Live for God in Holy Worldliness
“Live for God in Holy Worldliness” – July 6th, 2025
N. T. Wright describes the Gospel of Luke as “one of the most brilliant writings in early Christianity.” Luke was the first highly educated person to write about Jesus, and he did so with great attention to historical and theological detail, so that everyone, early followers and readers to come alike, could know the truth about Jesus and what he said and did. When we look at Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, we see him at the heart of the first century Jewish world and at the heart of the Roman world in which the good news of Jesus extraordinarily exploded, catalyzing radical transformation that then spread to the very ends of the earth. And the good news goes on!
Today we are setting out on a new adventure together as we begin a sermon series on the Gospel of Luke. The Bible project describes the Gospel of Luke as the “gospel of the Savior for lost people everywhere.” Along our adventure we will encounter various narratives in the life of Jesus: infancy, preparation, Galilean ministry, final journey to Jerusalem, and the passion of Christ. We will explore the continuity between the Old Covenant and the New, God’s love for the lost, and the resurrection of the suffering Messiah. We will examine other theological emphases like salvation, sinners, prayer, pilgrimage, wealth, welcome, the elevation of women, eating and feasting, good news for the poor, and the great reversal. We will experience Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and the Savior of the world; the one who enacts God’s mercy and life-giving power on earth and who models faithfulness and obedience to our heavenly Father; and the embodiment of God’s salvation in releasing people from bondage.
Who wrote the Gospel of Luke?
The early church fathers tell us that it was Luke, and that he was a physician from Syrian Antioch and a companion of Paul. Paul mentions him in Colossians (“the beloved physician”), 2 Timothy (“only Luke is with me”), and Philemon (“Luke, my fellow worker”). Luke explicitly tells us he was not an eyewitness but a second-generation Christ follower. Luke 1:1-2 – “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses …”
Why was the Gospel of Luke written?
Luke’s two book series, Luke-Acts, is the only New Testament narrative that names a specific reader, Theophilus, who likely underwrote Luke’s research, writing, and distribution. Luke’s purposes included expanding the story of Jesus to include “the events that have been fulfilled among us,” broadening his gospel to church history and showing readers how they are included in the good news of Jesus Christ. Luke helps Gentile Christian readers to have assurance of the reliability of God’s promises. Luke emphasizes the role of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ ministry and in the movement of the early church and beyond. Luke shows that it is not adherence to the law that saves, but by trusting in and living as Jesus lived, in whom God’s law is fulfilled. Luke clarifies how the church is positioned with regard to the Roman Empire. Luke emphasizes both Jesus’ and Paul’s innocence in the eyes of every Roman official before whom they are brought. Luke presents followers of Jesus as a noble community committed to virtue and orderly living, not to political subversion and disturbance of the public order.
When was the Gospel of Luke written?
Since it has as one of its sources the Gospel of Mark, which has been reliably dated to 66-70 CE, and since Luke includes specific details concerning the manner in which Rome actually sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE, it is likely that Luke was written between 70 and 90 CE.
Ongoing history
The Gospel of Luke presents us with an ongoing history of who Jesus is, what he said, and what he did. But it’s more than that – Luke is the only one of the four gospels that carries the gospel story beyond the resurrection and the appearances of our risen Lord. Luke is concerned with how history unfolds, particularly among Jesus’ present-day followers and in the generations to come! Luke’s history – past, present, future – centers on our Christian hope and faith in Jesus Christ, who is both the climax and the conclusion of history.
The Gospel of Luke-Acts could be dubbed “the unfinished Gospel” because it leaves us hanging both chronologically and geographically. When we come to the end of Luke’s part two (the book of Acts), the story suddenly ends precisely at the point where it’s most engrossing and we want to know what comes next. We’re also left hanging as to how Jesus’ followers did what Jesus said they would do in Luke 24:47, “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
I wonder if the Gospel of Luke-Acts is unfinished because Luke wanted to go beyond just informing us, by writing an orderly account so that we may know the truth concerning the things about Jesus which have been passed down to us through both the New Testament and the church. Luke also wanted to invite us, his followers, the body of Christ, the church, to become part of the good news and continue the story that has been spreading outward in ever-widening circles. As Jesus said shortly before his ascension, we read in Luke 24:48-49 – “You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” Just as Jesus invited those first disciples, Jesus invites us today, to proclaim and demonstrate his good news to all nations, by the power of the Holy Spirit, as members of the body of Christ, the church. Luke invites us today to cross our own cultural boundaries and to explore how to express and incarnate our faith in our own place and time.
Cuban-American historical theologian, Justo L. González, speaks beautifully to this idea of invitation: “We study and write history to invite. Those who see hope in the present, use history to invite others to hope. Those who see doom, to invite others to fear. Those who seek guidance and correction, to invite others to follow the guidance and correction of history. For us, as for Luke, history is ongoing, unfinished, an invitation to join what God is doing among us.” How do we discern and decide which cultural boundaries to cross and how to express and incarnate our faith in our own place and time? To answer this, for the remainder of this sermon, we will look at two primary ways in which God calls us to live, as he continually calls the church to be separate from the world and yet to go into the world.
Live for God in holiness
Firstly, we are called to live for God in holiness. 1 Peter 1:13-16 tells us to “prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” To be holy is to be set apart for God and to live the way of love, as Jesus lived and taught.
Avoiding contact with the world so we aren’t corrupted or compromised is not what Jesus modeled and taught. Blanket condemnation of the world as evil is not what Jesus modeled and taught. The only people Jesus condemned were the scribes and the Pharisees, the hypocritical self-righteous religious leaders of the day. These groups complained to Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” (John 5:30). In John 15:2 the same groups grumbled, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” In our day, if we focus on only what we perceive to be the negative aspects of worldliness, we will end up being judgmental and hypocritical, too. We might also end up focusing attention and energy on the world to come to such a degree that we become so heavenly minded that we’re of no earthly good! That kind of imbalance is easily seen in the unfortunately common yet narrow understanding of “saving souls.”
The New Testament book of James cautions us against this narrow view of the Gospel by reminding us to act on what we hear Jesus saying. We are to not only be hearers of the Gospel, the good news of Jesus, but to be doers of the Gospel, to do the things which Jesus taught and modeled, proclaimed and demonstrated. I appreciate how James 1:22-27 is rendered in The Message translation: “Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like. But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God – the free life! – even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action. Anyone who sets himself up as ‘religious’ by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being saddened by report after report of yet another Christian leader, evangelist, preacher, church, or ministry that has discredited the name of Christ, in spite of talking a good game. Just this week, a very well-known and discredited evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart died, his tarnished legacy described by a headline in Christianity Today, “TV Minister Caught in Scandal.” This article, written by Daniel Silliman, a good friend of Cascade’s whom I greatly respect, laments that “historians such as Suzanna Krivulskaya have looked at Swaggart to see how ministers have avoided consequences.” She comes to the sad conclusion that “disgraced celebrity preachers experimented with obfuscation and confession” and “learned to rebrand their downfalls as evidence of the gospel’s effectiveness.” This is a horrible distortion of the gospel. Silliman goes on to say that “too often, in the spirit of an extreme individualism, the grand Reformation doctrines of sola Scriptura and sola fidei have been turned into pitiful escapes from responsibility and accountability … cases like Swaggart’s indicate just how much we need to restudy and then take seriously the New Testament doctrine of the church.” Many people within and outside of the church get hurt when someone with influence in the name of Christ lives or preaches a distorted gospel.
None of us is immune to these kinds of temptations involving money, sex, or power. In many, if not all, of these downfalls, one notable similarity is that the disgraced minister has invariably no real connection or commitment to a local church. In other words, they have prioritized individualism over interdependence within the body of Christ. Isolation leads to self-deception and a whole host of other problems. It is unscriptural and unhealthy and actually impossible to be a solo Christian. We cannot hear God clearly on our own. There is safety in the body of Christ, the church.
Theologian William Robinson wisely wrote that in order for the church to most securely receive the guidance of God and realize her divine character, two things are necessary: the attitude of worship, and that she should be under the judgment of the word of God. He explains, “It is in worship that we come fully within ‘the understanding distance,’ and in this atmosphere the church can express a ‘sure word of God’ … Whenever the church corporately yields herself to God, he guides her and acts through her.” It is only in corporate worship that heaven and earth meet, “what is ordinary becomes transmuted into something sublime, what is an event becomes a miracle of grace, and what is historical becomes invested with eternal significance.”
Live for God in worldliness
Secondly, we are called to live for God in worldliness. Wait, where is that in the Bible? To be worldly means to be “devoted to, directed toward, or connected with the affairs, interests, or pleasures of this world.” (Sometimes, I think we only focus on the pleasure part, which often gets equated with evil, thanks to the legacy of Puritanism, which has often come to mean “against pleasure.”) Listen to these words from Jesus’ prayer in the garden immediately before his betrayal and crucifixion in John 17:14-16: “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”
Jesus affirms that we do not belong to the world, and he explicitly says that he is not asking the Father to take us out of the world. This call to live for God is a call to be worldly, in the sense that we are to be in the world, to rub shoulders with others, to participate in cultural activity. More than that, we are to be devoted to, directed toward, and connected with the people and concerns going on around us.
Max Lucado names three proclamations that grace makes, in his aptly titled book, In the Grip of Grace: You Can’t Fall Beyond His Love, one of which is “I must accept who God accepts.” He cites Romans 15:7 – “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” Lucado then goes on to say, “God loves me and makes me his child. God loves my neighbor and makes him my brother. My privilege is to complete the triangle, to close the circuit by loving who God loves.” We don’t need to fear being tainted by the world. Jesus didn’t separate himself from or shun sinners; he pursued them! Jesus welcomed, communed, conversed, healed, and loved all, no matter who they were, or whether or not they agreed with him or believed in him. Missionary and cricketer, C. T. Studd, famously said in the late 19th century, “Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop, within a yard of hell.”
Salvation is so much wider, deeper, and expansive than just “saving souls”! Jesus modeled and taught the goodness of God, the goodness of God’s world, and the goodness of his and his followers’ work in the world. Luke’s key theme is encapsulated in Luke 19:9-10 – “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” Jesus spoke these words about Zacchaeus, a despised chief tax collector. In spite of being lost and deemed the worst of the worst, Jesus saw him, called him, and welcomed him into salvation. The arrival of Jesus the Messiah signaled the arrival of God’s salvation. And now, salvation is available to all who respond in faith to Christ, whatever their past life, social status, or ethnicity.
Live for God in holy worldliness
Let’s put those two things together. We are called to live for God in holy worldliness. When God created humankind, God gave us a mandate on how to do this, in Genesis 1:28 – “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”
How did God intend for us to fill the earth? Have more babies? That’s a part of it, for sure, and we rejoice in the blessing of each child, each one a precious image-bearer of God. Theologian and philosopher Richard Mouw adds that the biblical mandate to “fill the earth” also refers to cultural activity. God continues to bless us and call us to tend and cultivate our earthly home, the fruit of which we call culture. Culture is an anthropological term that means “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another”. The fruit of our tending and cultivation produces a wide variety of cultural fruit: social behaviors, scientific knowledge, family structures, philosophical ideas, traditions, tools, language, legal systems, music, government, visual arts, values, clothing, customs, instruction, and ideologies.
We fill the earth as God intended by establishing just laws; coming alongside families with spiritual, moral, and practical support; and reading good books. We fill the earth through teaching the next generation, researching therapeutic interventions, and building durable structures. Some ways in which we at Liberty Vineyard Church fill the earth include bringing welcome bags to new neighbors, picking up trash from streets and rivers, and being present through music with elderly residents and staff in care homes.
Brothers and sisters, we are not called to be passive observers in this world. We are called to live for God in holy worldliness as culture creators and culture shapers, as we practice hospitality to all. We are called to live for God in holy worldliness as, in our own brokenness, we do the risky and messy work of getting involved with other people’s brokenness, no matter who they are. We are called to live for God in holy worldliness as we create some imperfect models of the good world to come.
We are people of the Book, the Bible, yes, and we are also the body of Christ. We look to Scriptures as our authority, not in isolation, but in interdependence within the body of Christ, the living church. Just yesterday as I sat again with this sermon I had prepared earlier in the week, I was reminded of a quote from G. K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man which emphasizes the free will and agency which God has given us humans: “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” Religion goes with the stream, with the status quo; the living church goes against it, creating and shaping culture for the greater glory of God, in the body of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. In the footsteps of the church leaders who have gone before us for 2000 years, we are to set the Scriptures, especially the authority of the New Testament, within the living institution, the body of Christ, the church, and so allow for development of thought and the spirit of inquiry. It’s not about rulebooks, it’s about relationships in the body of Christ, as William Robinson beautifully expressed, “The truth which is in Jesus Christ needs for its full understanding and application to life such a society living together in a love relationship. Thus it comes about that the church in history becomes the sure witness to the fact that fellowship is the hidden structure of reality.”
As bearers of God’s image, our free will and agency flow from God, who, in a divine creative act that is largely beyond our understanding, made the universe, the world, everything that is, out of nothing! God created all that there is in Trinitarian relationship and love and fellowship, for the purpose of extending that relationship and love and fellowship to all. Luke’s invitation to us to become part of the good news of Jesus Christ is an extension of God’s eternal invitation to us to enter into the eternal embrace, the dance of love. We enter into and abide in God’s eternal embrace, and we go straight and advance with that same kind of self-giving love for God and for everyone and every part of God’s good creation. This beautiful world which God created and sustains, along with the dynamic culture which we humans create and shape, together form the setting in which we (and others) obey or disobey God, honor or reject him, glorify or curse him. How we live matters. How we fill the earth matters.
I want to leave you with a final quote from pastor and theologian John Stott’s book The Living Church, “Nobody has ever exhibited the meaning of ‘holy worldliness’ better than our Lord Jesus Christ himself. His incarnation is the perfect embodiment of it. On the one hand he came to us in our world and assumed the full reality of our humanness. He made himself one with us in our frailty and exposed himself to our temptations. He fraternized with the common people, and they flocked around him eagerly. He welcomed everybody and shunned nobody. He identified himself with our sorrows, our sins and our death. On the other hand, in mixing freely with people like us, he never sacrificed, or even for a moment compromised, his own unique identity. His was the perfection of ‘holy worldliness.’”
How is Jesus calling you to live for God in holy worldliness today, this week, this year? Let’s go! Come, Holy Spirit!
