Mar 17

Written by: Michael A. Milton
3/17/2010 1:28 PM

We Were Made to Shine: the Light of the Gospel in a Dark World
Isaiah 49.6; Acts 13.47a

Introduction to the Reading

I bring greetings to the saints at Scherer Memorial Presbyterian Church from RTS Charlotte and from the whole RTS family! I am honored to be with you here in Lake Wylie, SC! Thank you for your prayers as we seek to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth by raising up a new generation of pastors and missionaries. The Lord has blessed us with six campuses and now a new extension in Houston, with 3,000 students, and 50 professors who, like me, are not only teaching in our classrooms but bringing the Gospel to the nation and to the world through our preaching and teaching. RTS is a veritable world missions movement. Through iTunes U and our partnership with, of all people, Apple, we are sending out 125,000 downloads of sermons and Bible studies and lectures each and every week, all over the earth. Please pray that we will stay true to our vision of being a missional seminary that is committed to the inerrant and infallible Word of the living God, to the Great Commission, and to the grace-centered, Christ-honoring, old Reformed faith, which we believe is simply the Gospel.

I am so thrilled at your mission conference Scripture! I want to focus on Acts 13.47 in two sermons: one will focus on the fact that we are called the light. That is tonight. And then we will look at the purpose of God in missions that is embedded in this summary passage of the redemptive plan of God.
So tonight we begin. Let us read from the Old Testament, from the passage that Paul is quoting and then read Acts 13.44-48. This is the inerrant Word of God:

He says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49.6).

The next Sabbath almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul, reviling him. And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, saying, “It was necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you. Since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, ‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’” And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed (Acts 13.44-48).

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever (Isaiah 40.8).

I want to bring a message I am calling, We Were Made to Shine! But first let us pray.

Prayer of Illumination

Lord, let Your Word shine through me to these dear people, whose hearts are set on fulfilling Your purposes. Let me preach as if never to preach again and as a dying man to dying men. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Introduction to the Sermon

“What does God want me to be?”

That is a question that my fifteen-year-old son has been asking lately as he contemplates his place in this world. It is also a question that I hear from prospective students as they contemplate God’s call to ministry. And, believe it or not, as I talk with pastors, it is a question that I hear. “Is this the right place for me? Should I be a solo pastor, or a church planter, or a missionary?”

“Unto thine own self be true,” the Great Bard, said. So it is a worthy question. Sometimes I have seen that if the answer is not found, it can cripple a man. He will go from job to job. He may go from wife to wife. He may go from bad to worse, all because he is in search of the great question, “What am I to do? Who am I?” These are part of what philosophers call the great existential questions of life.

But I have good news for you tonight: Good news that I had to learn in my own life! You were made by Almighty God to shine! You may wrestle with how that is to work out, but once you grasp that God has made you to be His light to others, to share the great redemptive plan of Almighty God, you lose a lot of angst that you have had! You all of a sudden get a tremendous purpose for your life.

I will never forget how God worked that out in my own life. I had been orphaned as a boy in rural Louisiana. I was reared by my dear and devote Aunt Eva. It was just the two of us on a little farm in the piney woods along the Louisiana-Mississippi border. I didn’t know what to do with my life. I ended up getting into all sorts of trouble as I left home as a boy. (I was churched to the hilt, but still lost to the uttermost.) My Aunt Eva continued to pray for me. Just after my wife Mae and I were married our pastor asked me to go and hear Dr. D. James Kennedy’s Evangelism Explosion. There, in New Orleans, I heard him preach from Ephesians 2.8,9:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 9

My life was changed forever and I was a new person. The way to God was only through the finished work of Jesus, His perfect life over my sinful life, and His atoning sacrifice on the cross for my sin nature and my actual sins against God. His resurrection and Ascension meant that there could be new life for me by faith in Him. If you have never trusted in Jesus Christ, His grace is available to you right now. In fact, I implore you not to move from your seat until in your heart you have settled it: that it is not what you have done or can do, but what Christ has done for you. That is the beginning. But the next verse says,

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2.10).

You were made for His purposes. And taking that truth with the Old and New Testament passages we come tonight to say:

God has called us to be the light the Gospel to the ends of the earth. We were made to shine.

Some context here: Paul is quoting Isaiah 49.6 in which Isaiah says that it is too small a thing for the Messiah to be just for the Jews, but that He must be for the whole world. Thus, we must see several things. And the key idea is that we, the people of God, are the light of God’s redemptive plan. I want to consider three ideas from this passage for us tonight. There are three words that I would employ to describe what the Bible is here teaching about how we were made to shine.

The first word is...

1.    DUTY: We shine because of a duty of love above us (“For so the Lord commanded…”)

The verse says that God commanded. Missions is not an option. Evangelism is not an option. Living a life of shining forth the truth of God’s redemptive plan fulfilled through Jesus Christ is a command. But this command leads us to a duty that is not a legalistic duty but what I would call a duty of love.

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of our marriage. I plan on taking my wife, along with our son, on a trip to Vancouver. We’ll then catch the overnight Canadian Railway Train through the Canadian Rockies and then on to Calgary where we will stay with friends. It is taking a lot of planning and will deplete some of our savings too! But do you think that I am doing it as a duty because my conscience commands me, saying, “Mike, boy, you must do this because that is just the right thing to do and you will be punished if you don’t!” NO INDEED! I do it out of love. My conscience says, “Boy, God has blessed you with a faithful wife who has been your help mate for a quarter of a century, and this faithful woman of God is the best thing that has ever happened to you. What can you do to show her your love? What can you do to really allow her to enjoy herself? How can you bless her?” That is a duty of love.

And my beloved, Paul is preaching on this day, in answer to the revolving of the Jews, “The Lord has commanded us…” (Verse 47). But this is a command, from Isaiah 49.6, that is coming to a people chosen by God to be His own, chosen by God to bring forth the Savior of the World. This is a command coming to those who were blessed with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They were blessed with promises, and with prophets, with manna in the desert and with water coming out of a rock. They were blessed with God’s presence and power. And yet these rabbinical leaders didn’t want the Gentiles to hear. But Paul says it is a command, a command to be a light!

This is what Jesus said:

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden (Matthew 5.14).

My beloved, God’s command is a command that is coming to you tonight. But like the duty of love you have for your spouse or your children, this is a command that is a duty of love. Shine.

Well, someone might ask, what does that mean to shine? Glad you asked! It is my next point.

For the second word I would use, in looking at this passage, is this one:

2.    NATURE: We shine because of Christ the Light inside of us (I have made you a light…”)

I have made you a light speaks of what God had done for Israel and for us:

For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set His love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that He swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt (Deuteronomy 7.6, 8).

The Lord Jesus said:

You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He may give it to you (John 15.16).

So the truth is that Israel as a people, and all believers, were chosen by God. God made us physically. God made us spiritually. And God made us purposively. He made us to shine. It is our nature.

It is the nature of the cow to “moo” and the nature of the sheep to go “baa!” And it is the nature of the believer to speak the name of “Jesus” with others. The question I want to ask you, “Is that your nature?” For you see if it is, then you will shine. It will come, in a word, naturally. Now, like any gift, any natural talent, if you will, you may have to stoke the internal gift. In fact, we are told in the Bible to do this, to stir one another up

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works (Hebrews 10.24).

I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder (2 Peter 1.13).

Sometimes when I am doing pastoral counseling for marriage issues, I ask the couple to sing me “their song” from their days of early romance. You may have to get back to God, to go back and sing the song of your salvation again—of how He came to you, through your parents, or a Sunday School teacher, or a coach, or a pastor—and listen to the echo of that grace of the Lord in your life. Maybe that is what this conference is all about. Maybe that is why God brought you here. For if you are the child of God, you will have to let that light shine.

Paul is an example of this. Often when Paul was preaching or writing, he would break out into what I call spontaneous doxological explosion! Look at his testimony in 1 Timothy 1.12-17.

I thank Him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because He judged me faithful, appointing me to His service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life. To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. 

Did you see how Paul built up to this explosion of praise and witness? He was shining like the most glorious lighthouse! It was coming from deep inside of him, based on the grace this former blasphemer and persecutor of believers, had received from Jesus. He just had to shine!

And so will you. But maybe tonight is the night to stoke the old embers. Maybe tonight is the night to sing the song of grace again in your life. And if you do, if you go back to what Christ has done for you, then you will shine. I think a glow may be moving through this place already. I know just talking about it from God’s Word makes it shine again in my own heart!

And if this is so, then something must happen with light. Remember in Vacation Bible School how you would sing,

“This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine!”

Well, that is good theology! Because as we look deeper into this verse, we see that there is a truth here that I would put simply as this third word:

3.    LOVE: We shine because of the love of God for others around us (“I have made you a light for the Gentiles…”

Again, Paul is quoting Isaiah 49.6 that it is too small a thing for the Messiah to only be for the tribes of Jacob. God made us to be lights to the Gentiles.

The Gentiles were of course those who were not part of the Covenant People of God. It was not just an “ethnic thing.” For clearly, Rahab of Jericho, and Ruth the Moabites, were not ethnic Hebrews, but through faith they were engrafted into the Covenant People of God. And those two godly women became part of the lineage of our Lord Jesus in Matthew 1 (verse 5). But in those very instances, the congregation of God, the Jews, were reaching out to the Gentiles and bringing them in to the fold of the one, true people of the one true and living God. This is important for us to see and to believe and practice. The Gospel is always centrifugal. It is always moving out.

Abraham had received great promises—a great covenant from the Lord: Abraham would have descendants to become a nation, a land, and the world. Through Moses God raised up a nation of Abraham’s descendants. Through Joshua they claimed a land, all of it that God promised them. And they lost it through sin and rebellion against God. But the final promise was to come through the first two: through the Jews, through the land, would come forward Abraham’s greater son, Jesus, the true Joshua, who would lead His people to become a light to the nations.

Even Genesis 17.4 says,

Behold, My covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations (Genesis 17.4).

And the word for “nations” is the Hebrew word, “Goy,” the word for Gentile nations. Thus, it was never God’s plan for Israel to keep the faith for themselves. They were always to let it shine to the “Goy” to the world of people groups.

When we swerve from this Biblical, redemptive vision, we get into a lot of trouble, as believers and as churches. Just this week, I told our class that in all of my years of ministry in which I have sadly seen many pastors fall into sin, I have never met one who told me, “Well, my prayer life and devotional life has been just great. But I fell into sin.” No, in every instance, there was a lack of spiritual seeking after God in their own lives. Well, I want to say this: I have never seen a church get into trouble if their total focus is on letting their light shine for Jesus Christ, in personal soul winning (yes, as Reformed people we can call it that, for that is what the great Calvinist Charles Haddon Spurgeon called it!), or in seeking to reach their own community, or focusing their church on reaching the ends of the earth. I have seen churches walking through the motions of that. I have seen churches with mission’s conferences but with no personal passion. I have seen churches talk about missions. But here, there is a shining, that arises out of a duty of love to Christ for “what He has done for me,” according to the “new nature” that the Lord has worked in me, so that I must go and tell others.

Now, we must be sure that there is a tension in this passage for every one of us. For the Jews had religion. They had programs. They had laws. They had their own form of telling forth what they thought was the truth of the Bible. But Jesus would say:

Not everyone who says to Me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and cast out demons in Your name, and do many mighty works in Your name?” And then will I declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7.21-23).

Thus, it is incumbent upon God’s people, upon each and every one of us, that we are not like those who will hear these horrible words that will echo through eternity, “I never knew you!”

No, my beloved, if you belong to Christ, then God has commanded you to become lights to the Gentiles. But if you are His, then that command, we have learned, is a duty of love. And if He has commanded you to be His light, then that is easy, for you have received His grace and you are a new creature in Christ. You are a light. It only remains for you to do what you were intended to do: love others the way that Christ has loved you. That is how we reach others. Such love comes from looking upon a world of unbelievers not as pagans who could never know God, but like Paul, optimistically announcing His grace to any and everyone He can. The Bible says that this brought rejoicing:

…And as many as were appointed to eternal life believed (Acts 13.48).

The question then only remains, “Do you love like this? Do you see the world filled with people just like you?” There are people who curse Him today who will preach Him tomorrow. There are people in the Middle East who are terrorist like Paul was, who will become the great preachers of the 21st and 22nd century, should Chris tarry. For I believe that the wind of the Spirit is moving across the earth, bringing in people from India and China, Iraq and Iran and soon more and more even from that land where Jesus walked. Perhaps, more importantly for you, as you shine the light of the love of Jesus to your own family, your husband, your wife, your children, your parents, will be reached, and led from darkness to light.

Conclusion

You and I were made to shine, to become the incarnational light of the Savior to the Gentiles—those who were outside of the covenant of grace, but who were always intended to be brought in. And we have learned from this very missions conference passage that this happens through three words:

1.    DUTY: We shine because of a duty of love above us (“For so the Lord commanded…”)
2.    NATURE: We shine because of Christ the Light inside of us (I have made you a light…”)
3.    LOVE: We shine because of the love of God for others around us (“I have made you a light for the Gentiles…”

Years ago, at that conference where I heard the doctrines of grace and was born again, I also learned that I could share Jesus Christ and that some would hear and respond in faith, some would not, and some would want to hear more. This is exactly the pattern we see in Scripture and exactly what our missionaries experience, and what you experience. But even some of those who don’t believe today, because of the power of the Gospel, may believe tomorrow. That is the hope and the glory and the victory of the Cross! Well, in that conference, I will never forget this Irish Anglican priest. He had flown over from Northern Ireland to learn more about how to share his faith.

And after a few days of study and prayer, he went out with others to Bourbon Street in New Orleans. When they came back they reported on what God had done. And I will never forget his words, “Tonight, I have let my light shine before others. And another soul has come to Jesus Christ. I have been in the ministry for 20 years and that has never happened. I feel like tonight, I have become a ‘completed Christian.’” And we were all moved. Then his team member approached the microphone. And this man said, “I am a Jew. Tonight I shared the Good News of Yeshua Ha’Maschia with another Jew. And he became a believer. Tonight, I became a completed Jew.” It was then that I knew, the power of the Gospel. This is a new way of life. This is new way of living. And I have sought with my whole being to share that light of Jesus Christ with others, so that I could become a completed man.

Tonight the duty of love is before you to let your light shine. And when you do, you will become a completed man or woman—a completed church. For you were made to shine.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

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