Man, it is good to be here with you guys tonight.
I hope you had a good break.
I know many of you were all over the West Coast
and even in Mexico doing God's work
as you were on mission trips.
How many of you guys went on trips?
Let's, yeah, amen.
Many of you are probably at baptism
or sleeping right now from the week,
but man, so cool to see that you guys are on mission
all over the West Coast doing things
that God has desired us to do.
And I hope that for those of you who went home
that was restful and rejuvenating spiritually, physically.
You come back ready to tackle the rest of the semester.
I got to do a little bit of both.
I got to rest a little bit
and I got to travel a little bit,
checking out some potential future sites
of Resonate Church in the Northwest.
And it was exciting.
It was exciting to see other campuses
and see what God might be able to do in those places.
But it's good to be back as well.
And I'm excited for what God has for us
the rest of the semester.
So let's get into it tonight.
I want to talk to us about this idea of community.
If you have been around Resonate very long,
you know that community is a high value of our church.
You know that we talk about community a lot.
You've probably heard that word.
And maybe you've been around just long enough to hear it,
but you don't really know exactly what we mean
when we say community.
Or maybe you've been here a while
and you've experienced a bit of this idea of community,
this idea of life together, this idea of the church.
But you don't know exactly what that should look like
in your life.
So as I started to pray about what God wanted me to say
and wanted us to hear tonight and what I needed to hear,
this idea of community really rose to the surface.
This idea that God has created the church
to be a community of people,
not an event that we attend once or twice a week,
but a community that we live in day in and day out.
And so I wanted to tackle this issue
because I know that many of you are new to resonate.
I know that many of you have started coming to resonate
for this just this year even.
And so you may not necessarily have heard
what we believe about community.
You may not have heard what we believe about that idea.
And maybe you have heard that,
but it's helpful for us to hear it again.
So when we start to talk about community,
start to explore this idea of life together in community,
it goes back to the very beginning of all creation
that God created mankind in his image.
And we explored that in this series called Blur.
We did the last four weeks before break.
We started to look at what it meant
to be made in God's image.
That we were to be his representatives on earth,
we were to be his ambassadors on earth.
And so when God made us in his image,
when he created all the world,
there was one thing that God did not look at
and say that's very good.
And that thing was that Adam was alone.
It wasn't good that man was alone.
And so God created Eve as his friend,
his helper, his partner, his wife,
and they experienced community.
And so it wasn't enough that Adam had community
between him and God.
He needed community with another person.
And there's this value that starts right
in the beginning of creation
that we are to be in relationship with God
and we're to be in relationship with one another.
And these two things are so foundational
to who we are as humans.
So we can't neglect them, we can't avoid them.
They're just realities of who we are.
And so we need relationship with God
and we need relationship with one another.
We see this in Genesis right at the start.
And then he fast forward through this Old Testament story
of all of God pursuing his people
and setting apart a people for himself.
And we walk through history
and we arrive in the New Testament
after Jesus has come and died on the Roman cross
and taken away our sins, risen from death
to give us new life.
And this thing called the church starts.
This thing called the church arises
and it's this group of people
that are doing life together
and they see themselves as a people kind of set apart.
They see this idea of community
is so central to life and following Jesus.
They have to be in relationship with one another.
They value that above all else
and that structures the whole of their life
is this idea of community.
We see this in Acts chapter two
and it's where we're gonna kind of hang out tonight.
So if you brought your Bibles or you have your app
you can open up to Acts chapter two.
And man, my mouth is dry.
If anybody would grab me a glass of water
that would be, sorry, that's awkward, I know.
But it might be the only thing that saves this.
So Acts chapter two, it's where we're gonna hang out.
You'll see it on the screen as well
if you don't have a copy of the script.
Man, these guys, did you drink half of that
and then give it to me?
How'd you get it so fast?
Dang, thank you.
I don't even know your name.
I gotta meet you afterward.
So Acts chapter two, it's where we're gonna hang out tonight.
It'll be on the screen.
It says this in verse 42.
It says, they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching
and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders
and signs performed by the apostles.
All of the believers were together
and had everything in common.
They sold property and possessions
to give to anyone who had need.
And so, okay, let's stop right there, pause.
Let's look at the first verse.
They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching.
So they came into a space like this,
maybe a gathering like this,
and they heard teaching from the word.
They heard teaching from the Bible.
They listened to people who were appointed
as leaders and teachers in the church
to explain what life should look like
in this new reality of following Jesus.
They devoted themselves to fellowship,
that they were together and they experienced life together.
You can kind of compare this idea of fellowship
to what we do in village.
That we would spend life together
and we would eat meals together
and we would share things with one another.
We'd share all of our life.
And they broke bread in their homes
and they had prayer often, this idea of breaking bread.
It's just they ate food.
Food was a big part of their community.
They ate food a lot together.
It's good.
In verse 46, we'll keep going through this.
Every day, they continue to meet together.
So every day, they value this so much
that every day they gathered and said,
I need to be in community.
I need to break bread with my homies, right?
Maybe they didn't say homies, but Jamie laughed.
That's one, it's a joke, guys.
But they said, we need to break bread together.
We need to be in community together.
We need to hang out together.
So every day they gather together to worship.
And they probably had jobs.
They probably went and did their thing during the day.
But then they got home and they're like,
man, I wanna be with my friends.
I wanna be with these other people who follow Jesus.
Because if I'm not with them, I'm gonna forget
kind of what it means to follow Jesus.
So they saw community, they saw gathering together
is so central to their life.
They broke bread in their homes and together with glad
and sincere hearts, and ate together with glad
and sincere hearts, praising God
and enjoying the favor of all people.
And here is the result of their community.
The Lord added to their number daily,
those who were being saved.
The Lord added to their number daily,
those who were being saved.
So people who were not Christians
were close enough to their community
and saw what was going on,
so much so that it affected them.
And they wanted to be a part of it.
They wanted to be a part of this life of this community
following Jesus together as a family.
So the church is to be a people of God.
They're God's people living in such a way,
loving God in such a way,
and loving one another in such a way
that the outside world looks at that
and they go, man, I want a piece of that.
I want to be a part of that.
I want to be in that community.
There's no one else,
I don't see anyone else loving people like that.
I don't see anyone else doing things like that.
I want to be a part of that.
But again, just like in the garden,
when sin enters and disrupts that perfect community
that Adam and Eve had with God,
sin will disrupt our perfect community,
our chance at perfect community.
It's not possible, but we can try, right?
We can work toward that.
But sin will come in and it will disrupt that
and it will affect our relationships.
This is why relationships are so hard.
That there's something in us that fights for ourselves
more than the other person.
And so relationships get really difficult
and it's hard for us to enjoy
the kind of community God desires for us.
So I want to outline for us three things that I think,
that I see in our church that are disrupting
this vision of acts to community.
That we could live out this beautiful picture of community
where everything belongs to everyone else,
that we can share our possessions,
we can live openly, we can give freely,
we can enjoy each other's presence
and we can enjoy community daily.
But there's three things I think,
and there's probably more,
but three things I think I've observed in our community
that disrupt this and hold us back.
Number one, we're too individualistic.
We're too individualistic.
Western culture has taught us throughout our lives,
all of our lives, that there's this value
in being your own person, right?
And this is not inherently evil.
In the 18th, the word individualism
hadn't even shown up in the English dictionary
till around the 1830s.
And it was actually brought about by Christians.
Like Christians were going,
hey, we're tired of watching humans get devalued
by power structures and governments
and even the church sometimes.
And true believers started looking at the Bible
and seeing that God created people with value.
Each and every person has a unique value and worth to God.
And they started going,
we need to invent this word and this idea
called individualism and fight for the right
of the individual to decide what is healthy for them
because we can't let other people decide
how others should live their life.
And so they have the unique right as a human being
to decide some parts of their life.
And so Christians started fighting
for this idea of individualism,
but like a lot of things, it got twisted.
And now it's to this point in Western culture,
in our American culture,
where the highest value is your right
to decide everything for you.
Your right to decide everything for your life.
That you should be able to determine your destiny
and determine who you're gonna become
and who you wanna be.
And that's not inherently wrong,
but taken to the extreme,
it can be really disruptive and really damaging to us.
A definition of individualism to help us out.
It's the habit or principle of being independent
and self-reliant.
It's this self-centered feeling or conduct,
this egoism that life kind of revolves around me.
My relationships kind of revolve around me
and my desires and my hopes and my dreams.
It's a social theory, another definition,
a social theory favoring freedom of action
for individuals over the collective group
or state control.
Now, I'm not arguing that state control
is better than individualism.
What I am arguing is that individualism taken to the end
is really destructive to our society.
And we've seen this documented in our society.
There are psychologists and sociologists discovering this
who have nothing to do with Jesus.
They don't love Jesus, they don't follow Jesus.
They're not part of the church,
but they're realizing that individualism
is destroying the fabric of our democratic society.
What we value most is freedom,
but the biggest threat to our freedom might be our freedom.
The biggest threat to our freedom might be individualism.
I read an article this week
and it was by a guy who's exploring this idea.
He's exploring this idea
that individualism might be harmful to us if taken too far.
And his name is Harry Rice.
And he said, some of the most profound loneliness
can happen when other people are present.
He says, take college freshmen, for example.
Even though they're surrounded by people
almost all the time,
many feel incredibly isolated during the first quarter
of the school year
with their friends and family members so far away.
So what he's recognizing in these studies
is that even the people who are around the most people,
they've valued their individual rights
and their individual identity so much so
that they can't really have deep connections
with everybody around them
and they feel really isolated.
They've created this idea of themselves
and all they have is themselves
and they can't really lean on other people
because they've valued their self so much.
And I know this cuts kind of deep and we go,
oh man, I don't know if that's true about me.
I love having other people around.
But at the same time, we fight for our privacy,
we fight for our time alone,
we fight for a lot of things that really kind of isolate us.
And they set us apart and God doesn't desire,
God desires for us to be in relationship.
Another psychologist named Martin Seligman,
I'll have this quote on the screen so you can read along.
He says in his book on this topic,
he says, in the past quarter century,
events occurred that so weakened our commitment
to larger entities, such as church, community,
government, extended family,
that as to leave us almost naked
before the ordinary assaults of life,
like disease, like breakups,
like let down, like disappointment, like failure, right?
We've lost our insulation to those things.
So where can we now turn for identity, for purpose,
or for hope?
When we need spiritual furniture to lean on,
we look around and see that all the comfortable
leather sofas, it's hard to say,
and stuff chairs have been removed,
and all that's left to sit on
is a small frail folding chair called the self.
We've separated ourselves from people
for the sake of pursuing our own happiness.
And then when life happens, when tough times come,
what do we have to lean on but ourselves?
No one else knows us well enough to come in and help.
No one else knows us well enough to come and encourage us.
And I know that I'm painting this extreme picture,
but we've felt this, right?
We've felt lonely.
We've felt moments where we're surrounded by people.
We have people in our classes,
we have people in our dorms, in our Greek houses,
but yet we feel lonely.
And I think that there's this picture of community
that God desires for us,
but we're too individualistic sometimes
to see it or to pursue it.
Say it really simply, you aren't enough for you.
I'm not enough for me.
I need other people in my life.
I need deep friendships.
I need people to know me deeply,
to know my likes and dislikes,
to know the things that hurt me,
and to know the things that disappoint me,
to know my hopes and dreams,
so that when those things don't work out sometimes,
I don't have to just lean on myself.
I can lean on other people.
I know I'll have friends there to come alongside me
and say, man, this can be okay.
I'll only point you in the right direction.
Let me remind you what God's doing in your life.
Let me remind you who Jesus is.
We need that community.
We are not enough for ourselves.
We need deep, deep relationships.
So from here, where do we go?
If that's the problem,
that we've somewhat become too individualistic,
and we fight too often for ourselves and our own happiness,
where do we go from here?
How do we start to merge back toward community?
How do we start to pursue community?
The second thing that we have to tackle,
the second thing we have to overcome
is this idea that church isn't about you,
but it is for you.
Church isn't about you, but it's for you.
We grew up also in a culture,
many of us, especially if you grew up in a Christian home,
like I did, I grew up believing
that church was something I went to.
Church was an event.
It happened on Sunday, and it was really boring,
and the pews were kind of cool to feel
because they were velvet, and I went to Nazarene Church,
and that kind of kept me occupied when I was a little kid,
but mostly it was really boring and dry,
and I couldn't stand it.
Like I would, Sunday morning would roll around,
this is how delusional I am as a little child,
and you probably, I don't think it was just me.
I don't think I was extra delusional.
I think kids think this way,
but I would lay in bed and close my eyes,
and I would think, okay, Sunday morning,
church isn't an hour.
If I just pretend to be asleep,
my parents will leave me and go without me,
and I won't have to go to church.
I'm like four years old, right?
I'm thinking I won't have to go to Sunday school.
The kids are weird, and I don't want to do felt boards
anymore, please don't make me,
and I'm thinking if I just pretend to be asleep,
my parents will leave me alone as a four-year-old,
and never happened, never happened,
but I tried every single week to get them to leave me,
and then one day I was old enough to be alone,
and they did leave me, and thus started a dark day,
dark path for my life, but no, so church,
we've been told, sorry, that was a real long tangent.
Point is, we've been told all our lives
that church is an event you go to,
not something we are.
That church is to be this thing that we go to
for encouragement and spiritual uplifting,
for maybe connection with other people,
but church is not a part of who I am.
I'm not the church.
You're not the church, church is an event, right?
We've heard this, we've been taught this.
It's kind of intuitive, right?
Because church in America sometimes is painted
only as an event.
It's painted as this thing you go to on Sunday mornings,
and occasionally during the middle of the week,
if you have time, if you have time,
you'll go to a church thing like Village, maybe,
unless there's more important things to do,
but church has never, from my childhood experience,
never was talked about as a body of believers,
a group of believers who are the church,
who are the embodiment of God's people in this world.
But that's what we see in Acts 2.
They never use the word church in Acts 2.
It just describes a people that break bread
in their homes together, and eat together,
and have glad and sincere hearts,
and they continue to meet together,
and worship together, and they sell their stuff
for the benefit of the church.
And the first time in the New Testament,
this word ecclesia, it's Greek word that means church,
the first time it's used is just to describe
this group of people.
It's not to describe an event that people go to.
It's not to describe an event,
and so we have to believe that church is not about us.
It's not an event we go to get filled up for us,
but it's a people that we are.
It's a group of people who are all mutually connected
under Jesus, and under God as our heavenly Father,
and that we are the church, we don't go to church.
God didn't send Jesus to create an event
that saved people could go to.
He came to save a people group for himself
that would embody this in everyday life.
There would be the church in everyday life.
So church is this experience together in all of life,
not just on Sundays, not just in village,
but this experience together,
where we get to experience God in all of life,
and then get to show that love of God
that we experience to one another.
Man, I need some water, my throat is dying.
Sorry, excuse me.
Worst part of public speaking when you have to drink water.
So back to Acts.
What we see is no matter how diverse they were,
no matter how diverse they were,
these people were from all different kinds of countries,
they spoke different languages,
no matter how diverse they were,
they were committed to loving one another and to loving God.
In fact, one of the primary ways
that the Bible talks about the church
is this picture of a family,
that the church is to be the family of God,
that God would be our Father,
and that we as people who follow Jesus
would be brothers and sisters,
and Jesus is our big brother
who saves us from sin and death and gives us new life,
and then we follow all together with him,
our heavenly Father God.
And it's this beautiful picture of a family.
In 2 Corinthians 6, 18, Paul quotes
an Old Testament piece of scripture that says,
I will be a father to you.
This is God speaking.
I'll be a father to you,
and you will be my sons and daughters.
I will be a father to you,
and you'll be my sons and daughters.
He doesn't say that you'll go to an event on Sundays.
He says, you will be my sons and daughters.
And 1 John 3, 16, it says,
this is how we know what love is.
Jesus Christ laid down his life for us,
and we ought to lay down our lives
for our brothers and sisters.
And so, listen, I want us to begin to even use this language
if it's not too weird of brothers and sisters,
that you would view one another.
You would view the person next to you.
If they follow Jesus, and you follow Jesus,
and you both love Jesus,
view one another as a brother and sister.
That changes the way you treat one another, right?
They're no longer my classmate,
they're my brother or sister.
And I treat them differently.
They're no longer that person
that lives down the hall from me.
I treat them differently
because they're my brother or sister in Christ.
And so, it's this picture of the church,
not just being something we go to,
but something we are.
It's a family.
It's this family dynamic
that gives us a new outlook on all of life.
And what does a healthy family look like, right?
Cause it's hard.
Healthy families are hard to come by
in today's day and age.
I sometimes think there's one kind of family
and it's dysfunctional, right?
Let's be honest, like my family dysfunctional,
your family likely a little bit dysfunctional.
That's okay, you can admit it, it's normal.
Everybody's family is dysfunctional.
It's some level, right?
Nobody's perfect.
Okay, I think you got it.
What does a healthy family look like?
What does a healthy family look like?
I came up with a couple things
that I think healthy families demonstrate.
And we see this in scripture and healthy families.
We see this in the church in Acts 2
as they are a fairly healthy family.
They had their issues, but I think they're pretty healthy.
Number one, a healthy family shares everything.
A healthy family shares everything.
Okay, this one is tough.
This one's tough for us
because individualism has taught us
that we should have our own house.
We should have our own car.
We should have our own space, our own stuff,
our own money, all this stuff, right?
Healthy families share everything.
I remember when I was a kid, sharing was hard for me.
I know it's caring, but it's so hard.
And so I had this action figure.
It was the coolest action figure ever.
About this tall, taller than most action figures,
if you aren't aware, had a jet pack,
like jet packs are cool, right?
If you can fly with a jet pack, better toy right there.
And I don't even know, he wasn't, he was a mystery.
Like he wasn't from a cartoon or a superhero
or any like thing I knew of.
He's just this awesome toy action figure thing.
And I had to, it was the best toy ever.
And I kept that toy safe, right?
I didn't share it with other people
because I knew it would get broken.
And then one day I was feeling extra generous
and my friend asked to borrow two of my things in one week.
He was like, hey, can I borrow that action figure?
It's super cool.
I was like, sure, just keep it away from your little brother.
He doesn't understand how to value things yet.
He's three.
And I think I said this, this is maybe word for word.
I was like six at the time.
It's like, hey, don't let your little brother have this.
He'll break it, I swear, I promise you, he will.
And he said, no, no, no, don't worry, don't worry.
I'll keep it safe, I'll keep it safe.
And then he's like, hey, by the way,
can I borrow your bike too?
Because I saw that thing and that's tight.
It's like a mountain bike, but it's got the brakes up here.
It's on the pedals, right?
That's a step up when you're a kid.
When you get the brakes, the hand brakes, that's big time.
And it didn't have shocks, but it did have
those side handlebars that you could pull up on jumps more.
It was legit.
It was a sweet bike.
And he asked to borrow it and I was like, man, sure,
you can borrow this bike.
It has so many gears.
You're gonna love it.
It goes so fast.
It's not just one gear with the backwards pedal brakes.
It has legit stuff.
You can borrow it.
So one week I lent out my favorite action figure
and my bike, brand new.
And I said, okay, just don't break anything.
Just don't break anything.
I'll share it, but don't break anything.
Lo and behold, I come back the next week.
Arm ripped off the action figure.
The little brother got it.
And I knew that was gonna happen.
And he'd ripped the arm off his action figure
and it was never the same.
And I was ruined for sharing forever.
So slowly Jesus has been building sharing into my life.
Oh, and my bike.
He wrecked it into the back of a car.
He had shipped a tooth and I didn't feel bad at all
because he broke my bike.
He broke my brand new bike.
Sharing's hard, I get it.
But listen, in community, it's not my car.
It's not my money.
It's not my time.
It's not my stuff.
It's not my house.
It's ours.
And that's hard.
I get that because there's some times
where I don't want people in my house.
I don't want to share my food.
You don't want to share your food.
I get it.
But in community, if we value one another
and we say I'm gonna love you like Jesus has loved me,
that there's this new level of love
that allows us to share everything
and say you can take whatever you want.
Cause it's really not that valuable to me.
You're more valuable than my stuff.
And if you need it, you can have it.
If you need it, you can have it.
Healthy families, they share everything.
The next thing they do.
Healthy families, they speak with grace.
Healthy families speak with grace.
This is so hard.
A, healthy family speaks with grace.
This is so hard for us too.
That it's one of the hardest things in life
to speak in a way that builds one another up
and set of tears one another down.
Because it is so easy to speak in a way
that would elevate ourselves
at the expense of another person.
But in community, we don't have that luxury.
We don't get to degrade our brothers and sisters in Christ.
We need to learn to speak with grace.
A healthy family speaks in a way that brings love and light
and encouragement to the family.
That we would be people who speak in such a way
that our brothers and sisters are continually reminded
of the love that God has for them.
And the vision he has for their life.
Healthy families, they pursue healthy conflict.
This is also difficult.
These are all difficult.
I don't know why I picked such a hard list.
They get maybe a little easier to lower down.
Healthy families pursue healthy conflict, okay?
So conflicts unavoidable, right?
You're gonna have conflict.
People are gonna say stuff.
They're gonna do stuff that's gonna hurt you.
And you're gonna have to deal with that.
But healthy families don't run away from that.
They don't make it worse and exacerbate the problem.
They bring together the people
and they seek forgiveness and reconciliation.
They seek healthy conflict.
They don't run away from conflict,
but they press in and say,
no, we're gonna find grace here.
We're gonna find reconciliation.
We're gonna come together and be forgiven.
This happens a lot in my marriage.
Not a lot, sometimes.
Sometimes a lot.
It happens.
But we fight well, right?
We seek to fight well.
We try to do our best to provide an environment
where Kelly and I can converse in a way
that shows grace to one another
and seeks forgiveness and seeks reconciliation.
But it's unavoidable.
You're gonna have conflict.
If you don't have conflict,
I will question the depth of your relationship.
You need to have conflict sometimes.
And it's better to deal with it in a healthy,
God-centered way than to avoid it all together.
So healthy families, they have conflict.
In community, you're gonna have conflict.
Don't run away.
Don't run away when life gets hard.
Press into community.
God will show up.
Healthy families, they believe in each other.
They encourage one another.
Is that next?
They empower one another.
Healthy families, and I changed my notes right before,
and this is clearer for you
than having trouble remembering what I wrote down.
Healthy family empowers one another.
That we would know what our hopes and dreams are.
I wanna know the hopes and dreams of my people.
I wanna know the hopes and dreams
of the people in my relationships.
I wanna seek them out.
I wanna say, man, how can I encourage you
to become who you have been created to be?
I don't want you to miss this in your life.
I don't want you to miss where God's working.
I wanna empower you to become exactly
who he's created you to be.
And I wanna help steer you away from pitfalls.
I wanna help steer you away from bad decisions.
I wanna empower you to become who you're created to be.
This is what your family does for you, right?
This is what a healthy family does.
They look at one another and they say,
what can I do to be a blessing to you
and help you become who you're created to be?
And lastly, healthy families invite others into the home.
They invite others into the home.
When I was a kid, we lived on a street
next to two other families that had kids our age.
So there's a girl named Amber on this side
and a kid named Jared on this side.
We're friends, my sister and I are friends
with both these guys still to this day.
And I remember we would just run
in and out of each other's homes all day long.
All day long, kids in this home and in this home,
my parents, our moms were constantly on the phone
like, where are they right now?
Are they at your house?
No, okay, they're here.
I hear them, I hear them.
They just ran in the door.
So we were constantly running between these three houses.
And I remember this beautiful picture
because I knew that I was welcome in this home
whenever I wanted to be there.
I was welcome in this home whenever I wanted to be there.
And sometimes we got mad at each other and we'd say,
fine, you're gonna be like that, I'm gonna go home.
And we'd run home to our house.
But for the most part,
we saw these three homes as our home.
And community, this beautiful picture that there is,
if my home is not my home, but it's our home,
you're welcome there any time.
You're welcome there any time.
That we would live in such a way that we would say,
man, you're welcome in my space any time.
My space doesn't exist.
It's all about Facebook, right?
My space doesn't exist.
That was cheap.
I just threw that in there for fun.
But for real that we would say,
man, you can come over whenever.
I want you around my life because here's why.
I want you in my life
and I want outsiders to come into my life.
I want people who don't know Jesus to come into my life.
I want people as close to me as possible at all times.
And yes, I need some alone time sometime.
I'm an introvert, I get it.
But let's call that solitude.
Let's be intentional about that
and get some time with Jesus and get recharged
that we can go back out there and love people
and welcome them into our homes.
And so when we get this,
we live in community in a powerful way.
When we don't engage in community,
here's what's at risk.
We will routinely miss out on God's grace
and His love and experience in that in our life.
When we disconnect from community,
we separate ourselves and say,
I'm gonna fight for my happiness,
my individualism and my right to choose how I wanna live.
We disconnect from community
and we will miss opportunities to experience God's grace.
The primary way for God speaks to us
and moves in our lives and reminds us who He is
and encourages us to follow after Jesus is through community.
They gather together in their homes every day
to encourage one another,
to be thankful for what God had done,
to sing hymns and pursue God together.
When we disconnect, we're gonna struggle.
If you feel like you're struggling
in your relationship with Jesus,
it might be because you've disconnected from community.
And so you're not around other people
who can routinely speak His grace into your life,
who can routinely love you in a way
that shows His love to you and shows His grace to you.
We need to be in community.
We miss out on so much of God's work in our lives
when we're not.
Last thing that we need to pursue
in order to find healthy community
and in order to find this axe to community.
A healthy community always grows.
The community of God's people, the church,
is a living thing and living things grow.
And when living things stop growing,
like even when you're old, you're still growing.
Your nose and your ears are still growing.
Like you may not grow vertically,
but you're still growing in some way.
And that's kind of weird.
And it causes people to look strange
when they get really old, I get it.
But you're still growing, right?
So healthy organisms grow.
Churches that are healthy, they grow.
And I know that there's seasons sometimes
where things don't grow.
There's times and seasons where things don't grow as much.
But healthy things grow.
And the church is no different.
And what this looks like is this picture
that the church is to be a frequent blessing to believers
and also a frequent blessing
to those who are not yet believers.
There are two kinds of people in this world.
Those who know Jesus currently
and are part of God's family,
and those who are not yet part of God's family,
but he wants them to be part of his family.
Two kinds of people in this world.
And so the people who are part of God's family
should make it their business to love one another
and live in community in such a way
that it would show to the outside world
this amazing picture of God's love,
this inside out community.
That we would so care for the people inside the community
and love the people inside the community
that we'd be so full of the Holy Spirit
and full of God's grace and full of his love
that when we turn out to the world around us,
they go, man, I've never seen love like that.
I've never seen people love each other
and pursue each other like that.
There should be no sense that people
who aren't Christians yet aren't welcome here.
They should feel so welcome here
because of the love they see between us.
Because of the community they see between us.
They should see us routinely doing things
that are mind-blowing and counter-cultural
and so different that we're to be an inside out community
that shows and displays the love of God to the world.
In the Gospels, we see Jesus teach us in two primary ways
how we are to display God's love as people who follow him.
Matthew 5, 16.
He says, let your light shine before others
that they may see your good deeds
and glorify your Father in heaven.
Let your light shine before others
that they may see your good deeds
and glorify your Father in heaven.
This is what our mission trips are about.
This is why we do things in the community.
This is why we love one another through actions
and not just our words.
Because when we do these things,
the outside world looks into the church and they go,
man, I've never seen people sacrificed like that.
I've never seen people give like that.
There's been multiple stories of people in our church
who needed a new computer to do school,
needed a new computer to do jobs.
And the community came around them
and gathered together $1,500, $2,000,
and they had to have a Mac, so they bought a Mac, right?
And so they bought a computer for this person
so they could live their life and do their job well.
One student in WSU, I heard this story in our community
of a student who had this financial issue come up
and they couldn't continue to go to school
if they didn't get their tuition paid.
It was like four grand or something like that.
They owed the university this money
and they needed to pay this in order to keep going to school.
And the community said, no, we don't want you
to leave this community.
We want you to stick around.
So they gathered together the money
and they paid that guy's tuition that semester
so they can keep going to school
and be part of the community.
And so when the outside world sees that,
they go, what, you paid for his tuition?
I can't even pay for my own tuition.
You want to help me out?
No, they look at that, they go, man,
I can't believe that that you did that.
I can't believe that you would give like that.
And they see those good deeds and they want
to start asking the question of how do you do that?
What empowers you to do that?
The second thing is John 13, 34 and 35.
This is the last supper Jesus is gathering with his boys
one last time before he goes to the cross
and he has this message for them.
He says, a new command I give you to love one another
as I have loved you, so you must love one another.
By this, people will, everyone will know you are my disciples
if you love one another.
This is pictured that when we love each other
with the love of Jesus, there is no other love like that.
There's no other picture of love greater than that.
And when we really love one another that way,
the outside world looks at that and they say,
what happened to you that empowers you to love like this?
What happened to you that empowers you
to have community like this?
And then you go, man, it's not me.
You get this opportunity to say it's not me.
I have been loved by God and he loves you too.
What happened for me can happen for you.
What happened to me can happen to you
and I can introduce you to the people who know about this,
who can tell you about this.
I can tell you about this.
I can tell you about Jesus right now.
But something happened to me and it can happen to you
and I want it for you.
I want that for you.
I want you to know this community.
The church is to be an inside out community
that displays God's love and his works so powerfully
that the outside world looks at it and says, I want that.
I want that.
I want to be a part of that.
The church is not for perfect people.
We're imperfect people.
And so the outside world should look at us
and see a group of imperfect people
who just are doing our best to love each other.
We're doing our best to love each other and to love them.
And that should be so attractive to them.
So I want to close and just say this.
Practically this gets really difficult.
Last month in February we got the opportunity as a staff
to take 30 of us down to Oakland,
experience a community like we've never seen.
The closest thing on earth that I've ever seen
to Acts 2 community.
This is a church called Grace Point.
And you've maybe heard us talk about them before.
But they are an incredible group of people
because they actually take God at his word
and believe that Acts 2 is possible.
They all live in a very close proximity
so that they don't have to drive across town
to get to each other's houses.
Their houses are so open
that they can be in each other's homes all the time.
They have students in their homes all the time.
These people are in their 30s and 40s
and work jobs at Apple and Google
and all these tech companies in the Bay Area.
And then they come home to students in their homes
and they cook meals for them.
They say, man, you can have anything you want.
If you want to cook it, great.
If you're not, I'll cook it for you.
Any time you want, my life is open to you.
And their church is exploding.
Their church is growing so fast
that they have church minds all over the United States now
because they embody this Acts 2 community.
They say, nothing is mine. It's ours.
Nothing is mine. My time is not mine.
It's ours. My life is not mine.
It's ours.
And I will give anything so that you can know Jesus better.
I will give anything so you,
person who follows Jesus can know Jesus better.
I will give anything so that you,
person who doesn't yet know Jesus can know Jesus better.
But they believe that God's love transforms people
and that the community is worth fighting for.
So I don't know what that looks like for Resonate.
I don't know yet what that looks like for us.
But I know, I know that Jesus wants this for us.
I know that we can become this.
I know that we can be Acts 2.
And so my prayer for us
is that we would be able to set aside our desires
to be individuals
and let Jesus determine what it means for us to be
an Imago day, image bearing individual
and take our focus off of that
and instead put it on the community.
So I'm going to do whatever I can to be around
the people who follow God.
And I'm going to invite people as close as possible
who don't follow God
so they can see what it's like to follow God.
I'm going to invite people as close as possible to my life
so they can experience community and the love of God.
I want to invite the band up.
We are two weeks away from Easter
and I know that there are thousands and thousands
of students on this campus
who maybe don't have any interest in Easter at all.
But they know you.
They know you.
And you have been placed where you are for a reason.
You've been placed where you live for a reason,
where you go to school for a reason,
the classes you have for a reason,
and you have friends who need to experience community.
And I would love to see this beautiful picture of us
being asked to and just saying,
hey, I'm not going to invite you to church
and give you an opportunity to lie to me.
I'm not going to tell you about Resonate,
but I'm going to bring you.
I'm going to come to you and say, man,
would you come with me to this thing?
Would you come with me to experience community?
The life that I've found in this community
of people who love each other really well,
would you come with me?
What if we invited our friends to Easter
and gave them a chance to experience community?
And that requires us to be that community, right?
That loves them and loves each other really well.
But I'm so excited for the day when Resonate
is so axed to that it is mind-blowing
to every college student on this campus
and a WSU and a Central Washington University
and how else we would plant churches?
We can do this.
We need God's grace.
We need God's grace, but we can become
that kind of community.
Let's pray.
Heavenly Father,
man, I love that you have called your church
a family, that you call yourself a father
because there's power in that, God.
There's power in being a family that loves one another.
I'm so glad this isn't just an organization
or an event, but we are a people
that we have been changed by Jesus.
We have been given new life by Jesus
and that empowers us to love you
and to love one another.
And I pray, God, that you would make us
an X2 community, that we would say,
I will give everything I own.
I will give up my time. I will give up my energy.
I will sacrifice day in and day out
because I know that joy is found in community,
that I experience you in community,
that I cannot live on my own
and I will construct my life around community
because that's where you are, God.
I pray that for us, Jesus,
and I ask that you help us to live this out
small steps at a time.
In your name, amen.
