Fault Lines Series

The Point: TO PREVENT FAULTLINES IN OUR RELATIONSHIPS WE MUST BE INTENTIONAL ABOUT BUILDING UNITY

ME:

GOOD MORNING, Gateway Church. It is great to have you with us today as we continue in our teaching series ONE. Through this series, we're looking at what it means to become a community of ONE… a community that is UNITED around Jesus.

WEEK 1: YOU ARE A MASTERPIECE. ACT LIKE IT. If we're going to be a community of ONE, we need to recognize what we are - A MASTERPIECE and we need to treat others as the MASTERPIECES they are. (The world is drawn to that kind of love in action.)

WEEK 2: WHEN WE ARE ALL TOGETER, DIFFERENT; WE ARE GREATER THAN THE SUM OF OUR PARTS. We all have different gifts, abilities, talents, interests, passions. And they can all be used to reflect Jesus back to the world around us. When we come together as a community, each doing our 'part' we become greater than the sum of those parts. We become an unstoppable force in our world.

This week, I want to look at the biggest roadblock to seeing that COMMUNITY OF ONE become a reality.

Go ahead and open your bibles to Ephesians 4:1. Page 800 in the house bible.

WE:

Question:

Have you ever had your favorite band break up?

• Beatles (For you 60's music lovers)

• Led Zeppelin or The Who or The Eagles (For you 70's music lovers)

• Guns & Roses (for you 80's hair metal fans)

• The Police (more 80's fans)

• Backstreet Boys (90's boy band fans… blech)

• More recently - for the Millennials - One Direction/Jonas Bros.

It's discouraging and disappointing.

Now, some of those bands got back together and made music again. But it's rarely as good, right?

Or much worse… and far more serious than you're favorite band breaking up, you've seen relationships come apart.

• Your parents' divorce

• Your child's divorce

• YOUR divorce

• Friendship ends

• Siblings don't get along/fight over parents inheritance

• Families fracture over things that shouldn't matter

We've all seen it. And we hate it when things we've grown to love or things we depend on… things we thought would last forever… fall apart.

And often, when we're in the middle of it, we feel like those institutions or those relationships come crashing down suddenly. It seems like, out of the blue, the relationship just crumbled and fell apart and we can't figure out why.

But those seismic events that rip apart your favorite band or that relationship… those seismic events that leave an indelible mark on our lives and - in many cases - leave us with painful scars… Those seismic events are rarely sudden.

Almost always, there have been FAULT LINES below the surface for some time:

• The Beatles didn't break up overnight. There was a lot of frustration and animosity and just the craziness of being the biggest band in the world that finally came to the surface.

• Your parents divorce or your divorce wasn't as sudden as it felt. There were issues that had been below the surface for a long time and they had never been properly addressed

• That falling out you had with your brother or your aunt or your parents or whoever. If you're honest, you can see that there were things going on… little hurts here, wounds there, things said or left unsaid and over time those FAULT LINES finally ruptured.

In geological terms, a FAULT LINE is a fracture along which the crust has moved. ... Seismic waves are generated when the two sides of the fault rapidly slip past each other. For most earthquakes, the faults do not break the surface, so the faults can be "seen" only through analyzing the seismic waves.

FAULT LINES are often invisible… until the earthquake strikes, and everything falls apart. FAULT LINES can be hard to see, but they're there and they're dangerous.

GOD:

What does any of this have to do with being a COMMUNITY OF ONE? Everything! It has EVERYTHING to do with becoming and staying a community of Jesus followers, living in our world as a COMMUNITY OF ONE.

FAULT LINES happen because we are broken and imperfect people who do life with other broken and imperfect people. EVEN IN THE CHURCH.

In fact, these FAULT LINES are the single biggest reason most churches (small 'c') and the Church (big 'C') in North America is failing to have the impact we are called to have. These FAULT LINES are the single biggest reason the Church in America fails to live as a COMMUNITY OF ONE.

One of the reasons the Church in America appears to be defeated is because we are divided.

Or, to put it another way.