flesh. We've had that mentioned today. He's been sent by God, he's ministered through Israel with evangelism, sharing the gospel, healing, feeding the poor. He was crucified, resurrected, and he's now about to ascend. He gives these words that we read here today to all his disciples. Mary's in the room. We know that because she saw Jesus and came running back, and then Jesus appears. So there's more than the twelve there. So he's not just talking to the leaders of the church, that the Levi's of this world, and I'm a leader as well, and my wife is a minister as well. He's not just talking to us, he's talking about all of us. And all of us are charged with being sent people to go into the world. So what's our vocation then? So if we go to this next slide, we've got that verse again. Jesus said to them, peace to you, classic Jewish greeting. As the Father has sent me, I also send you. So we are a sent people to this place, and he said, Receive the Holy Spirit. We're empowered. Acts 1.8, the same thing. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses. So we have a challenge here. The challenge is that the God sent one, Jesus, is sending us. So our job as Christians is to equip one another, but also to be determined to be equipped. Go to Bible college if that's what you're called to do and be equipped. I remember when I became a Christian, I was hungry. Lord, feed me, feed me. You know, I'm still the same. I get up every morning and I do my memory verses. And I want to be fed and fed and fed so that I can be effective to God. He breathes on them. So that breath of God. You have the Holy Spirit already in you when you're not a Christian. That may sound controversial. That's what's giving you life. That's why we're not robots. We have God in us. So all the people drifting around out there who don't know about God and hate even hate God, they have a taste of the Spirit in them. But when you receive the Spirit at conversion, that Spirit of God blends with your spirit. And so from that point on, the Spirit testifies that we are children of God. That's why you know inwardly that you are a Christian if you are one. And if you doubt it, and you say, I'm not sure, you wouldn't doubt it unless you were, right? It just means you've got growing to do, which we all do. They're to go into the world that God loves, for God so loved the world, and continue the work of the Son by the power of the paraclete, which is John's way of talking about the Holy Spirit. It's a comforter, it's a counselor, he's an advocate, he's a helper. They are to give witness to him with words and deeds of love throughout the world. Those two things cannot be unbound. We love people first, and we share Jesus with them as the Holy Spirit leads us in that moment with words and actions and attitudes that make them question God. This is our vocation, which for you centers here in Tauronga, Mount Monganui Bay of Planning. So I'm going to unpack this a little bit more now. So what are we here for? I'm going to introduce you to a Q and made-up word. We call this a neologuism. There's a fancy word for you. I like making up words, okay? So you've heard of the Great Commission. The word I've made up is the great cosmission. I've chucked an S in it. Because the Great Commission is not the first mission given to you as a human being. That came a lot earlier in the garden. You blend the word cosmos in Greek as world, missio in Latin as mission, and you get a mission to the world. So it's a play on the idea of the Great Commission because the Great Commission is what we're to do as Christians, but we're humans first. You're a human who has become a Christian, so you carry more than one commission. The Great Cosmission is God's commission to humankind to exercise dominion on his behalf over the world, an obedient relationship with him, utilizing its resources for good, building human society and caring for the world. We trace this to Genesis 1. And I'm not going to read the text that's going to be put up there, Genesis 1, but we are made in the image of God. Notice it says in the image of God he created a male and female. So woman and men are called to this vocation to an equal extent. When it says that Eve is the helper of Adam, that word is used of God. So it's not saying that Eve is below Adam because God is not below us, but he's our helper. Together we co-create, we work in the world. And notice he says, be fruitful and multiply. Okay? Babies. Okay, that's scary for some of you, I know. But don't worry. Many of us are called to be single as well. How do you know if you've been called to be single? You're single. You might get married later on, and then you're called to be married. But while you're single, you're called to be single. Genesis 2. So if we go to the next slide, then the Lord formed the man out of dust. So he breathes in him the breath of life. He plants him in the garden and he tells him to care for the garden. He says, work it and care for it. And again, he mentions marriage. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife. So you've got this man and this woman living in the garden, and they're to subdue it, which sounds like domination, and that's how it's been misinterpreted in history, and to care for it and keep it. So the garden of God, effectively, we're to make the world the garden. So we're all gardeners. I hate gardening, which terrifies me, but it does, that's what we're doing. We're working in God's garden. The world, in a sense, is a wasteland. Our job is to bring life or be agents of God bringing life because we can't bring life to anything. So we're created in God's image. We're given dominion over the animal kingdom, and we're royal and priestly calling. You are children of God, you are dukes and duchesses, you are priests of God, it says in 1 Peter, that we're all priests, and our job is to fill the earth. Some of us will marry and have children and fill it, and some of us will be single and serve alongside those who are married in this commission with no status elevation over each other. We work in the garden, we keep it. This is what it means to subdue. And we were originally designed to do this without shame. And guilt and shame, of course, is so big a problem for us today. So the Great Commission is the first mission, and I'm spending a bit of time on this because most of us don't understand this. There's a form, there's a mission that we were given before we were given the Great Commission. That's to be a human. That's why going to work matters. Because your work is building God's world. You know, you're doing what God created you to do when you go to work. It might be IT, it might be uh cleaning. Does God want a clean world? It might be a policewoman. One of our daughters is becoming a policewoman. Absolutely, God wants justice. And she's to be a good one, isn't she? It involves humans coming together, having children, utilizing the resources of the world to build human society for good, working across all areas of society, caring for it. We don't need the Green Party as Christians to tell us that we've got to care for the world. That's just, of course, how did we ever not think that we're meant to do that? It's God's world and He loves it. And it's our world because we're going to inherit it at the end. We live in equality without oppression and injustice. So the Great Cosmission provides the framework for the mission that we've been given to make disciples. That's the framework. Because not long after the Great Commission, what went wrong, we had the great corruption. And we know this story. We don't need to dwell on this for too long. I'm not going to spend long on this today. We know from Genesis 3 that right from the start, humans chose their own way. They preferred their own way over God's way. And we're all at. Emma and I, our story is years of rebellion and doing what we wanted and partying, and then Jesus grabbing our hearts and changing us. And we're still being put back together by Jesus. Now the great cosmic has actually been fulfilled to a large degree. Humans have filled it. In fact, some of us would say there's too many of us, right? So we are doing it, but we haven't done it well. It's inadequate. Human societies have been built, the world has been populated, but some only yield to God, and many do not. Many are in rebellion, and we live in a world of colliding empires. And this is this idea of forces wanting control of the world. Some of them are in politics at the moment, who I won't name in the Western world, but there's people outside the West as well. There's been this great corruption of the cosmos: pain, suffering, enmity, war, discord, violence, sexual immorality. You guys know it. You've been victims of sin, but you've also hurt other people, haven't you? And that's what happened in my life. And of course, when you are a victim of a lot of sin, you get broken and you often need a lot of putting back together. The world has been worked and subdued, but it's been dominated, not nurtured. It's marred and it's blighted. Our job is to undo what has been done to the world. So we read, for all have sinned and fall short of God's glory. Romans 5, 12, death entered because of sin. Romans 8, corruption to the whole cosmos, decay and death. The whole creation is in liberation in frustration and requires liberating from the bondage to decay. So we we worship the wrong things. We're idolaters. We disorder our loves. We put things that are not as important like the hurricanes ahead of the other things in life, brother. I had to say something. Ecological mess. Suffering and death, brokenness. Nothing is as it should be. So you can see what's happened. God gave us the cosmos, the great cosmic, but we mucked it up and it's not quite what it should be. So Christians are in the business of undoing that. But we're only agents of God who's the one with the power. So what's our solution? Well, God's solution wasn't to jump to us, it was to send Jesus. And we mentioned John 1. Okay, but first, before that, we have to think of the Old Testament. Right back with Abraham. God chose Abraham. Not because Abraham was any more righteous than anyone else, but that's because God chose him. And it says that he was the first person of faith in the Bible. He was justified because of his faith. And from him came Israel. But Israel itself was no better. They were no better than the other nations. Even though they had the law and everything given to them, they were no better. So they started to, their prophets started to come and say, one is going to come. I call him Theo, the expected one. And there's a whole lot of names from in the Old Testament. The most popular and common one is Messiah or the Christ. And so he did come. And he came in A.D. 30, 33, we're not 100% sure. And Matthew says he was Emmanuel God with us. God was made flesh. Now that's called the incarnation. Now that is unbelievable. That God would become like us, to dwell with us and to know our pain and experience it, but then die for us and rise again. I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's beyond belief when you think about it. And it's one of the reasons that so many people like me are Christians. Because who would have made up the story? It's a brilliant story. It's not the anti-store, the real story would be God would come with blazing fire and angels and weapons, and he would just drive all those that are evil to their knees. The problem is that we'd be driven to our knees because we too participate in sin. We're no better. Sure, there's degrees of evil, isn't there? But we ourselves are flawed. So Jesus had another way of doing it. He became flesh. In the beginning was the word. The logos was with God, and the word was God. He is the gospel. When we share Jesus and we talk about our gospel, we talk about Jesus. The church has made terrible errors in its history. In New Zealand history, we've seen that with colonialism and many of the terrible things that have been done in our history. But Jesus didn't do those things. So that's what we're pointing people to. The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. In Greek it says he tabernacled. So we're in the Old Testament now. The tabernacle going through wilderness. Jesus is the tabernacle of God. And you are part of that tabernacle if you believe in him, filled with his spirit. And he's full of, we've seen his glory, the glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. For from his fullness we've all received grace upon grace. Isn't that a beautiful line? And then it says, No one has seen God except God who is at the Father's side, Jesus, the one and only God, has made him known. In Greek, those of you who've done a bit of study, that the word is exegete. He has exegeted or expounded or explained God to the world. I got a lot of questions about the Old Testament. I don't have all the answers. But then when someone says to me, Well, what's God like? I said, Jesus, go to Jesus, just look at Jesus. Read those Gospels, inhabit those gospels, let him inhabit you. Jesus is amazing. So the pre-existent, glorious Logos, God the Son, entered history, sent by his Father. The co-creator with the Spirit, remember when God spoke at creation? The word was Jesus. And the Spirit was hovering. He entered his own creation to take it back, but not with violent, glorious, transcendent, supernatural force with armies and angels, which we expect, but as flesh. Subject to death. How about that? Subject to sin. But he didn't. That's the difference. He came to reveal God to save, not to enslave. For if the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed. So part two of the solution was Jesus' part two, the great crucifixion and resurrection. Horrendous day of pain and misery. Watch the Passion of the Christ at least once in your life when you're a bit older, young people. I can only watch it once. It was too hard. It was not the ending they expected. They expected Jesus at some point to launch war on the Romans, but he never did. Instead, he let the Romans kill him. They crucified him. That's what they did to slaves, criminals. The lowest of the low. Jesus was just went to his death without a whimper. But he knew what he was doing because at the Lord's Supper he said, This is my body broken for you. Mark 10, he will be a ransom for many. Being in the form of God, being equal with God, he emptied himself. This is this picture of God, Jesus emptying himself in service of the world, pouring himself out, washing feet, healing people, long days in the hot sun in the Middle East, serving us, and then on the cross dying. And on the cross, God demonstrates his love for us. That while we ourselves are sinners, Christ died for us. And so Paul can say, Christ died for our sins at the center of the gospel. One Peter talks about Jesus having no sin, no deceit in his mouth, but he did not retaliate. He made no threats. He bore our sins in his body on the tree. So that we might live for righteousness. By his wounds, we have been healed. And he's risen. And that's the brilliant story. I remember my uh our little grandson Joshua recently was walking on the beach and saw a dead bird and he freaked out. He's four. He suddenly wear eyes. What's that? And he suddenly realized, Mommy, you're gonna die. And so the family had to negotiate that. And I remember getting together with him, because our daughter said, Dad, can you talk to Joshua? And I got to talk to him and I said to him, Josh, there's a guy called Josh. Because his name's Joshua, and Jesus' name actually is Joshua. So I started telling him stories about Joshua. There's a guy called Joshua many years ago, who's your invisible friend, who lives in your room with you at night, protecting you. How do I know? Because he lives in with my place too. And my that little boy was transformed as he suddenly realized, oh, there is a thing called death, but there's something after it. There's life. And that's the beautiful story of Jesus. The sinless one, Jesus, absorbed every vestige of human wickedness into himself, and he extinguished it on our behalf. He defeated corruption. The fact that a body decays, he defeated that. He did not decay, it says in Acts 2. Christ's resurrection is the launch of a new humanity. Going back to Genesis and the great cosmion, now there's people who rebelled against God back then, now are receiving the same spirit that God always wanted them to have to go and undo the great corruption. His death and resurrection. Resurrection undoes death, and so a new creation was launched with Jesus. A new humanity was launched with Jesus. And now we have it we have it we have a vision for what the world will be, and that's our job to work for it. So part three of the solution, we come to the Great Commission, the one you've heard so much about. As the Father has sent me from our reading before, even so I am sending you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. Go therefore, make disciples of all nations, including Mount Monganui, baptizing them in the name of the Father. Baptisms, hallelujah! Give that thing a workout if you're doing it here or go to the beach, it doesn't really matter. In the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, and don't do it the Presbyterian way and sprinkle it, and I'm a Presbyterian minister, I can tell you that. Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and behold, I'm with you always to the end of the age. That's our job. First, to be humans, to work with God in the world as we're called. Every single one of you has a vocation. Some will have their vocation as a full-time minister of the church. And Nadia, you and Levi are going to work in the church of God, in the garden of God, leading God's people. Emma's done that as well, and there's others in this room. Others will become engineers and IT people. Some will travel as missionaries into other nations and do the work there. The job is clear to be human and to do the Great Commission. Luke puts it this way: repentance and forgiveness, forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem, radiating out. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. John said the same. He breathed on them, and you'll be my witnesses. So the Great Commission is now in the center, is the center or the heartbeat of the Great Cosmission. We carry two burdens with us as Christians every minute of every day to work for God's will to build it as God wants for us. With our specific weirdness. If you're a bit weird, that's good. God made you weird. Hallelujah. I'm a weird guy, man. I like Coronation Street. I mean, it's a disgusting program. It's deplorable. It's been going 700 years. I don't like it very much anymore, to be fair. But but we're all weird, and that weirdness is what God wants to use. He doesn't want to change your weirdness away from weirdness. He wants you to reach into being weird and celebrate each other's weirdness and love each other. If the weirdness is badness, well, we need to sort that out. And live it out. Humanity in Christ is commissioned afresh to go to the peoples who fill the earth and preach Christ. So the second thing we carry with us is that the people around us we want them to know about Jesus. So first of all, we humanize them. We love them. We look at them. We see people in this room that are people that God made, planned before the creation of the world, predestined to exist. You are. You look in the mirror, you may go, really, Lord, what were you doing? Well, I do that anyway. But we're also called to live that human commission and then to share the gospel. So at the center of this recommissioning is that people become disciples. You see, a human is not fully what they were created to be until they met Jesus. You can't be. That's why for us to tell the world how to live, as some Christians want to yell at the world, I'm not one of those people we don't, they can't. They can't without the spirit. We struggle to do it with the spirit, right? Our job is to go out, to be great humans and to share the gospel. They're intertwined. Your earthly lives and works mat work matters, for that's working out the great cosmic, but also to be a Christian. So we're to be human and Christians. We go about our earthly lives, we work, we share the good news of Jesus with Aruha, courage, wisdom, and compassion. To everyone we meet, you know, in the church this morning, the prayer time, he prayed for our enemies. It was so cool. I thought that is the coolest thing. He got up and just prayed for all the people that Christians supposedly don't get on with. Muslims, he prayed for uh people who are invading people, um, people who hate Christians, atheists. He was praying for them all. I thought, man, that's cool. To be you as you are made, completed in Christ. We're nearly there. What must compel us? We come to another great the great commandments. There's a way we've got to go about this. Too many Christians are behaving badly in public. We have to be different. I personally am not going to go and yell at them, the Christians, and tell them to sort the ract out. I'll leave them to God. But we're different. We go out and we love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and our strength, not just when we sing songs, but in our service and we love our neighbor as ourselves. And we're told by Jesus who our neighbor is. It's the person who hates us the most is our neighbor. We know that the ones who love us are our neighbor, but it's the one who hates us the most. Paul said this about mission. He said the love of Christ compels us. Remember hearing a sermon many years ago, the guy talked about water being pushed through a dam. Love of God is behind us, propelling us to love. Paul in Philippians prays that the Philippians' love would abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight. Beautiful. Taking the fruit of the Spirit as an analogy, where to be trees laden with fruit that people can come and eat off. How are we relating to people? We love joy, peace, kindness, goodness, patience, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. These are the things that are full of us, that just honor some people can come and eat. We are to bear the fruit of the spirit. We are not to become wary, patient, kind, not falling for enviousness, boastfulness, arrogance, crudeness, being egocentric or easily angered, being resentful and unjust, rejoicing in the truth, persevering in love, trusting, hopeful and enduring. And my last sort of point. And we don't do it without hope. There are two poles of hope in Christian life. The first is the Holy Spirit is in you. God is with you to the end of the age. There is never a moment that you can't handle it. You've just got to reach to God because He can handle it, right? There's never a moment. And I don't know if you're like me, I get anxious. I'm a bit of an anxious guy going back to my childhood. I tend to get a bit freaked out and trying to control things too much. And the Lord is trying to teach me, Mark, relax into me, bro. It's okay. I got this. The Holy Spirit's in you. You don't need to behave like that. But the day will come when the gospel is preached to the whole world as a testimony to the nations. We don't know when that is. In fact, the same chapter says no one knows the day or hour. It may come when we least expect it. But our job is to work hard for that. Then Jesus, there's going to be this loud command and the voice of an archangel and the trumpet call of God, and the dead will rise in Christ. There will be the renewal of all things in Matthew 19, 28. That's so important. God's not going to blow the place up, as in some theologies. He's going to come back and heal this world, and we're going to participate in it, and we're to start now. And then it says in Acts 3 that Jesus is waiting in heaven until the time for the restoration of all things. And creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay. And all things will be filled with God. So the initial vision of God, the great cosmission, will be complete. And the great commission will be complete. Believers from all nations will gather to live in communion with God, and everything that is evil will be washed away. So our mission, and I'm going to end here, and then we're going to sing you a song: to be the disciples of God, living out the Great Commission. Absolutely. But we also continue to be humans. To live out the great cause mission, building the world, filling the world, working. We have different roles. And this is where it comes down to you. I can't tell you what your job in this commission is. We can pray for you, leaders can pray for you. They can have words for you. Those are important. One day Emma had a word over her life when she was a young woman, which she didn't know anything about Christianity. She would be a mother of Israel. She had no idea what that meant. And what that was, which she realized over time, was God wanted her to be a leader of God's people. And we were in a church that didn't believe in woman and leadership. It was like, what? And so over time Emma's growing into that person because the Lord spoke. But we do we learn our place in this mission by prayer, deep engagement with the word, fellowship with other believers, and hearing and obeying the voice of God. And we obey. That's the key thing. We count the cost. God is faithful. So we're going to come and uh sing you a song to finish with. And uh as we sing it, I want to challenge you just to uh listen to the words. Uh song I wrote, um, part of our uh with the backing tracks, our band. So I'll give you that microphone and we'll go up and get organized.