Giving receipts
We will begin sending out receipts for 2009 giving during the last week in January. If you prefer to receive a PDF version of your receipt, please email Val (val [at] citychurchrva.com). If you would prefer that a hard copy be mailed to you, please make sure Val has your most current address on file (in the event that it is different than what appears on your checks).

Prayer Life Conference, 1/23
Paul Miller will be leading this conference at West End Presbyterian Church. The cost is $20 per person and includes lunch and materials.  You can register online by following this link:
http://www.seejesus.net/events/upcoming/PrayerLife_Rich/PL_Welcome.php.

*NEW*

Ellie Risher Visiting, 1/14
Ellie Risher will be coming to spend some time in Richmond on January 10. Ellie is a City Church-supported missionary preparing to move to South Africa indefinitely to share the gospel and provide relief for victims of human trafficking and vice. The Fishers will be hosting a sit-down with Ellie at their home (2610 Grayland Avenue) on Thursday, January 14 at 7pm. This will be a time to hear from Ellie about her work in global missions and her plans for the future, as well as getting some relational time with one of our sisters in Christ Jesus. For more information on this event, please e-mail Matt Fisher atl mattmoment [at] gmail.com.

Loaves & Fishes, 1/17
Our monthly opportunity to prepare and serve a meal to the hungry will be on Sunday, January 17. We will be meeting at the Conrad Center (1400 Oliver Hill Way) from 11am to 2pm. If you’re able to help out, please RSVP to Kira Disse at kmdisse [at] gmail.com.

[Click here to listen to this sermon in its entirety.]

A couple members of our church recently went on a mission trip to Africa, where one of them was invited to take part in an actual exorcism.  His takeaway from the event was that the people there were aware of a very real spiritual warfare going on amongst them, and that demons were a palpable threat rather than just a bedtime story.

This passage in Mark basically outlines a typical day in the life of Jesus, and in the course of the day it shows him casting out demons.  Demons are not something that’s a part of our everyday lives, at least not in that language.  But we can relate to things in our lives that are controlling us and oppressing us.  The things that in Jesus’ day were called demons, are now called obsession, compulsion, and addiction.

Our songs and our poetry betray us, though, for in them the concept of demons is very evident.  As INXS sings,

Devil inside / devil inside / every single one of us / the devil inside

And as W.H. Auden writes,

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.

And here’s a popular quote from the movie The Usual Suspects:

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

Our modernistic, scientific minds like to slap secular labels on these things, but in the third world we come face to face with reality.  Humanity has fallen from the state that God designed for us.  Sickness, death, and mental and emotional upheaval are everywhere.  Ever since Satan deceived Eve we’ve been deceived over and over again to think that we can take things into our own hands and be successful.

When Jesus casts out the demons, people are shocked.  It’s the same way we’re unsettled by our church member’s story about the exorcism.  On the holiest day of the week, when it’s most important for Jews to be ceremonially clean, he interacts with the most unclean thing imaginable.  And then, by casting the demons out, he does work on the Sabbath.  This story is showing us the character of Jesus and by default, the character of God: it’s not about rituals or rules, it’s about setting people free.  And he doesn’t need a bat’s head and toad’s foot to concoct a spell to cast out demons, instead he does it with just a word!  He heals with great authority.  In the same way, he heals with great intimacy.  He touched Peter’s mother-in-law when he went to heal her, a gesture that would not have been kosher at the time.  The way he acted was unsettling for some, but Jesus explodes the rules!  With true healing it’s always a scandal.  It was in Jesus’ day, and it continues to be in our day.

So the question we ask ourselves is, “How would we treat a demon-possessed person, if one walked into church today?”  It’s too late…one already did walk in.  I walked in with my demons, you walked in with your demons…we wall walked in with our demons.  They’re not quite as “on display” as the ones in the passage, but it doesn’t make them less real.  Whatever you call your demons — self, lust, depression, etc. — they control you, stop you, and limit you.  They are the power of darkness in your life, and they separate you from God.

The message of hope here is that Christ cares.  He wants to take our hurt away.  In his life he always moved toward afflicted people, and he healed them with intimacy and love.

There are two ways that people typically react to this passage which miss the message of hope:

1. We dismiss exorcisms as a pre-modern thing.  It’s easier not to respond to them or to entertain them as serious ideas, because it seems contrary to our self-aggrandizing sureness of everything around us.
2. We react with jealousy.  We wish that things were as concrete and obvious now as they were then, and that Jesus could come and simply deliver us as he did for the demon-possessed man.

These reactions miss what Jesus did on the cross; what we have access to now!  He already died for this.  These vignettes that Mark gives us show Jesus as a physical, temporal healer, but they point to what comes next.  They point to something greater, that demons have no claim on us any more.  That grace is free and infinite, and that we can take it freely and often.

In this passage we see a distinct shift of attention to the wilderness by Mark.  Speaking of a prophet such as John the Baptist, previous prophets are brought to mind.  These “wild men” were out there just a little bit.  And John the Baptist’s style was the same; he seemed to herald the coming of wilderness with his camel-hair shirt and breakfast of locusts and wild honey.  All of these wilderness clues would have meant one thing to the Jews: “Oh, he wants us to think about RESCUE.”  Because it was in the wilderness that God saved his people.

This story of Jesus’ baptism occurs at the beginning of his ministry.  Directly afterward, he goes into the wilderness.  This is a snapshot of what his entire ministry is about: facing down wilderness.  Going into the wilderness of sin and brokenness and bringing hope and peace.  Christ calmed storms and exorcised the wild demons from people.  In death, when he headed to the cross, there was a true moment of him entering the wilderness, of entering God’s wrath and all that’s evil in the earth — so that he could bring peace to us.  He came in an epic battle of good vs. evil, war vs. peace, and he won.

Why does it matter?  Why does Mark start his story here?  Because we know about wilderness; we relate to it.  That’s where we start.  That’s what got us into these church doors.  Loneliness, disorientation, feeling threatened, being tempted.  As George Alexander Chadwick wrote, “Surely we may believe that He Who was tempted at all points like as we are, felt now the deadly chill which falls upon the soul from the shadow of our ruined earth.”

This is why the happy, clappy Christianity that’s sold in some places feels so hollow — because we know it doesn’t ring true.  Here are some ways in which Christ’s experience with wilderness help him to relate to us:

1. He is familiar with wilderness.  What we’re going through isn’t news to him.  As it says in Hebrews 2:14, he “partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death.”  Because he suffered when tempted, he can help those who are tempted.  He’s not just this guy in heaven giving out platitudes.  He came here and experienced it.
2. He takes part in wilderness.  His experience here wasn’t one of those idyllic nature excursions where he reached the top of a mountain and took a bit out of a Nature Valley bar.  He was hungry and thirsty, he was dirty and tired.  He faced down the devil, and did battle in the dark places.
3. He has tamed the wilderness.  He was victorious!  He gained this victory on the cross — a cross that was outside the city of Jerusalem, on a hill that was really a symbol of wilderness to the people.

Christ’s baptism, or knowing to whom he belonged, is what allowed him to face down the wilderness.  God affirmed him by declaring “This is my son, in him I am well pleased.”  When a child is lost in the woods or at the mall, what does he cry for?  Not a map, or GPS.  He wants his mommy.  Because the answer to wilderness is relationship.

This week, who will you listen to?  Threats from the wilderness, or this voice from heaven, saying “in him I am well pleased?”

What does it mean when we say we’re “sent out?”  What does it look like for us as a church?  Perhaps the much more important question is “What is the source of our being sent out?”

The way that we’re sent out of is by knowing the Jesus has come first to us.  We often begin to think that the effects of God’s love are the conditions of God’s love.  We say to ourselves “If I do this, and don’t do that, God will love me more.”  But this is how we fail to see God’s point.  Being sent out doesn’t originate with what I’m doing or what you’re doing, it starts with what God’s doing.  That simple fact has been so widely ignored that a lot of people think of Christianity as a set of rules, or as a convenient way to organize your life.  But in reality, God looked down and saw that we were sinners, broken and hurting, and he sent his son to do something about it. So we’re not sent out to gain love or approval from God, we already had it in the first place.  We’re sent out as a natural reaction to what he did for us.

“The secret of the gospel is that we actually do more when we hear less about all we need to do for God and hear more about all that God has already done for us.” — Kevin DeYoung

There are no try-outs for God’s grace.  All that’s left for us to do is to receive it.  But the simplicity of this offer is hard for us to accept, because it starts with us admitting that we need help.  That we need that grace.  Because we’ve been incubated in this culture where you have to earn everything and you can’t be satisfied unless you do, we keep picturing ourselves as needing to earn God’s love.  In truth it’s freeing to know that God has sent Jesus to us, and that we don’t have to be “good enough” to get him.

Our motivation for being sent out depends on the constant renewal of this discovery.  It’s got to be new for us.  We need to rediscover this again and again and again.  And remember that his work for us was done once and for all, and is still in effect today.  When we see that all of our behavior, good and bad, can’t save us, and that Jesus can, we really appreciate what has been done.  The message is to believe, not to behave.

Jesus is sent to us comprehensively.  It involves everything.  Jesus has come for every part of who you are; there’s no part of you that’s too dark or too bad, or that Jesus can’t bring hope to.  Likewise, in every part of our lives we’re sent out to be Jesus’ ambassadors.

A good reminder of God’s love and what our reaction should be is that we are always failing at this kind of love.  When you take your son to a baseball game and he refuses to sit close to the field because he has an irrational fear of mascots, your desire to talk him into it anyway comes from a certain selfishness, and wanting to love him the way you want to be loved.  But God loves us unselfishly, always the way we want to be loved.  His love just fits.  And when we begin to understand how deeply God has loved us, it changes us.  So we are sent out only insofar as we know that Jesus Christ was sent for us.  And when he came to us, he became like us in every way, and died on a cross to bring us back to the God who made us and loves us.

“Missions,” which is translated as being “sent out,” is a big part of the focus at most churches.  But we tend to make three major assumptions about missions:

1. Assumption 1: It starts with and is focused on where you’re going and who you’re going to. This is the first thing that’s asked about when a mission trip is brought up.  There’s this us vs. them mentality that begins to develop when we see ourselves with this triumphalistic feeling.  We think of ourselves as saviors going to fix the problems of these people who don’t have all that we do.

   Truth 1: Being sent out starts with you. With the reality of Jesus Christ in you, and you finding your identity in him.  The “front line” for missions is in your heart.  It must start there if you’re to be of any use.  When we miss this point, we turn missions into just another program that our church does.  But it’s about Jesus in us, and it never gets more complicated than that (v. 12).  From this focus, something new is created (v. 17).  The following quote from Donald Miller illustrates what happens when we ignore this:

   “I could not in good conscience tell a friend about a faith that didn’t excite me.  I couldn’t share something I wasn’t experiencing.  And I wasn’t experiencing Christianity.  It didn’t do anything for me at all.  It felt like math, like a system of rights and wrongs and political beliefs, but it wasn’t mysterious; it wasn’t God reaching out of heaven to do wonderful things in my life.”

2. Assumption 2: It’s for people who have it all together. You know, those holy folks who glide along rather than walk, and who presumably know regular words but only talk in scripture.  We hold these people on a pedestal, and we think to ourselves about missions, “Maybe when I get it together I can do it.”

   Truth 2: Being sent out is for you. And you don’t have to have it all together, because Jesus Christ has it all together.  The good thing that we’re trying to spread by engaging in missions doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to God!  And we’re just holding it for him; we’re just being his jars of clay (2 Corinthians 4:5-7).  We need more people to say “I am weak, but he is strong.”  It would change our whole outlook!  But it’s counter-intuitive and counter-cultural to take the emphasis off of our own powers.

   When you recognize that you don’t have it all together and that you are in fact dependent on JC, that’s when you’re best poised to be sent out.  Because you realize that you and your Big Solutions are not the treasure, but that it’s what’s inside of you that is the treasure.

3. Assumption 3: It’s just another rule of Christianity that you’d better obey. The idea of doing missions has been hammered into you by preachers, church members, etc., and you always have this feeling that you should be participating in it.  Or perhaps it’s the thing that’s kept you away from the church, because it induces all of this guilt, this weight.

   Truth 3: Being sent out flows from JC’s control and love (v. 14). Missions is not a condition, it’s an effect of God’s love.  When we really are in a place of assurance and love with Christ, he controls us — the word “control” literally meaning “held together.”  His love holds us together, and this love we feel moves us on to affect other people.  It changes us to where we can’t help but affect them.

It all goes back to the fact that JC was sent out to love you.  No matter what you did, or how hurt you are, JC was sent out for you and nothing can change that.