20/20 Vision Series -- Rooted in Jesus

Well, good morning, CTK. It's great to be with you this morning. I'm going to say this: you know, it's an enormous blessing that we have all of this technology right now. I mean, can you imagine what this mess would be like for our church if we didn't have the opportunity to live stream a service or broadcast our sermons over a podcast? Because for many people, you just can't interact with any of this stuff apart from that right now.

But I do want to say that with that technology comes temptation. And I know that there's probably a lot of you that get on the live stream or the YouTube cast and the temptation is to just skip ahead, right? To the sermon.

So I was reading a book on parenting recently and there's a chapter on how to control unwieldy children. And I noticed that at the beginning when I first started to read it, it was chapter five. So I skipped to chapter five and the beginning of that chapter says, "Let's be honest, most of you just skipped right to chapter five."

Well, that's what I'm trying to do right now because I think there's some of you there that have skipped to chapter five and you're just listening to this sermon. And I just want to encourage you: go back and listen to the first part of this worship service. Because the rich leadership of Jared as he's walking us through the liturgy, the prayer, the pastoral prayer—that just ministered to me. The music—you know, John Calvin said that we sing truths into our hearts. That's how truth moves into our hearts. So don't neglect that.

The 20/20 Vision Series

I want to begin by encouraging that today. We are continuing our series that Jeff began last week. It's called Vision 20/20. It's 2021, we're aware, but we had initially planned this series for 2020, which is why it's called that, and we're just not going to change it because it was just too good of a title, I guess.

Last week, Jeff gave an overview of that. And listen, here's what this is. In Joel 2, the prophet Joel predicted that there would be a day when all of God's people would be prophets. Like all of them would dream dreams and have visions. That's the language that he uses. And in Acts 2, when Pentecost happens, Luke picks up on that and he says, "This was the fulfillment of Joel 2." Acts 2 is the fulfillment of Joel 2. Everybody was dreaming dreams. They were predicting the future. They were talking about the redemptive work of God and how it was going to move forward, right? They were moving in the Spirit with that.

It's an incredible privilege that we know how the story ends, right? We've read Revelation. We know where this is going. We can redemptively dream about the process of moving towards that, right? And so when we talk about a vision, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about moving towards that redemptive ending that Jesus Christ has achieved for us, and we're being strategic about that.

Our leaders have thought and prayed and wrestled with Scripture as they put this vision statement together, and it's designed to guide us, to push us towards where we are called to go—which is a beautiful place. Amen? Right? So this shouldn't be a laborious thing. This should be a joyful thing as we wrestle with where God's calling us and we fight the complacency that exists in our hearts to just be happy with the status quo, right? We have been given so much in Jesus Christ, and we want to press towards that.

Now, I realize that our vision statement—you know, there's a lot of things that you could include in a vision statement, right? And it's important to remember what the difference between a mission statement and a vision statement is. A mission statement is a grand kind of—here's the direction that we're going. When you think about mission statements for churches, you think about things like the Great Commission, right? And we have a mission statement: "to live, speak, and serve as the very presence of Christ in Downtown Raleigh."

But a vision statement is very specific towards like a ten-year goal, right? It's strategic. And so the things that are included in this vision statement are not all of the things that the Bible has called us to, and we're not going to neglect those other things. But as our leaders have looked at it, these are the strategic things that we want to push towards. We feel like we need to grow in, right?

And so I want to go ahead and read the vision statement again. And while I'm reading that, our AV guy—AV, that's literally his name, AV Harvey—he's going to put up the illustration, the graphic that represents the vision statement, the tree, while I read this for you folks that are tuning in at home.

Alright. So here's the vision statement again.

By God's grace, we will be a people deeply transformed by the gospel who plant churches, become cross cultural disciples, and pursue biblical justice starting in Downtown Raleigh. Now, this morning, I'm going to be focusing on the first part of that: By God's grace, we will be a people deeply transformed by the gospel. Deeply transformed by the gospel. That is a beautiful goal and a beautiful vision. And as always, we're going to let scripture speak to us about what pursuing that ought to look like.

I can think of no better place to launch us into a conversation about that than Ephesians chapter three. That's what we're going to be looking at this morning: Ephesians 3:14-21. This is the apostle Paul. He had a vision too about people being deeply transformed by the gospel. Listen to this. This is God's word.

For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named; that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now, to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. — Ephesians 3:14-21

That's God's word. Alright, so we're going to dive in this morning, looking at this vision statement, allowing Ephesians 3 to guide us. And the temptation would be, especially with this passage, to move right into the gospel transformation part. When Paul starts talking about heights and depths, my blood pressure rises. I get excited. That is like a banquet feast and I want to get there, right? I want to skip past the salads and move right on in to the meats. There's some Texas brisket in this passage, and that's where I want to go. And that's the same thing that's true of our vision statement. We want to move right into that gospel transformation, but let's not make the mistake of moving past the first part: "By God's grace." That's how our vision statement begins, and those three words are incredibly important.

The Foundation: Prayer and Dependence on God

In Ephesians 3, Paul doesn't begin by just talking about the vision. He talks about his knees being bent and his prayers being uttered. Here's why he does that: he understands that this is not something that is going to come about by the work of the saints in Ephesus or by all of the church, nor is it going to come about by his work. It is going to become reality by the work of the Holy Spirit, by the Father working in us and through us. So he gets on his knees and he prays.

We began this year with the Daniel Fast. It's not too late to sign up. If you missed it, you can still sign up for the Daniel Fast. My wife is doing it. I'm kind of not doing it because I can't give up coffee. Can you cheat? Can you do it without giving up coffee? Grace in Christ. There's grace in Christ. Okay, I might do it without the coffee.

Listen, if you're not doing this, think about doing this because praying is a beautiful thing. But a friend of mine said to me recently—we were talking about the Daniel Fast, and their church is doing a Daniel Fast, a different church—and she said, "A fast without prayer is just a diet." Well, I want to say to you this morning that a vision without prayer is just a hallucination, right?

Paul begins on his knees because he knows he doesn't have the power to pull this off. He doesn't deserve it. He doesn't have the ability to earn it. He knows that everybody in the church at Ephesus doesn't have the ability to earn it, and we don't either. So, whether you're doing the Daniel Fast or not, I want to challenge you to get on your knees with us and to pray for this, because prayer will put this in the right perspective.

If we don't do that, we're going to fall into the trap of thinking that a church's vision statement is the same as a business's vision statement. And I realize that's a temptation for a lot of us, because we do this in our workplace, right? In a business, it's like, "Hey, here's our dream about what we're going to achieve, and we're going to work towards this together. We're going to push on to it." But in a church, that's not what it is. This is what we're dreaming about what God is going to do, and that's a beautiful distinctive. Because apart from that, we start to think we deserve it, that we can earn it.

We start taking glory for it. Look at CTK. In ten years, we'll be able to look at all this stuff that we've accomplished, right? And we're also tempted not to pray because we have solid leadership. Jeff, when he stands up here and starts talking, I think he believes. He's confident. You know, I admire his confidence. He says he's often wrong but always strong. I don't know that he's often wrong. Maybe occasionally. When I listen to him, I kind of believe him. I'm like, man, this guy can take us there. But listen, our vision statement is not predicated on Jeff's ability to lead us. It's predicated on God's grace. It's not predicated on our ability. We're smart people. A lot of us are very sharp, or we think we are, and we could be tempted to start to think we could do this.

And there are some of you that we're gonna talk about this vision statement. We're gonna talk about how intense this is. And you might go the other way. You might feel like we're putting an incredible burden on you. Right? And that's why this first part is so important. Another reason—that's not what this is. This is a dream. A dream that we know at some point in the future will be made true. Right? Perhaps even more true than we could ever imagine. It's important to begin and move through this always on our knees because this is something that God is doing.

That's the first thing that I want you to see. I also want you to see that the bigness of this vision is something that ought to drive us to our knees too. The gospel transformation piece alone—I want you to understand that's something that's beyond your ability. And I want you to understand that's something that God by his grace longs to do.

But here's what that means. When we start talking about being a people deeply transformed by the gospel, that means you're gonna have to change. And we don't like to change. And left to our own devices, probably we wouldn't change. And we certainly can't change in the ways that the gospel wants us to change.

You remember C.S. Lewis, right? Chronicles of Narnia, Eustace and the Dragon. He's a dragon and he wants to change but he can't change. He keeps pulling it off but he can't get all the way to the core. He needs Aslan to do that, right? That's what we need.

So, let's commit to whether it's the Daniel Fast or some other way. Let's commit to praying for this vision statement as we move through this series, okay? Because it's only gonna happen by God's grace.

Gospel Transformation: The Roots

The second thing that I want to move into now is kind of my charge. This is what Jeff told me to talk about. The roots, the gospel transformation. This is the part that we wanted to get to. We're moving into the banquet feast.

So we're looking at the gospel transformation piece. In ten years, we wanna be deeply transformed. You look at the roots. This is the roots vision of the diagram. The diagram implies that we're going to dig deeply with our roots and as the roots grow, shoots are gonna pop up and fruit are gonna come out of that. Right? In many ways, this is a very important part of our vision because it's very foundational. Gospel transformation is what's going to lead to the rest of this vision in many ways. That's why we wanna start with this. That's why the vision statement starts with this.

In Ephesians, this is what Paul is praying for. He's praying for gospel transformation. If we look at the passage, he wants the Ephesian church to experience four things. Four ways in which they're gonna be transformed.

If you look in verse sixteen and eighteen, he talks about them being strengthened. Let me read it again:

He may grant you to be strengthened with the power through his spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. — Ephesians 3:16-17

He wants us to be strengthened. We want to be deeply transformed in a way that strengthens us to house Christ. Now, that's nice. We're praying for strength. We can do that. That's easy. But think of the imagery here. Strengthened in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts. What kind of strength does it take to have Christ dwell in your hearts? Think about that for a minute. What kind of strength does it take for Christ to dwell in your hearts?

For the Jews, this would have been shocking. The concept of God dwelling within his people, his sinful people—God's too big to dwell. You're not big enough. That's the kind of strength that we're talking about.

I have a friend who was driving around with his kid, and they were talking about what it means to be a Christian. He says, "Well, you ask Jesus into your heart." And the kid says, "Well, I'm a Christian. I've prayed to follow Christ." He says, "Well then, Jesus is in your heart," and the kid freaked out in the backseat: "Get him out of there!" It's a crazy thing to think about—someone being inside of you. Jesus Christ dwelling within you.

But this is touching on the doctrine of our union with Christ. There's a great book written about that by Rankin Wilburn. I encourage you to read it. There are lots of books written about this. This is an incredible truth of Christian doctrine—that Jesus Christ dwells within us. And Paul's praying that we be strengthened to be unified with him in such a way, that we would be in sync with him. It's talking about us being unified with the Trinity. This is Jesus's high priestly prayer in John 17.

Let them be one as we are one and let them be one in us — John 17

This is this beautiful picture of unity. In order to do that, we've gotta be strong. So think about transformation—maybe a good image of that is the Hulk. This is the kind of transformation that Paul is asking for for the Ephesians church. It's not human; it's superhuman.

Rooted and Grounded in Love

Second, he prays in verse 17, the second half of verse 17, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with the saints the breadth and width and length and height and depth. Notice: being rooted and grounded in love. The image, the transformational image here, is like a seed being transformed into a tree. There's actually a mixed metaphor here. Paul's talking about buildings and he's talking about trees—rooted trees, grounded buildings. But his point is that you have been rooted and grounded in the love of Christ.

John in his epistle says:

This is how we know what love is. While we are still sinners, Christ died for us — 1 John (paraphrased)

That is the root, the foundation of our love. When he talks about love, that's it. We know what love is because we've seen the cross. We've seen Jesus who saw these desperate, undeserving people, came down from heaven, offered himself as a sacrifice, lived a perfect life, died a perfect death, rose again so that we could have life. Think about all of the suffering that he endured. That's how we know what love is. That's the foundation. That's where we're planted. That's the nutrients we're going to suck up in order to do the next thing that Paul talks about in terms of his transformation.

The Ever-Expanding Love of Christ

Which is to comprehend and to know. This is the juicy part—the four directional unknowable ends of the love of Christ. We start with this foundation: this is how we know what love is through his work on the cross. But guess what? His love is deeper than that. I think often times we just think, "Man, if I get the propositional truth that Jesus died for me and rose for me, then I'm done. I've figured out the length and width and height and depth of the love of God."

Brothers and sisters, that is just the beginning. And that's really saying something because that is extraordinary. Paul's talking about this love knowledge growing, exploding in all kinds of directions. But he says, you know what? You're never going to get there. It's beyond our knowledge. This is the business of heaven. We start with knowing the love of God through what he did on the cross. That's the epicenter of what we know now, but that's going to grow for all eternity. We're going to be searching out the depths of his love—the heights, the widths, the breadths, all of it.

I always think about this when I come to this passage. I think about the Big Bang. Because that's what Paul is talking about here. You have this concentrated thing of matter, and it explodes in this ever-expanding universe. That, brothers and sisters, is the realm of love that we have to know. So you think about that, right? We think we've figured it out. We've gone as far as we can go. But the reality is Christ wants—and Paul wants us—to hop in our starships like Captain Kirk and boldly go where no man has gone before, because the universe keeps expanding. God's love keeps expanding.

We want to keep working to figure out the ends of it and that's what heaven's gonna be like. We're never gonna get there but it's always gonna be in a process of beautiful exploration, right? Amen?

And I want you to notice too that he says, "with all the saints." Oftentimes when we get to this passage, we tend to think about it individualistically, right? Like, "Hey, this is about me exploring my relationship with God. I'm gonna get in my prayer closet. I'm gonna meditate, cross my legs and start focusing on Jesus and just feel the love." No. Together with all the saints—this is something that we do together. Right? As we discover new things, new aspects, new wrinkles to God's love, as we cross cultures. Right? Part of our vision is cross-cultural disciples. So when we cross cultures, we're gonna learn more about the love of God from others. That's why I encourage you at the beginning of this to go back and listen to the first part of this worship service because Jared and Danny and all those people leading worship up here, they were helping me to break new ground in understanding the height and depth and width and breadth of the love of God.

Filled with the Fullness of God

And the last thing that he prays for is that we would be filled, right? You look at the end in verse 19:

"To know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." — Ephesians 3:19

The transformation here is a picture of emptiness, brokenness, death being transformed to fullness, wholeness, life. It's a beautiful thing. This is like the concept of Shalom—that we would be filled with the fullness of God. Again, something that would just be shocking to the Jews. But this is Paul's vision of gospel transformation. What it looks like for gospel transformation to be deep.

When we talk about that in our vision statement, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about growing, changing. We want to be different in ten years than we are now. We don't want to be complacent and satisfied with the theological truths that we've mastered. There are more to master. We don't want to be satisfied with the ways in which the theological truths that we learn have impacted our hearts. We want to keep pushing to becoming more and more passionate. We don't want to become complacent in how the gospel changes what we do. We're going to get to that when we talk about the fruits. We want to be different in ten years. Doing more. Because of how we have been transformed and changed.

But I want to lean in for just a second because some of you have given up on this. You've gotten to a place—C.S. Lewis talked about this in Screwtape Letters—like the middle of life. Some of you are here. That's the time when it's really easy to be attacked because you can kind of give up. Some of you think you've mastered this. You would never say that to me or anyone else, but the way you live is like, "I kinda got it" or "I've got enough of it." No. Paul's prayer, our prayer, our hope is that we never stop growing in this.

I wanna encourage you: there are depths and heights and lengths and breadths of the love of Christ that you have not reached, that have yet to really soak in, and they're incredible. They're incredible. Don't stop reaching.

And others of you, you hear me talking about this and you're just kind of like, "I'm ill-equipped. I'm just never gonna get there." Not that you've mastered it, but you've tried, James. You have tried to stretch and you keep failing. I wanna encourage you: that's a part of the gospel. Our failure doesn't matter. Remember the first part? This happens by God's grace. Take your failure to the cross. Come in the first part of the worship service where we're confessing sin. Lay that down in front of our Lord Jesus and listen to him say, "I don't care. I still love you." And that's those roots going deeper. Can we do that together with each other?

And I know—I know some of you are hurt, right? You've gone after this and it's fallen short and it hurts. There's a brokenness that comes to it. Take that to the cross too. Work through that hurt with the one who was hurt, who bled and died for you so that you might be transformed.

So when I think about our roots going deeper in ten years, I mean, just practically speaking, here's what I would love. I would love for us to just be a people who are known for our passion for Christ. I would love for us to just be people who are known as a group of people who are so in love with Jesus, but more than that, who want to keep falling in love with Jesus. We're called the frozen chosen. Can we change that in ten years?

Can we start a tent revival that happens every Sunday? I love looking over at that Baptist church and saying, "Where are you, Baptist?" Can we have a little friendly competition with other Christians? Can we actually say, "Hey, we want to as a church really push into this. We're not going to be complacent anymore about the gospel going deeper into our lives. We want to be deeply in love with Christ. We want to be deeply transformed by him." Amen? That's our vision.

The last thing that I want to talk about, and I know I'm running out of time, so I'm going to fly here. I want to talk about the relationship between the fruits and the roots because this is important. The root health of our church—this gospel transformation—we can't always see it. The stuff I was just talking about there at the end, us no longer being known as the frozen chosen—our worship is a fruit. Remember, I said at the beginning that the fruit on the diagram is strategic, it's not everything. There are other things that we're going to continue to pursue because they're part of our mission, not just our vision. These strategic things are areas that we've identified where we need to grow. We're not seeing what we want to see. It doesn't mean that we don't have any of it, but we want to see more of it.

So here's what I want you to know: when we're talking about the fruits in the coming weeks, some of you will be tempted to say, "Well, why aren't we talking more about the gospel?" Guess what? When we're talking about the fruits, we are. That's how we see whether the roots are growing.

I had an apple tree in my backyard when we bought my house. It bore apples for like five years. It was great. Then one year, no apples. I thought something must be wrong. I started checking the tree for bugs, spraying it, got some fertilizer and put that down. I thought I'd solve the problem, but the next year, you know what happened? No leaves. And the next year, I walked into that backyard and that apple tree with a trunk this big, I literally just pulled it over. It had no roots. I don't know what the problem was, but the roots were gone. I wish I had thought about that being a problem and worked on it. I missed those apples.

So when we're talking about the fruits of this vision statement in the coming weeks, I want you to know that we are talking about the roots. Biblically speaking, there's lots of evidence of gospel transformation. We could talk a lot about how there are other things that reveal fruit. You must naturally think of Galatians 5—the fruit of the Spirit. We're not talking about that, not because that's not something we believe, but because we're strategically focusing on these things. Remember that. But I want you to see how these fruits specifically are evidence of our roots, and why when we're talking about them, we're really talking about gospel transformation too.

Church planting. When you're in love with Jesus, you can't help but want to plant churches. When you fall so in love with the transformation that Jesus Christ has done for you in the gospel, the things that he's doing in your life, the first thing you want to do is go and tell everybody. You want to put a map on the wall and find all the fire stations in Raleigh. You want to put a pin by them because you know why? The city has planned fire stations strategically to reach the most number of people quickly. We want churches by every fire station because we want to reach people quickly with the gospel. That's what church planting is about. It's not just about planting churches so we can have a number. It is about our love for Christ, our gospel transformation, so that we want to do this because we are being transformed. We don't want to do it just because of a number. It's about gospel transformation.

Second thing: cross-cultural discipleship. When you're in love with Jesus, you can't help but want to go incarnational into uncomfortable relationships, longing to partake of the love of Christ with others. You're not satisfied with just hanging out with your kinds of people. You want to move into other kinds of people. You want to move into that discomfort the way Christ moved into discomfort when he came to this world. Nobody does cross-cultural discipleship like Jesus. His incarnation—that was somebody totally, radically different moving into our world. You want to do that because you want to be like Christ when you're in love with Christ.

Biblical justice. When you're in love with Jesus, you can't help but want to see the wholeness of creation restored to rights. You can't handle it. You can't stand it, right? Because you love him.

So why only one sermon on gospel transformation?

Because really we're doing lots of sermons on gospel transformation. The other thing I want to talk about is how the fruits lead to more roots. As we're stretching for these things, guess what happens? We have to rely more on Christ. We have to be transformed. There are trees that have been dug up whose roots have broken through rocks in order to get to the nutrients they need. And as we push for these things, it's going to do the same thing for us.

Think about this question: What if your complacency with regard to your transformation is rooted in your unwillingness or fear of going to the places that we feel like God has called us to go as a church?

When we're talking about gospel transformation, we're talking about church planting. Nothing has been more formative in my personal discipleship than being a part of a church plant. Because you know what? We were desperate. And Christ showed up. And sometimes we didn't feel like he did. So we had to dig deeper. We had to take more comfort from him instead of the things that we thought we would get comfort from.

Cross cultural discipleship—I've honestly learned more from different cultures about God than I've ever taught them. And biblical justice. Listen, we postponed this partially from the summer because we were like, "You know what? This is a politically charged topic in a really heated time. So let's wait till 2021. That'll be better." How's that working out? I am literally very scared about talking about this because I have seen how talking about this in other churches has split them in half. If we're going to talk about that, we are going to have to dig our roots deeper into our unity with Christ. Much less pursue it, which is our vision. We're talking about the roots when we're talking about that.

The Promise Beyond Our Vision

Alright, I've got to end. Here's the conclusion. Star Wars Episode Four—Luke and Han are going to rescue Princess Leia. Han's not so sure he wants to do it, and Luke is trying to convince him. He says, "You know, she's a princess. You know, she's rich. The reward could be well, more than you can imagine," and Han says, "I don't know, kid. I can imagine an awful lot."

I always think about that scene when I come to this passage. You know why? Because what does Paul say?

Now unto him who's able to do more than you could ask or imagine. — Ephesians 3:20

We just spent a little while doing a little imagination, vision, dreaming redemptively for what Christ could do. And if you're like me, you get to the end of this, we're talking about some of this and I'm kind of like, "I don't know, we've imagined an awful lot." But here's the promise of this passage: God is able to do so much more. Our vision, as big as it may seem to us, is kind of laughable to him in terms of what he's going to accomplish.

I've been a part of this church for twenty years. If this has been a ten-year process, I've done it twice, so it'll be the third time. My third lap. And I will tell you that there is no greater joy than seeing what God does over the course of a decade and how it is almost always more than you think—in more ways than you think.

And that, brothers and sisters, essentially is the gospel. God is at work in you because of the work of Christ Jesus. I can't wait to see what the next ten years holds, and I can't wait to join you in prayer for him to work. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.