The Mennonite church depends only on the power of the Holy Spirit. It receives into its membership those who have voluntarily received the saving power of Christ. The Mennonite church also encourages regular attendance to reaffirm one’s identity in Christ, to express one’s highest loyalty to Christ and to seek the will of Christ for one’s life. Today I am going to be talking about Article 10, and this time I mean it Article 10 refers to the mission of the church and that is what we are going to focus on.
Today I am going to start a sermon series on the Confessions of the Mennonite Church. We live in a time when many people don’t want to be associated with a denomination. Sometimes it is because the presence of different denominations look like unnecessary divisions created in the larger faith community. The Mennonite Church through its unique faith history, being birthed out of extreme persecution has picked up on certain aspects of the kingdom of God particularly well. This is what I want to present to you in this sermon series on the Mennonite Confession of faith.
Life is a balancing act. We have to constantly balance between our work and home lives, balance between attending to things that are important versus things that are urgent, between spending and saving. But have you every wondered about balancing the old and the new? Dwelling on the past versus looking to the future? Well, focusing on the old helps us learn from past mistakes and build old skills, deepen old friendships. It is a reminder of where we came from. Focusing on the new helps keep life fresh and exiting as well as helping expand our horizons and grow in new ways. In the Bible we have versus that ask us both to remember what God has done in the past but also to journey with God into the new. God wants us to cherish the lessons from the past but also be sensitive to the new things that God is doing in our midst. Today we stand at the beginning of not just a new Year but a new decade as well. So I think this is a good time to think about the new. Entering the New Year is like reached the shore of a new land waiting to be explored.
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So what is the Cause of Motion? The human tendency is to think that the cause of motion is the 5 cylinder drive that revs from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep. The Bible says the human drives causes only the engines to spin. The forward motion your vehicle has is when God has the clutch engaged. The cause of motion at the most fundamental level is God taking the work that you do and the intensions of your heart and establishing it and giving it success. And God can do more than just engage the clutch. Even if your engine misfires or if you are running out of fuel God can take all your effort and everything in your environment and establish it for your good. And God also says when you work to help God with his plans for the world then he will take care of all your needs.
when verse 12 says, the Holy Spirit will continue the revelation of who God is to us, we have to understand it carefully because this verse can be greatly misused. So when we are getting a new revelation of who God is from the Holy Spirit, it does not mean that we get a revelation that can be in any way be different or contradict what is already revealed in Scripture. You see Scripture already tells us everything the world knows about the Father and the Son. So because Jesus Christ has explained this extremely tight coupling within the Trinity, and focus on glorification of the other, if we get any revelation from the Holy Spirit, to test that it is actually from the Holy Spirit, it should pass the Son test.
Now if you are hesitant about sharing the Gospel because you can look at this situation and say, that is why I don’t share, because people don’t believe or change. Or perhaps you are thinking that they will get offended or even that they might think of me as “that kind of person”. Well the Good News is that if it is the Holy Spirit’s job to convict people of who Jesus is, and of God’s goodness and judgment day then that makes it better because it takes the pressure of you to convince anybody. Your job it not to change anybody’s mind. You job is to share what you have. The treasure box of the Gospel that was given to you. You can also share how the Holy Spirit unlocked the box given to you and what he did in your life. But isin’t it a beautiful thing that the job of transforming people’s heart is going to be done by the Holy Spirit himself!
