No time in my 30 years of ministry has been as complicated as the last few months. Conflicts over race and politics in the middle of a tumultuous pandemic have presented innumerable pastoral challenges.<\/p>\n
Given these difficulties, my church’s elders decided we wanted to spend time intentionally shepherding our people to think rightly about our identity as a gospel community as well as our responsibility to one another and the world in these divided times. One way we did that was by preaching a sermon series highlighting four texts on our covenant relationship as they applied to race, ethnicity, and God’s purposes in the gospel.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, pastor, you might consider doing something similar.<\/p>\n
THE TEXTS<\/strong> <\/p>\n The four texts we chose were Deuteronomy 4, Amos 5, Ephesians 2, and Revelation 7. I want to briefly explain these texts below.<\/p>\n Deuteronomy 4<\/em><\/p>\n In Deuteronomy 4 God establishes a gospel community by his power, presence, and word. As his covenant people, God intended for Israel to testify about him to the watching world. Think of them as a “fishbowl community” comprised of cultural, political, judicial, and economic structures that testified to the presence of God and his unique wisdom. If the community failed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hopefully, these passages and the questions they evoke will propel us to become the fishbowl community into which the nations can look and clearly see tangible, gospel-centered love in a world that so desperately needs it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[322],"class_list":["post-22543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-preaching-theology","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22543"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22545,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22543\/revisions\/22545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}