When we belong to Christ and are united to Him by faith, it changes everything about our lives. Christ becomes our life, and we receive a new focus in life, a new foundation for life, and a new future of life. 

We all have a longing to belong because we were created by God for belonging. We broke our belonging and threw away our relationship with God through sin. Yet, Christ loves us so much that He came to live and die and rise again so that we could be restored and reconciled, and finally know true belonging. 

I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me... Fear the Lord and find in Him a strong fortress. 

Submission is part of our mission because it is a practical demonstration that our real hope is in God. His wisdom is better than our freedom. 

We submit to our shepherds (elders and ministers).

We submit to our siblings (fellow believers in Christ). 

We submit to our Savior (everything - our selves, our situations, our safety, and our sufferings)

Our mission is not easy, and along the way we forget our identity. Christ, the Chief Shepherd, has given us the good gift of shepherds (ministers and elders) in His church, to help us. Shepherds are to minister to us by:

Overseeing Willingly.

Serving Eagerly. 

Modeling Humbly. 

How do we sustain with hope when we face opposition and suffering? 

We trust God because God is good. And we do good because we trust God.

We have been blessed by God to be a blessing to others. How do we bless others? By stewarding well what God has entrusted to us. 

We steward our selves.

We steward our stuff.

We steward our service. 

All for the blessing of others, as an expression of our mission of hope.

Suffering in this world is inevitable. How can we suffer with hope?

We bless one another in our suffering.

We bless our enemies in our suffering.

We bless with the Gospel, which gives us hope in our suffering.

Christian households are to be outposts of the kingdom of God in the world, shining hope to the world, with marriage as an essential building block. In marriage, husbands and wives are equal in status, different in role, and have the same goal: imitating Jesus through humility toward one another. 

Our identity of hope is that we are exiles and sojourners in this world, having been born again to a living hope. But we are also invaders, waging war against the kingdom of darkness on the internal front against the passions of our flesh (by grace resisting them) and the external front against those who oppose us (by grace submitting to authority, silencing fools by doing good to them, serving others, suffering well, and in all things seeking Christ).