Ephesians one verse 3 Praise be to God, the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly
realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be
holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us for
adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with
His pleasure and will to the praise of His glorious grace
which He has freely given us in the One He loves.
In Him we have redemption through His blood, the
forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of
God's grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and
understanding. He made known to us the mystery
of His will, according to His good pleasure, which He proposed
in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their
fulfilment, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on
earth under Christ. In Him we were also chosen,
having been predestined according to the plan of Him who
works out everything in conformity with the purpose of
His will, in order that we, who were the first to put our hope
in Christ, might be for the praise of His glory.
And you were also included in Christ when you heard the
message of truth, the gospel of your salvation.
When you believed, you were marked in Him with a seal, the
promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our
inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's
possession to the praise of His glory.
Amen. Take a moment and just sit with
those words for a moment. Christ above all things,
bringing all things in heaven and earth under Him.
And now you are invited into that family.
September 22nd, 1994. A big day in television, the
world premiere of Friends. Raise your hand if you are a fan
of Friends, right Friends was a giant hit, a television show not
about a family. A lot of sitcoms before that
were about families and the kind of hijinks and stuff that they
would get in. But Friends was a a story about
a group of young adults that had a found family in the city and
doing life together. And it was really this beginning
of this trend that we see through TV after Friends.
A few years later we have How I Met Your Mother.
How many people liked How I Met your Mother Marshall still one
of my favorite TV characters, right?
Same kind of thing, group of young adults trying to make it
in the city, doing life together.
We love shows like this, whether it's The Office, Parks and Rec,
Brooklyn 99. We love TV shows that are about
friends coming together and creating a community.
We love it in our movies, right? Like The Magnificent 7, if you
like Westerns, Suicide Squad, Guardians of the Galaxy, all
these stories about people that should be so different and not
get along, but they come together around a common
purpose. Everybody wants friendship,
everybody wants to belong, Everybody wants to be known and
loved and cared for. We love the idea of found
family. We love the idea of community.
But if we're honest, very few of us know how to make community
work. Because community, frankly, is
inconvenient. It's slow, it's costly.
It takes patience. It takes forgiveness, and it it
takes when it becomes easier to leave, it requires you to stay.
And that's why the church is hard.
It takes an intentional choice to belong.
In the 3rd century, there was a pastor by the name of Cyprian
who led the church. He was a Bishop, which is really
a pastor of pastors. He was born into a really
wealthy merchant family, so he had kind of a career set up for
him. He was going to do really well
in life, but then he came to know Jesus later on in life.
And his distinctive was it was that he loved the church and he
believed in the church more than anything else.
But while he was Bishop, persecution broke out OK, and
some believers, they they stood by.
But when persecution comes, it has a way of revealing what's
actually there and not just persecution.
When anything hard happens in our lives, it has this revealing
nature in our lives. So as this persecution broke out
during the 3rd century, some people stayed, some people left
the church because they didn't have, like, a firm foundation.
But when the persecution did eventually end, the real
fracture began to develop. See the church started to tear
itself apart over what to do with those who had left the
church. The church was asking the
question, those that that left are were they actually ever
there? Was the casual Christian that
they have a place to belong in the church?
Who was in, who had gone too far, and who was going to be
welcomed back. And Cyprian he, he saw something
that still feels painfully relevant for all of us today.
Sometimes the church survives suffering only to be undone by
division. And so he wrote a couple books
about unity of the church because he knew the deepest
threat was not from the outside of the church.
It wasn't culture wars. It wasn't persecution.
It was hurt people within the church hurting one another.
It was Christians wounded and disappointed attacking one
another. It was disunity.
And that's not just an ancient problem.
It's a problem that we still continue to have today.
See, we live in a world that teaches us to leave when things
get hard. Think about social media, for
example, right? You're on your, you're on your
feed. I don't know.
I'm if I call it a news feed, am I too old for that?
Is it so-called a news feed? Is that what TikTok has?
I don't know. But when you see something on
there, right, you see something you don't like, you see
something you disagree with, you see something that makes you
angry. We've been trained that our
reaction is either to unfollow, unsubscribe, unlike, or get
really mad and yell at it. Social media is not a place of
patient forbearance, am I right? We're not sitting on our social
media feed going, man, I really want to believe the best about
Greg. He's such a good guy.
I can't believe that he would say such a thing.
Instead, we immediately unfollow or unsubscribe.
We live in a culture that has taught us to divide when people
disappoint us, to protect ourselves at all costs, to keep
everything casual. Everything's curated, everything
is on our own terms. But Jesus did not save us into a
private spirituality. He binds us together as his
people. Scripture describes us as a
body, a family. This is the church and that
means if we want to have a life with Jesus, if we want to have
his his presence, if we want to be Jesus in our city, we are
also going to have to learn how to live with Jesus's people.
So this week we are beginning a new series.
It is called The Good Church and we started the series kind of on
purpose right after Easter. We're going to be going through
Ephesians 4 through 6, which if you listen to Pastor Ben, his
scripture reading, it's out of Ephesians 1 and Ephesians one
through 3 is all about Easter and what happened on Easter.
Easter is Jesus died and was resurrection, and through his
resurrection he defeated the powers of evil, death and
darkness, and he became enthroned in heaven above all
things on heaven and earth. And he took a divided people and
united them so that there's no Jew, no Gentile, no man, no
woman, no different social classes.
There's nothing that can divide us.
But now, underneath King Jesus, we are one body, one church.
And so Ephesians 4 through 6 begins to describe what does
that then look like? And so we're going to be talking
about that for the next few weeks, talking about being His
church, a people of grace, a people bound by love, a people
trying to disciple in the way of Jesus.
Together, my friends, we have to unlearn church as an event that
we go to or an organization that we are a part of.
It's not just like a weekly habit of something we need to
do. It is the living body of Jesus
in our world. And This is why the New
Testament talks about this unity of the Christian life over and
over again. And one letter Paul says, For by
1 Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or
Greeks, whether slaves are free, and we were all made to drink of
1 Spirit. Hear that language coming
together under 1 Spirit. No slaves or free, he says in
another letter. In addition to all these things,
put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.
If Jesus has saved us and invited us into life with Him,
then we have to trust not just the ends, not just the fact that
we have been saved, but also the means of how our life is to look
today. We have to follow the way He
designed us to live. So if you have your Bibles with
you, go ahead and open to Ephesians 4.
We're going to be in verses, verses one through 6.
We recommend a physical Bible for a lot of reasons, but it's
also going to be on your phone if you have the app or it's
going to be on the screen. And so like I said in the first
3 chapters of the letter, Paul has been talking about
orthodoxy. He's been talking about the
truth. He's been talking about the
reality of Jesus as King and him being above all things and
unifying all people underneath him.
And then in chapter 4, he begins to talk about what does this
mean for you and I? Chapter 4 verse 1 is a hinge
talking about how are we to live in light of what came before.
So let's start up. Ephesians 41 says, therefore, I
the prisoner of the Lord urge you to walk in a manner worthy
of the calling with which you have been called.
OK, first word I want you to mark if you have a pen or
something, circle it. The word walk, walk in in
chapters one through 3, Paul repeats a phrase over and over
again and it's remember, remember this, remember that
Jesus is king. Remember that you are a body.
Remember that there's powers in this world that Jesus is over.
Remember, remember, remember. It's it's education, language.
But then in four through 6, he begins a new word.
Remember stops and he begins to say walk, walk.
Paul has been telling us what is true, who Jesus is, what he has
done, and who we are in Christ. But it's going to now move from
theology to practice, from what we believe to how we live.
In other words, the gospel is not just something to think
about, it is a reality to step into.
Paul is saying you have been called by God, rescued by grace,
brought into a new humanity in Christ, and now live like it.
Let your life catch up to what is already true in Jesus.
Not a casual suggestion, but an invitation into a new kind of
life. You are not who you once were.
You are no long. You no longer belong to sin or
to the world or to a a story. You lived before.
You belong to God now. And if that is true, then there
is a way of life that He is calling you into.
The second word to notice is the word manner.
Now this is this is kind of cool.
The Greek word is axios and it means to have the weight of OK,
to have the weight of he is saying to the church that the
weight of of its life should measure the same as its
declaration. It should be who they say
they're going to be. If we're going to say that we
are Jesus in our city, the church should live like we're
Jesus in our city. If we say that we're a people of
grace and forgiveness, we should be a people of grace and
forgiveness. Apparently, the way that you and
I live together is just as important as what we believe
individually. The late formation writer Dallas
Woodard, One of the things that he talks about over and over
again is what is God's goal for humanity?
Why did he put us here? Why did he create us?
And he says that it's God's aim in human history is the creation
of an all inclusive community of loving persons with God Himself
as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.
What he was saying was that the church is not just a good idea,
it is the idea. God's goal was to create a
community of love in which he could enjoy, and the church is
His primary way of doing this. So the church needs to walk in
the way that he called his people to walk as a people of
love for the sake of others, as an all inclusive everybody
belongs. Anyone that walks in these doors
is able to be a part of this community of love.
We are here for others. So how do we live in light of
that, right? If we're to live in this manner,
how do we begin doing that? He says in verses 2 through
three, with all humility and gentleness, with patience,
bearing with one another and love, being diligent to keep the
unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
There's a lot there to unpack, so let's do a small word on
each. But first, notice the movement.
OK, Paul begins with beneath our behavior towards other people.
He begins with the posture of our heart and then he moves
outward. Community is always downstream
of the person that God has created us to be or formed us to
be. He has to do an inner work
before we begin to treat people differently.
The way we treat others reveals also the kind of person we are
becoming. And so how are we supposed to
live first? How do we begin to live with
humility? And I don't want to spend a lot
of time on this. Pastor Ben just preached on
humility. He did a a pretty good job, I
think. So I recommend go back on Apple
podcast, give a listen to that sermon.
It's good. But I do want to say a couple of
things. First, Kyle Snodgrass wrote a
beautiful commentary and the book of Ephesians and he talks
about humility like this. He says humility is an awareness
that all we are and have is from God.
The humble person refuses to value self above others or to
assign more privilege or important to self than others.
The word humility literally means loneliness of mind.
Humility is the surrender of our ego.
It is a refusal to live under this illusion that we are
self-sufficient that we make our lives work.
Humility is what happens when you stop pretending you run your
life. Paul is saying that the first
step into real life together is humility, is to acknowledge God
first, God's presence in your life, how God has LED your life.
See, the church doesn't revolve around you and I.
It wasn't started by you and I. It's not sustained by us.
It's not built by us. We're not focused here on church
growth. The church is the work of Jesus.
It's the work of Jesus uniting, of Jesus's calling, of his
bringing people in. It's his work of grace and
mercy, and we get to join along with him.
All this means that the beauty and the unity of the church
cannot be brought together by you and I.
In fact, my friends, if you and I try to unite the church and we
try to force it to be united and at peace with one another, we
will do more damage than good. The only thing that can unite
the church, build the church, sustain the church, is for us to
surrender to God and His work in it.
Second word, gentleness. Now I'm going to be really
honest with you guys. I was working on this part this
morning because when we write sermons, when anyone's writing a
sermon, the first person that's getting preached to is the
preacher. Beware the preacher that is not
being preached to 1st. And often when we are working on
a sermon, God will put His finger on something painful in
our lives that He is working on. And man, let me tell you, every
time I would sit down with this word gentleness for the last two
weeks I thought this is not too bad, I agree with this.
And then last night happened. Our son is 4 month old and he is
in middle of sleep regression and sleep regression is really
hard. My parents, can I get an Amen?
You would be surprised on how little sleep you actually need.
And our son was having just a really hard time going to bed,
just a really hard time falling asleep.
And we were doing all the like parent moves.
We were trading off, you know, we were getting along really
well. We were rocking and while
sitting, we were rocking and while standing, we were putting
a bottle in his mouth and letting him eat.
And then we would do that like awkward, really slow set down
that you do with a baby. And then one of us would like
open a door a little bit and me and a wood creak and he'd wake
up. My wife said, yeah, the other
room didn't clear. And man, at first I was like,
peace of God, God with me. I want to be a great example to
my wife and my son. At 11:30, I'm getting a little
aggravated, but I'm still holding on.
And then my daughter has a nightmare as soon as my son
falls asleep and we're having to comfort her for like an hour.
And then my son wakes back up. And let me tell you, my cadence
was less gentle in that moment. I was finding myself just more
and more sharp. And I was laying in bed after
that at 2:30 in the morning, thinking about this message and
thinking about the word gentleness.
And God began to bring to mind all these moments during the
week. I had not been gentle, like when
my daughter was running towards a hot stove and I yelled at her
to stop. There were other ways of doing
that and I can make excuses about just wanting to keep her
safe, but it was not gentle. So I don't say this from a
elevated stand. I say this is a another
apprentice of King Jesus trying to figure this out.
OK, gentleness is strength under the control of love.
It is really easy for us in our world to hear the world
gentleness and humility and think weak because the tools of
this world are not to be humble or gentle.
Again, I mean point to any anything on the news, anything
on your social media feed. Social media is not built about
humility, right? Social media is built as a
platform to lift yourself up. But also look at the things that
do well on social media, the things that go viral.
They are hot takes. They're things that people will
disagree with. People don't guard their tongue.
We live in a world where humility and gentleness are
looked down on and are even thought to be weakness.
But it's not. Gentleness is strength under the
control of love. It is power that no longer needs
to control or prove itself. Gentleness is the power to no
longer force your will, to no longer need to prove yourself.
It is the kind of soul that is rooted in God, that it does not
have to dominate, force or wound others in order to achieve what
it wants. Let me speak to the the men in
the room real quick. Men, your significant other,
your wife and your kids need you to be gentle.
Gardens do not grow under forced will.
If I plant a garden and I am forcing my will look going out
and pouring as much water as I can and fertilizer and and just
yelling at it to grow, it's not going to do well.
Over and over again studies have shown that what children need is
a gentle hand in guiding in life and your spouse needs it just as
much. Husbands, if you find that
you're you're button heads with your wife, it feels like you
aren't getting along for some reason.
My challenge to you is check your gentleness, check your tone
of voice, check your cadence. Ladies, I say lovingly pretty
much the exact same thing. Your, your husband needs your
gentleness. You would be amazed at how you
can soften a man's heart by acting gentle towards them.
Gentle people do not make everything around them pay for
what is unsettled in themselves. Gentle.
Excuse me, this is not a sermon on gentleness, but I just, I
have a lot here, so I'm sorry, but the gentleness also reveals
what we care about. OK?
I had a time in my life where I loved to, I'm a giant nerd.
I loved collectibles like Funko Pops, collectible cards.
And one of my pride, like pride and joys of my collection are
back when Lord of the Rings came out, they came out with these
extended edition gift sets and they were beautiful.
And they came out with these like beautiful models that along
with the DVD. So like I have like this, like
very breakable Gollum and it's, he's beautiful, right?
Like my wife looks at it on our mantle and goes, man, I'm really
glad that my husband placed that there.
And then I have this beautiful, meanest turret and just, and I
remember like taking it out-of-the-box at like 15 years
old. And I was so gentle because I
cared about it so much. Or the first time holding my
kids. I'm gentle because I love them
so much. We treat things gently when we
do not want them to break, when we don't want to cause them
harm. Dallas Willard also talked about
kind of one of my mentors from afar.
He would talk about who should do the correcting in your
church. Often, if we are honest, we do
not correct out of love and we don't correct in gentleness.
We correct in order to fix a behaviour we don't like, even if
it's good or bad. But real correction needs to be
handled gently. And he would argue that the
people in the church that are able to do that are the the
older people that have walked through life and dealt with
their woundings, that are able to correct without trying to
control the other person. 3rd patience, bearing with one
another in love. Patience is the choice to bear
discomfort, pain, and more. It is a kind of inner strength
that does not give up. It perseveres.
Now, Paul is not talking about grim endurance.
He is not saying just tolerate difficult people.
He's talking about the kind of patience that is rooted in love,
which means that this is not merely about surviving one
another, putting up with one another.
It is about remaining open to one another, staying soft
towards one another, refusing to withdraw affection or mercy or
your presence when another person becomes difficult.
Notice love, not affection. If it were to bear with one
another in affection, we would have patience with those we
like, and then do away with the people that we do not.
Love turns patience from reluctant tolerance into willing
self giving. One more illustration with my
kids and then I'm done. Stop talking about my kids.
Raise your hand if you've seen Blue E.
How many of you have watched Blue E?
OK, how many of you watch Blue E more than once?
Twice. 3 * 4 * 5 * 6. Yeah, let me tell you, we have
watched Blue E so many times. I have watched Moana so many
times. I have watched it.
I have watched Frozen so many times.
Why do I do it? I patiently endure with my kids
because I love them, right? We need to practice a patient
that that comes out of love, a bearing with one another, out of
love. And then finally, Paul says
making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the
bonds of peace. Another way of saying this is
that we make an intentional choice towards unity.
We intentionally pursue unity as the church to stay together to
to value staying together no matter what.
Notice what is at the centre of this though.
OK, it is the unity of the Spirit.
God is not looking for a community of people that look
exactly the same, that all sound the same, with same gifting,
same kind of values and stuff like that.
All this. No, God has created us with
great diversity. This is one of the distinctives
of the church. There is a difference between
false unity that the world offers and the real unity formed
by the Spirit. 1 of Missy and my favorite shows from the end of
last year was Pluribus. Has anyone else watched this on
Apple TV? Maybe a couple of you?
OK, it's this really interesting show that is like a a take on
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Basically everyone wakes up one
day and almost everyone has like a hive mind.
They're all of equal mind. They're all thinking the same
things, all feeling the same things.
Everybody is exactly the same except for the main character.
And here's the thing, when everybody was is exactly the
same, same mind and all of that, there is complete peace in the
world. War is over, people are no
longer fighting. People are completely sharing
resources. Things look really good.
But all throughout there is something unsettling.
And the question the show Act asks is, is this actually
better? See, our culture calls us to two
sides. On the one hand, we are called
to like a false unity that really becomes tribalism.
If we're honest, Tribalism is when our identity is completely
swallowed up by by a people group or a community or a
belief. Your belonging becomes
conformity and you're safe as long as you align with your
tribe, right? And that's the thing with tribes
is they're usually really open. They're willing to have anybody
come in unless they're different.
The moment someone is different than the tribe, they become at
least an irritation, if not a threat.
And we see a lot of this, like in our special, especially our
political discourse these days, the left and right are
incredibly fall apart, far apart, and they can't seem to
like see eye to eye at all. You have two tribes existing.
But if I'm honest, I don't see a ton of that in Ankeny.
What In Ankeny, I see the other side.
And that is complete self-sufficiency.
It's that belief that I have built up my life.
I, I control my destiny. I can be the only one to make
myself successful and the problem with that is, is that
you can't bear the weight of your life.
You can't control tomorrow. Tragedy could strike, you could
get sick, someone you love could get sick.
You are not as self-sufficient as you might think.
The problem with each of these is that they are both self
enslaving. In tribalism, you become
enslaved to the tribe and then self-sufficiency.
You become enslaved to yourself. One loses itself in the crowd.
One loses itself and cuts itself off from loving other people.
Because you cannot have love without others.
And if you are self-sufficient, you can't connect.
The only other way is the way that Jesus offers.
See. He gives an identity that is not
achieved by self and not bestowed by the tribe.
He gives you an identity through grace.
He says that you are deeply loved and that you belong.
He offers kindness instead of suspicion.
He offers patience instead of harshness.
He offers love and hope and healing and he says that you can
be a bit different in this community.
In fact, God created you a little bit different than the
others within. But the thing that you and I
church have in common is Christ. Pastor Ben and I are different.
Pastor Ben likes to go and fix things in his time off.
There's one, there's one time I think you'll be OK with me
saying this. It was one time I asked him what
he did with his weekend and he was like, I was in my walls
rewiring things. I'm like, what a freak.
That sounds exhausting, but what unifies us is Christ Jesus.
There's another friend in here who believes that Star Wars
Episode 3 is the best of the Star Wars movies.
Oh, brothers and sisters, I'll rebuke that later.
The goal is not organizational unity.
The goal is unity in the Spirit. Through Jesus, the church is
able to become this kind of community because our life
together does not begin with us. It begins with God.
And our unity is not held together by our personalities or
our temperaments or our interests or our ideologies.
It is only held together by the Father, Son, and the Holy
Spirit. And that is exactly where Paul
goes next in Ephesians verses 4 through 6.
There is one body and one spirit, just as you also were
called in one hope of your calling, 1 Lord, 1 faith, one
baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through
all and in all. These are the essentials, my
brothers and sisters. You could have other brothers
and sisters that are in this church, other churches, other
church traditions, and they still belong to the great church
as long as they hold to these other political ideologies,
other values. You're going to go to churches
that are are slain in the spirit.
You're going to go to other churches that have a heavy
emphasis on on serving the community, maybe more than us,
maybe, but everyone that follows these things belongs in the
church. See, once you think about an
orchestra, real quick, an orchestra has a lot of
different, different elements, right?
A lot of different instruments. I forgot the word instrument.
You don't want them to all sound the same, right?
If you had all violins, it would be a really boring orchestra.
But what do you have if everyone is playing something different?
You have dissonance. What brings unity, what brings
goodness and beauty to an orchestra is when they are
united in vision towards 1 peace through 1 conductor.
And that is who we are, my friends.
One God, we are united in him. So point #1 you cannot follow
Jesus without the church. Every time we try to do that,
church will feel wrong or our walk will feel wrong, Eugene
Peterson, one of our favourite pastors, wrote.
God never makes private secret salvation deals with people.
His relationships with us are personal, true, intimate, yes,
but private, no Dietrich Bonhoeffer around in World War
21 of the that the the rebel pastors against Hitler has this
beautiful book called Life Together, which is all about the
church living together. It's all about community.
And he writes not what a man is in himself as a Christian.
His spirituality and piety constitutes the basis of our
community. What determines our brotherhood
is what the man is by reason of Christ.
Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ
has done to both of us. We do not build community, Jesus
does. It is not about what we do, it
is about what He has done. And with Jesus being at the
center, we are apprenticing to him.
We are disciples together. One more Bonhoeffer quote just
for good measure. The Christian needs another
Christian who speaks God's word to him.
He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and
discouraged for by himself he cannot help himself without
belaying the truth. When you try to follow Jesus as
a self help thing when it is just a personal Jesus, you will
make a caricature of Jesus. You need Jesus revealed in the
in the diverse body of the church.
You need to hear Jesus through other pastors and teachers and
the people in your in your bands, the other disciples in
your community. Fill in the colours.
It's like Jesus is a colouring page and when you're sitting by
yourself, you don't have all the colours.
It's a black and white Jesus that you have made in your own
image, but the other people colour him in.
We cannot become like Jesus on our own.
We can't do any of these. We can't seek his presence.
We can't become like him, and we certainly cannot be his presence
in our city. We can only follow Jesus
together. Todd Hall is a professor and he
did this multi year study about what spiritual practices
actually form us into Christ likeness and he came up with
only three. And that is slow, quiet prayer
suffering, right? That's great.
And then long devoted community to one another.
We need community to be formed. But here's the tension beneath
it all. If Jesus has bound himself to
the church, and the church is one of the primary places of our
healing and formation, then why is it so often the place of our
wounding? Why does the church often become
not a home, but a place of disappointment, frustration and
pain? And let me be honest with you, I
have also been hurt by the church.
I have had relationships with other people.
I have relation, had relationships with pastors where
they have not lived up to who I thought they were, where they
have made choices that were either painful to other people
or painful to myself. And it is a special kind of
hurt. So I again, I speak as a as a
fellow disciple that there's something really painful about
church hurt because it hits your identity, right?
Like you begin questioning something about yourself when
when someone you've looked up to as a mature disciple or a pastor
says something that's hurtful, you begin thinking, was I not
good enough? Did I not follow Jesus right?
What's going on? Does God love me?
Is he still there? But I've also hurt people.
I remember so, so am I. I remember one of the first
times as a pastor, I was sitting down with someone and I said
something and I watched the pain in their eyes and I had to feel
completely humbled in that moment.
This is really hard because the church that we are a part of
should seem like it should be filled with people that just
look like Jesus, but it often is filled with really cranky
people, people that are really opinionated, people that are
weird. Do you know anybody weird?
You can just look up here. So how can we say that we're
supposed to belong to the church when it's so difficult?
And let me tell you, the reason that the church hurts is because
of sinners. We are all sinners.
There is no perfect church. The fact that I am a Sinner and
our church is full of sinners means that we are going to get
hurt. My friends, I feel blessed to be
a part of Presence Church. Pastor Ben, my wife and Susan
feel the same way. We've had very little drama.
We've had very little blow UPS. We have actually been really
unified, and that is a beautiful thing.
But if you are a part of Presence Church, you will
eventually get hurt by someone else here, or even Pastor Ben or
I, because we are sinners. So how do we hold this tension?
I think that by remembering that the church is not where perfect
people gather. It is where imperfect people are
being apprenticed to Jesus together, which means of course
the church will sometimes wound us.
Wherever real relationship exists, pain is possible.
Therefore, if there is pain in your church, there is real
relationship. Pain does not happen if there is
not true intimate life on life happening.
Pain can be the proof that there is love and formation happening
in the church. Just like someone that has gone
through surgery, usually there is pain as a part of the
healing. The church is not the place
where no one sins. It is the place where sin is
meant to be confessed, forgiven, and transformed by grace.
And so we are doing this series not because there's problems in
our church, but we're doing it so that we don't have problems
in our church. See, goodness does not just
happen accidentally. Chaos does.
And if we are not intentional about pursuing goodness in our
church, then we will be a Church of chaos.
I just want you to imagine for a moment too, Like imagine the
church that's completely united, not just presence church, but
imagine if like all the Ankeny churches got together and
completely united or the OR the global church.
What if, what if we had a church that wasn't perfect or polished
or or without difference, but deeply, genuinely united?
A people where nobody has to perform to belong, where wounds
are not ignored but tended to, where confession is normal,
where forgiveness is normal, where nobody is disposable,
where people stay. Can you imagine a church where
love is the atmosphere? Where gentleness shapes every
hard conversation, Where patience is deeper than
irritation, Where humility has pushed out ego, Where people do
not keep score, Where people do not quietly drift, Where people
move toward one another, not away?
We live in a world of suspicion, self protection, and distance.
But imagine a church full of love, forgiveness, peace, hope,
healing. Honestly, that would feel like
another world. It would feel like heaven is
coming closer than it is today. The power of the church is is
that brings heaven just a little closer.
It gives the world a glimpse of Jesus at the end of his life.
At his last dinner, what did Jesus say to his disciples?
That they were to love one another and that they would know
you are my disciples by your love for one another.
Our first job, my friends, as a good church is to pursue unity
with one another. And it is through that unity
that the world will bear witness to King Jesus.
So I've gone over my time, but three just really quick things
that I want to invite you to practice this week.
This is now I'm putting on my coach hat, something I never
thought I'd wear as a as a as a nerd.
It's a sports reference. Three quick things.
OK, these are really practical to just think about one of these
this week to try. First, pause before you react.
Stop, breathe. When you begin to feel that
tension, when you something feels like it's escalating,
stop, breathe, pray, say Jesus, bring peace to the situation.
Help me to act in the situation how you would bring your
gentleness. Second, interpret with
generosity. When someone says something to
you, interpret it as if they want something good from you.
We often walk around the opposite.
We often walk around believing people are trying to do
something to us. Let me be really honest with
you, most people are only thinking about themselves.
People are not out to get you. So instead, when you are talking
with someone, interpret what they're saying with generosity
and then finally move towards people with gentleness.
If relationship need action, don't gossip about it, don't
talk behind people's backs, don't try to avoid it, don't try
to people please, instead move towards them gently send the
text, make the phone call and just ask.
Hey, you said this, what's going on?
It made me feel this way. What, what's what's going on?
In this moment? Jesus has brought us together
and he has made US1 and what God has made 1 he is going to
protect. Unity is not something we
achieve, it is something that we receive.
And so that's the invitation today, my friends, my invitation
today is that we be a church that pursues unity, that we're a
place where we live with humility and gentleness towards
one another. We're patient.
And if, if you would like to be a part of that today, we have
like the next step of coming to neuter presents, we would love
to have you. But first, I want to invite you
to follow King Jesus because maybe you're not doing that
today. Maybe you're looking at yourself
and you're saying I would like to belong to that community, but
I don't know if I'm good enough. I'm not a gentle person.
I'm not a humble person. And that's OK.
Jesus wasn't calling the the humble.
Jesus wasn't calling the patient.
Jesus wasn't calling the perfect people.
Jesus calls you today where you are and all you got to do is
make the choice that I don't want to do that anymore.
I don't want to be that person and turn and begin following
him. And that's the beginning today.
And so as we transition into worship, I want to invite you to
go ahead and, and let Jesus know that.
And I'm going to have a couple people up here that you can come
up with and they can guide you through a prayer.
And then just the other invitation is look at look at
your life with the church prayerfully.
Consider how have I, how have I walked with the church?
Maybe you have hurt one of the dreams that we have always had
for presents. That would be a place for hurt
people that they could come and receive healing.
So if you need that today, if you've been hurt by the church,
come and pray with somebody up here.
Come find Pastor Ben or myself and would love to pray with you.
And then check yourself for humility.
Check yourself for gentleness. And if you don't feel like
you're any of those things, if you're looking at that list of
things that Paul mentions and saying this is not me and I'm
not here and I'm already following Jesus and what do I
do? The prayer is to ask the Spirit
to begin working on it. So let's be a church, a good
church. That begins with being a United
Church.