GOD’S VISION FOR HPPC: A GLOBALIZED CONGREGATION
Isaiah 66: 18-21
08/04/13 © Dr. Ronald W. Scates
So, after 13 years and having preached literally 100s of sermons from the pulpits of HPPC, what do you say when you’re down
to your final 4? What do you say to the Lord? What do you say to a congregation that is very, very dear to you?
Well, first of all, you say, “I love you! Lord, you know how much I love you. You know how over the past 13 years that I’ve tried
faithfully pastor this church as just one small way of saying that I love you.” And HPPC, you know that I love you and I always will. I
will always have you in my heart.
Secondly, you say, “Thank you, Lord! HPPC, thank you! Thank you for the privilege, for the honor that I have had of working
with you, alongside you as we have made disciples of Jesus Christ here in the Dallas area and literally around the world.” Faith
always begins with gratitude and I will leave this congregation with a heart gratefully filled to the brim that God called me and my
family to this place of ministry for this long a time.
And then lastly, you say, “Don’t forget your name! Don’t forget who you are! Don’t forget who God called you to be! Don’t
forget what God has called you to do, especially in the midst of a surrounding culture that is becoming ever more antithetical to the
gospel of grace and to biblical morality. God has big, big dreams for HPPC. Do not ever settle for small dreams! Do not ever allow
yourself to be seduced by voices who would tell you that HPPC’s future can be assured more by cultural acclaim and
accommodation than by radical discipleship—a discipleship that is sold out to Jesus Christ!
My 4 final sermons will be my way of saying, “I love you! Thank you!” and to encourage you to live into God’s vision, not my
vision—God’s big vision for this congregation! You know, a church discerns God’s vision by simply looking around and asking itself
what is God already and obviously doing in our midst rather than formulating a vision and then asking God to bless it.
For nearly 2 years now, I have been trumpeting 4 things that are obvious and clear to me that God is doing in our midst. So I
believe God’s vision for this church is to be a globalized, biblically Orthodox, missions-driven, renaissance church for a very broken
and lost 21st Century world. There you have my 4 last sermons. Today—globalized!
I invite you to turn in your bibles now to the Book of Isaiah, the 66th chapter, as we take a look at verses 18 through 21 and I
invite you to pray with me before we read. Holy Spirit, open our hearts and minds now to Your Word that we might clearly
understand it, that we might gratefully receive it and that we might faithfully apply it to our lives. For Jesus’ sake! Amen.
And now, if you’re able, please stand for the reading of our Old Testament lesson this morning, as God speaks to the nation of
Israel about all of the nations that she is surrounded by and here’s what He says:
18 “For I know their works and their thoughts, and the time is coming to gather all nations and tongues. And they shall come
and shall see my glory, 19 and I will set a sign among them. And from them I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and
Lud, who draw the bow, to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away, that have not heard my fame or seen my glory. And they
shall declare my glory among the nations. 20 And they shall bring all your brothers from all the nations as an offering to the LORD, on
horses and in chariots and in litters and on mules and on dromedaries, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the LORD, just as the
Israelites bring their grain offering in a clean vessel to the house of the LORD. 21 And some of them also I will take for priests and for
Levites, says the LORD.”
Please pray with me again! And now Father, as my words are true to Your Word, may they be taken to heart but as my words
should stray from Your Word, may they be quickly forgotten. Through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen. Please be seated.
Did you know that Dallas has been classified as an Alpha-World city by the Globalization and World Cities Study Group? Did
you know that Dallas is the 2nd fastest growing Muslim city in America? Only slightly outranked by Chicago! Did you know that
annually the metroplex area takes in more immigrants than does the countries of Norway and Canada, who are two of the leading
immigration nations on planet earth? God is globalizing His world. God is globalizing Dallas. God is particularly globalizing HPPC.
Wherever I’ve traveled around the world as your senior pastor, I’ve had the privilege for 13 years, on every continent, you need to
know with what high esteem HPPC is held in by the world church, especially when they hear that we have a Chinese pastor and an
African pastor and a Korean pastor on our staff, plus a bunch of white guys and we are planning a Cuban congregation here in
Dallas.
Down the road, Philip Jenkins, Baylor University professor, he’s probably the world’s foremost authority on the church and
globalization. Listen to what Philip Jenkins says, “Although I describe my area of study as global Christianity, that is a flawed
phrase. If it’s not global, is it really Christian?”
My friends, what God is doing here at HPPC is messy, it’s mysterious and it’s miraculous! As genuine faith in Christ Jesus
always is!
Now, God has always been global. For God so loved the world! But by Isaiah’s day, the nation of Israel had become any but.
The nations that surrounded Israel were seducing her and she becomes exhibit A of what goes theologically and morally wrong
when a people allow themselves to become more shaped by a surrounding cultural spirituality rather than what God is clearly
revealing to them through His Word. The nations around Israel have their own gods, with a little ‘g’, idols really—nationalistic
parochial tribal gods. And so Israel looks around and sees that and begins to view the One True Living God of heaven and earth as
being just their god—a Hebrew god, a localized god. All of the nations around Israel had kings and so Israel trades in the kingship of
God for mortal human beings. How did that work? And all the nations surrounding Israel practice killing their kids and sexual
anarchy. Sound familiar? And Israel was soon hot on that trail. Now the ironic thing is that though Israel is easily seduced by all
these surrounding nations, she always saw these surrounding tribes and nations and races as unclean, as spiritually dead, as
people who have no hope of salvation because God was not interested in them because He was only interested in Israel—God’schosen people.
Now watch, in our text, how God literally shatters that parochial xenophobic, even racist, Hebrew heresy that has captured the
hearts of the Israelites and imagine how radically uncomfortably these words must have sounded in the ears of those Jews who first
heard God speak these words.
As God prophesies in verses 18 and 19 that, “There is a day coming, Israel, when I am going to globalize my church in
Jerusalem, despite your desire to be a part of a church that only consists of people just like you.” And so God says He’s going to go
all over the world and start gathering the nations, all tribes, tongues, people, groups to Himself, right through Jerusalem.
Now we know historically that this came true. In fact, it came true on one day—the Day of Pentecost, the birthday of the church.
We find, on that day, Peter preaching in the streets of Jerusalem and we’re told in Acts 2:41 that in response to Peter’s sermon that
day, 3,000 people come to Christ.
Now just like they asked in the Revelation text, (Revelation 7:9-17), “Who are these people?”, we’ve got to ask, “Who were
those people?”
Well, if you look at Acts 2: 9-11, the Word of God tells you. It says that they were Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians,
Jews, Cappadocians, (that’s down in Africa), Pontians and Asians, Phrygians and Pamphylians, Egyptians, Libyans, Cyrenians,
Romans, Cretans and Arabs.
And God says in verse 19 that He’s going to set a sign in their midst. What sign? That sign—the cross. My friends, the ground
is level at the foot of the cross for all people. All nations, tribes, tongues, races, under the cross all of them now become God’s
chosen people. Thank God He globalized Jerusalem from day 1. Thank God He’s globalizing Dallas. Thank God He’s globalizing
HPPC. It’s messy! It’s mysterious! It’s miraculous but thank God!
Secondly, God, in verse 20, prophesies that there’s going to come a day when He is going to launch a global missions
movement that is going to go to the utter ends of the earth and by whatever means—on horses and chariots, on litters, camels,
mules, he is going to draw the nations to Himself. He’s going to bring them home. He’s going to bring them home to Jerusalem.
This prophecy is coming true in our midst. You and I are now living in the middle of Acts 2. Yeah, it’s messy. It’s mysterious,
miraculous but that’s the script that God is writing for the future of HPPC. And then God really does a number on the Israelites
thinking that all of these nations surrounding them are nothing more than unwashed Goyim, unclean peoples. You see, by the time
of Isaiah, only Jews could go into the Temple in Jerusalem. Oh yeah, there was a Court of the Gentiles where foreigners could come
near but they could not go in. And only priests could get anywhere near the Holy of Holies where the presence of God was. And to
be a priest, you had to come from only one tribe. Priests only came from the tribe of Levi. Now the Hebrew word for priest is ‘kâhan’.
English - Cohen. Do you know any Jewish friends named Kohen or Cohen? They’re of Levitical descent.
Look at what God says to the Israelites. He says, “Israelites, do you think these people are unclean? Let me tell you this: All
these nations, tribes, tongues, people groups that I am going to be drawing to myself, they are going to be as clean as those grain
offerings that you bring to me in those clean vessels.” That’s God-speak for “What I now call clean, don’t you dare call unclean.”
Why God even goes further than that! Look at verse 20. He actually calls all those other nations-‘brothers’ to the Israelites.
What He’s saying is, “These folks are now your family. Israelites, you do not look down upon, you do not put down family.”
When you and I walk the halls of HPPC and we’re passed by Africans and Asians and Anglos and Hispanics, think to yourself,
“Hm, that person is my brother-, she is my sister-in-Christ!”
Well, God really steps in it in verse 21. He commits a liturgical faux pas in the eyes of the Israelites. I mean He does a real
number here by saying, “Israelites, these people you look at—you call them a Greek, you call them an African, I’m now calling them
Levites.” God busts open the doors to the priesthood for any and all believers, no matter what tribe, tongue, nationality, race. My
friends, right here we’re witnessing 2nd class citizenship in the Kingdom of God flying right out the window.
This Table is a globalized Table. Always has been from day 1, always will be on into eternity. I invite you come to this Table this
morning and as you do so, I want you think about what is THE MOST important thing above everything else in the entire universe:
It’s the GLORY OF GOD! And ask yourself as you come forward this morning, in the light of this text, “What does God say brings
Him more glory? An homogenous church? Or a globalized church?”
My friends, where God is globalizing and churches are homogenizing, those churches will be left behind in the 21 st Century.
Come to this Table this morning rejoicing that God is obviously not leaving HPPC behind. Not at all! On the contrary, He is
honing us, positioning us, by being a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic church that we might extend His kingdom more faithfully and
effectively across the Park Cities, throughout the metroplex and around the world.
Never, never, never, never, never settle for small dreams; only God’s big dream for this congregation which is to be a
globalized congregation to His glory.
Oh yeah, let me remind you again: It’s messy! It’s mysterious and very, very much miraculous! But that always trumps
comfortable, convenient and culturally correct.
Come to this Table and then go live joyously into God’s big dream.
In the name of the Father, of the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen!