When Jesus came into the world and he was casting a vision, right? Here he has, he comes, he begins his ministry, telling people why he came, what it's all about, what is it that he said everywhere he went? Look at chapter three, verse one and two, now in those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying what? Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. Look over at chapter four, verse seventeen, Jesus begins his ministry, it says he began to preach and say, repent for the what? Kingdom of heaven is at hand, look at verse 23, Jesus was going about an all-gallilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness amongst the people. Now turn over to chapter nine verse 35 and it says the same thing again, Jesus was going about all the cities and all the villages teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. Turn over to chapter 10, he is verse seven, he's sending out his disciples now to do his ministry, extend his ministry through them and he says now as you go preach saying what? The Kingdom of heaven is at hand, heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the leper, cast out demons, freely you have received, freely give. Now all the way back to chapter 24 of the book of Matthew, let's call the upper room, discourse verse 14 and Jesus announces his disciples, this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witness to all the nation and then the end shall come. Now I want you to turn all the way back to Revelation almost to the very back of that book, the next to last chapter in the Word of God, chapter 21, you want a vision, here's a vision, I want to look to the future, here's the future, John said I saw new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth passed away and there was no longer any sea and I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God made ready as a bride adorned for her husband and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying behold the tabernacle of God is among men and he shall dwell among them and they shall be his people and God himself shall be among them and he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes and there shall no longer be any death, no longer be any mourning or crying or pain. The first things have passed away. By the way, where is that happening? Where is there no tears or death or mourning or crying or pain? It's on, it's on where? Earth, it's on earth, not in heaven, do you see that? It's on earth, heaven comes down to earth, earth becomes heaven, heaven and earth are one, it's on the earth that will happen and then look at the last slide, how could it be that the earth could be such a place? What does it say? He who sits on the throne says what? Behold I am making all things new. You may be seated. Sitting on the couch with my wife and daughter this week on Thursday evening and flashed on a picture of that morning's commemoration in New York City of the horrible terrorist attack of two years ago and they had children reading the names of the thousands who died. One beautiful little girl stood up and she read a few names and then she read one name with her voice trembling and she said, that's my daddy. She said, I love you daddy. Inside, you know, it's lame. Read in the paper the other day about a girl a little bit older but still just a daddy's girl. In her early 20s she went to the coffee shop to meet her dad. He is a surgeon because she's about to be married and she had some books. I think they were she was going to show her dad some of the arrangements that she made for her wedding. Really excited about it. As they kind of intersected at the doorway of the coffee shop, so came a man with a bomb in his back pack. The bomb went off and they buried that little girl and her dad side by side last week. That was people this week. I sat with a woman whose husband is soon to die so that I don't know what I'm going to do without him. I sat with a man this week who's had his family ravaged by divorce. I think of a woman who wrote a letter to the LA Times not long ago. She said, I've been a school teacher. As a career, I was a teacher. I love teaching. I love the students. We had a great rapport. Good things happen when I went in the classroom. I stepped out of the classroom. I thought I would retire but I missed it so much. I decided to go back. I used to begin every day greeting my kids warmly and they would respond to the obvious affection I had for them. She said, when I went back in the classroom for the first time, I said, good morning class and one young man stood up and he said, why don't you shut the belief up, which she said, something's changed. Something's wrong. Something's wrong with our country and who's going to do something about it. Something's wrong with our world. Who's going to do something about it? Well, the answer to the Bible is the only one who can Jesus. He has, he is and he will do something about it. He's entered into human history. That's what it means that God looked on his creation with sorrow, with anger, with disgust, with resolve. He sent his own son to enter into history and declare what? That the kingdom was being established. That the rule and reign of God that would restore health and wholeness to the world was being inaugurated. That's what it means that everywhere Jesus went, he announced that he was the what? He was the king. He was the king come back into the world to bring righteousness, shalom, peace, healing and wholeness to the world. And when he went through every village, what did those scriptures say? He did what? He not only pronounced the gospel of the kingdom, he did what? He touched the people and what happened? They were made well. Now in theology, what do you mean to lose me now? When I say the word theology, some of you just go somewhere else. In theology we say the kingdom is now. Jesus said when I come, we can know that the kingdom is happening right now. It's introduced right now. If you see demons being cast out, how do you think that happens? Except that Satan is bound and we are plundering his house. The kingdom is right now, but just what the Bible tells us, the kingdom is also not yet. It's future. And so it's been inaugurated in the first coming of Jesus, but it's not going to be consummated until his second coming. So what do we do in between? That's where we live, right? Well in between, Jesus has appointed his church to be his kingdom representative, to move out into the world and be his hand to touch the world, to bring health and wholeness and healing to live and to culture. Our world is horribly broken. Who's going to do something about it? This is the morning in which we say we are. We are going to do something about it because we are the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now I hope that's a calling that will grip your heart. You know, I'm going to tell you something, the de-caffeinated lukewarm North American Church is not going to get the job done. The North American Church that basically completely imitates the values of the culture in which it lives with just a thin veneer of Jesus laid over the top is not going to have any kingdom impact on our world. It's going to take something far more revolutionary and far more radical. So if you want a comfortable experience of pure sitting, pleasant music, church, then there's a sense in which I want to say wrong place, wrong place because I want to get the jumper cables out and never use. I want to amp you up to understand this is a far more radical calling than that. We don't want to do church. We want to be the new community that Christ establishes in the world who understands their calling, to impact our world, to be an alternative community, a radical community, so that if someone would encounter it, they wouldn't say, oh, those Christians are just like everyone else. Well, that community is just like everywhere else. I could go to the lion's club or I could go to church. It's all the same. Everywhere I go, it's all the same. It's just the same. It's just a group of people. No, there's something radically different in this place. Something that would compel retirees to go to the Philippines. People would say, that's nothing. Exactly. Exactly. What did they say of the very first Christians in the first chapter two of the book of Acts when people encountered them? They said, they're what? The day of Pentecost they said, they're what? They're drunk. Very often people would think, no, they're drunk. They're loony. What did they say of Jesus? He might not be in his right mind, you know? Listen, I went to church with my family this summer on the beach in North Carolina. It's kind of one of those churches that they have more in the summer. When all the people are at the beach, everybody fills up the chapel. They have a guest pastor every week. You know, it comes in the summer and we got in and the place was packed 300 people maybe. I want to tell you, my temperature just rose the whole service. The guy got up there, they read the Bible. I don't know why. Because after we sang a bunch of patriotic songs, it could have been a fourth of July cook out as far as I was concerned. We read the Bible, we sang a bunch of patriotic songs. He gave some Nambi Pambi talk about, I don't know what it was about and told some cute stories. There was a point in the service I wanted to stand up and take my Bible and just throw it up to the front of the room and say, I've got one. I've got one. If nobody else here has one, why don't you use this? Look, there's hundreds of people in this place who need Jesus and you've given them nothing. You know, when we got out of church, my wife said, you look a little irritated. And she said, maybe we should come to church somewhere else. And I said, no, this was perfect. Because I want my children to see what going to church in North America is like. I'm so glad they were here. I mean, there was the best discussion to say, what was that? What was that? Listen, it's going to take God coming in our midst and making us something that we are not, if we are going to be a part of making all things new. So take your sermon outline. The first thing I want you to see about this new community is this new community is a place of spiritual formation. It really couldn't be said much simpler. The Bible says, if any man is in Christ, he is a what? He is a new creature. If any man is in Christ, he is new. There's something new. If the simply put, this new community, the God forms in the midst of the world, is a place where Jesus dwells by his spirit. And if he's there, then people are made new. We are resurrected. We are spiritually dead. And we are made alive. And spiritual life is formed inside of us. If the world is broken and it needs fixing, then surely the people who are fixing it have to first be what? They have to be fixed themselves. We are broken. We need fixing. We need to be made new. Church is a place where God isn't work. And we are on a journey toward wholeness. Church is not a place where you go and just learn the right doctrinal formations. There's one God that one God is in three persons. The Bible is the word of God. It's authoritative. It's infallible. Jesus is both God and man and and justification by faith and not by works. And I've got my I've got it all down. I'm a Christian. Every one of those doctrinal truths is precious and valuable. But church is not a place where you just come to understand justification by faith. It's a place where you're actually justified by faith so that you are actually reconciled to the God that you are once separated from. You experience him as your father welcoming you into his family. We could say you get the gospel, but what we really mean is the gospel gets you. It's a place where you're changed. It's a place where there's transformation. It's a place where once barren soil and barren hearts suddenly begins to produce what? Fruit. And what's the Bible say that fruit is? Love. Love. Love actually comes out of us. And believe me, if people see that, they'll say what? That's a godsend. Joy. The Presbyterian stasis even begins to crack. Love. Joy. Peace. Instead of that anxiety ridden life we live in. We know that we live in a world in which Prozac is the vitamin of our culture. God sends the Lord that we have things that help us in our brokenness and yet at the same time, we want to say churches is a place where we experience transformation. We experience healing. We experience life change. It's a place where we move because Jesus is here and that's what happens when Jesus is in your midst. It is a place where unbelievers are converted, but it's a place where believers are renewed and renewed and renewed and renewed continuously. When woman wrote to us recently, she said, I've always thought my husband had some great qualities, kind and humorous and strong, but since he's gotten involved with the men's discipleship group, his growth has amazed me even in areas where I didn't see room for improvement. The Holy Spirit is doing wonderful work. From his compassion to his leadership ability, I see a special light that comes from his time with his group. I was so moved and proud of all of you the other day when you prayed for my husband to be a godly example to his family. This would never have happened a year ago before the softening of his heart. Spiritual formation. That's what happens in the new community. Christ is there and we are made after his image conformed to the image of Christ. The obvious question is, is it happening in you? Are you experiencing the transforming work of God in your heart and in your life? Are you shake your head and say, I cannot believe what I am becoming? I am actually seeing leaking out of faith through the joy and peace and love and patience and things that have not marked my life. Are you being transformed? Because I want to say to you, you can be. That's what this is about. We've got no business about talking about transforming culture if what? If we're not experiencing it ourselves, how we get to change culture and change all these horrible things that we see in our world and all that, you know, people sleeping outside the Montgomery Alabama courthouse that keeps the granite 10 commandments in there. That's going to change the culture. What are we talking about changing the culture? We've got to have communities of people becoming experiencing the love of God in such a way that it transforms their own heart. Some of the manifestations of that, I think, because you'll see the posture of the church look different. The church is such a lack of credibility in the world for one is because of our arrogance and our self-righteousness. I saw an ad the other day for a Christian college and the Christian college was being comparing itself to a bottle of spring water. So it said, so-and-so Christian college, 100 percent pure since 1908. Ingredients that had the list of ingredients, 100 percent Christian, it said, you know, Jesus wouldn't have said that about his own disciples, right? Jesus' own disciples were in 100 percent followers of his. I mean, who does the church think they are? 100 percent pure?
The sheer arrogance. There's something about the gospel that, as you get it, as spiritual life is formed in you. On the one hand, there's a new confidence and a new security. On the other hand, there's humility in brokenness. There's a new posture in a place with God dwells. And there's worship and worship becomes more passionate and more heartfelt, more joyous, more delightful. I pray that that's already happening in this church and it'll continue. People don't stop to argue about whether we're singing choruses or hymns because it's about pleasing him and not about pleasing us and they start to get that. It's a place where marriages are different. Where marriages, listen, I don't think anybody when they get married knows how to love each other. To say it more boldly, I don't think anybody when they get married loves is their partner. They think they do, but I don't think they know how to close. I don't think they have any idea of what's going to be asked of them or what's involved. I don't think they can. So what's a church? It's a place where you learn. It's a place where marriages that are not intimate and they're not connected and they're it's where they change. It's where God comes and works in a marriage and works in a home and where people whose marriages are are cold and distant have a growing discontent to say, I want the spiritual life that's ebbing up in my heart to change my home. And it happens because God changes us. It's a place where the leaders are different. With their spiritual transformation, being a good orator, being a Bible scholar, being a good manager and goal-setter simply will not suffice. If it's a place of spiritual formation, what one thing is preeminent in the leader, they must be experiencing what? Transformation themselves and it must be visible to the people that are following them. And if it's not, then you have no credibility and no credit. If the gospel isn't changing you,
then what ministry do you have? What message do you have? This is what's demanded of the leader. What is seven rivers church to be? One of our staff members described going to see the movie Seabiscuit. I suppose many of you have seen the movie and they said by the end of the movie they were just weeping. Now some of you cynics among us would say it's about a horse. Can we just go to movies without the whole weeping thing? It's about a horse.
You know what they said? My heart is soft to see people get healed, to see hearts get healed. Yes, about a horse, but it's about a horse that's beaten and unwanted and unwaived and unproductive. Somebody sees something in that horse and draws it out. It's about a trainer who's a social misfit, who doesn't find his way in a developing world. It's about a jockey who's got a broken body, but he's got a broken soul abandoned by his parents during the depression and it's about an owner who lost his little boy in a car accident and then lost his wife in the ensuing brief. It's about broken people whose hearts get healed. That's what the church is. It's the place where hearts get healed. Got it? That's our vision. The place where God comes and he lives and he heals hearts. Second, it's the second part. Not just the place of spiritual formation, it's the place of missional living. Missional living. All right, you're with me. Got to get to get to hear this. The new community doesn't have a missionary program. It is a mission. So if we're a mission, what's our mission? I'm going to be terrible if the helms went to the Philippines and when they got there and they got off the plane, they said, we forgot why we came. We don't even know why we're here and everybody's a mission says, we don't know why you're here either. Nobody even knows why you're here. Why did you raise it? Why did you come? If they went all the way over there and they didn't even know their mission, imagine the soldiers clamoring up the beach, invading the country and all the sun, stopping in the beach and saying, what is it we're supposed to do? What's our mission? Well, I want to ask you what's yours? Do you understand that our mission is to be transformed by being connected to Jesus and then taking that love that we receive from Him and pressing it into our broken world to bring a health and wholeness, peace and beauty and joy into our world as emissaries and representatives of Jesus. That's our mission. Gosh, do we need the people need this sort of opportunity? In the new community, lay people are not the consumers of clerical services, they are the providers of them. They are missionaries. You are missionaries. So how are we going to love, how are we going to take the love we receive in love our world? First of all, we're going to love our world with words. Jesus said, you will be my what? Power will come on you. The Holy Spirit will come on you and you will be my what? My witness is. With our words, we will invite people to join the new communities. You know, as much as we can talk about people dying on 9-11 or people dying in Israel, all around us people are dying who are living, right? They're dying because they live in a world in a culture that tells them accumulate, get more. And if you have more stuff, you'll have life. So they get more stuff and there's no life. There's no life in it at all. So we can walk out into the world and we can say to people, leave that life of self-centeredness, leave that life of emptiness and join the massive global mission and purpose your heart longs for. People are perishing because they have no calling, no mission that's worth living and dying for. To understand, it puts a whole new face on evangelism. Is evangelism mean that I have to go to the most hearty, cynic and talk them out of their false beliefs and use scripture and reason and logic and argue them down and defeat their arguments? I don't know how to do all that. I'm telling you, you invite them to church. You bring them to the new community and there they get a taste of what it's like. You bring them to Jesus. Isn't that the purpose? Where is Jesus? Jesus says he comes and dwells in the midst of his people. He's creating a new people. You invest in people's lives and you invite them. You invest and you invite with your words to come, be a part, taste and see for yourself. The Christ is making people new. Listen, when the bomb went off in Israel and there's people injured in the street and everyone comes running, what do they do for those people when they get there? They pick them up and they bring them where? They bring them to the place where you get healed. They bring them to the hospital. So when you walk out to your job, when you walk out to your neighborhood, when you walk out to your family, what should you be thinking? Oh God, would you use my life and my words to bring these people to the place where hearts get healed? That I might bring, that I might invite them to a place where they're healing. See, I love our community with our words. Listen, we've got two members of the pastor's class that have said in the last week, we are inviting everyone we talk to to come to this church. Some of us have been here 10 and 12 years and we don't do that anymore because we've forgotten our mission. Love people with our words. Secondly, we love people with our deeds. Jesus said, you let your light so shine before the world that people see that you're life and you're working your deeds and they'll give glory to God in heaven so we wait out into our world and we press, we press the healing bomb of the love of God into the wounds of our world.
There's so many ways to do that. With deeds of compassion and kindness and mercy and grace, whether it's the prisoner or the poor, the disabled, the sick, the unborn, the addict, the orphan, the unemployed, the homeless, wherever we find brokenness, we pack the wounds with kingdom, compassion. Ray and Penny Ferris with the Isaiah Foundation. Joyce, children, Sally, white, prison, ministry, Stuart Green with the homeless, Bonnie Gertus with the disabled and the key center. Joyce and Wally Gable with the elderly and firm, leaving worship with the nursing home, Arden, Shirley Gertus, sponsoring children with compassion, international, wherever the herd is. God's people go and they bring the bomb. That's our calling, that's our mission, that's why we exist.
Some years ago I said that our church maybe God would enable us some day to start a children's home and start a senior's home and so every five days or so someone asked me when we're going to do that. And my answer is the church is not going to do it. You are because it's your mission. And God will raise up people in this church who care about the needs of this community. And someday perhaps there'll be a health clinic in this community offering health care for indigent and needy people that local doctors and dentists and nurses and health care providers circulate through. There'll be all sorts of ministry happening here because God laid it on the hearts of this people to wait out into this culture and find the wounds of people and touch them. That's our mission, our words and our deeds and third and maybe most surprising with our labor. That's how we're to love our world. Teaching chapel to our school kids a couple of weeks ago and I think it was in 6th or 6th grade chapel. I said what did God make us to do?
And one little girl raised her hand and she said glorify God and I said well how are we supposed to glorify God? And she said well we worship. I said how did your dad glorify God? He said well we worship him that's how you glorify God. I said how long did when you do that? She said I'm Sunday. I said how long does that take? She said 90 minutes. I said so you are made to glorify God but you only do it 90 minutes a week. Oh she said don't you know we read the Bible at home too. I said well maybe a half hour a day you read and pray and that's sort of saying so so five hours a week. That's what your life is for those five hours a week. I said what is your daddy do on Monday and Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and Friday? And clearly she looks at me and she said well he doesn't glorify God then he can't. He goes to work. The primary calling of God on most of our lives is to labor. Everybody here Monday through Friday what? It's our labor is our primary ministry. Now I'm going to tell you it's a discreet point in the sermon you either just let this roll right off your back and you don't pay any attention to what I'm saying or you say I am an architect I am a nurse I am a school teacher I'm a school administrator I'm a bus driver and I don't have the faintest idea how to bring the kingdom to bear through my work guess what welcome welcome back to point one that's at that very point you say I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand how my labor advances the health and wholeness and righteousness and healing of this world because basically that's what you do with your almost your whole life and effort and energy and gift and talent is you walk out into the workplace and it is there that you are called to be a missionary not by just witnessing the people not by just being honest and nice and kind but by what you actually do is your primary ministry you've been called to take your place in the family business your father's business you know how precious that is I told the Christian school because why do we have a Christian school I said we have a Christian school because you don't know squat about running your dad's business and you got to be trained up how in the world do you know how to run God's business but he's appointed you he's chosen you and it's our job to train you up and get you ready to walk out into this world and do his business with impact in the culture and so it is for what is the product of son do he came home or a wretched and foul and his father embraced him and had a big party but what happened the next morning when everyone woke up what happened the next morning he came downstairs and the father put him to work that's what happened son your home you know what that means you take your place in the family business that's our mission folks if you think the vision of seven rivers church has to do with what we do here on Saturday nice and Sunday you don't get it it's all of your life for Jesus Abraham type of said there's not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus does not declare this is mine it belongs to me wherever you go every day Christ wants you to be the agent of kingdom healing and wholeness that you bring with you to that place I don't know how to do that of course you don't but the father will show you and the last point is this it's not just a it's not the spiritual formation and mission of living the last point is is authentic it's authentic connection has to be a community where we know we've experienced Christ to love for us and therefore we go into our world and we love one another but what do we also do we love each other the church is a home it's a family tribe it's plan it's fraternity it's the connection we were made for the connection we need church is the only place in town you can find such connection and you know how much we need connection actually to study Harvard did a study of 7,000 people over a decade and found that the most isolated people are three times more likely to die than those with strong relational connection people who had bad health habits like smoking and obesity and alcohol use but strong social ties live significantly longer than people had great health habits but were isolated in other words it's better to eat twinkies with good friends than to eat broccoli alone the journal of the AMA reported on a study where volunteers were infected with a virus that produces the common cold and they found that people with strong emotional connection did four times better fighting off the illness those people with strong emotional connection were less susceptible to the cold had less virus and produce significantly less mucus than relationally isolated people the author says I'm not making this up they produce less mucus this means it's literally true unfriendly people are not here than friendly people now I got to say one thing we love to eat idealized Christian community oh yes the church is to be a place where we're all for each other we're all family we all love each other Henry now and said community is the place where the person you least want to be in community with always is and so if you think it's easy to love each other then I just want to say banished this idealized idea that okay we're in church now we're all Christians that means we're all good and we're all unselfish and we're all kind and we all really care about each other that couldn't be the case because you're here you're messing it all up this is not going to be a place where you know one one one of those magazines you see in the grocery store checkout line said that the title was on the article was um um totally normal women who stalks their ex-boyfriend who's totally normal and might stalking an ex-boyfriend suggest that maybe you're not normal let alone totally normal the church has no totally normal people it's got up and so community is always going to be difficult it'll always be hard it will not come naturally that's why we want every individual in a small group and we want every small group striving to be a place where real relationships are nurtured let me say this in closing I see some of the sweetest things here in terms of people loving each other I love it particularly when I see it in the kids I see a Rachel Barlow working with a with a middle school student Danielle Albury was a star volleyball player here in our Christian school she's gone on to college but I came over after one of the recent volleyball games to clean up the cups and the things from the bench where the kids were sitting and there were gatorade bottles for every girl on the team the current team Danielle Albury had put a personal note on every gatorade bottle to the kids now I love you you're great you can do it I mean it just grips my heart to walk up in the summer to children's church and they're Sean Donovan come home from college and he's teaching a little kids in the church and children's church beautiful community I know a senior in high school who has a small group for nice and tense great girls she's mentoring the younger girls here it is our kids are modeling something aren't they it's fair to say maybe they even get it better than we do how to be family how to be connected real relational community they'll know we are Christians by our life by our love one guy said to me as a friend and his friend is so frustrated with him his friend says you're fat you're broke your single he said I've got everything in my life that you don't have but you're happy and I'm not because you have seven rivers church because you have the new community brothers and sisters this world is so painfully broken who's gonna do something about it by God's grace we are