Embracing Gospel Ambition for Christ's Glory

Please keep your Bibles open to Romans 15 this morning. We're going to be looking at just one of those verses, verse 20, as I preach this morning. If you're new to Manoa Community Church, we just finished a series going through Advent together with the Christmas Eve service, and then Bill did a great job of eat well, live well last week as a one-off getting us ready for the new year. Well, I wanted to have one more message as a one-off too before we got back into Luke. So next week, we will launch back into our Luke preaching series. But the beginning of a new year, and happy new year, by the way, I forgot to say that, happy new year, happy new year, is an opportunity for us to recenter not only personally on some of our goals, but also as a corporate body, as a church on where the Lord is taking us. [00:00:07] (44 seconds)


The vision and the mission that God has given for our lives compels us forward. And that's both a personal truth, but also a collective truth. And the Lord's placed a vision and mission, which I'll talk about the vision tour in a little bit. Our membership class kind of helps invite you into that because there's a real sense that we're not just playing church here. We're not just going to church here. We are on mission together as disciples of Jesus Christ. Amen? And that involves movement and commitment and sacrifice, things that disciples of Jesus Christ do. [00:02:20] (32 seconds)


Oh Jesus, we pray that the ambition born of the Holy Spirit to the apostle Paul would become our ambition to make Christ known, that our lives would be about exalting Christ and making his glory known, making his forgiveness known, making his mercy known, making his love known, experiencing that, and then displaying that to the ends of the earth. And Lord, we don't pretend to be the biggest church in the world. We're just a small part of what you're doing in the world. But we pray that we would be faithful to our part here in Havertown and beyond. [00:03:48] (42 seconds)


There's a great quote I want to set out today's sermon with. Please put it on the screen. He says, you will never, you will never know the fullness of Christ until you know the emptiness of everything but Christ. Let me say that again. You will never know the fullness of Christ until you know the emptiness of everything but Christ. Here was an individual, a preacher, who experienced the glory of Jesus Christ, but at that, he also had to empty himself of all the other things that we chase after in this world. [00:05:37] (34 seconds)


Paul was on the move with the gospel. And as I read the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the book of Acts, and then all the epistles, I don't get a you warming Christianity. Do you? No. Do you? No. These disciples are on fire. And we want to be on fire. Jesus Christ. That is the vision for biblical Christianity, a gospel ambition. You can pull the verse down. Now, Paul says it was always his ambition. That's not 100% accurate because there was a before and after in Paul's life. [00:10:07] (35 seconds)


We dream and pray big, believing God for supernatural results beyond our imagination. If we can do it in the flesh. It's not of God. Our goals have to be far bigger than we could ever accomplish without supernatural power from on high. Amen? Gospel ambition. Now, this is a teaser for those of you who haven't joined this church yet, because in two weeks on a Saturday, we're going to go through not just two of our values, but all five of them. We're going to talk about our vision, our mission, our strategy, and how God's called us to do that together. [00:15:36] (32 seconds)


But we have to keep strengthening the foundation for the vision and mission God has given us so that we can be faithful witnesses to the next generation and also be a stable base of sending from Manoa Community Church. Years ago many of you know we were a little smaller back then didn't have as many of the resources that we have we didn't have any children in the children's ministry wing uh so i i tell the story often but if you haven't heard it this was an empty hallway back here and i i dreamed one day said one day this place will be overflowing with kids. [00:18:45] (35 seconds)


The mission is not the building. It never has been the building. We're not building a building for building's sake. We're not relaying a foundation on the parking lot. That's not our mission. Our mission is the gospel, amen? But we want to stay in Havertown for the long term, amen? We don't want to go anywhere, and you'll see some water damage on our ceiling because there was a time where we couldn't replace the roof, so water was coming in. That's not an effective base for ministry, and the ultimate dream that we have as a church is not only to purchase this campus, renovate it, and grow a thriving church that becomes ascending base to all of greater Philadelphia. [00:24:20] (40 seconds)


Preaching is central to the miracle and how God saves the world. And I'm not just simply saying that because I'm the preacher, by the way. I had to grow in this conviction by reading the Bible because at Drexel, I was like, well, I'll go out and share the gospel, and sharing the gospel matters. But there's something powerful when we herald a message that's not a conversation. God is speaking to us through it. And the word of God says it's through the foolishness of what we preach that God saves the lost and saves the least of these. It is through the preaching of the gospel that people come to Christ. [00:31:49] (31 seconds)