So that.....

Genesis 1 18-19

1 Peter 2: 21-24

John 3: 16

So That….

There is a series of commercials on TV that I enjoy. That doesn’t happen often, but these commercials are clever in building a case for why we should buy the services of Direct TV.  They show us a sequence of decisions, one leading to another. They show us the possible unintentional consequences of our actions if we do not do purchase Direct TV.  Today we are going to touch upon our intentional and God-intended actions and their consequences.

The phrase “so that…”  is found over 760 times in the Bible. That phrase is used to link a sequence of actions, or desired or expected actions.   It is used to link cause and effect.  It is also used to explain why God has chosen to do something. And it is used to show us what Christ expects us to do. God and Christ use the words “so that” very intentionally.

In the year AD 42, Herod, king in Judea, killed the apostle James with a sword. When he saw it pleased the Jews, he threw Peter, another apostle, in prison. The night before Herod was about to dispose of him an angel of the Lord woke Peter and led him out of the prison unharmed. After going to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where the disciples were praying for him, Peter left town.

The next morning Herod was enraged that Peter was gone and had the guards put to death. Then he left Judea and went down to the coastal town of Caesarea where a very strange and terrible and instructive thing happened. Herod had a grudge against the people of Tyre and Sidon—we don't know why. But at the same time he had them over a barrel because they were dependent on him for food. So holding the purse strings like he did, Herod enjoyed making himself scarce and watching the people be pinched. It gave him a great sense of power to have others so dependent on him.

So the people of Tyre and Sidon tried to get an audience with King Herod by going through his personal chamberlain named Blastus. This attempt succeeded and a day was appointed for King Herod to make an appearance and an oration. The rest of the story is very brief. It is recorded in Acts 12:21–23: "On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne and made an oration to them. And the people shouted: The voice of God and not of man! Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him because he did not give God the glory and he was eaten by worms and died."

Jesus said in Matthew 5:16, "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven." Jesus clearly commands that the goal of our lives should be to behave so that God gets the glory. Live so that men will see your life and give your Father in heaven glory, not you. So it should be very clear that glorifying God is not merely an act of worship on Sunday. It is a peculiar kind of living.

For God to get glory from the way we live, we must be engaged in good works—we must be fruitful. Glory is far less than merely avoiding gross sins by which God's people display his glory. It is in the pursuit of good works, acts of generosity, works of kindness, ways of love. Since it is God's goal to be glorified in his people, and since Jesus says this happens when his people do good works, we would expect the Bible to tell us that God's goal in redeeming a people is so that they might do good deeds. And this is exactly what we find. Paul says in Titus 2:14 that Christ "gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds."

The fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel contains rich imagery of the vine and the branches, an image that would have been obvious to those who labored in vineyards and enjoyed the fruit of the vine. “I am the vine; you are the branches,” he teaches his disciples and us. We draw our strength, our life, from him: “I am the vine; you are the branches, and apart from me,” he says, “you can do nothing.”

Then Jesus concludes with a necessary implication. We are connected with God, and we are in communion with each other as a church for a larger purpose: a calling in the world. “You did not choose me,” Jesus says. “I chose you…  I appointed you to go and bear fruit.”

Fruitfulness is about more than individual spirituality. Jesus had been with the disciples for some time — a significant amount of time with just a few people, twelve people. He was teaching them about friendship with God, which involved prayer and the reading of scripture. He gave them a command and an invitation: love one another.

But it was always about more than an individual’s spiritual life or a group of people and their love for each other. He was not teaching them to be a closed group, an inwardly focused group. He wanted the disciples to bear fruit; he wanted their lives to make a positive difference in the lives of others who had yet to come to know God’s love.  He calls us to do the same. We exist to make life better for others outside our own circle of family and close friends.

When we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, they are words with a profound meaning after the resurrection. Christ was not speaking of a kingdom in some far distant future, or up in the clouds. He was speaking of the here and now. Christ came to show us that we exist to bring God’s kingdom here on earth. His words to his disciples after the resurrection made it clear his kingdom work was to continue, and we are to make new disciples and help to transform lives.

“So that” applies to the church as a whole too, not just to us as individuals. “So that” should accompany every decision we make as a church. When a new program or activity is planned, we should say, “We are doing this program so that…..”  Christ expects the answer to “so that” to be “so that others come to know him, and accept him, and grow in faith and knowledge of God’s love”. 

Christ died so that we might do good works, bear fruit, and so bring glory to our Father in heaven.

Fruitfulness involves accountability. We are accountable to Christ for the life we have received from him. What is important is that we allow the grace of God to be poured out through us. Through our actions we are to allow the inward and spiritual grace to become an outward and visible sign of God’s love for everyone, so that lives will be transformed, and others will come to accept Christ as their Savior and Lord. It is the only reason we, and this church, exist.

Amen