Being Distinctive

Having crossed the Jordan but before the first battle, God told Joshua it was time to re-establish the distinctive mark of the people of God. For forty years of wandering in the wilderness, they had not been circumcising the male children, and now was God’s time to put that right.

Of course you and I might think it strange that God didn’t get them to do this before crossing the river. At least there was some security the other side of the Jordan. But here, on this side of the river, surely they are vulnerable. If word got out, their enemies might attack during their recovery period. It might only be a few days, but a few days would be all that was needed to wipe them out. Perhaps this is a timely reminder to us that God’s way of doing things is not the same as our way of doing things.

The point of the exercise:

When God called Abraham and promised him both an inheritance of land and a long line of descendents, he gave a mark of distinctiveness. Circumcision becomes the outward sign of the chosenness of Abraham and his descendents as the people of God. It’s a sign of grace. But beware, the Bible is clear that this is only a sign, and it’s possible to have the sign and not the relationship that it signifies.

In the NT the sign of the new relationship is baptism. Full of the symbolism of death and resurrection, baptism is our outward mark of the inward grace we have received. But again, just as with the OT sign, it’s possible to posses the mark, to have been baptised, but to have nothing more. The sign does not save. The sign does not guarantee a relationship.

What are the distinctives of our relationship?

If the mark is a mark of distinction, then what are the distinctives of our relationship with God?

#1 Distinctive faith

The first thing is that faith is distinctive in itself.

Three aspects to our distinctive faith:

Incarnation: Central to our faith is the belief that God became human. That he came and lived out a human life in full view of human beings.

Grace: Grace can be defined simply as getting what you don’t deserve. We don’t deserve God’s forgiveness, but he gives it. We don’t deserve his mercy, but again he freely gives it away.

Atonement: God dies for us. How the immortal and eternal God can die, I don’t know, but in Christ this is exactly what he did for us. And because he did this for us, we now have access to the Father; we have the opportunity of forgiveness and reconciliation.

#2 Distinctive community

There are many things that mark the Christian community as distinctive. Some of these can be found in the early description of the church in Acts 2:42ff. We’ll pick up on three things:

Devoted to the core teaching. What made the community a community was the commitment to the core teaching. It doesn’t mean that they never disagreed or had differences, but the heart of their community was marked by this devotion to the teaching of those who had been with Jesus.

Devoted to the core relationships with each other. It’s never easy to live out the principles of Jesus command to love one another as he loved us. It’s the easiest thing in the world to take offence at what someone says or doesn’t say, what they do or don’t do. It easier to withdraw from relationships than it is to persevere with them. But relationships are at the heart of being a community.

Devoted to worship and prayer: There are many clubs and societies that do things together. You can join the ramblers or the gym, or you can join a social club. At the heart of the community of faith is a relationship with God, a relationship that in part is expressed through prayer and worship.

#3 Distinctive mission

To live out the grace of God in a broken world. Many of us would probably begin to define a distinctive mission in terms of outreach or evangelism. But it seems to me that the first step in our mission is to live out the grace of God that we have experienced. We add our words to our actions.

Into all the world: One of the great things about Bedford is that world seems to have moved into the neighbourhood. I’ve been told that it is the most ethnically diverse town in the UK. You don’t have to go far to go into all the world these days.

Introduce your friends: There was a follower of Jesus called Matthew. He was a tax-collector by trade, and I guess that meant most of his friends fell into the “undesirable” category of society. But he did an extraordinary thing. He threw a party and invited all his friends, old and new. He mixed sinners into the disciples of Jesus. He didn’t appear to do anything else; he just put them in the same room.