John 5:19-30, Our Purpose: To exalt Christ as Lord (1)

Several years ago (1983) in a book entitled Let the Church be the Church author Ray Ortlund described the variety of “model” churches.  There were …

ü Evangelistic centers, where everything all week long was geared towards an altar call on Sunday.

ü Mission centers, with a thermometer in front, a map on the wall, and lots of missionary reports from the pulpit.

ü Information centers, where the key terms were teach and teacher.  People come to fill their notebooks and their heads.

ü Program centers, where, if you thought this week was good wait till next week!  We have a gospel magician, three singing groups and a ventriloquist that will blow your mind!

ü Fellowship centers, where its all about “body life,” relational theology, discipling, small groups and spiritual gifts.

ü Counseling centers.

ü Rescue missions.

ü Training schools.

Here is what Ortlund said about this: “All these are good, and all may be part of what we seek to do or be.  But do these functions achieve God’s central focus for the church?”  The bottom line was: God has ordained the church for Himself!”

My study of the Scriptures leads me to something more precise than that.  You may have noticed that the title of this post is, “Our Purpose: To exalt Christ as Lord.”  We just spent several days saying our purpose is to glorify God.  The way we have talked about it is that glorifying God is a total statement; nothing exists outside of that. 

Yet, Scripture makes it very clear: for the Church there is one thing that glorifies God and that is the exaltation of His Son.  Jesus referred to His disciples as those which You have given Me (John 17:2,6,9,11,24).  Did you see in today’s passage all the ways that the Father exalted the Son.  The Son gives life as the Father gives life.  The Father gave the Son all judgment SO THAT (hina) all may honor the Son even as they do the Father (v23).  Then there is a profound statement: He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him. 

There is much more that we will study on this.  But for the moment we need to figure out how this works.  We have one purpose, to glorify God.  Then God says, the one thing I want you to do is to honor My Son.  In a good business model, we would say, this is not good; two purposes that guide the entire operation guarantees a divided house.  However, we know this will not be the case for the Church because we know that there is no division between the Father and the Son!