The Cross: The Basis For Reconciliation "“ 2 of 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Many who seek justice call for a level playing field of opportunity. There is one place where the field is level, and that's at the foot of the cross of Christ, the only basis for reconciling people of different backgrounds.

Today, we'll learn why. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, you're teaching us about Christians, politics and the cross. Can the cross really bring together the extremes of the left and right? You know, Dave, I want to tell you and everyone else who is listening how thrilled I am that I can say that the ministry of Running to Win goes around the world, and I will answer your question in just a moment.

We are actually in 50 different countries in seven different languages. Why do I mention that? Because, Dave, you asked the question about the cross of Christ bringing together the right and the left. Yes, if we are all repentant, we can meet at the foot of the cross. And one of the reasons that the ministry of Running to Win is able to minister in different countries with different political organizations and even some countries where there is chaos is because we have continued to emphasize the cross of Christ. Would you help us get the gospel to even more people? Would you consider becoming an endurance partner?

That's someone who stands with us regularly with their prayers and their gifts. Very quickly, go to RTWOffer.com. When you're there, you click on the endurance partner button or you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's RTWOffer.com.

Click on the endurance partner button or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now let us listen carefully as we preach the one message that goes around the world, perhaps from different passages of scripture, but always the gospel of Jesus Christ. You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and with a household of God. And what he's saying is that in the Old Testament, if you asked the identity of a person, he would always go back to his roots. There were three sons of Noah. There was Shem and there was Ham and there was Japheth. And from those three sons, the entire human race has come.

And those divisions were important and that was your identity. But we get to the book of Acts and what do we discover? First of all, there is a man who is a Shemite and he's converted. His name is the apostle Paul. Paul is Jewish and Paul is converted. And then you have a descendant of Ham, the Ethiopian treasurer, who's on his way to Ethiopia and he, you recall, is converted.

And then of course there are those who come to us from Japheth. That represents in the New Testament Cornelius and those of us who are of European descent. And now our identity no longer is racial. Our identity is, he says, that we are of the household of God. That means that we have the very same father, we have the same brother, namely Christ, and the same companion, namely the Holy Spirit, and that's what the new nation is all about. We can admire ethnicity.

It has its advantages to help us to understand the contributions of the various cultures. But the minute you walk into the doors of a church where Christ is preached and where believers have come to saving faith in Christ, you have lost your ethnicity as being your identifying mark and you are now a member of the household of God. Jesus said, who is my mother and my brother and my sister, but those who do the will of my father who is in heaven.

Now the hard part. Fragmented culture, families breaking apart, single mothers. The responsibility you see of the church is to create a new family and to be the family for our fragmented, disengaged, disconnected, alienated, suspicious culture. And that's our responsibility. Our responsibility is to create an environment in which those that are poor are going to be helped.

Those who are weak are going to be defended. And those who have gaping holes in their family structures discover that there are members of the body of Jesus Christ who move in, perhaps not being able to do everything that their families should have done, but to grant the help and the strength and the support so that together we can be what we should be as a church. Father, I pray that they shall be one even as thou father art in me and I in thee that they may be made one in us.

That's the New Testament pattern. And you see, as long as I say to myself, America is a big place and I can go to my home and you can go to yours and we come together only to sing the same songs and to hear the same message, we have missed the underlying commitment that Jesus is asking us to do, to be a family in the midst of any culture, but particularly one in which family structures have been shattered by the ravages of sin. That's our privilege. It's our privilege. The way to church this morning, Rebecca was telling me about some members of our extended family, great needs. And we do all that we possibly can at a distance to help.

And I'm sure that you do the very same thing. And that's not only our obligation, that's not only our duty because, you know, as Christians, we're supposed to do those things. That, my friend, is our privilege to represent Christ well in a broken culture.

There's a third illustration. The new body reminds us that we share the same life. The new nation reminds us that we have the same family. You'll notice also that there is a new temple. It means that we have now the same purpose. Verse 20, he is building a new temple, having been built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom also you are being built together into a dwelling of God in the spirit. This is one passage of scripture, like many others, where you can't really do it justice in two or three minutes. Notice that all of the verbs here, by the way, are passive.

God is the one that is doing it. We are being built. Christ is the foundation stone. And then the imagery is this. Now, we know that stones can't grow in real life, but Paul is saying that they can because it's only an image.

It's a figure of speech. Remember when they built Solomon's temple, I should say? They went into the quarries and they hewed stones and they brought them and they did the hewing in such a way that when they fitted them together, it says that there was no noise of an ax or a hammer.

They just fit because all of the fitting and the chiseling was done in the quarry. You know what God does, don't you? He goes into the quarry of sin and he picks up people whose lives have been checkered, lives that have been tossed asunder and torn apart because of sin. And he finds them and he chooses them and he brings them and he puts them into the temple and he puts them next to each other and they begin to rub on one another and they begin to smooth one another. It's a temple that's being built. And why is the temple being built? That's a good question. Is it so that we can all be happy, happy, happy?

No. Before I answer the question, what should people say when they come to Moody Church? What is it that they should really say?

They should say, well, the singing was wonderful, the choir performed well, the soloist blessed us. They always say that every Sunday. They can say other things. They can comment on the message. I'm sure they comment every Sunday. But I'll tell you what they should really say.

Look at the text now. Being built together into a dwelling of God by the Spirit. You know what they should say? God dwells with those people. God is here. And sometimes the singing might not bless you. It always does me, but maybe your style is a little different and sometimes the sermon may not bless you.

It usually does me. You know that isn't even that important? Do you come here to say this is where God dwells, God among his people? And that's what God is doing in the world. And you see, the fact that we are members of the same temple reminds us now that we have the very same purpose. And what Jesus is saying, that all this fragmentation, all the diversity that we've talked about with different expectations and different backgrounds and everything, all of it now becomes one in a body in a new nation as stones in a brand new temple.

Few important observations. First of all, the very high cost of unity, the high cost of unity. How much does it take to bring people together?

Well, it costs Jesus the cross and we want to get by on the cheap, don't we? We want to say, well, you know, we are singing the same hymns and we do rub shoulders with these folks. You know that it takes forgiveness, forgiveness sometimes racially for our insensitivities. And some of you African Americans, you know sometimes our insensitivities. It takes forgiveness on the part of all of the different races, accepting the other because now in Jesus Christ, ethnicity takes a back seat. We are now one in Christ and we are absolutely convinced that that which binds us together, namely this great work of God on the cross and the blessed Holy Spirit of God is much stronger than anything that could ever tear us apart. That's our responsibility.

It costs forgiveness. It costs inner strength, inner strength that we might be able to reach beyond our comfort zones and include within our friendships and our involvement people who are not like us. Now you know your heart.

I know mine. I gravitate to people who are like me, who think like me, who have the same, we can have the discussion about different topics because we always know that we'll agree and we are able to make sure that we reinforce our prejudices. That's the kind of people I like to be around. People who reinforce views like I have.

And those are the kinds of people that you like to be around too. I'll tell you what the cross says. The cross says what you must do is to enlarge your circle. The cross of Jesus Christ says you must be willing to move out of that comfort zone and you must be willing to set aside your individual preferences for the good of the other members of the body of Jesus Christ who are quite unlike you.

A number of years ago here in the suburbs or in one of our suburbs I should say there was a man who ran for mayor and I will not mention the suburb but he ran on a very racist message. His slogan was let's keep this suburb for people like us and I say shame on him and I hope that the day never comes when we say to ourselves let's keep this church for people just like us. No let's keep this church for the people of God. For the people of God. It involves risk. It involves a death to selfishness because if there's anything that unity demands it is selflessness and a fundamental desire that we shall do all that we possibly can to repent of that which is in our hearts that we might love across some very uncomfortable lines.

So first of all a word about the cost. Secondly a word about the goal. Where is all this leading? What's God's intention? We know from Ephesians 2 that he has the intention of creating a new man, a new nation, a new temple but where is it all going to end? Use your imaginations for just a moment and imagine off in the horizon you see all of these dots.

These dots are all over the place but you notice that they are coming together as streams from the east and from the west and from the north and from the south and they are converging upon a mountain and as we look carefully we notice that the dots are actually people. People from every tribe and tongue and nation they are all gathering together there and yes from every tribe they have maintained their ethnicity but that's not their distinctive mark because what God has done is he has taken all these barriers that we have erected and through the blood of Christ has demolished them so that the ethnicity and the distinctiveness remains in a mighty crescendo of unity and praise from every country of the world not just the great United States of America but from every country of the world God brings his people together and they say thou art worthy O Lord to take the book and to break the seals for thou was slain and has redeemed us and then they sing the Hallelujah chorus. That's God's design the transnational community and he invites us to have a church to reflect that before we get there. Now if you're the kind of person who says well you know at all costs one thing I'll never do in life is live in an interracial neighborhood not me. Well if you're saying that I need to warn you about heaven some of you might want to reroute your travel plans.

As I look at this text and all that I see is diversity and interracial praise to Jesus Christ. You remember that story that I like to tell you? You say well as yet we don't exactly remember it.

I'll help you a little bit. Remember the guy in World War II who their buddy died these two soldiers and they wanted to have a place to bury him and they came to a cemetery and they asked if they could bury him and the priest in the cemetery said is your buddy a Roman Catholic and they said no and he said I'm sorry but this is a Catholic cemetery you can't bury him. So they felt very badly and they buried him just outside the fence of the cemetery.

Dug a grave there, went on their way and came back in the morning so that they could at least straighten it up a little bit and bring some flowers and they couldn't find the grave shocked. Then the priest came to them and said you know I couldn't sleep all night because of what I told you so I got up early this morning and I moved the fence to include your buddy within the cemetery. Now you know me well enough to know that the purpose of telling that is not to make any ecumenical points so much as to make a different point. That if we are to be the people of God and fulfilling Jesus Christ's prayer, if the cross that we take into the world is a cross that is to reconcile people so that the fragmented culture and by the way Jesus never prayed that the world would become one. He only prayed that his people would. If this fragmented culture that is so distrustful and cynical of us Christians who are also filled with the individualism and the clause of modernity are also consuming our flesh.

If we want to be able to say yes Christ's prayer is fulfilled and we have become one at high cost. What we need to do is to move the fence. We need to move the fence. For some it is a racial fence. Some of you aren't over it yet. You're not over it just because you come to a church where there may be some integration. You're not over it and that fence has to be removed. It may be an economic fence that has to be removed. Maybe it is the fence of personality that has to be pushed over or an educational fence because if our love does not extend beyond those who make us comfortable we have not found yet what Christ prayed for and for what his heart longs.

Edwin Markham, he drew a circle that shut me out heretic rebel a thing to flout but love and I had the will to win. We drew a circle that took him in and this entire message will have been a failure. If right now in your mind you are not thinking of ways by which the fence, the circle, the walls can be demolished, the fence extended, the circle enlarged so that so that now you begin to see like God sees beyond all the differences that mean so much to those of us who still sometimes walk in the flesh and we begin to see God's desire for a transnational community that's to be modeled in this world.

There's some of you who are listening who are not yet a part of that community by the way because you don't become a member automatically. What does the text say? Repeatedly Ephesians chapter 2 through his cross, through his cross he made him one and then as you come to God through the cross and you get close to God the closer you get to him the closer you get to other people the unity begins to happen. Here's what God does. First of all he demolishes the walls of the human heart so that he can come in, cleanse us, forgive us and reconcile us to himself.

Then he came along historically and he demolished the walls of the temple and said those walls have to go and then in Acts chapter 2 through a series of events that we do not have time to tell you about he opened the walls of the church and said that the church has to be without walls. The unifying factor is peace through the blood of his cross. Today I speak to some people and you are our friends but you are not yet our brothers and sisters. You may be our neighbors there may be many of you here who fit into that category but you are not yet our prayer partners for it is in Christ that we are reconciled. I urge you with all that is within me be ye reconciled to God and become a part of the new body, a part of the new nation, part of the temple that God is building and eventually a part of that great company which no man can number from every tribe kindred and people at on the nation.

I urge you today to believe in Christ that you may be saved. The emphasis that you have just heard is what millions of people hear around the world when they listen to the ministry of running to win. I'm holding in my hands a letter from someone from West Africa. This person says I listen to you regularly goes on to thank us for this ministry and I will pray for grace to focus so that I can win the prize at last. Why West Africa?

Well as you've heard me emphasize running to win does indeed go around the world we're in 50 different countries in seven different languages. Would you help us even as we continue to expand? Would you consider becoming an endurance partner?

You say well pastor what's that all about? Glad you asked. Here's what you do go to rtwoffer.com that's rtwoffer.com and when you're there you click on the endurance partner button or you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. Would you right now go to rtwoffer.com click on the endurance partner button and you will see there that endurance partners pray for us regularly.

They give a regular gift of course the amount that you give is entirely your decision. I hope that you at least investigate. Go to rtwoffer.com click on the endurance partner button. You can write to us at running to win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. A culture that rejects Christ is a culture that says it's the yardstick for moral choices and those choices lead to polling place choices that help determine a nation's destiny.

So where does true morality come from? Next time on running to win Erwin Lutzer brings a message on the cross as the basis for morality. Running to win is all about helping you understand God's roadmap for your race of life. This is Dave McAllister. Running to win is sponsored by the Moody Church.