Brant site or in Kitchener. Really glad to have you joining
us this morning is we have a special morning this morning,
not just because it's snowed, although our guest speaker here
this morning because he comes from the West Coast, is very
impressed that you Ontarians would brave the Blizzard out
there and make it out today. I'm shocked there's anyone in
this room right now. He is.
Unbelievable. We had this discussion.
So Jeremy Johnson, who's with us today, Jeremy is one of the
senior pastors at Village Church, which is a multi site
church started out in BC, although now you've got you've
got sites across three different provinces right in Calgary and
in Oakville here in Ontario as well.
We're really excited to have Jeremy.
Not only is he a pastor at Village, but Jeremy has also
been deeply involved as an ambassador for international
justice ministries. So IJM for a number of years.
And so Jeremy is going to speak to us this morning on the topic
of biblical justice because our Christmas offering this year is
really going to be focused on us as a congregation, how we can
take part in that. So I'm happy to turn it over to
Jeremy. Let's give him a big round of
applause as he comes this morning.
Thanks, Derek. Well, good morning Forward
Church. You've such a great church,
getting to know your leaders and a lot of your team here this
year actually. And then this morning, what an
amazing church. So it's an honor for me to be
able to be here this morning. Yes, my name is Jeremy, senior
pastor at Village Church out on the West Coast.
But I was actually born just a little down the four O 1 in
London. So I have some history here and
I am still a die hard Leafs fan. I don't talk about it a lot out
there, but hopefully this isn't being recorded or anything,
right. I, I'm a huge Blue Jays fan, of
course, still a huge Blue Jays fan.
We're not going to talk about any of that this morning, of
course, recent events. But I try and get to a game
every time I come back to Ontario, I try to get to a game.
So I was here recently meeting with some pastors in the summer
and so I got a chance to go to a a game.
But I'm a massive introvert actually, so there's nothing
better for me than free night, go down and see a Jays game all
by myself, just me in the game. Now if you don't know about
baseball, it's a funny thing. Baseball is designed to do 2
things. It's designed to make you really
bored and it's designed to make you really hungry.
That's how baseball games work. That's why they're so long.
That's why they have the inning structure.
It's make you bored and make you hungry.
So here I am at the game and I'm snacking away, you know, going
pretty hard here, like hot dogs and Pepsi's and one of the big
family Cracker Jacks. And it gets to about the 6th
inning and I'm still going. So I go out in search of a new
snack and I find the greatest snack I think I've ever found at
a baseball game, which is, I don't know if you've seen these,
it's the helmet, like the actual baseball helmet full of soft
serve ice cream. You've seen these.
It's unbelievable. It's like the size of an actual
man's helmet full of soft serve ice cream.
It's incredible. The greatest thing I've ever
found. So I, you know, now I have no
one with me. So I have 0 accountability
around my life choices in this evening, of course.
So I, I buy this thing and I go back to my seat and I sit down
and I'm, I'm going away and I'm thinking you could wear the
helmet. It's a real helmet.
You'd have to, you know, lick the, lick it clean, of course,
because there's nowhere to clean it, which would kind of be
psychotic. But anyways, so here I am.
I'm licking it clean. And I, I, I kind of noticed
there's there, there's someone watching me in a row.
You know, you get that feeling. You just know it's happening.
So I look over kind of like, yeah.
And there's two women. There's women.
They're just staring at me. And I think their, their faces
were like half awe and half judgement with how I describe
it. And I could tell she wanted to
say something. So I waited.
And she just goes, you are an eating machine.
This is what she says to me. I have, we have never seen
anything like this in our life, right?
It's like the 6th inning. And I don't know if that's a
compliment or not. I'm not sure how you're supposed
to take that at moment. Now here's the thing, just they
knew nothing about me. They knew nothing about my life.
They knew nothing about my story, anything, whatever.
All they knew about me was what they saw.
What they saw was what they knew.
And that's all that mattered. I could have sat there and
explained to them, you know, I try to eat healthy, you know, I,
I care about fitness, whatever. I could have, you know, said all
these things, it wouldn't have mattered, right?
They saw what they saw. And that's just how it goes for
us as Christians today in our culture, people see us and they
see what they see, and that's how they form their opinions
about us. Doesn't really matter sometimes
what we say. It's what they see us do that
ends up giving them the impression of what we are like,
what the church is like, what Christianity is like, what God
is like. You know, there's a study done
really recently actually, and it looked at people who don't go to
church and just said, why, Why don't you go?
And one of the number one reasons why people reported they
don't go to church is because they think the church is just
full of hypocrites and they just don't want to be associated with
hypocrites. That interesting.
So I think that's a problem, but maybe an opportunity, an
opportunity for us when it comes to the conversation around
justice. You know, our world loves the
idea of justice. Like our culture right now loves
the idea of justice. We see it everywhere, social
justice, environmental justice, online justice, just kind of
just people yelling at each other, you know, in comment
sections. But culture loves justice.
They do. It just doesn't have any, any
good reason for why justice matters.
There's no cultural foundation for the point of pursuing
justice. But we know that there's a point
to it because for us as the church, as Christians, justice
isn't just an idea. Justice is actually the very
nature of God himself. We're going to look this morning
at Proverbs 2115. It's a great short little
proverb and it's so profound. I just love this proverb.
So let's take a look at it. Proverbs 2115.
Here's what it says. I'll read it for you.
It says when justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous but
terror to evil doers. When justice is done, it is a
joy to the righteous, but terror to evil doers.
What a profound little proverb. When justice is done, the first
word when is very important. This proverb, it reminds us that
there is justice and there's injustice in our world.
It's not a theoretical question. There are real wrongs that need
to be set right. Some days, I don't know if
you're like me, it can feel like the injustice is just winning.
The problems of the world seem so immense.
The injustices around us seem so impossible to even think about
tackling. Did you know that there are
actually more people in slavery today in the world than ever at
any other point in human history?
Isn't that crazy? All the progress, all of
everything. Sometimes it just feels like the
evil, the injustice, is winning. And how can we possibly be
equipped to solve any of these massive problems?
I remember a few years ago, it was the middle of the night at
home and I was woken up by our, our house alarm.
Our house alarm went off. And of course, that's not really
what you want to be waking up to, Of course, is your home
alarm going off in the middle of the night.
So I, I got out of bed and I hit the keypad things.
We had a thing in our, our bedroom and I turned it off.
And of course, the next thing that happens is you get a phone
call. So you get a phone call.
I pick it up and it's the alarm company and the the alarm
company, you know, they're on the phone.
They say hello, your, your alarm just went off.
Said yes, that's correct. I turned it off.
Seems like we're good. Yeah, they said OK.
Is everything OK? I thought, huh, that's a good
question. It's 3:00 AM and my alarm just
went off and I'm upstairs. I don't know if everything's OK.
Actually, the alarm just went off and the guy on the other
line goes on the other end of the line says OK, can you go
ahead and check for me? But everything's OK.
I thought, hold on a SEC. This is where I realized the
whole home and alarm company system is kind of a scam.
Sorry. Is the plan when my alarm goes
off in the middle of the night that I go downstairs and just
confront whoever it might be that is armed downstairs?
Is that the plan right now? And that was the plan.
So I I felt very ill equipped. I'm not the kind of guy ready
for combat, I'll just put it that way.
And so I don't want to look bad in front of my wife, of course.
So I'm just going, Yeah, of course, yeah, no problem.
I'll go down and take care of whoever this is, you know, so I
making lots of noise getting to the stairs hopefully and
listening. Please don't be anyone down
there, you know, turns out there's no one down there.
But I was very ill equipped. I didn't feel ready for what I
was being called to do. The problem seemed a lot bigger
than something I could handle. But the word when in this
proverb isn't an if. It also, for us as Christians,
carries the certainty of what God is doing when God brings
justice in His name. Ultimately, this verse points
beyond our efforts. It points to the certainty of
what God is doing when God brings justice in his name.
It's pointing to God's character because from the beginning to
the end, the story of Scripture is the story of a God who is
setting all things right. In Exodus 34, God reveals
himself to Moses and he says a few words about himself.
This is what he says and describing himself, he says the
Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and
abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast
love for generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and
sin. But who will by no means clear
the guilty? Our God is love.
He describes that in that little explanation of himself for many
sentence, many, many words. But that love all ends up
looking like justice. Justice isn't something that God
just decides to do. It's who He is.
His character, his actions, his words, all of it are perfectly
aligned together in this idea of pure justice.
That's why we as Christians can be confident that in the end,
God will set all things right. I've got to visit field workers
with International Justice Mission out around the world.
This idea is how a field worker in an IJM office in the
Philippines can keep rescuing children that are caught in the
online sexual exploitation of kids, knowing that there are
still thousands and thousands more that are trapped and need
rescuing. How do they possibly go on?
How do they possibly keep doing this?
Because they know that justice for Christians is not a
hypothetical, it's grounded in God's very character.
And that's how we as the Canadian church, we can be bold
because we're not working towards a possibility.
We partner with a promise, a promise of God's good and
perfect justice. So what exactly does God's
justice look like? Well, we've talked about how
it's not really partial, it's not really optional.
He doesn't sit on a justice committee where they're deciding
whether there's going to be justice.
This is his nature. His justice looks like, as we
read in Exodus, love in action, love that rescues, love that
restores, and love that reform. So let's just break it down for
a SEC, how God's pure justice looks.
So the first part of God's pure justice is this, that his
justice rescues and restores. In Luke 10, we get this great
story from Jesus of the Good Samaritan famous story.
Sure. Most of you are familiar with
the story. A man is beaten, he's left for
dead, the side of the road in a ditch, and a priest just walks
by. A Levite just walks by and of
course the Samaritan stops. But what's the Samaritan do in
the story? The Samaritan doesn't just pull
this this person out of the ditch, you know, dust them off a
little bit and then pat them on the head and come on their way.
He tends to his wounds. He puts him on his own donkey.
He even pays for his care and then he promises to return and
check in on him later. That is a picture of biblical
justice. That's a picture of God's pure
justice. It doesn't just stop at rescue.
It continues into restoration. A number of years ago, I also
got to visit an aftercare home for girls.
This was in South Asia, in India and to a girls rescued from the
sex industry in in in a city in in India.
And the first time I went, IJM was showing me around and they
said, you know, we have dreams for this place, but it's a
really tough place for these girls.
It was I was sad. It was dark, it felt kind of
neglected and underfunded. So it wasn't enough to just
rescue these girls, but then put them in a system that was
broken, that wasn't right. So what we did was IGN stepped
in and they wanted to do more the rescue.
How did they do the work of God's holistic look at justice
in the world? And so I got to actually visit
it again a couple years later, and it was astounding to see the
difference now. It was a totally different
place. It was light, there was safety.
There's a feeling of hope. The girls were full of joy.
Because justice in the biblical sense always moves towards
wholeness. OK, what else does God's justice
do? Well, God's justice also
condemns. Now, this is the part that
culture doesn't love. Sometimes we don't love the idea
of God's condemning just justice.
We love the rescue part, not so much the judgment part.
Unless it's someone you know we don't like.
Maybe. But Exodus 34 reminded us God
will by no means clear the guilty.
Why? Because his love demands it.
A God who loves cannot look at exploitation and depression and
violence and simply shrug. We can't.
One of the most important aspects of how I've seen this
work out in our partnerships around the world, and
specifically definitely with AJM, is how they're helping
justice systems solve the problem of keeping perpetrators
accountable. So last year I got to be at a
dinner with prosecutors and judges who talked about the
importance of criminals facing real consequences for their
actions and how through training, seminars and advocacy
efforts for victims, what International Justice Mission
was able to do is actually help increase the convictions
happening in the country and the sentences for those crimes.
Because you see, God's not indifferent.
The reason he hates injustice is because it destroys what he
loves. And this should actually be good
news for our culture. This should be something that we
talk about. This should be something we
should be proud of. God's justice will not fail.
And this is where the idea of biblical justice differs from
just cultural ideas of social justice.
Social justice is often reactive.
There's no real fixed moral point.
It's really just chasing shadows.
But biblical justice flows from a God who is perfectly loving
and so therefore perfectly just. So our call is not to be judges.
Our call is to simply act like the God that we serve,
reflecting his justice through our compassion, our courage to
fight, and the truth that we stand for.
But even that isn't the full picture of God's justice.
God's justice does something else.
God's justice reforms. It reforms the systems that
perpetuate injustice. It's not enough to rescue
individuals or just punish offenders if the environment
still produces the injustice and depression, right?
I have two sons. They are both in grade one.
They are twins. And this is not a hypothetical
situation. If one of them were to take, you
know, a hockey stick and just smash the other one in the face
with it, they're boys. That's what happens.
You know, when I was to take my one son who just got hit in the
face, he's crying. And I take him away and I say,
oh, are you OK? And I make sure he's OK.
And I say, look, we're putting your Pokémon away for the night
or something, right, As a punishment, you know, for, for
my other son. But then I just said to my hurt
son, all right, we'll go back. And my other son's still
standing there, you know, with a stick in his hand.
I'm not. That's not justice.
I got to take the stick. I got to change the environment
or I haven't actually made justice whole.
So that's why I love when I hear these stories of, say,
Guatemala, where in Guatemala, what we've seen in our
partnership with IJM is laws and government practices actually
being written into code based on biblical principles of dignity
and protection that have been cut and pasted out of the IJM
manuals. Changing the environment,
changing the system. That is true justice.
That's the ripple effect of God's justice.
It actually transforms environments.
Now, it's a crazy section of the Bible, but in Revelation 18 and
19, there's this picture that's painted of this vision that John
gets, and it's this crazy vision that's representing how God is
going to set things right in the new creation.
And what happens in those chapters, what we see is the
righteous are rescued, the wicked are judged, and the evil
systems of Babylon are destroyed.
A holistic approach. And then all of the oppressed
and the Saints rejoice because sin and injustice are finally
gone. And that's the hope that we as
Christians can live for and the justice that we are called to
live out. OK, so back to the the proverb.
We when justice is done, we get 2 responses, 2 responses.
A joy to the righteous, but terror to evil doers.
Joy and terror. Let's look at joy for a minute.
Those who look like Christ rejoice when justice is done.
Why? Because we've been forgiven,
forgiven by Christ, and we understand, hopefully, mercy and
grace and love. So justice should naturally for
us bring unbridled joy. We should love seeing justice
being done. We should be excited about
seeing justice done. You know what brings my son's
unbridled joy? Candy and Pokémon.
They don't even, you know, this is fascinating.
They don't. They told us they don't even
want to go to Disneyland anymore because they want to go to
Japan. That's interesting.
They have in their heads, for some reason, this idea that
Japan is like a large town just full of Pokémon and candy, which
might be true. I don't know.
Anyways, it's crazy. Don't want to go to Disneyland?
The church should be the loudest voice fighting for justice and
celebrating when it happens. Too often.
We talk about as the church pointing people to the Kingdom
of God, we're pointing people to the Kingdom of God.
But pointing doesn't mean in this that kind of a theological
context. It doesn't mean pointing to them
to something like directing them over here.
Pointing them to the Kingdom of God means we embody the Kingdom
of God. That's what it means.
We embody the Kingdom. This is how God's Kingdom breaks
into our world through the church.
We don't just tell people, we actually begin to create a world
that is the Kingdom of God, where we live in it every day.
People should see the justice of God by how we as the church
live, not just by what we're saying or pointing people to.
And that's why in Revelation 18, it warns the church, It says
come out of Babylon, my people, lest you take part in her sins.
Babylon is representing a system of exploitation, of power used
for control of the self, to exploit others.
And so for Christians, coming out of Babylon, I think for us
in Canada means not being indifferent.
Being different in Canada means not being indifferent.
We can't look away from the injustice that's done globally.
We can't look away from the injustice that's being done even
in our own backyard. Canada represents one of the top
Four Nations in the world consuming online sexual sexual
exploitation of children material.
Indigenous women and others are trafficked at far higher rates
than other groups. This isn't something that's just
someone else's problem somewhere else.
Injustice is our problem, and as the church, we have to care.
Imagine, though, if the reputation of the Canadian
church was one of righteous joy at justice being done.
If people looked at us and they said those are the ones who
fight for the vulnerable, those are the ones who rejoice when
the oppressed go free, those are the ones who are making it
happen. Imagine if that was how our
country saw us. That would be game changing for
our witness. Rodney Stark once wrote that the
early church actually exploded in growth because it was
compassionate in the face of suffering and injustice, plagues
and poverty and persecution. The church didn't run from it.
They were the only ones who stayed.
They ran toward it. And that's part of what exploded
the church in the early centuries.
This could be that kind of moment for us as the Canadian
church. But when justice is done,
there's a second response. It's a terror, A terror to evil
doers. I remember one of my professors
at Regent College years ago used to say the Gospel is good news,
but it's also bad news. Sounds pretty heretical, but
what he means is it's good news for those who receive it, but
it's bad news for those who resist it.
When the systems of Babylon all collapse in Revelation 18, when
exploitation loses its power, you know what the wicked do?
It says. They weep and wail.
That's a sobering moment that
actually challenges me. I hope it challenges you because
it asks us a pretty profound question.
Would we, would I really rejoice at God's justice being done, or
would I mourn at what that might cost me?
Would you really rejoice at God's justice being done or
would you mourn at what it might cost you?
Would we celebrate the fall of Babylon or would we miss the
comforts that it gives us? It's a sharp call to self
examination to let God shape our hearts so that we love justice
more than our own convenience. But I don't think we need to
dwell in conviction on this. Remember, God is, yes, a God of
justice, but also God of mercy. Like Exodus 34, it said,
merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding and steadfast
love. He knows that we as this church
aren't perfect. He knows that we're in a process
of being sanctified. Yet He still asks us in our
imperfectness to partner with Him in this work in the world.
Because God's justice does always cost something, right?
Look at what he did. It cost Jesus his life.
It always cost something. When Jesus said in Matthew 16 to
take up your cross, he's not just talking about dying.
He's talking about living a certain way, living differently,
living sacrificially, laying down our comfort so that others
might find freedom. When Paul says he's been
crucified with Christ, he means he's literally killing the life
that he had and cared about before Christ.
And he's now living a whole different kind of existence
where he says Christ now lives in and through me.
He now embodies the life of Christ in his actions, in his
heart, the character of God. And he does so, he says by
faith, faith that the cost is worth more than the price to
follow the call. That's what we have to wrestle
with. Now imagine a church full of
people who have taken up their cross, who have crucified their
old lives, now live through Christ's power and character,
all with huge, huge faith in what God can do, not for
themselves, but for others, and most certainly for the
oppressed. Wouldn't that be amazing?
What could that church do? But that's what the Kingdom of
God looks like. That's what we are called to
look like. That's what the cross
accomplishes, rescue, freedom and restoration, and we see that
in God. It's always worth the cost.
If it was for Him, it certainly is for us.
A few years ago, I was at a global prayer gathering in
Baltimore with International Justice Mission and my church
Village Church had partnered with IJM for years and we had
funded or helped fund 2 field offices in the country of India.
1 was fighting the sex trafficking exploitation of kids
in brothels and on the streets in Kolkata and the other was
fighting against a system of bonded work slavery in the city
and area of Chennai. And I got to walk those streets.
I got to see those places. I got to see, you know, what
the, the streets and the brothels and the, the brick
kilns and everything looked like.
I got to meet survivors. And then years later, I'm
standing at this convention in Baltimore as thousands of IJM
staff are all gathered together from all around the world to
hear a report on these two specific areas and what had been
achieved. And when they announced the
findings in these two areas, the room of thousands of workers
just erupted. Here's what an independent third
party auditor found after all of the work the village got to
partner in directly in these two areas.
In Kolkata, they found that there were now 0 minors in the
red light districts, in brothels in the whole city.
Children no longer for sale in one of the worst red light areas
in all of South Asia. That was actually done and still
today in Chennai, they reported a third party audit reported
bonded labor slavery had been reduced to 0 or nearly zero in
Chennai, in the targeted regions around.
You know what that meant? It meant over 300,000 people
rescued and the system changed so millions protected in the
future. This is the kind of impact that
is actually possible. And so I stood there
overwhelmed, not just because of my church's partnership in these
initiatives, but because I was seeing with my own eyes what can
happen if God's people believe He can actually do what He says.
If we just have faith, there's literally nothing, nothing that
is off the table for our God. Anything is possible.
There is nothing that the church in Canada cannot do by the power
of Christ in US and the movement of His Holy Spirit through US.
Do you believe that earlier this earlier this year, I got to be
back in South Asia, this time in Kolkata again celebrating
everything I was just talking about.
And as we're celebrating, I learned about a crisis going on
right across the border in the neighboring country of
Bangladesh. Here it was similar to Kolkata,
the exploitation of children on the streets and in brothels, but
happening at an even greater scale than what we saw in
Kolkata. So the dream was pretty simple,
but impossible. Could we take everything we had
learned, everything we had proven, everything we had done
successfully in Kolkata and take that across the border to see
the same justice but this time at the scale of a nation?
We met with Ijms, national director for Bangladesh, and I
asked her what is the biggest prayer request you have so we
can pray this morning? She said we've been waiting for
three years, three years for the government paperwork to come in
so that we can be approved to actually start working.
We're all set up and ready to go, and we've been sitting here
for three years waiting for the paperwork.
So we prayed. A few minutes later, as we're
still talking, she suddenly stopped.
She pulled out her phone and she said the approval just came
through. Minutes after praying with her
and asking God what would be the call for the Canadian church in
this project in Bangladesh that happened.
And in that moment I knew God's in this and we have a calling.
We are called to play a part as a church, not just village
church. I think the Canadian church.
And I thought, what if, what if the Canadian church could be
written into the story of how an entire nation was transformed by
the justice of God? What if years from now, the
history books said that Bangladesh was transformed into
freedom for its children because the Canadian church stood up and
we attempted to do the impossible and then achieved it?
That's the vision. That is the invitation to us
that God is putting forward for us as the Canadian church today
and forward. I ask, will you be a part of
seeing the dream of children in Bangladesh freed?
Will you join village church and churches all across Canada who
are saying yes to something absolutely historic together?
Imagine the children rescued, Imagine the systems of the
country for oppression reformed, and imagine the witness of the
Canadian church strengthened like never before to our
culture, that we might be known for the good we have done as a
demonstration of embodying God's Kingdom and character together
as his church. It's a massive task, yes.
Can God do it? Absolutely.
Because in the end, and Revelation 18 reminded us of
this, justice is an optional. Justice is inevitable, so we can
Live Today in full confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit,
the love of Christ, and the unstoppable justice of our great
and holy God. Would you join me in pray?
God, we first just honored you. We honor you, and we praise you
because of who you are. You are this perfect love.
You are this perfect justice. And so we humbly kneel and bow
before you and say you are great, you are holy.
And God, we ask that you would continue to pour out your love
and justice into the world around us, here at home and
abroad around the globe. God, would you give us a vision
that matches your vision? Would you give us a scope of
vision that matches your scope of vision?
And would you give us a sold out confidence?
God, to the assurance that we find in you that you will make
things right and that you are making things right and that you
ask us to participate with you. God give us by our Holy Spirit
confidence to do this work. Shape us also by your Spirit to
look and be and act more like you and your Son Jesus Christ.
We pray all for your glory in Jesus name, Amen.