A Bigger Gospel for a Weary Faith

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Welcome to Grace at the Fray, a podcast that explores the many dimensions of God’s grace that we find at the frayed edges of life. Come explore how God’s grace works to renew your life and send you on mission in His Kingdom.

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0:00:22.6 Jim Lovelady: Hello, beloved. Welcome to Grace at the Fray. All right, be honest. Are you bored? Are you bored of the Christian life? Have you lost your passion for following Jesus? Are you floating through the malaise that has become your Christian life? If so, you need a bigger grasp of the glory of the gospel. Maybe you live like your Christianity is one of many aspects of your life. It’s in the list of things that identify you, like maybe mother, daughter, spouse, teacher, Christian, coach, student. It’s in the list. If it’s an aspect of who you are, your gospel is too small. Or maybe your Christianity is just a long list of things you do or don’t do, like go to church, attend small group Bible study, give to missionaries. You don’t curse. You don’t drink. You don’t tell lies or any other bad thing. If it’s a list of do’s and don’ts, your gospel is too small. If your Christianity is one of the things that identifies you, and if it’s just a list of do’s and don’ts, you need a bigger gospel. You need someone to show you the beauty and grandeur of the story of God and His Kingdom. Well, whenever I need someone to get me stoked about the gospel, I know I can trust my friend Bob to totally blow my mind with the beauty of Jesus. And all I have to do is ask this simple question. All right, Bob, what’s the gospel? My guest today is Bob H., and I’m not going to use his last name for security reasons. He’s a longtime field worker with our company, and I called Him up because I needed to be reminded of the beauty and grandeur of the gospel. I got to chat with him over Zoom and from his London office where he’s been serving for decades, and I wanted to hear him answer this simple question: What is the gospel? And let me frame this conversation for you. In the first half, Bob shares how a bigger view of the gospel, the rescue, rule, and reign of God grabbed him and changed his life. Then in the second half, he shares something of his personal ministry manifesto, where he systematically explains how the gospel of the Kingdom of God works itself out in both his ministry context and in churches and ministry locations all over the world. And I don’t want you to miss this because I think it’s a really, really helpful framework that you can use for doing gospel ministry. So I want to give you a synopsis now. He presents his ideas as if guiding us on a tour of a grand cathedral. Imagine the gospel as a beautiful cathedral with seven altars. And here they are. Ready? The radical centrality of Christ and His Kingdom reveals a radicality of grace, forming a radical community that is radically sent to be radically incarnational, committed to being radically prayerful, ready to be radically self-sacrificial. You need a bigger gospel. Or let me put it this way, you need eyes to see just how big the good news really is. The Christian life is not a to-do list, and your Christianity is not just one aspect of who you are. It completely redefines who you are. Every aspect of your identity is in relationship, is in relation to Christ and His Kingdom. And you live in a world that belongs to Him. The Kingdom invades the entire creation, but the Kingdom also invades your entire being. The gospel is bigger than you think. 

 

0:04:04.1 Jim Lovelady: Reverend Bob, I’m not going to use your last name. Welcome to Grace at the Fray.

 

0:04:07.6 Bob H: Thank you. Glad to be here.

 

0:04:09.1 Jim Lovelady: Oh, man, you are a legend in the company. I was thinking that you’ve been around the company longer than the company has been around, right?

 

0:04:16.0 Bob H: That’s correct. I was a two-year, short-term kind of worker in Uganda before Serge was World Harvest Mission and before it was actually begun. Could say I was an apprentice before we had an apprentice program.

 

0:04:31.0 Jim Lovelady: You were the first apprentice. You kind of were.

 

0:04:34.8 Bob H: Yeah, I mean, we didn’t have a program at that point, but it was sort of that age group of people, finished university, unsure of maybe the next steps in life. It was an opportunity and a need that I thought would be a way of testing gifts and calling. So then I came back after two years and spent some time studying at seminary and doing some work in philosophy. And then I was involved with the formation of World Harvest and a part-time kind of worker with helping get things going, bringing short-term teams for prayer and evangelism in places that we were thinking about opening up.

 

0:05:10.8 Jim Lovelady: But I think the question is something like reframing this idea that the work of salvation in the gospel is this individualistic kind of thing where Jesus saves me and then I join a church so that I can learn how to be sanctified. And then maybe the ultimate source of sanctification is to go on the mission field and then I die and go to Heaven. And that’s the salvation plan that we have. And I’ve discovered more and more, not only are non-believers bored of that story, uninterested in that story, that actually Christians are too.

 

0:05:52.4 Bob H: Right.

 

0:05:52.5 Jim Lovelady: And so if you find a Christian who’s bored, it’s probably because they’ve bought into some sort of like, I’m saved, I’m working on my sanctification, I give to missions, here are all the things that I do. I’m just kind of bored. Can you give me something more exciting? And so it’s like, what is the gospel? Just how radical is God’s grace in the Kingdom of God? Okay, so blow our minds with the grandeur of this.

 

0:06:17.9 Bob H: That’s actually partly what was going through Karen and my life. One way to describe it would be saying we’re bored. Another was, is this all there is to work on my becoming a better Christian or a better person and then go to Heaven? I know I’m supposed to witness too, but… And again, seeing that Jesus and God doesn’t revolve around me. Again, that Jesus isn’t in Heaven seated at the right hand, wringing His hands, saying, how am I going to help Bob in his agenda to become more like me?

 

0:06:56.8 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:06:57.3 Jim Lovelady: I mean, He wants us to be like Him. Of course, we want to grow. But actually, what I left out of that picture was His mindset and His agenda. His sense of purpose was world restoration. Again, one summary of it. Jesus came to recapture a runaway world and bring it under His redeeming and healing and transforming, saving power. And so one of the things I had done before that was I’d kind of reduced my understanding of the gospel, whereas Peter didn’t have any sense that Jesus had to die and rise from the dead for his forgiveness and for the deeper issues of the fact that he was guilty in bondage, rightfully under the judgment, condemnation, and wrath of God. Many Christians, including myself, at different times was preoccupied with thinking, how can I gain God’s love? And so really recognizing that, hey, there was a time when I was in a prayer meeting and praying for God to heal me so that He’d be glorified and God sort of opened the curtain and said, you don’t want me… You’re really praying that you’ll be able to get well so that you can keep your autonomy.

 

0:08:16.7 Jim Lovelady: Interesting.

 

0:08:18.0 Bob H: And it drove a spike into my heart. I really felt like running out of the room because I felt like, woe is me. I am a man of unclean lips among other people who are holy and I don’t belong here. I was too ashamed to run out of the room though. And I realized that it was actually during singing a psalm, thou O Christ Jesus lover of my soul, let me to Thy bosom fly. I was asked to read some parts of it and beginning with thou O Christ are all I want more than all in You I find. As I read those words, I said, that’s not true. My mouth actually dried up and I realized I’m playing games before God. What I really want is my freedom. I don’t want to go on dialysis. I was having kidney issues. And later on that hymn, Wesley hymn says, false and full of sin am I. I am all unrighteousness. And I thought the girl who asked me to read this hymn was exposing my sin.

 

0:09:18.7 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

 

0:09:20.0 Bob H: It was unbearable. And I began to realize at that point that I knew Jesus died for sinners, but I had no sense of how deep my own sin was. It was more on the fruit stuff than the root stuff. And I had a lot of bad fruits, but it was as though Jesus said to me, don’t you see Bob, you are this bad. That’s why I had to go to the cross. So Peter didn’t get that. And a lot of Christians don’t get that. We kind of think we’re not that bad and God isn’t that holy. And Jesus doesn’t let us off on that level. So this gospel is radically broad and comprehensive in all that it wants to do and also radically deep in how it deals with this. One of the basic problems of our alienation, guilt, and bondage under sin.

 

0:10:19.8 Jim Lovelady: How would you pastor someone who came to you and said, you know, I want to be honest with you. I’m just pretty bored of the Christian life. What would you say to them?

 

0:10:27.0 Bob H: I would want to know, what do you think the Christian life’s about? And I wouldn’t be surprised if he was either a moralist thinking the Christian life’s about kind of pulling my socks up so that God will like me or a gospel centered free person, a good Lutheran who really understands that he’s far worse than he thinks. And God has been far more merciful and loving than he deserves. And I’d wonder if he fell into either of those groups and had failed to see the broad banner message. You know, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel. And that meant for Him healing, setting people free from both the guilt of sin and the bondage to sin and the empty way of life. The values that are bending us and warping us and creating a new community that will actually both be part of what part of our own healing and will embody to the world what God’s Kingdom people should look like, where God’s taking history, a taste, a foretaste of a future that’s going to be made perfect. So in the late mid-80s, we were asked to consider thinking about coming to London for either church planting or renewal. And Karen and I said, no. Didn’t have much vision for it, though we were still involved in the mission. But I said I would be willing to come over to London, meet some people, and see whether there was a ministry, make some recommendations about ministry possibilities for World Harvest. This, by the way, gets into this gospel of the Kingdom theme in a biographical way. During a period of about two years, three things converged in our lives. And it was simultaneous with a few visits to the UK. So the first thing that happened was I began to realize that my interest in spirituality and being a Christian was kind of very me-centered. Even though I wanted to be godly, I wanted to grow in Christ, sanctification was a big theme in my life and something I thought about and studied and worked on. But I came to realize it’s all kind of all about me in many ways. That coincided with us feeling like, what are we really living for? And saying, we’re going to go back to the gospels and just look at Jesus. And one of the things that attracted me to Jesus on the tail end of the counterculture movement was His countercultural lifestyle and values and purpose. And I realized that over the years, I kind of lost that. And many of the things that Jesus says that are quite challenging, like sell your possessions and give to the poor, and if struck on one’s cheek, give them the other.

 

0:13:54.1 Jim Lovelady: Right. He didn’t really mean that.

 

0:13:55.7 Bob H: Right, exactly. Exactly.

 

0:13:58.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, Whoops.

 

0:13:58.6 Bob H: Willing to be confused again by Jesus and challenged by Him. And one of the things that emerged was recognizing that Jesus saw Himself as a man on a mission. Or in other words, a King on conquest. His main organizing center of His teaching and thing that gave direction to His life and ministry was the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. Now, that’s not two subjects there. The Kingdom of God and the gospel are just the same thing in Jesus’s mind and ministry.

 

0:14:43.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, all one sentence.

 

0:14:45.6 Bob H: Yeah, right. And so I began to realize that the gospel that I came to love and appreciate, which was really necessary, was kind of self-centered and salvation-centered. And what I’m seeing in Jesus is mission-oriented and not like in some evangelical circles where the gospel is the way to go to heaven. It wasn’t that dualistic where everything earthly was bad and you just want to escape and go to Heaven.

 

0:15:15.2 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:15:15.9 Bob H: But the kind of orientation was wrapped around God’s plan of redemption inside my epidermis.

 

0:15:24.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:15:24.5 Bob H: And maybe my family.

 

0:15:26.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, it’s this God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life, which is not false. Like, thank God that is very true. But if that’s the starting point, you’re saying, well, there’s a lot more going on than just me and my need for Jesus. It does not. Yeah, definitely. That is part of it. Absolutely.

 

0:15:51.6 Bob H: Yeah. And so I came to see He came to change everything. Behold, I’m making all things new.

 

0:15:59.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:16:00.4 Bob H: He came to establish His Kingdom. In the coming of Jesus and the pouring out of the Spirit and the formation of the church, there was a radical inbreaking of God’s Kingdom gospel, God’s reign and rule, saving reign and rule. That’s a brief definition of what the Kingdom of God is. It’s His saving, gracious reign and rule whereby He is changing and healing, redeeming, restoring, renewing everything that’s been broken by the fall. Now, it’s not, of course, fully accomplished, but it’s been certainly inaugurated.

 

0:16:38.2 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:16:38.5 Bob H: And then Jesus was to us somebody who said, I’ve got a world to take over. Psalm 2 speaks of the nations raging against Yahweh and Yahweh’s answer is I’ve set my King, my Messiah, my Christ on Zion. And then Christ speaks and He says He’s associated with the Son. Today I have begotten You and ask of me and I will give You the nations as my inheritance. And that’s what Peter was articulating in the turning point in Jesus’s ministry in the gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. They each say it’s slightly different, but Mark 8, Luke 9, Matthew 16, they each represent Peter’s assertion as the turning point in Jesus’ revelation to them. And Peter’s assertion in Matthew’s the most full, where Matthew says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” That’s the theme of Psalm 2. God’s answer to the raging nations is my Christ, my Son.

 

0:17:48.3 Jim Lovelady: The Messiah.

 

0:17:49.0 Bob H: Yeah. And in Peter’s mind, that messiah was going to come with a rod of iron and break the nations like clay pots.

 

0:17:58.0 Jim Lovelady: Right, yeah, yeah. Psalm 2.

 

0:17:59.5 Bob H: Yeah. And that’s why Peter couldn’t understand Jesus. Then immediately, it says, from that time on, Jesus started talking about the necessity of His death, of His rejection and death. And that made no sense to the disciples because dead messiahs don’t defeat the Romans.

 

0:18:15.9 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:18:16.3 Bob H: Dead messiahs don’t transform the world. And so I came to see that this was Jesus’ passion and organizing principle. It meant missions. And that opened up the whole Bible from creation to Revelation. But it’s the theme of God’s Kingdom expanding on the earth. First, before the fall, Adam and Eve were His priests and kings to expand the garden, the temple garden throughout the earth, and put image bearers all over the earth. They rebelled against that and brought disaster upon the earth, curse. But God immediately picks up the agenda and says, one day a seed will come and he will crush the serpent. And of course, then it unfolds. And here and there, you get these glimpses of God’s in-breaking and reversing, not only reversing the effects of the curse, but ultimately improving upon the original state of Adam and Eve.

 

0:19:26.7 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:19:29.8 Bob H: And so the promise to David about a Kingdom that will last forever, a king who will be on the throne forever, and in 2 Samuel 7, Psalm 2 picks up on that idea. It was an inauguration psalm. And then it runs right through the Bible. Isaiah 11, for example, there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, a branch from His roots shall bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding and spirit of counsel. You hear the anointing of Jesus with the Holy Spirit here.

 

0:20:03.4 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah.

 

0:20:04.6 Bob H: And then God spoke, you are my Son whom I love. Again, it echoes Psalm 2 and it echoes the idea that you are going to be a ruler who’s going to transform this world and take it back for yourself.

 

0:20:19.9 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:20:19.9 Bob H: Ask of me and I’ll give you the nations as my inheritance. And then, of course, in this passage, it speaks of this one who’s going to come from the fallen house of David. With righteousness, He will judge the poor. He will decide with equity for the meek of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth. Again, echoes of Psalm 2. He will kill the wicked with the breath of His lips. Righteousness will be the belt of His waist. Faithfulness, the belt of His loins. So He’s going to bring righteousness and justice and the end to oppression. It’s going to bring jubilee.

 

0:20:51.9 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:20:52.3 Bob H: That theme is picked up later in Isaiah. And then Jesus uses those verses when He introduces His ministry in Luke 4. But then it breaks into complete shalom. Making of the healing and bringing together of all things under Christ. The wolf will dwell with the lamb. The leopard will lie down with the goat. A little child will lead them. That was where I saw the radically big nature…

 

0:21:20.4 Jim Lovelady: Yeah you went to Psalms 2…

 

0:21:20.4 Bob H: Of what Jesus came to do.

 

0:21:24.6 Jim Lovelady: I love that. So when I say, what is the gospel? You go, well, let me show you Psalm 2. And it’s like, it’s not just that you saw this. It’s that you lived it. I love that you say, hey, let me give you a biographical exploration of how I came to these things and how the Lord brought you to Psalm 2. I love that.

 

0:21:44.2 Bob H: So this theme of Jesus coming to recapture a runaway world, to bring it under His saving rule and reign, His transforming healing rule and reign on four levels, as far as the curse is found between God and man, the curse and brokenness, between man and man, this brokenness in our societies, the brokenness within our own selves, all our neuroses and psychoses and hang-ups, and ultimately giving us back our rightful position in creation. And so came to see that was what was really driving Jesus. And recognized that I was a lot more, in some ways I was like Peter and the disciples. I had another agenda for Jesus before this. They had a political agenda, essentially. I had a salvation and sanctification agenda.

 

0:22:51.2 Jim Lovelady: So Jesus is like, get behind me, Bob.

 

0:22:54.3 Bob H: Yeah, I’m going someplace. Grab onto my coattails or get out of the way.

 

0:22:58.8 Jim Lovelady: Or get out of the way.

 

0:23:00.4 Bob H: Yes. So seeing this whole mission from beginning to end of the Bible taking place first through Adam, then Abraham, the calling of Abraham, the calling of Israel, the formation of Israel, not to be God’s special people who He loves instead of the world, but God’s special called people for God’s mission in the world.

 

0:23:24.1 Jim Lovelady: Amen. Absolutely.

 

0:23:25.4 Bob H: So of course they failed. But then the true Israel came, the one who sums up Israel in Himself, the representative of Israel, the Messiah. He comes and He accomplishes what we fallen people couldn’t do. We become part of the problem. And so the second thing that was going on is during these visits to the UK I was introduced to these big communities that live here who though they’ve been living in the UK for maybe 10, 15, 20 years, had very little exposure to the gospel. They were in their own little world for the, for the most part. A believer who I met over here took me to some of these neighborhoods and said World Harvest should be working here among these radically unreached people groups. And that started to excite me now. Now the idea that Jesus is on mission and He’s called the whole church into that mission. These are themes I should have learned from Jack if I listened carefully enough or read his books. But my self preoccupations sort of formed a grid that kind of obscured the Kingdom themes.

 

0:24:35.6 Jim Lovelady: All in due time, you know, it’s like, I’m sure you look back and it’s like, okay, well the Lord, this is how the Lord. And that doesn’t negate the reality of a certain amount of regret that will be washed away at the restoration of all things.

 

0:24:49.9 Bob H: Correct…

 

0:24:50.3 Jim Lovelady: But…

 

0:24:50.7 Bob H: Right…

 

0:24:50.9 Jim Lovelady: But still I, I get it. It’s like, man, I wish I got this earlier.

 

0:24:54.4 Bob H: Yeah.

 

0:24:54.9 Jim Lovelady: And Jesus is like, well, I love you…

 

0:24:59.2 Bob H: Yeah, amen.

 

0:25:01.0 Bob H: If you wake up to this broader theme of God’s fourfold renewal: us, our social lives and ultimately the creation itself, you might think, well, what happened? How did we lose it? And it actually goes back to about the second or third century where the Kingdom theme started to drop out of the church’s consciousness and rhetoric and the idea of escaping this world and leaving it, started to take greater hold. So, I mean, there are historians who’ve argued those things, and I think they’re largely right. It goes that far back. And hey, God’s in charge of His church, you know…

 

0:25:50.1 Jim Lovelady: Right…Another amen.

 

0:25:52.5 Bob H: So I can’t be critical, but I was formed by that tradition in addition to my own sort of extra energetic self-preoccupation. So seeing these communities, I thought this would be a place for World Harvest to have a ministry. And the third thing that was going on in that period of time was the recognition that the church’s resources are like 99% focused on the most Christianized parts of the world and 1% focused on the least Christianized parts of the world, the unreached people. And so by 1994, Karen and I made it over to the UK, and we’ve been here since then, first as team leader for church planting in one neighborhood, then eventually became area director for several teams that are working in London. And then we had a hope, and it turned into a reality of expanding into itself. And so because I had the connections over there, I was for many years area director for UK ministries. And more recently this past year, I’ve turned over the AD role for the UK to Barry, and I’m moving into a position called senior advisor as I’m approaching my 70th birthday. So that’s a little bit about me. I’m still involved very much so in one of the local churches. I’m a co-pastor in one of the first church that we planted. And I’m still excited about the vastness and depth of God’s salvation of this Kingdom theme.

 

[pause]

 

0:27:31.1 Jim Lovelady: I want to pause this conversation and invite you to join us in prayer for the Serge field workers that we here at the headquarters in Philadelphia are praying for each week. We gather on Tuesday and Friday mornings to pray and this week we’re praying for our teams in South Asia. Would you pray with me? Lord, we pray that you would bless these folks. Give them joy in their work, in your Kingdom, and the pleasure of Your joy as they follow You. Give them wisdom and let your grace abound in their relationships with one another, with family members and children and with the people that they serve. Heal all sicknesses, liberate the enslaved, protect them from the powers and principalities of darkness, and restore to them the joy of Your salvation, and let Your Kingdom come and Your will be done in these places just as it is in Heaven. We pray in Your name. Amen. Now back to the conversation. 

 

0:28:30.2 Jim Lovelady: I think of you as a tour guide in a grand cathedral. Like if the gospel of the Kingdom of God and His grace is this grand cathedral, it’s like this podcast episode is like, hey, I’m bringing all of my friends, the listeners and viewers of this podcast, to come get a tour of this grand cathedral, this place that you’ve been hanging out in for decades. So you know some nooks and crannies of this beautiful reality of the gospel that is just like, hey, look at this, look at this. Isn’t Jesus beautiful here? Isn’t this amazing that He’s done this? All right, Bob, give me a tour of this cathedral. What is the gospel? Just how radical is God’s grace in the Kingdom of God?

 

0:29:19.6 Bob H: If we’re talking about the cathedral, I might want to say that there’s like seven altars.

 

0:29:24.2 Jim Lovelady: Oh, okay.

 

0:29:26.4 Bob H: The first is the good news of the Kingdom of God in the person and work of Jesus, the pouring out of the Spirit. It’s the good news of the Kingdom invading this fallen world, this broken world, driving back the curse of sin, the forces of darkness, and bringing with it reconciliation and restoration, right? It’s a holistic gospel that’s addressing the fall in every aspect again. And another great example of this that sometimes just goes right over our heads, the great Christmas song, Wesley’s song, joy to the world, the Lord has come, let earth receive her King. And it says, you know, no more let thorns and sorrows reign. No more let sin and sorrows reign, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make His blessings found. Far as the curse is found. And that’s both geographically, mission in that sense, and in every nook and cranny in which the world has been cursed and broken.

 

0:30:30.1 Bob H: So this gospel is holistic. It must address the effects of sin in all of its ramifications, right? That includes the propitiation and the wrath of God being removed, justification, being right in Christ, in God’s eyes. It involves regeneration and being set free from the bondage of sin through union with Christ and being drawn into this new Kingdom. It’s all there. It’s high time to recapture the grand scope of Christ’s redemption, including this social, the cultural, the economic, and not only eventually, but even now the natural consequences of the fall are being addressed in different ways. But one day there’ll be no earthquakes, no tsunamis, and no COVIDs and so on.

 

0:31:17.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, the one who can still the ocean, the storm in the ocean.

 

0:31:22.6 Bob H: Right. That’s an example of that, right? Feeds the 5,000 and healing people.

 

0:31:27.2 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:31:27.6 Bob H: Restoring them to their proper function.

 

0:31:30.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, it’s going to be like that.

 

0:31:22.7 Bob H: Yeah. And those are good pictures, foretaste of future complete consummation of this shalom that we read about in Isaiah 11.

 

0:31:42.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah…That’s the first altar?

 

0:31:45.9 Bob H: Yeah. So the good news of this broad Kingdom. 

 

0:31:50.5 Jim Lovelady: That’s a good one. That’s a good altar.

 

0:31:52.0 Bob H: The second is that this is a Kingdom of radical grace.

 

0:31:54.4 Jim Lovelady: Okay.

 

0:31:55.3 Bob H: We enter it by grace. We’re dead in our sin. We’re under judgment. So we need the Spirit to work in us to bring us alive and enable faith. And we need Christ and His death and resurrection to bear the penalty of sin and in His resurrection in the Spirit break the power of sin and then through His presence enable us to live out this, the Kingdom calling that He’s given us. That’s the second kind of altar.

 

0:32:24.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, that’s the, I am all unrighteousness, clean me, let me to your bosom fly and find rest for my weary soul. That radical grace.

 

0:32:36.1 Bob H: Yeah. But there’s enough that, you know, we need grace in two senses. The grace of God’s forgiveness, cleansing, justification, and the grace of His presence, the risen Christ and His power through the Holy Spirit at work in us, not only individually but in community. Another thing that kind of fell out of rereading Jesus and thinking about His life and ministry was in my previous way of thinking, it was almost as if the only thing Jesus had to do was die for my sins.

 

0:32:30.4 Jim Lovelady: Right, right.

 

0:33:09.6 Bob H: And, you know, if we want to be more fully reformed and to live a perfect life in my place as well. But He had two other big agendas. One was creating His community. When He prays about the work being finished in John 17, I think He’s looking forward to the work of His death and resurrection, but He’s also talking about the community that He created.

 

0:33:32.5 Jim Lovelady: And that’s just not meant to be a secondary kind of thing.

 

0:33:35.9 Bob H: No…

 

0:33:36.3 Jim Lovelady: It’s like…This is my mission is to do this.

 

0:33:39.5 Bob H: Yes. To create this new Israel who will fulfill the role of the original Israel that was called out and elected to be a Kingdom of priests and a holy nation for the world.

 

0:33:56.8 Jim Lovelady: Right, right.

 

0:33:57.6 Bob H: That’s the language of Exodus 19, which Peter, of course, picks up in 1 Peter 2, where he describes it as the church.

 

0:34:06.8 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:34:07.4 Bob H: Right, So we’re the new…

 

0:34:09.3 Jim Lovelady: The new exodus community.

 

0:34:10.3 Bob H: Yeah, the new exodus community. So just as Israel wasn’t chosen instead of the world, we have to get this idea that election is missional too.

 

0:34:18.9 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

 

0:34:19.6 Bob H: It’s not only to privilege, it’s also to purpose.

 

0:34:22.8 Jim Lovelady: Oh, Amen.

 

0:34:23.9 Bob H: There were blessings given to Abraham, but if you read carefully, the underlying thing is for the blessings to flow through Abraham. Israel fails. Jesus comes. He finishes the job first through His death and resurrection and the creation of the new Israel, Jew and Gentile, united to Him by faith, but the creation of the values that He gave them, the right side up values in an upside down world. He called them to a radically different kind of life. He called them to be, as Lesslie Newbigin says, a sign, an instrument, and a foretaste of this gospel of the Kingdom.

 

0:35:06.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me see if I’m tracking with you. The first altar…

 

0:35:10.9 Bob H: Good news of the Kingdom.

 

0:35:11.7 Jim Lovelady: Good news of the Kingdom. Second is the Kingdom of radical grace.

 

0:35:15.0 Bob H: Yes. In two senses, both in the forensic and legal sense of being right with God and acceptable, not having to do anything to earn God’s love.

 

0:35:26.1 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:35:26.4 Bob H: And the second sense of being dependent.

 

0:35:31.3 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:35:32.3 Bob H: The vine, the branches that are in the vine.

 

0:35:36.4 Jim Lovelady: Right, right. And then the third altar…

 

0:35:39.1 Bob H: The third altar is the Kingdom of God is represented in a radical community that embodies the gospel of cosmic shalom. And that’s a matter of being assigned to the world. The King has come, being instruments, you know, we’re the body of Christ on earth, and actually entering into, grabbing hold of these blessings that are in Christ. So this could be unpacked for hours, I think. The way we live together and enjoy and love one another is the first fruit of the new age of the Kingdom, which we’ve entered and experienced, right? It’s one of the ways that the world gets a chance to see what God’s grace and gospel looks like. Harvey Conn used to say the church is the model home of the Kingdom of God. Not in the sense that it’s the perfect home.

 

0:36:31.4 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:36:32.0 Bob H: Not model in that sense, but in the sense in which when a big tract of 500 houses is built, they normally might build three models, three types, two-bedroom, four-bedroom.

 

0:36:48.2 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:36:49.0 Bob H: And they build the three types first. The rest of the area is all trees, or maybe they’ve knocked all the trees down, but these three homes represent as a foretaste. Another way to put it is an outpost of, like in the old Western days where civilization was brought to the wild west, represented by a fort or a town. And so in many ways, people get to taste the gospel partly through the church community.

 

0:37:24.3 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:37:25.3 Bob H: And that’s influenced our evangelism by saying, you know, for us, often belonging comes prior to believing, wanting to be part of the community.

 

0:37:38.2 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, it’s so not linear, the believe, belong, behave stuff. Behave, belong, believe, all that. It’s just, it’s all jumbled up into one big mess. And you know, what does Jesus say to that? He’s like, I love you all.

 

0:37:54.2 Bob H: Right. And so, another thing we can point out is that, well, we’re not anything like the model homes that are built. We, in fact, are more like derelict buildings that need to have our windows fixed and our dirty, smelly carpets cleaned, and that’s part of what we model as well, the fact that we are sinners in need of grace all the time, both the grace of ongoing forgiveness and cleansing and the grace of God’s empowerment through His Spirit. We need to model that to each other as well as these values of giving and sharing and celebrating others and sacrificing for others. So out of this Kingdom, gospel of the Kingdom or the work of Jesus as King, the church falls out, its whole identity and mission and purpose. And that’s really, I believe, one of the big themes of the letters of the New Testament. Richard Hayes suggests that Jesus and Paul were community developers, and the letters were in the aid of creating, of fostering and encouraging the values of a countercultural community of love and celebration and healing and welcome and acceptance and worship. So we need to be praying for ourselves and for the church that will grow in these areas, both so that we’ll be healed through it and also so that we’ll be an embodiment of this to one another, but to the world outside this. So the church is part of the gospel, a radical community embodying the gospel. The fourth spiral is, and this comes out of this Kingdom gospel, a radically sent mentality. John Stott pointed out that in the gospel of John, Jesus refers to Himself as the one who was sent or the Father as the one who sends Him like 50 times. Don’t quote me on that, but it’s around that. It dominated, Stott says, everything Jesus thought about Himself and His ministry. And in the Latin Bible, that word apostello got translated as missio or Mitto. That’s where we get the word mission.

 

0:40:07.5 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:40:08.4 Bob H: So God’s the one who missioned Jesus and the Father, Son are the one who missioned the church. And so we have to have that same mentality that Jesus had. The whole church is a sent church. That’s something that Jack pointed out and many others too, but Jack pointed it out before the word missional even existed.

 

0:40:25.3 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:40:26.8 Bob H: So if we believe this gospel, that Jesus is on the march to the ends of the earth until the end of time, how can we not be walking with Him if He says, follow me?

 

0:40:41.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, it’s the whole frozen chosen thing that is very convicting.

 

0:40:45.7 Bob H: Right.

 

0:40:46.8 Jim Lovelady: The fact that that’s a thing that we say, ah, the frozen chosen, well, this is a direct indictment to that.

 

0:40:54.7 Bob H: That’s right.

 

0:40:55.2 Jim Lovelady: We are sent to follow Jesus. It’s not like He doesn’t go with us, you know?

 

0:40:59.3 Bob H: Yeah, no. No, He’s calling us to go with Him.

 

0:41:02.5 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:41:03.3 Bob H: He’s with us in our midst is another way.

 

0:41:05.9 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:41:06.3 Bob H: But He went outside the gate and He’s calling us to go outside the gate.

 

0:41:10.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, let’s go. Let’s meet Him out there. Yeah.

 

0:41:13.4 Bob H: Right. And so that falls right out of this theme of Christ and His Kingdom. And then number five, if you’re a sent church and a sent people, mission church, then that requires being an incarnational church, an incarnational people who try to get involved in the world, who don’t become a city set on a far hill. It means seeking to bring our community into the communities of others and seeking to bring others into our community. And that means learning, trying to understand others, just thinking about how we behave when we’re gathered together for worship. We need to be thinking contextually about that, but also how we’re speaking to and relating to and communicating to the world that God has called us to reach.

 

0:42:06.2 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, this is the need…

 

0:42:07.6 Bob H: You got to know Him.

 

0:42:08.4 Jim Lovelady: This is the need for cultural humility and the ability to see and understand a culture, but to also be humble enough to not lord anything over that culture, but to submit it to Jesus.

 

0:42:26.6 Bob H: Right. And I think Serge has, Jack modeled it. He was a man who repented of his pride and unbelief and self-reliance. And he used to say, we’re not telling people to come up to our level. We’re not even like telling them we’re on the same level. We’re actually calling them to come down to our level as sinners in need of grace, as weak people who need empowerment. And that changes. You got to think, man, I don’t have all the answers. My culture doesn’t have all the answers. That becomes obvious, right? I have a lot to learn.

 

0:43:03.7 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:43:04.3 Bob H: And also, hopefully, a lot to enjoy about these cultures, though they’re fallen just as mine is.

 

0:43:11.2 Jim Lovelady: Right, yeah. I love that the missional endeavour of being an incarnational person means that those people that you’re serving and that you’re ministering to and with actually speak back into you to reveal all the ways that you have been living idolatrous for life and a life contrary to the gospel. Yeah. I love that dynamic. That’s part of the gift of being a missionary, thinking missionally, is that the people that you serve actually become a missionary to you.

 

0:43:42.7 Bob H: That’s right. And of course, we’ve got to recognize that the culture around us and our church culture are worlds apart too.

 

0:43:52.0 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:43:53.6 Bob H: So we need to learn how to communicate to our neighbors. It’s not as obvious as when you go to another country, when you even have to learn a new language even to say hello. So Kingdom is comprehensive. It includes God’s radical grace. It requires the formation of the church. The church is a sent church. The sent church must be an incarnational learning, humble church. The sixth and seventh altars, if you want to call them that, are Kingdom-centered prayer. It’s not only prayer about me and my family. Jesus, I think, in the Lord’s prayer prioritizes God’s name being glorified or hallowed, His will being done on earth as it is in Heaven, His Kingdom coming, which I think is unpacked as His will being done on earth as it is in Heaven, pushing back the fall, pushing back the curse, pushing back the brokenness. That’s the heading under which we would be praying about racism, sex trafficking, poverty, and other kinds of physical problems, natural problems, why we would want to empower people for education, for hospitals, for medical work, for social work. It covers that expansion on all the four levels of the fall.

 

0:45:17.1 Jim Lovelady: Asking for that, begging for the Lord to bring that…

 

0:45:19.7 Bob H: Yeah, recognizing that often my heart just isn’t there.

 

0:45:23.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, you just don’t want to go on dialysis because your kidneys are…

 

0:45:28.1 Bob H: Man, yeah.

 

0:45:29.1 Jim Lovelady: The Lord’s like, I love you too much to let that be your main concern.

 

0:45:33.9 Bob H: Right. So some of my prayers have been over the years. Jesus calls the Kingdom and Himself as the pearl of great price and the treasure in the field, and I need to ask God to make that shine in my eyes instead of the rusty things that take up my attention. Change my passions for… And to repent of the fact that I still want my kingdom more than I want Your Kingdom. So the next part of the prayer is forgive us our sins as we forgive… And that’s all about reconciliation and getting along with each other and the horizontal, both the forgive me for failing you in thought, word, and deed, but also may we be a reconciled community of love and forgiveness and service. I think it has all to do with the way the church behaves towards one another. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. It’s a spiritual battle that we’re in, and we need to be praying about how desperately needy and intense that battle is, and we often fail to see it and ask God to be at work. And then finally, when Peter and the disciples recognize Jesus as the Christ, it says from that time on Jesus started to teach them that he must go to Jerusalem and be rejected and suffer and crucified, and the disciples, as Peter spoke, said, no way, Lord, can’t do that. And Jesus turns up the heat. He doesn’t try to soften the message. He says, I must do this because the problems of this world, the brokenness, is bigger than Roman domination, and it’s bigger than just the vindication of Israel as a country or a nation. This is about me taking the nations as my inheritance, and it requires that I purchase men for God from every tribe and nation, language, through my suffering. 

 

0:47:14.0 Jim Lovelady:: With His life. 

 

0:47:14.05 Bob H: With His life. And so it’s a radical call to self-sacrifice for Christ and His Kingdom that I think is hard for us to hear these days, hard for some parts of the church to hear these days because we’ve had it relatively easy. We’ve been described as living in a peacetime mentality when in fact we’re in a wartime state of emergency, as Richard Lovelace has said something like that. Of course, Piper has pointed out that life is war because God’s at war with evil, and He’s called us into it. And so that’s something that we need to, I think, also it comes out of this whole Christ and His Kingdom, the necessity of His death and resurrection and His suffering. Another guy put it this way. When he was a Romanian pastor during the communist times, was put in jail many times and threatened, and at one point they told him, if you don’t stop distributing your sermons, we’re going to kill you. And he said, go ahead. My sermons will become more popular and powerful than they ever were. He said, your way of winning is killing. Our way of winning is dying. And we’ve got to take that seriously and recognize there are pastors being put in prison every day and churches being burned down and Christians being threatened. So they know that they may be called. And it’s not only persecution simply because you’re a Christian that Jesus calls us to. He says, take up your cross, deny yourself, lay down your life so that others will live. And so those are the seven kind of values that come out from recognizing this little sentence that Jesus came into Galilee preaching, the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel. 

 

0:49:36.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. So if someone says, I’m kind of bored of the Christian life and maybe I need to see what’s really going on. You go, well, there’s the radical good news of Jesus and the sending of His Spirit. And don’t forget about the radical grace of His Kingdom. And don’t forget about the radical community of shalom and peace and wholeness that comes from that. And don’t forget about the fact that we are radically sent and you have to have a radically sent mentality. And don’t forget about how you’re designed to be radically incarnational. And don’t forget about the need for Kingdom-centred prayer. And don’t forget about the call to self-sacrifice. And if you want a tour of the gospel, well, Bob can give you a tour of this grand cathedral. We can start over again every day. I’m giving these tours every day.

 

0:50:29.7 Bob H: Yeah. I have to admit there are seasons when my heart strays from this and I need to be warmed up again and again. So, you know, I’ve been thrown into a situation which is obviously missional. And so I lose sight of these truths and they kind of grow dim and distant. And it’s in that matter of our hearts needing this kind of transformation regularly.

 

0:50:55.4 Jim Lovelady: Well, I mean, this is why we remind one another. And all of those ingredients are there. And so as I was thinking through these things, it’s like, if I was planting a church or if I was pastoring a church, I would want these things to be, my desire would be for these things to be just part of the DNA of the church. And well, like you said, well, I need to… They need to be a part of my own DNA. And my repentance actually is this continually coming back to, I don’t believe Jesus in… Pick one of these things, pick one of these examples of the gospel working itself out. I don’t believe Jesus helped my unbelief, forgave my unbelief. And the radicality of the grace of God is that Jesus goes, yeah, I forgive you. Let’s go.

 

0:51:53.1 Bob H: Yeah. I mean, we get really excited about whether MAGA is going to triumph or whether some other agenda is going to triumph. You know, people are leaving churches because they disagree about things like this. And we can get really worked up and passionate about something like that. But this is far bigger and more important.

 

0:52:16.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. So Lord, give us eyes to see, you know, help us see that. Well, I feel like this is a bit like drinking a 59 Bordeaux out of a fire hydrant. This stuff is so good. Yeah. I really appreciate the tour. And my prayer is that people will come back to this over and over again because they’re like, okay, wait a second. What did he say there? I need to go back to that seventh altar. I need to go back to that third one. I need to sit with that some more. So thank you so much.

 

0:52:44.5 Jim Lovelady: I want to repeat Bob’s Kingdom of God gospel manifesto, these seven values that have guided his ministry. It’s the radical centrality of Christ and His Kingdom reveals a radical grace forming a radical community that is radically sent to be radically incarnational, committed to being radically prayerful, ready to be radically self-sacrificial. When I asked Bob to tell me what the gospel is, he went to Psalm 2 because it’s a beautiful and poetic declaration of the lordship of God that finds its climax in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

“Why do the nations rage and the people’s plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and His anointed saying, let us burst their bonds apart and cast their cords from us. But he who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord has them in derision and then He will speak to them in His wrath and terrify them in His fury saying, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill. I will tell of the decree of the Lord. He said to me, you are my Son. Today I have begotten You. Ask of me and I will make the nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession.” Here’s the good news about the world. Jesus is Lord. Here’s the good news about your life. Jesus is Lord. That’s good news because no one can protect you like the Lord. No one can forgive you like the Lord. No one can rescue you. No one can heal you. No one can reconcile you. No one can restore you. No one can love you like the risen Lord Jesus. No one else can put the world back to rights. You can’t say that God is reclaiming the entire world without saying that God is reclaiming your entire world. So how can you lean into the gospel and let Jesus reclaim all of you for His glory? One way is to explore the ways that you’ve not been living in participation with God’s Kingdom. We talk about lifestyle repentance a lot at Serge because of how quickly we find ourselves forgetting the gospel, forgetting that Jesus is Lord, and forgetting that our allegiance is to Him. Repentance is where God reclaims what is rightfully His, your entire being. You belong to Him. And if you’ve lost your passion and find that you’re just going through the motions, bored of the Christian life, we want to help you walk in repentance. I want to invite you to sign up for Mentored Sonship. It is a fantastic way to work the gospel deep into your life and restore your passion for God’s Kingdom as the world is being reclaimed, redeemed, and restored. And if you’re feeling called to participate in God’s reclaiming of the entire world, I want you to explore what it means to go. Maybe God has given you a heart for a certain culture. I know a friend who ended up becoming a missionary in Japan because from a young age, he enjoyed watching anime. And God used that to grow his love for the Japanese people. Where is God calling you to sacrificial living for the sake of the grandeur of the gospel? Go to serge.org/apprenticeship to start a conversation with one of our mobilizers.

And if you’re a young person or know of a young person who’s thinking and praying about being a missionary, I want you to send them a link to a new video series that we’re producing called Inside Out. It’s a new initiative from Serge that aims to envision the next generation toward God’s global mission. And there’s another way that you can participate in God’s reclamation of the entire world. You can be someone who sends missionaries through your generous giving. So I’m going to leave a link in the show notes for how you can give toward the work of Serge. Go to give.serge.org. And there are a variety of ways that you can give. And when you do, do me a favor. There’s a little box that says, add additional notes. And just write in there, click that box and write in there that you heard about this through the podcast. And please share this episode. It not only helps with the algorithm stuff, you know, it becomes a perfect conversation piece for people who are partnering with you in ministry. So share. And as you go to participate in God’s reclamation of the entire world, my prayer is that He will continually be reclaiming your heart by His love and His grace. So as you go, receive the blessing from the one who loves you and gave Himself for you. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face to smile down on you. May the Lord be gracious to you and turn His bright eyes to you and give you His peace. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God, life everlasting. Amen.

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