Replacing Judas

SERMON: 2009-04-12--ac0909--replacing-judas SOURCE DURATION: 00:42:11.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 2 concludes the theological exposition of the sermon ('...his cause is going to triumph.'). Candidate 3 marks a clear transition into lyrical, repetitive material that sounds like a hymn or chorus, which precedes explicit music/applause segments. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:38:38.120-00:42:02.780 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- The New Year has begun and we're going back in our study of scripture to where we left off before the Christmas season, which is the story of Judas as recorded in the Book of Acts, the first chapter. As we look then at these verses that we have read together this morning, there are three observations that I want to make, three things that I want to try to point out to you. And the first is this, Judas was engaged in an apostolic ministry. Notice again how scripture puts it, "Then they," that is the early church, "prayed, 'Lord, you know everyone's heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry.'" Judas had been engaged in an apostolic ministry. Now in our circles we don't talk historically a great deal about apostles or prophets for that matter. We talk about evangelists, we talk about pastors, and we talk about teachers, but we don't talk about apostles and we don't talk about prophets and there's an interesting history to that just for the record. Goes back all the way to the days of John Calvin. John Calvin was really one of the founding fathers of the Reformed family of churches some 450 years ago. And John Calvin decided I think somewhat arbitrarily that apostles and prophets belong to the biblical age and that those offices have not continued beyond the closing of the canon of scripture. And his argument for that was a fairly common argument. You hear it in a lot of different quarters. The apostles and the prophets served as vehicles of God's revelation to give us scripture. One scripture was given to us and the canon of scripture was closed as we call it. Then apostles and prophets were no longer needed. Instead we have evangelists and we have pastors and we have teachers who helped the body of Christ grow up. That's one of the reasons that he gave I believe. And I think a second reason is to try to get away from the Roman Catholic tradition of apostolic succession. Because if you're familiar with the Roman Catholic tradition then you will know that the pope to this day is seen as a successor of who? Peter. And bishops in the Roman Catholic Church tradition today are seen as a continuation of the apostolic tradition. Now you can see where for a burgeoning new reformation movement trying to break free from the power of the Roman Catholic background, it was rather politically expedient and I don't mean that in a negative term but it was rather politically expedient to challenge the belief of apostolic succession. Now all of that being true it's hard to argue from a biblical point of view that apostles were limited simply to biblical times because the same passage that talks about evangelists, pastors and teachers as having been God's gift to the church also talks without any kind of qualification about apostles and prophets. The text in question of course is a very familiar passage in Ephesians chapter 4 where in verses 11, 12 and 13 scripture says it was he that is the exalted Lord Jesus at the right hand of God the Father gave these gifts to the church. These are the gifts of leadership. Some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists and some to be pastors and teachers to prepare God's people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up and as I said here the picture is the exalted Lord Jesus at the right hand of the Father he is victorious, he receives the gift of the Holy Spirit and in pouring out the gift of the Holy Spirit on the church pours out on the church the gift of leadership and the gift of leadership is apostles and prophets and evangelists and pastors slash teachers, all of which are necessary to bring the body of Christ to maturity. And so there are many that argue today and I think fairly persuasively that if the body of Christ is to come to maturity, if the church is to be healthy, if the church is to overcome the power of sin and death and hell then we need not just evangelists, pastors and teachers but we also need apostles and prophets and that of course immediately raises the question then what is an apostolic ministry? What does scripture mean when it says that Judas had an apostolic ministry? And to help us with that I have included or had Marlene include in your bulletins this morning a sheet that is headed up with the title fivefold ministries, take that out for just a moment if you will, we won't go through it in great detail but there are some things in there that you can read in more detail on your own that I think are extremely helpful to understand what the difference is between all these ministries and why they are important for the church in my judgment even today. Now notice how this is structured. The column on the left gives you the fivefold ministry positions that are taken from Ephesians chapter one, the apostolic, the prophetic, the evangelistic, the pastoral and the teaching ministry. Then across the top you have first a definition of what that looks like, the core tasks or the focus of those ministries, what happens in the next column when they work right and what are the liabilities and the problems that you have to watch out for. So let's take for a moment the apostolic there and you notice the definition that the apostolic is the steward of the DNA of the church. Now what is meant by that is that the apostolic ministry safeguards the essence of the gospel because you see the gospel has a particular message. It's a message rooted as we'll see later in the death and in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and repeatedly in the New Testament the apostolic ministry is defending the truth of the gospel against heretics, people who want to take away from the reality of Jesus and today that would be any kind of movement that says Jesus wasn't really human or Jesus wasn't really the son of God, Jesus didn't really die on the cross or Jesus wasn't really raised from the dead or that's the heart of the gospel and that is entrusted to an apostolic ministry. Now beyond that they are the sent ones. The apostolic ministry and leadership ensures that Christianity is faithfully transmitted from one context to another context from era to another era. The word apostle means sent ones. You'll recall from the gospels the Lord Jesus started out with disciples and disciple means follower or a learner but then there came a point where he said it's time for you to start participating in my ministry because when I leave you're going to carry on the work that I've come to do, the proclamation of the truth of the good news that in Christ God reconciles all things in the universe to himself so then he sent them out. So traditionally and historically an apostle is one who takes the gospel from one setting to another, takes on the prevailing culture and then in those new cultures tries to establish new churches. The closest thing that we have to it is missionary which comes from the Latin rather than the Greek but not every missionary as we'll see later on has an apostolic gifting because that is a unique and particular ability to oversee a large area of work and to establish. So in the next column more detail on the core task of an apostle, extending Christianity, guarding and embedding the DNA of the church both theologically and missionally, establishing the church in new contexts, founding the other ministries and that little diagram there is the apostolic leads to the prophetic, to the evangelistic, to the pastoral and to the teaching position, the development of leaders and leadership systems, strategic missional perspective, hence local networking, in other words a person with an apostolic calling and gifting isn't just confined to a local congregation, doesn't just shepherd the people, we'll talk about that in a moment, no he or she has oversight over a much larger area of work and is responsible and has the anointing, the gifting, the capability of taking the gospel from one culture to another and establishing new churches and the best way to just understand that position is to look at the apostle Paul, he'd come sailing into town, he would preach the gospel, he would gather a bunch of people together, they would appoint some preliminary elders and leaders and he'd go on to the next place and to the next place and to the next place and then a couple years later he'd go back again to where he started just to make sure that things were still on track and then he'd write them letters which is what we have in the New Testament to help keep them on track, to be strong in faith and to keep moving forward. Now when an apostle does his work right what you get is a healthy manifestation of apostolic genius. Apostolic genius is the ability to read the cultural context into which you arrive and then holding on to the core truth of the gospel, translate that into a particular setting in such a way that people are won over to the Lord Jesus. Apostolic genius means you have the ability to modify not the core of your message but the way in which you present that message and the methodology that you use to get it across with a view of helping people break out of their traditions and to embrace the gospel of the Lord Jesus. You know if you read the history of the Christian church and you hear of St. Patrick in Ireland and St. Bonavis who evangelized the Frisians as a lot of you will know at the cost of his life I might mention. Those were people with an apostolic mandate. They had the courage, the boldness to step out into new situations and to say Jesus is Lord. So it produces an extension of the faith, it produces authentic Christianity, it produces churches that are outwardly focused because that's the passion to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth, a healthy translocal networking that means across regional areas, churches working together, growth of church and movement, pioneering mission, experimentation with new forms, incarnational church that is to say, learning how to do church in new ways that are culturally relevant that enable people to come to faith in Jesus without getting hung up about certain ways in which we have culturally become conditioned and then manifestations of the apostolic, the prophetic, the pastoral and the teaching ministry. Just to give you one quick example in the history of missions, how sometimes this apostolic genius was missing. When early missionaries went to Africa and even when early missionaries went to China they went out of obedience to the great commission but they didn't realize how much of their Christianity was cultural in orientation. And so they come to an African culture and they teach them translations of western hymns played to the tune of a little pump organ. Now there's nothing wrong with a little pump organ and there's nothing wrong with the great hymns of the western church. But you understand that if you're a native and you have an entirely different kind of music and musical background, it would be far more effective in worship to be able to take the gospel, put it in the context in which you have lived, redeem of your culture or what could be redeemed so that you can have worship that is truly native to the population. Now the first one to break through that in the history of missions or one of the first to really clue into that was Hudson Taylor when he went to China. And Hudson Taylor years ago in the 1800s when he was called to do mission work in China, he was one of the first to adopt in the face of great criticism from his contemporaries. He was the first to adopt Chinese dress and to engage the Chinese culture on its own terms. The temptation and the tendency of the apostolic, if you don't do it right, is you come at it from a superior position as opposed to entering into the place where people find themselves. And we've all been at the receiving end of people who think they know better than we do and who are going to try to tell us how to do life and you know that almost immediately your back goes up, is that not true? So when it works right, it really works right, but it has its dangers. And you see that when it gets emphasized to the exclusion of the other ministries. And so there's a tendency to autocratic styles of leadership. People can easily become bossy because you're so used to being an entrepreneur. I remember years ago, we had Richard Wurmbrandt stay at our house. And if you know anything about Richard Wurmbrandt is he suffered greatly for his faith under communist rule in Romania. And he survived all of that to become leader of the persecuted church and a wonderful man. But I discovered very quickly when we had him staying with us, you didn't cross him and you didn't question what he was about to do because he didn't get where he got by being overly touchy feely about everybody that disagreed with him. You can appreciate that. That comes with the territory. So we like to revere the apostle Paul because he wrote so much of scripture and he was obviously such a great dude. I wonder how many of us would have hung around with him for very long. He'd be tough to keep up with. And he wouldn't put up with a lot of nonsense that you and I have to put up with because that's the apostolic genius. You can't afford to be touchy feely when there's a world out there that needs to be one for Jesus. So what is the result? Lots of wounded people in the organization due to the task and the future orientation of that ministry. The more outward focused you are and the more you want people caught up in your task, then the more chaos you can leave at home. Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision, had his heart broken by all the brokenness in third world countries. Threw himself into that ministry, as did many in the great apostolic tradition. In the process of doing that, he wrecked his home life because his wife could not keep up. And if you hear the stories of the early missionaries who served in this kind of apostolic fashion and listen to the stories their children tell you, then you will know that they are often the ones who paid the price for this incredible outward focus. I'm not justifying that, but I'm saying that's one of the liabilities when you have an apostolic type ministry. So lots of challenge and change, not enough healthy transition, because this requires the pastoral and the teaching function. If you have a world out there that needs to be conquered and things that need to be changed on a dime, then the apostolic genius is to say we're going to change it and we're going to change it now. But it's easy in that process to forget how much time and effort it takes for the average person to come on board with that and to enable them to make that kind of transition. So that's really a pastoral function or a teaching function. And just to compare those two, and I don't want to elaborate on this duly, but it's important for us to understand this. If you drop down to the pastoral, the pastor cares for and develops the people of God by leading, nurturing, protecting, and discipling them by cultivating a loving and spiritually mature network of relationships and community and making disciples. Think of the pastoral role as that of a father and/or a mother who is shepherding the children. And so if you have an alley and you come crying to mom or dad, mom or dad, or the pastoral role is to step into that situation, to demonstrate empathy, to demonstrate care, also to speak truth. But the primary focus is that of providing that kind of support. And so what is the impact of that in the third column over? Nurture into faith and the community, loving relationships, growth in discipleship, sense of connectedness, worship, and prayer. Well, and that works and works well. People are just happy with God, and they're happy with each other, and they love to hang around with each other, and they come to church as much for each other as they do for God. True? Yeah, you can be unspiritual and say that it is, because I'm not so naïve as to suppose that our gathering is always just to seek the Lord. It's also to seek each other, and that's perfectly legitimate. That's one of the functions of community, and that's one of the functions of a pastoral role. That's why as a congregation, we have a whole pastoral care team that tries to extend that shepherding ministry. That's what the word means, a shepherding ministry, so that we can help each other through the bumps and through the ups and downs of life. I know there are always more needs than what we can ever meet, but that's the ideal, and that's the vision. But again, that has a downside, and a lot of people don't always understand that. Because if there's too much emphasis on the pastoral and not enough on the apostolic, then what happens is that a community becomes closed and non-missional. And the best way to describe that is to just mention what your experience has been when you're part of a small group. You'll notice that when you're part of a small group and the small group works well, then pretty soon you're so comfortable and cozy with each other that when somebody says, "But I want to bring my friend to it," you've got to have a whole discussion in the group about whether you're going to let somebody else in or not. Because the minute you bring in somebody else, you change the dynamics. You've just learned to trust each other. You've learned to depend on each other. You've learned to open up your hearts to each other in deep places, and now all of a sudden you're introducing a whole new factor. Listen to me in this and listen to me well. The constant struggle for the church historically is the tension between being and doing. Jesus calls us to look outward, out of a position of strength, to make disciples of the nations. The human tendency is almost always to forget about the nations and to just worry about me, my family, and my comfort. That's why you need these multiple offices. You need an apostle who waves the flag for missional ministry. You also need the pastoral type who says, "Hey, just a minute. You're wearing us out here, and we need a little loving." Because without that sense of wholeness, we can't keep on running the way that we have been running. So a church can easily become closed in. You can have an unhealthy codependency between those who are the pastoral caregivers and those who are receiving it. You get a "don't rock the boat" approach to the organization. We love peace more than we love truth, or we love peace more than we love ministry. We like it the way that we are. Don't rock the boat. Don't bring new people in, or don't cause us to be challenged in our relational friendships. I've got enough friends that I need. I don't need any more friends. And so just leave me alone. And then, of course, if too feminine—this is a really interesting one—if too feminine in expression, males can be alienated from the church. I have a book at home. I've talked about it before. It's called The Church Impotent. The subtitle is The Feminization of the Church. And it raises the question why so many mainline churches have become a haven for women and children and an absence or a dearth of men. And it traces it back to the feminization of leadership, that when leadership becomes too feminine in the sense of being too worried about relational niceness, too worried about nurturing, too worried about keeping it all together. And if there isn't enough challenge to a man, to be a man, to rise up, and to use his God-given strengths—whatever they are—to accomplish the mission that God has called the church to, in moments like that the church ends up going downhill because men leave in droves to sit around the campfire drinking beer and shooting guns, or whatever manifestation of masculinity there may be in that culture. You see where I'm going with this? Now, you can read through the rest of that in detail, and you'll understand why the Lord Jesus, in his wisdom, says for a church to be healthy, for a church to be balanced, balanced between being and doing. You need the apostolic, because that's outward-reaching. You need the prophetic, because the prophetic speaks truth in the body of Christ, always calling it back to biblical reality, and that has strengths and that has weaknesses. You need the evangelist, who's got a heart for the lost, and who can proclaim the good news of Jesus, and who can bring them into the body. You need the pastoral role, and these are roles not just filled by given individuals, but given by teams of people, if they're going to work right, if the church is to grow, and then you need teachers. Again, on the list, if you read through it in some detail, you will immediately recognize what it looks like when that is working well, and you'll recognize what that looks like when it's not working well. What's the purpose? To equip God's people for the work of ministry, to bring the body of Christ to maturity, so that as a body we can do the calling that God has called us with to himself. So Judas occupied an apostolic ministry. You with me? Do you see the implications of that? So Judas had an apostolic ministry, and it's that apostolic ministry then that he abandoned. For notice how the passage goes on, he abandoned his position, Acts 1, 24, 25, the church prayed, "Lord, show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs." In betraying Jesus, he not only led Jesus to his death, but he also turned his back on his own apostolic ministry. All the things that we've just been talking about, they were all part and parcel of what Judas was called to. When Jesus sent out his twelve disciples as apostles, Judas was one of them. When they went out there preaching the gospel, and when they went out there healing the sick, and when they went out there establishing the kingdom of God, Judas was right in there. We've talked extensively before Christmas about why it is that he turned his back on that. Because you see, Judas fundamentally did not share the values of Jesus. What were the values of Jesus? The coming of God's kingdom. The whole world restored to God and restored to doing the will of God in every area of life for the glory of God. That kingdom could only come about by his death and by his resurrection because that was the only way to break the power of sin and to reconcile all things to God and to each other in all of creation. And Judas, he took one look at that and he said, "That's not what I'm on board for." Because like many of his contemporaries, Judas said, "I want to get rid of the Romans. I don't want pie in the sky. I don't want a kingdom that is a future kingdom. I want it now." He lined up with Jesus because he wanted to bask in his reflected glory and he could probably see himself as secretary of the treasury of the new kingdom that the Lord Jesus would come to establish and God's Old Testament prophecies for Israel would be fulfilled. And when it became clear that that's not what Jesus had in mind, Judas was cut to the quick. And in his disappointment and in his anger, he threw in the towel, betrayed Jesus, and abandoned his apostolic calling. Now, I don't know about you, but a story like that always troubles me. And I'll tell you why. Because as I've said many times, history is littered with a carcass of those who heard God's call, shared in his glory, engaged in his ministry, and then for one reason or another decided to turn tail and bail. There is the whole Old Testament generation of Israel that came out of wilderness. Everybody aged 20 and over that ended up dying in the wilderness because they couldn't make the adjustment from a slave mentality into a mentality that says, "God is my father and I can trust him to lead me to the promised land." You see it in King Saul who was called to be king over Israel and yet who broke covenant so badly that God said, "You're out of here." You see it with the Judas. Later on, we read about Demas who was in love with the world and who abandoned at least for a season. We don't know the outcome of that history, but abandoned at least for a season his apostolic assistantship, if you will, in helping the apostle Paul. And in my book Blessings and Curses, if you've ever read it, I tell the story of Charles Templeton. Charles Templeton was a contemporary of Billy Graham, and at the age of 21, he had a marvelous and an incredible religious experience. Let me just read you a short paragraph of how he described his own conversion. "Suddenly," he would recall later, "it was as though a black blanket had been draped over me. A sense of guilt pervaded my entire mind and body. The only words that were come were, 'Lord, come down, come down,' and then slowly a weight began to lift, a weight as heavy as I. It passed through my thighs, my torso, my arms and shoulders and lifted off, and ineffable warmth began to suffuse my body. It seemed that a light had turned on in my chest, that it had cleansed me. I hardly dared breathe, hearing that I might alter or end the moment, and I heard myself whispering softly over and over again, 'Thank you, Lord, thank you, thank you.' And later in bed, I lay quietly at the center of a radiant, overwhelming, all-pervasive happiness." Sounds a lot like what John Wesley went through when he described about his heart being strangely warmed. And Charles Templeton went on to team up with Billy Graham, and together they headed up the early days of the Youth for Christ movement. He was 26 years old when he founded the Avenue Road Church of the Nazarene in Toronto. Charles Templeton was a Canadian, drew phenomenal crowds and was said to be a better preacher than Billy Graham. That church continues to exist today. Some of you will recognize the name Bayview Glen Church of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination. At the age of 33, he attended Princeton Theological Seminary in New York, I believe, a very liberal seminary at that time, but gradually his faith began to erode. And so at the age of 42, after a long struggle with doubt, Templeton renounced his faith and publicly announced himself as an agnostic. To imagine the repercussions of that, think of Billy Graham at this phase in his life, saying to his worldwide audience, "Well folks, I've lost my faith. Everything that I've ever said before, I don't believe it any longer." That was the impact Charles Templeton's renouncing of the faith had on the evangelical church. Years later, just before his death, he wrote a book called Farewell to God, My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith. And if you read that carefully, then you will discover that one of the reasons for rejecting the faith was that he could no longer square what he had come to believe about God and the Bible in the light of science and in the light of modern discoveries and in the light of modern scholarship. And so in 2001, he died after an additional career in journalism and television and as an author. And I read a story like that. And I think back to the days when I was a youngster lying in bed praying, "Lord God, don't ever let me grow up coming to a point where I don't think I need you anymore, where I think I can do it on my own." See, Judas renounced, he renounced his apostolic calling. And the danger that you and I face at every moment in our lives, especially when the Lord calls us to go into difficult places when there's persecution or where there's misunderstanding. The danger and the temptation then is to give it all up and to start living for my own security and for my own comfort. And outwardly, we may still go through all the right motions. People turn their back on God years and years before many of them, they ever drop out of church. But you can already see the seed beginning to take root because they're disappointed in God, they're disappointed in other people, they don't know how to resolve their conflicts or their tensions, they begin to wander away. And before you know it, something happens and the devil grabs hold of you and you're sidelined and you don't even know it happened. How do you prevent that? You prevent that by walking closely with the Lord Jesus and remaining in accountability with communion. That verse in Hebrew, you've heard me quote it often, "Take care lest there be in any of you an evil and an unbelieving heart to lead you to fall away from the living God. Exhort one another as long as it is called today." And the good news is that Jesus who called us can also keep us, and he can keep us faithful to the end. And so it's the Apostle Paul who, sitting in a jail waiting for his head to be chopped off, can say, "I've run the race, I've finished the fight, and there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness that God has reserved for me and all those who have loved his appearing." I don't know about you, but I want to finish well. I don't want to be part of a generation that God has to throw aside because it hasn't had the courage to face the reality of a broken world and the faith and the hope and the love to step into that and to declare that Jesus Christ [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:38:38.120; remove through 00:42:11.000] at the end of [CUT] the day, his cause is going to triumph. Your light broke through my night, restoring exceeding joy. Your grace fell like the rain and made this land to live. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. Your hand lifted me up, I stand on higher ground. Your praise broke in my heart and made this valley sing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. This is how we overcome. This is how we overcome. This is how we overcome. This is how we overcome. This is how we overcome. This is how we overcome. This is how we overcome. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the sorrow if you're dancing. You have blue, the morning if you're dancing. You have blue, the sorrow if you're dancing. (Music) (Applause) [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:42:11.000; resume after this marked segment]