5 Feb 2024

God’s purpose for His people has always been: – His people, bound to him by covenant grace, should become the light-bearers of divine truth to a broken world.

As we study the Gospels, Luke in particular, we would notice that the role mentioned above had been assigned to Israel (Exodus 4:22) and back in Deuteronomy 4:6-7. The distinctiveness of Israel’s holy living was to be a testimony, for the glory of Israel’s God, to the surrounding nations and a magnet to draw them to the uniqueness of Yahweh. In the face of Israel’s failure, God promised an obedient servant through whom his promises to Abraham of blessing for all the families on earth would be fulfilled. The one obedient servant is none other than Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the prophet, priest, and king, God incarnate, the God-Man, who would bring God’s purpose to fruition. This is the context as Luke began his gospel – the coming of the Messiah, preceded by the coming of John the baptist in the ‘spirit of Elijah’.

The task of fulfilling God’s purpose is now set to be passed on to the church, following the completion of the mission of the Messiah, the Son of God, and Luke took great pains, in interviewing various ones, in ‘research’ into the happenings around the arrival of Jesus and the completion of his task at the cross, to ensure that the hearers (besides Theophilus) would be certain of the content and credibility of the Gospel, and subsequently in Acts, Luke went on to record the communication of this Gospel to the then known world. What is then the principal task assigned to the church of God in God’s unchanging purpose?

The Lord Jesus declared: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). We can rejoice today to be able to affirm, with the Apostle Paul, that the word of truth, the gospel, ‘in the whole world….. is bearing fruit and growing’ (Col.1:6). The Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, and although the mutilated body of the Church may be daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness, for God will not suffer his work to fail.
For the gospel is about the greatest change of all: from darkness to light, from Satan to God, from death to life (Col.1:12-14), The new birth is the implantation of the seed of the life of the eternal God within his people, through his indwelling Spirit. The growth and development of this seed will ultimately reach their fulfilment and completion in the life of the world to come.

However, the changes that the church needs to experience are the changes of spiritual growth, of development to maturity, of the restoration of the image of God and of progressive transformation into the likeness of Christ.
The change that matters most is the spiritual growth of the individual, and therefore by implication the sum of them all in the local congregation, into maturity. Like physical growth,it is a process; it takes time, but it also takes nourishment and exercise, The means for this is described as making ‘the word of God fully known (Col. 1:21-29), which means not so much preaching the whole BIble (though that would be a worthy aim in itself), but preaching Christ as the centre and key to all the Scripture (v28). The gospel is therefore not only the way in to the Christian life, but the way on as well. The Holy Spirit takes the Word of God to accomplish the work of God.
We shall elaborate further on this.