A Cool Church Name

So I tweeted today that my latest read has surprised me. I seem to be something I formerly was happy to say I wasn’t.
Ever thought you were definitely not something and it turns out you may actually be it!
This is often how we operate. Its not that we claim to be something, we more often or not claim not to be something.
We so often define ourselves by what we aren’t.

So, we’ve changed the name of our church. No longer First Baptist Church of Reedley we are now Redeemer’s Church and everyone is loving the change.
The new name is so powerful.
Yes its classic and not hip.
Yes its got a religious smell to it more than a cool smell to it.
But it is a loaded, powerful name that is absolutely spot on.

So come back to our habits of defining ourselves by what we aren’t, what we stand against, what we don’t do, rather than who we are, what we do and what we stand for.

Enter the Redeemer.

Its Exodus 6, early on in the story of God. God appears to Moses and he gives Himself a new name …and the moment that new name is given God, Jehovah, The Lord (or as its best interpreted The Eternal One) talks about redeeming. It’s a bigger word than ‘rescue’ and a bigger word than ‘save’ – the bigness of the word is in the wholeness and fullness of what redemption does.

Redemption is a rich word.
It’s a Bible word that Christians need to speak and talk about.
Redemption is a salvation word.
But this word doesn’t present salvation as ‘get me out of here God’ or the other classic Christian mistakes such as ‘it gets me saved so I can get to heaven’. Redemption is a word that we must preach because it tells us how brilliant God’s salvation is – its not only future in heaven when we die it is slap bang in the here and now and very much about who you are and what you do. It involves your essential being here and now and on into eternity.

Redemption says – I no longer need to define myself by the negatives I do not do, believe or stand for, I can define myself by what I fully have been made by God's redeeming power. Negative (I am a wretch) has been replaced with positive (I am a redeemed child of God). Its not what I don’t do its what I do – and that doing is me, fully me doing it because of the power of a redeeming God.

It challenges teaching that majors on how wretched we are and how that won’t be fixed until we get to heaven. It rather says …..there is a you that is created in the image of God with all God’s beauty, and God has come down now in Christ and is redeeming you to that original design beauty outworking now Christ’s redemptive death and resurrection.

So come back to my surprise today as I read a book and discovered I may be something I thought I wasn’t – this is sin. And its sin every time I define myself by what I am not or what I do not; when I define myself as a redeemed follower of Christ in the negatives. Sin is when we remain in the broken, wretched state of defining our being not by the redeeming work of God in Christ, but by the state of sinful, broken humankind.

Imagine how different you would be and everyone you engage with or even set eyes on could be if we spoke the language of the redeemed because we live the life of the redeemed and we tell everyone we meet about the Redeemer.

It really is a cool name for a church!!