September 24
Commitment brings Connection
The evidence of our connection with Jesus is our loving connectivity with each other.
We are called to biblical connectivity:
1. Biblical connectivity is inconvenient
2. Biblical connectivity is messy
3. Biblical community is transformative
(Use the plasma ball as opening illustration—turn on ball--turn lights down) We’re finishing up our series, Better Together. Week 1 we discussed that the Triune God, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit is in community Himself. Since we are created in His image, we are created for community—and the most important community we can have is with Him (touch ball with hand).
Last week we discussed that being in community with God requires our commitment to each other. Being here together on Sundays is not just about you. When you show up and sing and participate, it encourages those around you. (hold up 2 long thin lights) We get encouraged and shine brighter and leave brighter than when we arrived.
(turn ball off—turn lights up) Now this morning we finish the series by naming another reality: we need another level of community—and that is being connected to each other in a regular and meaningful way; a connectivity that delivers power and strength to us that we can’t find anywhere else.
Turn to 1 John 4:10-12
Don’t know if you noticed: have Bibles for you in the overflows. If you forgot yours, you can always get one. If you don’t have a Bible, take it home with you.
“Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the •propitiation for our sins. 11 Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God. h If we love one another, God remains in us and His love is perfected in us.” 1 John 4:10-12
v.10 “love” The love mentioned here is divine love; agape is the Greek word; it is a love that is not natural to human beings; it is a love that does not depend on the other person; it is innate in God; He loves the unlovable; He loves you and me. You may think you’re all loveable, and you are to someone. But to a holy & righteous God, you’re not as loveable as you think you are.
“He loved us” God loved us 1st. Don’t miss the sequence: He loved us and as a result, we love Him. We didn’t take the 1st step; God initiated it out of His infinitely flowing love.
“propitiation” propitiation( hilasmos): the sacrifice that satisfies the demand of Divine justice for breaking the Law Human beings are broken and broken people break things; daily, hourly, moment by moment, we break God’s divine Law. We’re selfish, we’re idolatrous, covetous, envious, impatient, angry, lustful—in a word, we’re depraved. Because one of God’s attributes is that He is just, it is impossible for Him to turn away from injustice. We count on our judges to render decisions based on the law, right? And to hand down sentences based on the law. Could a holy and just God any less? So Jesus stepped in to satisfy the divine demand for justice. He was the propitiation for our sinful condition.
All this is the set up for what is about to follow.
v.11 “if/since” If God loves us that much and initiated love for us, then we who bear His image and His name should show this same kind of love to other believers.
v.12 “seen God” Meaning no one has seen God in all His entirety. Jesus was God incarnate, but Jesus was in human form; finite form. So we have to wait to see Him totally and completely when we are brought into His presence in heaven.
“remains” remains (meno): to continue; to live in; to be at home in
“perfected” existing in fullness.
So can you connect the dots? God’s love for us demanded that He enter into our world to demonstrate that divine love—(build) and if His love abides in us, we must enter into each other’s world to demonstrate that love to each other.
So there is this connectivity between us. The common connector is our relationship with Jesus; and the evidence of that connectivity is love for each other. The evidence of our connection with Jesus is our loving connectivity with each other.
Are you connected with a small group of believers? It’s one thing to say you love everyone here this morning. That’s love in the abstract, right? That guy over there? Yeah, I love him. Sure. That’s pie in the sky love. But love on the ground—being connected to a small group of people that you love up close and personal—that’s what the Scripture is getting at.
We are called to biblical connectivity:
1. Biblical connectivity is inconvenient
We are all so busy busy aren’t we? Very little margin in our lives. So the thought of carving out an hour and a half each week for biblical connectivity is cra cra. But the truth is you are missing out on a critical part of God’s plan for your life. You cannot experience much of what God has in store for you if you’re not in a regular, weekly small group.
2. Biblical connectivity is messy
Our kids come over with their kids, so there’s 8 adult children and 8 grandkids aged 8 down to 1 yr. When they arrive, the house is all clean and straight. While they are there, everything gets messed up. The toy room is cluttered with toys. The kitchen is all messed up. When you have 7 of the 8 gkids using your bathrooms—well, you can imagine how messed up they are. But it’s worth every minute. Why? Because what we gain in the midst of the mess.
Biblical connectivity can be messy. Why? Cause we’re all a hot mess! So when we join our messiness with each other’s messy lives, it gets messy. But it’s worth it because we gain so much from the connectivity. This is where God’s love is perfected in us—learning to love messy people. (testimony???)
3. Biblical community is transformative
Being in a circle of believers transforms us, changes us. How can getting together, studying the Bible together, praying together, encouraging together, helping each other in times of need—how can that not change our lives?
(Plasma ball: Person giving testimony or groups guy up to demonstrate; give the light bulb to person; create connectivity so bulb lights up)
There is a part of your life that will not become more like Jesus unless you’re connected to a small group. It will light you up and change your live.
New group leaders on stage…commission/pray..etc.
Offering, etc.
Extra stuff
We finish up our Better Together series this morning. We are better together. We saw in Week 1 that we are better when we are in community with our Creator. We were created for Community with Him. We saw that as the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God is in community Himself and--created in His image, we are created for community. And the most important relationship we can have is our relationship with Him.
Better Together has vertical dimension—but it also has a horizontal dimention. Last week we examined that community with God then requires that we are committed to each other as the body of Christ; committed to the well-being and encouragement of each other. Hebrews 10:24-25 says: And let us be concerned about one another in order to promote love and good works, 25 not staying away from our worship meetings, as some habitually do, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.” Being here on Sundays is not just about you. When you show up on Sunday morning, your very presence here encourages the people around you. When you open your mouth to sing, you sing encouragement to those around you. You may think your singing voice is not pleasant to listen to, but it is such a sweet sound to our God and it is an amazing evidence of His presence with us when we are all together singing praise. We’re better when you are committed to being here and a part of what God is doing.
“We have been so soaked in the individualism of modern Western culture that we feel threatened by the idea of our primary identity being that of the family we belong to—especially when the family in question is so large, stretching across space and time. The church isn’t simply a collection of isolated individuals, all following their own pathways of spiritual growth without much reference to one another.” NT Wright
“Community” is a fair translation of koinonia, the Greek word also translated as “fellowship,” “communion,” “sharing,” “contribution,” or “participation.”
“Church” translates ekklesia, which derives from the Greek root words for “called out,” but which really means “called together.” In each case where a group of people is called an ekklesia, they weren’t merely roused from their homes, they were called to be together for some purpose.
We have been so soaked in the individualism of modern Western culture that we feel threatened by the idea of our primary identity being that of the family we belong to—especially when the family in question is so large, stretching across space and time. The church isn’t simply a collection of isolated individuals, all following their own pathways of spiritual growth without much reference to one another. NT Wright
In the American, evangelical tradition, we like to speak of our Christianity in radically individualistic terms. We have “a personal relationship” with Jesus. “Spiritual disciplines” are all about private Bible study, meditation, and prayer. I would just love to hear a sermon some day about the “discipline” of regularly being together with brothers and sisters! (And it very often does require considerable self-discipline to put up with people like me!)
But in a society defined by such ideals as “self-actualization” and the American sense of self-sufficiency, our members tend to have a radically individualistic, atomistic view of Christianity. I get saved. I pick a church that meets my felt needs. I find a place where I can grow. After all, my needs are the most important thing!
It’s very likely true that our greatest need as a community is just to get our members to start thinking about others! How about: God saves us so that you’ll be part of a community. Find a church where you can serve most effectively. Strive to build up your brothers and sisters. Others’ needs are most important.
[I]t is as impossible, unnecessary, and undesirable to be a Christian all by yourself as it is to be a newborn baby all by yourself. The church is first and foremost a community, a collection of people who belong to one another because they belong to God, the God we know in and through Jesus.
Mission, in its widest as well as its more focused senses, is what the church is there for. God intends to put the world to rights; he has dramatically launched this project through Jesus.
But the point here is that this mission is given to us as a community. We aren’t individually called to announce that Jesus is the world’s Lord. After all, who’d believe us if we can’t show the world a better society, a better way to live?
Worship, fellowship, and the work of reflecting God’s kingdom into the world flow into and out of one another. You can’t reflect God’s image without returning to worship to keep the reflection fresh and authentic. In the same way, worship sustains and nourishes fellowship; without it, fellowship quickly deteriorates into groups of the like-minded, which in turn quickly become exclusive cliques—the very opposite of what Jesus’s people should be aiming at.
“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.”
- Thomas Merton
“Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful—Christian community is the final apologetic.”
- Francis Schaeffer
One area where people are beginning to gain a great sense of belonging is through Crossfit.
Crossfit is a for-profit gym company founded in 2000 that now (2015) has 13,000 licensed operators serving at least two million exercisers. Some talk about their Crossfit “box” in the same way that others might speak about their church or synagogue. “In an increasingly secular America, all sorts of activities and subcultures provide the meaning that in the past, at least as we imagine it, religious communities did.”
Greg Glassman, co-founder of Crossfit spoke at a forum at Harvard Divinity called “Crossfit as Church?!” He said, “We’re saving lives, and saving a lot of them. Three hundred fifty thousand Americans are going to die next year from sitting on the couch. That’s dangerous. The TV is dangerous. Squatting isn’t.” He said he has refrained from marketing his own gym equipment because that would hurt his existing suppliers, which would be a “sin.”
One Harvard researcher said, “What really struck us was the way in which people were bringing their kids to their box, or the way different workouts of the day were named after soldiers who had died in battle. So there’s all of these things you would expect to see in a church — remembering the dead through some sort of ritual, and intergenerational community.”
Glassman said, “Down the road, the core CrossFit values will translate into, ‘I’m going to take my Camry into the Toyota dealer tomorrow, and will someone from the gym pick me up?’ And of course they will. ‘I’m going to move — will people from the gym help me?’ Of course they will.”
In his book The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, Louis Cozolino says that the core building block of Western philosophy is the lone, independent thinker. But, neuroscience tells us that human brains were and are never intended to function in isolation from one another. Cozolino suggests that human brains evolved in the context of other brains.
The field of psychiatry often feels caught in the middle between the brain and the mind, the biological functioning and the social constructs.
“A tragic example of this disparity comes from the recent history of the treatment of children in orphanages. In response to a high number of deaths, physicians attempted to keep the children safe from infectious diseases by separating them from one another and ordering that their handling be kept to a minimum. Yet they still died at such alarming rates that admission forms and death certificates were signed at intake for the sake of efficiency. It was not until the children were held, rocked, and allowed to interact with one another that their survival rate improved.”
In fact, “individual neurons or single human brains do not exist in nature.” Without interactions with one another, people and neurons wither and die. In humans, this process manifests as depression, grief, and suicide.
“From birth until death, each of us needs others who seek us out, show interest in discovering who we are, and help us feel safe…Relationships are our natural habitat.”
