But There’s Still More!
October 9th, 2022 – But There’s Still More!
Good morning beautiful Pine Rivers Vineyard (PRV) family, whether present in this room or online! I was so surprised and delighted when Pastor Kirk & Pastor Nichole reached out to me this past week and invited me to share with you today. What an honor and a blessing to be among sisters and brothers in Christ such as yourselves on a gorgeous spring day at such a time as this!
We were blessed to hear David give the last talk in your Come to the River series two weeks ago. So hopefully what I’m saying goes along with that as we ask God to help us to live in the more of God’s Kingdom life which is reaching from God’s throne through you because of what Jesus has done and by the power of the Holy Spirit to the very ends of the earth. I found a website this week where you can look up the antipode of any place on earth. Did you know if we drilled a hole from Atlanta (where Paul & I live) right through the center of the earth, we’d end up in Gnarabup, Western Australia? So more or less we’re on opposite ends of the earth, and I can assure you, gravity, distance, time zones, cultural quirks, lingo, and accents are no trouble at all to God. We can get into the more of God’s Kingdom life whoever we are, wherever we are, wherever we’ve been, whatever we’ve done, whatever we’ve not done, no exceptions. Each and every person of any age and stage is welcomed, included, and cherished in God’s radical invitation to live a life of love as Jesus did.
For those of you who are wondering how an American like me sounds like this, I did not actually fall into a hole that went through the center of the earth, but I had the privilege of immigrating to Australia when I was seven years old. I did all my schooling and uni here, met Jesus here, got married to Paul here (he’s the real Aussie!), and worked here. When we were 25 years old, we up and went to the US and have lived over there for most of the last 33 years. God has blessed us with six kids and four daughters- and sons-in-love, with several nationalities knit together in our immediate family – Australian, American, Indian, Romanian, Serbian, Turkish, we lived in Russia with our kids, and some of our kids have lived in various other countries as well. Our family is like one of those abstract paintings where various paint pigments are splashed onto a canvas and form all kinds of colorful and curious combinations. One thing’s for sure – wherever we are, it’s clear we’re from somewhere else. We don’t fully fit or belong wherever we are. That’s our story.
But you know, that’s true of all of us when it comes to the best and most important story of all. It’s clear that none of us fully fit or belong. The more any of us get to know God and His love for all people, the more we get to know our place in God’s story (the best and most important story of all), the more we realize that this physical universe is not all there is. C. S. Lewis famously said in his classic work, Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” Meanwhile we each find ourselves here, in this world, at such a time and a place as this. Today I want to invite us to engage our senses and our imaginations as we read some Scriptures and seek to hear God’s invitation to us here and now. Come, Holy Spirit – would you please speak to each of us today? Let us hear Your invitation, Your voice, and soften our hearts to respond to You with love, trust, and obedience, so we can know You, follow You, and live the life of You for which You’ve created us? We pray these things in the precious name of Christ Jesus.
(show video – “Demtel – Tim Shaw – The King Of Knives” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiATDMHU7gc)
I’ve called today’s talk, “But there’s still more!” as you might have guessed from the video. We’re going to explore this as we look at a couple of Scriptures, starting with Psalm 24:1 (NLT) – “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him.”
Notice that this verse does not say, “The earth is it’s own,” but “The earth is the LORD’s.” We are not our own. We do not belong to ourselves. Paul & I live in a country where one of the most important documents is a declaration of independence. When our kids were young, I used to talk to them about the dangers of being too independent from or too dependent on other people. The flourishing life that God wants for each person, the full and satisfying life that Jesus talked about, happens when we live in such a way that we are dependent on God and mutually interdependent on one another. Being a Christ-follower is less about “me and God” and more about “God with us.” Being a solo Christian makes no sense at all because God Himself, the Trinity, is a community of love – Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We’re in this together, together with God, together in the church, together on the journey of life. After going to church for most of my life, I only realized a couple of years ago that many of the pronouns in the New Testament are plural. When we read the word “you” in English, I think many in our modern me-centered world (at least where we live) tend to think “you singular,” when actually when more often than not Jesus, Paul, and other authors meant “you plural.” “You are the light of the world” – plural. “Love your enemies” – plural. “Do not worry about your life” – plural. By the way, scholars of Biblical Greek have studied for many years the best and most accurate way to translate the word which is often rendered “you” in English translations of the New Testament. I think I heard that some suggested “youse”, others recommended “y’all”, yet others proposed “you-uns.” I’m pretty sure that the consensus ended up being “all y’all.” You get the point. We are not our own. Together we belong to God.
The second thing to notice in Psalm 24:1 is that the earth and everything and everyone in it is the Lord’s. All of it belongs to the Lord. I tiptoed into the Hebrew and found a lot more detail. What belongs to the Lord is every land, every country, every region, every territory, every piece, every bit of dust, everything the earth contains, all of the fullness, all of the multitudes, all of the inhabitants, all who dwell there, all who are living, all of the occupants, all of the residents, all who are sitting, standing, staying, waiting, or lurking, all – all are the Lord’s. At this point we need to understand what it means to be the Lord’s. If God were a cruel or tyrannical ruler, that would not be very welcome news. It is crucial to understand who God is and what He’s like. Our Vineyard statement of faith begins with this declaration: “We believe that God is the Eternal King. He is an infinite, unchangeable Spirit, perfect in holiness, wisdom, goodness, justice, power and love. From all eternity He exists as the One Living and True God in three persons of one substance, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, equal in power and glory.” This is God whom we worship. This is the One to whom we each belong. This is good news!
We belong to God, and everything and everyone belongs to God. But there’s still more! Let’s look now at the first part of Psalm 139. I really like the title given to this by the editors of one translation – “The Inescapable God.” We’re going to read the first 12 verses of Psalm 139 in the NLT –
“O LORD, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, LORD. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night—but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you.”
God is inescapable. It is simply impossible for us to get away from God. We don’t have any superpowers that enable us to outrun God. We can’t time travel to a different era He hasn’t yet discovered. There are no shadows in which we can hide from God, because to Him the night shines as bright as the day. We can’t wait until He’s distracted and then slip away. God sees everything with perfect clarity at all times. God sees and knows each one of us completely as we actually are, with His eyes and heart full of love for us. We are all His deeply loved children, passionately pursued by Him whenever we get off track. God continually gives each one of us His full and undivided attention. He is above and beyond time and space and yet mysteriously is fully present with each one of us. It’s pretty mind-blowing really, but only because our minds are limited. God is present everywhere and at all times with each part of His magnificent creation. And He reserves His most special attention and blessings for people, individual persons, because He has created each one of us in His image. He is the Lover of our souls and has marked each one of us indelibly as “Beloved.” There is absolutely nothing any of us can do to make God love us any less. And there is absolutely nothing any of us can do to make God love us any more. God loves you and me and each person He’s created perfectly and completely.
We belong to God, everything and everyone belongs to God, and God love and presence are inescapable. But there’s still more! Our church back in Atlanta, Liberty Vineyard, recently did a series where we looked at the various heroes in the Hebrews 11 “Hall of Faith.” Listen while I read Hebrews 11:39-40 (NLT) – “All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised. For God had something better in mind for us, so that they would not reach perfection without us.” This passage assures us that whatever it is we think we need, God has something better in mind for us. It also explains that none of the men or women heroes of the faith who have gone before us will individually be completed in Christ apart from us, those still living on earth. We might be tempted to get a big head reading this verse – oh, they’re not done until we get there! But the point is that there is only one body of Christ, only one Church down through the ages. Ephesians 4:4-6 (NLT) says, “For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, in all, and living through all.” This one “big C” Church is a really big family and consists of Christ Jesus, plus all the Christ-followers who have gone before, plus all the Christ-followers who are alive today, plus all the Christ-followers who are yet to come. It’s a pretty big family! Together, at the end of the ages, the body of Christ will be fully formed, complete, perfect.
Recently our oldest son got married over in Montenegro, a gorgeous part of the world. Peter & Alex both enjoy everything about food, delighting in picking berries, whipping up pancakes, savoring a delicious cut of meat, ordering from a menu. Often the next meal is planned even before the current meal’s dishes are cleared away. For their wedding reception, they decided they wanted to prepare all of the food, along with each family member and friend who were present. Some of the food took days of preparation, some was cooked earlier in the day, some was made after the wedding ceremony. There was a flurry of activity in kitchens on five levels of the apartment building where we all stayed. Many of us ran up and down stairs all afternoon, gathering, delivering, and helping as needed. The components of the feast were delivered to the main level one by one, and slowly an incredibly beautiful and delicious spread was assembled. It would have been very unsatisfying, inappropriate, and quite strange if each dish had been consumed by just the ones who had contributed to its preparation in a location far from the main area. No one dined alone. We waited until everyone and everything was ready. When all of the preparations were completed, all the guests had arrived at the reception area, and most importantly, the bride and groom were ready to go, we all sat down to enjoy a magnificent feast.
The Bible in a nutshell is all about God’s story and our place in it. The beginning of our part of His story has us together with God in a garden, and the end has us together with God at a wedding. An angel said to the apostle John in Revelation 19:9 (NLT), “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb.” John had probably been to a number of weddings, so he used the best language available to him to try to convey how beautiful, how wonderful, how incredible it will be when all of the body of Christ are assembled at the end of the ages. After everyone has arrived, we will all sit down and enjoy the feast together. It’s gonna be a huge table! We can’t even begin to imagine how incredible this celebration will be! Of course, God has already invited the entire world to this feast. Even before God created the universe, He’d already prepared an invitation for each and every person in His plan of salvation through Christ Jesus. No one is excluded. Even better, we each get to participate in handing out personal invitations, too. Jesus talked about how the Kingdom of Heaven is like a wedding feast in Matthew 22:4,9. We get to tell those who have been invited to the banquet, “Everything is ready. Come to the banquet!” We get to “go out to the street corners and invite everyone [we] see.”
Who would that include? Who are we to invite? Another way to think about it is – where do we hang the “welcome” signs in our lives, in our homes, in our churches? Hopefully we don’t stock up on “not welcome” signs. In Christ, all divisions and distinctions have been transcended. It doesn’t mean that divisions and distinctions don’t exist or that we should pretend to not notice them. It means that Jesus Christ is higher than all of them. And we get to participate with Jesus in welcoming, including, and cherishing people in God’s radical invitation to live a life of love as Jesus did.
We belong to God, everything and everyone belongs to God, God’s love and presence are inescapable, no one is excluded from God’s radical invitation. But there’s still more! I heard a marvelous story the other day from a man whose friend had gotten his dream job as a footman to the Queen at Buckingham Palace. In describing what that role entailed, he summed it up by saying that he spent a lot of time waiting. But there were two kinds of waiting – a waiting on and a waiting for. This man waited on the Queen by being present in the room to do the tasks that were needed. He waited for the Queen by being patient when things needed to happen at a timeline that differed from what he may have predicted or preferred.
As we learn to live a life of love as Jesus did, we learn to wait on God by choosing to be present with Him. I like to think about aiming to be present in the present in the presence of God. In the Vineyard we are quite intentionally a centered set movement. That means that we seek to move towards the center, which means moving one choice at a time towards a deeper knowledge of and relationship with God the Father, Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. A beautiful and natural outcome of that is that as God deepens His life in each one of us, we are able to be more present with God and more present with others. This is how we, in a very practical way, live out loving God wholeheartedly and loving people unconditionally. It’s not about doing it perfectly, but about moving towards God one choice at a time. And as we do that, we become more desirous of and able to welcome, invite, include, reconcile with, and forgive, just as Jesus did and as His followers continue to do. It will not always be easy. God’s family is beautiful, challenging, rich, overwhelming, arduous, joyful, frustrating, loving, mind-boggling, history changing, intimidating, amazing, seemingly impossible, and expansive. We can wait on God by practicing being present with Him and with others.
As we learn to live a life of love as Jesus did, we also need to learn to wait for God by being patient even when the circumstances and timelines we’re offered are quite different from what we may have predicted or preferred. Christian missionary and author Elizabeth Elliot said, “I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.” We can wait for God and surrender our will by practicing being patient no matter what kind of circumstances or timelines we encounter.
We belong to God, everything and everyone belongs to God, God’s love and presence are inescapable, no one is excluded from God’s radical invitation, and we can learn to live a life of love together, as Jesus did, by practicing being present and being patient. I want to encourage us all, as I said at the beginning of this talk, to keep pressing in to the more of God’s Kingdom life, because it’s reaching from God’s throne through you because of what Jesus has done and by the power of the Holy Spirit to the very ends of the earth. You might not always feel like you’re making a difference. You might not always feel like your prayers are being answered. You might not always feel like you’re hearing God’s voice clearly. But every move of God throughout Church history has started when a small group of people decided to put their faith and trust in Jesus. Small things done with great love in the name of Christ Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit change lives, change families, change communities, change the world.
Can I share some specific things I feel like God has shown me for you here at Pine Rivers Vineyard?
I wrote to our Senior Pastor (John) back home a couple of days ago. I get to serve as an Associate Pastor at Liberty Vineyard Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Not to give you guys a big head or anything, but honestly Vineyard Australia and Pine Rivers Vineyard in particular are carrying some gifts and graces from the Holy Spirit that the rest of the body of Christ needs. It’s hard to see things when you’re in the middle of them, so let me share what I noticed. More than anything, I hope this encourages your faith and encourages you to keep pressing in to God’s heart and keep sharing freely whatever Jesus gives you with others, all things you have so obviously been doing. Here’s what I wrote: “Pine Rivers Vineyard and the Aussie Vineyards are carrying some things in the Spirit that we in the US need. Kind of like in the early days of the Vineyard movement, people from here would flock over to Anaheim to receive an impartation, which they did, and came back better equipped to ‘do Kingdom stuff,’ having both caught and taught what the Spirit was doing. Paul & I both noticed both the love and the supernatural gifts flowing in ways that we haven’t experienced to the same degree in the Vineyard movement at large for quite a long time. Paul & I simply cannot get over how significantly the love of God is being demonstrated here in both words and actions. The leaders here exhibit such humility, no posturing, no credential bragging. Over and over, we have heard leaders reassuring people of their love and appreciation, providing a place of safety and healing and authenticity. So refreshing!”
Please receive this encouragement – God has given you here at Pine Rivers Vineyard and in Vineyard Australia some graces and gifts that the rest of the Vineyard movement needs, that the rest of the body of Christ needs. How exactly will you share these gifts and graces with the rest of the world? That’s for you guys to figure out as you discern God’s direction for you and respond to His invitation to you. Every part of the body of Christ is needed in the Kingdom of God. We can all pray for other parts of the body of Christ. We can all watch for opportunities to speak words of life when we hear words of division spoken about other parts of the body of Christ. We can all learn from other parts of the body of Christ. But please hear what I’m saying – the rest of the body of Christ needs you. Your faith and love are simply radiant – you reflect so very well the radical love and welcome of Jesus. Paul & I thank God for you! We can’t wait to see more of the beautiful tapestry that is being woven in and through Pine Rivers Vineyard for the greater glory of God whenever we get a chance to visit Brissy.
I’d like to share one last personal story. As we were getting through immigration and customs here in Brisbane Airport, I said to Paul, “Even if we walked right past someone we knew from school, we probably wouldn’t even recognize them since it’s been 42 years since we finished.” I’m sharing this because I feel like the Lord wants me to assure you that in the Kingdom of God absolutely nothing is wasted, not even casual words spoken while walking through an airport. I suspect God and a couple of angels might have had a bit of a chuckle while arranging some quite unusual encounters while we’ve been here. At the Vineyard Australia conference up in Caloundra last week, a woman walked up to us and said, “Remember me?” I looked at her nametag then at her face and realized that although her surname had changed, she was someone Paul & I had done the same degree with at Uni forty years ago in a class of about 60 students. Incredibly, our classmate had married a guy from Paul’s year at Cav Road high school. These two didn’t know Jesus or each other back then. They don’t even go to a Vineyard church, and yet, there they were at the conference, now vibrant followers of Jesus with a large family, and we’ve reconnected. That got our attention. And then just a couple of days ago, I was watching the news with Paul’s Mum and kind of zoning out at some of the boring bits. Suddenly a face appeared on the screen with a name and I realized it was a long-lost friend from my high school days in Toowoomba. I’m still in close contact with a few of my friends from those days, and none of us had been able to locate this particular friend. The news item mentioned that he was recently appointed to the top post with the Australian Medical Association, so I figured out how to reach out to him. He got back to me within a day and was thrilled to reconnect. That also got our attention! In the Kingdom of God, there is always more! I wonder what the Lord will do next in each of these unusual encounters. These really got our attention and reminded us that God is always doing a good, holy, and beautiful work in all of our lives. We can’t even begin to imagine all that God has for us and for every other person on the planet. We can’t even begin to understand His huge heart of love for us and for every other person on the planet.
The Lord is with you, dear sisters and brothers in Christ! But there’s still more! Our last Scripture is Ephesians 3:20-21 (The Message) – “God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us. Glory to God in the church! Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus! Glory down all the generations! Glory through all millennia! Oh, yes!”
