Exiled: Salt, Not Bear - Audio
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Well, we're continuing our series. I'm Tom and Pastor here at Gospel Church. We are super glad you are with us. If you're just joining us in the middle, we are working through a series called Exiled. And this series is based on the notion that this is not our home. And this could be your literal house, it could be your town, it could be Orange County, it could be the United States of America, it could be Planet Earth. But in all of those things, this is not your home. And this is something that gets hammered throughout the New Testament. Here's from first Peter, just an example, Peter says, "Dear friends, since your immigrants and exiles in the world, I urge that you avoid worldly desires that wage war against your lives. Live honorably among the unbelievers. Today they defame you as if you were doing evil. But in the day when God visits to judge, they're going to glorify him, because they have observed your honorable deeds." It's an interesting way of thinking about life, especially for those of us who think that, you know, like, I love my country. My dad was a huge patriot, served in Vietnam as a pilot, and he instilled at me at a very young age that I love, that we love America in our household, but I still do. I was going to wear my USA socks today, but they didn't match. And so I know that my wife would have been upset if I had red, blue, and green and black. I'm not exactly sure how to match, but I know that that's not it. But I love this country, I love Orange County, I grew up here. I love this building, this is the building that I worshiped in as a child. I love a lot of things about where I'm at, and yet I'm told that I am an immigrant here, that my citizenship, my citizenry belongs in heaven, and that, at best, I'm an exile. And we saw in our first week in the series that we're supposed to be seeking the welfare of the place where we're sent. All right, we're sent here to Earth, to Orange County, to America. And while we're here, while we're planted here, we're supposed to be seeking the good of the place that we're in. The question is, how does that work out, especially? And here's the fact of the matter. The fact of the matter is that no matter what country, no matter what time you're in, you are going to be in a place that's ultimately hostile to faith. Now some parts of the place that we're in are going to be very pro-faith, some parts of the place we're in are going to be very hostile to faith, that's just the world. And so the question is, how do we deal with it? How do we deal with this duality of wanting to bless the place that we're in, but also, in some cases, we're going to see in our text, they curse it. I want to start with a little bit of a story that takes place in the 1940s in France. And there's a little village called Le Chamboncéon, which is French for the chambon on the Lyon, which is actually just like grove on the river or something like that. But in this place, it's a very small village, it's southern, maybe south-central France. At the time, in the 1930s and 1940s, it's about somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people living there. And it was a Protestant village in the middle of a Catholic country, and that used to be a really big deal. Now, we live pretty peaceably with our Catholic brothers and sisters.
Transcription truncated.
Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org