Jesus is the Vision

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Thanks for joining us today as you listen to a portion of the message recorded at Fine Life Church in Boulder, Colorado. If you'd like to connect with us further, you can visit us online at www.finelife.com.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

I want to say I'm on the journey with you. And I'm I'm not doing it from the front. I want to do it from the back. I don't want to help your guys love Jesus more. I want to help you guys just understand what God's doing in his world right now. We lose kind of context of the bigger picture sometimes when we're all caught up in our stuff, don't we? It's true about our marriages, it's true about raising kids, it's true about being the Church of Jesus together. And we live in phenomenal times. So I just want to say thank you for letting me spend time with you guys. I hope I get to know some of you a little bit more as well. And then I want to just uh pause for a second to introduce my family to you. Mindy is my wife. 47 years, people. 47 years. Woo! I said that to a grocer one day. She said to me, How long have you been married? I said, 47 years. She says, that's not possible. I said, what do you mean? She said, I'm on my I'm on number three. I said, well, there you go. Let's make that a really good one. I've got my daughter, Carrie, her husband Matt, and uh we've got Amelia, Madeline, and Sadie. My three granddaughters. Louisville people. Isn't that cool? And then we have a daughter down in Castle Rock, Amy and her husband, Christian, and four kids, three girls and a boy. Andrew and Pam are in Los Angeles working in Hollywood, doing set design for movies and advertisements. And two little girls. So we have eight granddaughters all in a row. I'm a blessed man. And then little Isaac came at the very end. Yeah, the caboose. So he's just the guy who holds his own, doesn't he, girls? I mean, he's an unbelievable little dude. He's learning to golf right now. So I went out with him and was I don't golf anymore. I'm too old. No, I'm kidding. I just I can't golf anymore. But it's so fun to watch this kid golf. And I'm thinking these days a lot about legacy, a lot about history, a lot about how do you you know I was born in 1952. I was a post-war baby. My parents were told they couldn't have children. Um, I was told by my parents that I could probably never have children. I went through some surgeries as a child. I I got all sorts of bad news. I was abducted two times before I was six years old. Um I born and raised in Japan. I had a Shinto priest and a and a sailor take me right out of my my parents' care and take off. Uh I encountered the demonic from the time I was three years old. I had nightmares every night about dragons chasing me into the pit of hell. I mean, I've had a crazy life. A really crazy life. I was so mad as a missionary kid, I decided I was going to, I threatened my parents and said, I'm going to take you off the mission field if you don't make us a family. Lived in dormitories. My parents were the dormed parents, which created confusion in my head, right? I've got 25, 30 people in my house, and I'm not allowed to live with my parents. I have to live in a in a dorm with everybody else. Yet they're the dorm parents. It was it was odd. Got saved at 17. The Lord delivered me of my anger and it began a process. I came to the United States in 1970, came full on into the Jesus movement. It was just blaring in those days. It was so cool. Went to Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, which was kind of the inception or the mothership of much of what happened in the 70s. Came into the Holy Spirit, got nuked when I was 19 years old, settled on the floor like bacon. Here's a little Baptist boy gets filled with the Holy Spirit, and my whole world changed. It's like, what on earth? Where have we been all this time? You know, with all this religious nonsense. And I spent about 35 years getting out of depression and getting out of my anger towards the church. I hate, I did not like the church. I want to know part of it. I was glad to find the Jesus movement because it was very, I was deconstructing a lot of what we knew church to be. And my poor dad was just, he's bald, so he didn't have hair to pull out, but he was frustrated, you know. What on earth? And I want to just talk to you real quick about two little turning points in my life. Um I've been a church planner since I was 23 years old. I um fell in love with the idea of being a pastor. I thought it was God's gift to the earth. I was anointed, you guys. What a man. Right? Start with 12 people, and two years later you have 800. You the man. And I I was young, and the Lord blessed us. All I can say is, He just took all of my stuff and went over my head. He just blessed us anyway. Sometimes you think you're being blessed because you're such a cool person. It has nothing to do with you. Right? And you start taking yourself too seriously, and then you encounter a small little obstacle called the cross. And then it all goes to hell in a handbasket. And for that we're grateful. Amen. I had two things. I was planting churches with the hippies in southern Oregon, and the Lord moved us to um Amsterdam, Holland. We lived in the red light district, raised our kids there. I don't have time. Oh, by the way, shameless advertising. Um I wanted to tell the story of my life, basically, and I wanted to parallel it with the story of the church. 1960s was the was the decade of the Spirit, 1970s was the decade of Jesus, 1980s was the decade of the mission movement, right? 1040 window, unreached peoples. It went nuts in the 80s. 90s, we were kind of redefining the church, the family of God. And then at the turn of the millennium, God began to reveal Himself as a father to the church. We started talking, whenever you get father, you get family. And so I wanted to just kind of tell this, my story woven into the church's journey. And then at the end of it, uh each chapter, we wanted to tell a little bit about lessons learned, right? You young leaders, what do you learn in each church? What are you supposed to be learning in your 20s? What are you supposed to learn in your 30s, 40s, 50s, coming from coming into our sonship, then coming into being fathers and mothers of the faith? I want to tell that journey for you. So this is a fun, fairly easy read. Then I get a little more serious on you. And now that we've talked about personal transformation and what God's up to to transform his church, I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of what the church was really meant to be by telling a story of three of my friends. So it's a story of a church in Kansas City, three 22-year-olds wet behind the ears. They're now booming in Kansas City. They're multiplying house churches all over the city. They're engaged with the city church, they're engaged with racial reconciliation, becoming benefactors to the culture. They're moving into dark areas of the city intensely. I want to talk about my church, my church friends in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who really had a bad rap on them because their pastor, very well-known guy, grew the church to 4,000 people and then he fell in sin. And my friend Roger took over. And when Roger took over, he took over a mess, and the church went down to a thousand people. Sound familiar? It's disheartening to lose people. Better to lose people than to lose Jesus. And so it went now thus, and it's a story how you take an existing church with a hierarchical structure and watch the Lord flip it upside down and turn it into a family on mission. Amen. It's about my friend Ken Yankee and his wife Lori and their kids, who were pastoring a 5,000-member church in Texas. And they he came to church one Sunday morning and he said to the Lord, I can't do this anymore. This is not what I dream about. Lord said, What do you dream about? So I want to terrorize neighborhoods with the love of Jesus. So he moved into New Haven, Connecticut. He moved into a minority community, and he literally turned the whole community upside down. Nutritional food for children, training people how to cook good food, growing food in school gardens, repaving all of the roads in the whole community. Jobs began to increase. Then they created an economic engine called co-working space. God gave my friend Ken the first, one of the first co-working space ideas in all of America. Gave it to him in a dream. And he began to put it into place in New Haven, Connecticut. And they turned that part of the city upside down. The mayor got involved, the governor got involved. God's people are being placed in cities to be light, light, salt and light for the people that are in so in need of the Lord Jesus. Amen. I could not have done this without Rick Killian, who's sitting right here. He's my editor. And many of you know Rick and Melissa, and I just Rick, thank you so much. So these two, these two are available in the back afterwards. So on this journey I was on, I uh I came up, I was we were planting churches, we were hanging out with pimps and drug addicts and Satanists and the whole nine yards. And I realized even then I was still struggling with the church. I would look at the church and I would see its hierarchical structure. People were going to church, but they weren't being the church. I saw that there was a sacred, secular thing, that what we pastors and leader types do was really sacred, and what the rest of you blokes were doing was kind of secular. And I thought, this can't be right. This just can't be right. Uh uh clergy-laity thing, right? The clergy and the laity. Where on earth do we get this thing? Well, actually, laity is from the Nicolaitans in Revelation 2 and 3, and it's a heresy. It's when God's people elevate men above Jesus and build what they build on personality. And the Lord just said, I'm getting rid of that synagogue of Satan. Woo! And I realized I had biases against the family of God. And I remember the Lord so clearly in those days say to me, if you want to bring change to the church, if you want to bring change to culture, just remember you can't change what you don't love. You cannot change what you do not love. If Jesus loved his church with all of its spots and wrinkles, if he loved it from the foundation of the earth, he was the Lamb of God that was slain. And he said to me, What excuse do you have? He said, Oh, it's so much more fun to criticize the church. It's a lot easier, that's for sure. You know, and then to distance ourselves. I'm not like those guys. No, it's his family. Those are our peeps. Those are our people. Methodist peeps, Lutheran peeps. As long as they now, not because they're in a box, but because if they declare the name of Jesus, doesn't matter what box they're in, Catholic box, Lutheran box, charismatic, full gospel, they're his family. And we get to love them and see them through redemptive eyes. Not from what they are, but what God wants to make each of us. It's how you raise your kids. Right? If you look at your kids the way they are right now sometimes, whose child is this anyway? Right? You gotta learn to see your kids, not through all the funny stuff they go through, but what they're gonna become in the spirit. Long story, another time. Got a lot of kids' stories. And then in 1998 or so, I had we had come back to the states, we were living in Sacramento, California, and we were extremely engaged with the whole city transformation thing that happened in the 90s. And Ed Savoso and a bunch of guys, we were going all over the place, the cities, here in the States, overseas, Asia, uh, Africa, Europe, and we were just doing the trying to get the Church of God to be unified and to pray together. And I remember, I remember saying to the Lord, we are in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I'll never forget it. We got 800 people in the room. You got pastors, you got business people, um, you've got uh a few government folk, a lot of intercessors in those days. It was a lot of great fun. And I'm sitting there and I hear this the church the way she is cannot reach the city the way she dreams. I thought, wait a minute. Here we are talking about kind of techniques of city transformation, lighthouses of prayer, doing this, doing that, uh, unifying. And then I realized, oh my gosh, she just undermined my whole thing. The church the way she is cannot reach the city the way she dreams. And I felt like the Lord said, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna clean her up, I'm gonna wash her, I'm gonna change her, I'm gonna make her like the Son of God. And I thought, oh, that sounds really painful. That sounds long stuck in my craw. And sometime later the Lord just began to affirm that that's indeed what he was doing. And I looked back and saw we had the Spirit Movement, Jesus movement, we had the mission movement, we had uh a big discussion of what is church, and then God began to reveal himself as a father, and I and I it became very clear to me that we were on a journey. God had us on a journey. It's an old journey, it's been around forever. But there was a new awakening, a new okay, right? We pray for revival. No one's ever just given me a definition of revival that I'm satisfied with. I've never heard one. I don't see it in the Bible. Are you shocked? A little bit. Spirit, come down, spirit come down, break these walls down, right? We just sang that. The first part of any renewing or reviving of God is deconstruction. We have a picture of, oh, hallelujah! We're gonna get filled with the Holy Ghost, and then we're gonna run all over and cast demons out and do all this fun stuff. Good luck with that. There has to be a personal and a collective deconstruction of everything we've known until we get back to a foundation founded on the Son of God. So I want to talk to you this morning about. You know, yeah, but and then it's like yah but like there's supposed to be something else. Well, you know, no, there's no well buts. That's it. Jesus, the person, the son of God on his throne, is the vision. That the eyes of your heart might be opened, that you might understand the hope of his calling, the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints. Which he wrought when he raised him to the right hand of the Father, full of power. Why did he go up? To give you a picture of who he was and what he wanted to do on his earth. Okay, so Jesus is a vision. Next slide, please. Now, hold tight, fast in the seat baths, boys and girls, because we're we're gonna I'm gonna give you quite a bit of content this morning. Is that okay? And my assumption is that I may be back someday to kind of flesh it out a little bit for you, but that might be a wrong assumption after we're done this morning. Okay, can't change what we don't love. We have that next one. God's family, God's church was was built on the genetic of the Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They had a conference in heaven and they decided, you know what? Let's make man in our own image. What do they and what do they do? Of course, we talk about Adam and Eve being the first uh couple, the first marriage. They were also the first family. What does the Trinity always birth? Whatever it does on earth, it births family. Family is very different than an organization. Very different. It looks different, smells different, and it runs different. And so Father sent his son to get a family bride. He wants his family, he wants a bride. Adam and Eve broke the family through the curse. Jesus was sent back by the heavenly family to recover all that was intended to be on earth in the first place. So Jesus comes in and he began, he had this message which the Jews just simply didn't get. That he was the Messiah. He didn't come out and say it in so many words, but he proved it. And that he had come to build a new community. Eventually we realized it was of Jews and Gentiles. This was really hard for the Jews. They had such a Jewish-centric view of life. Everything was Jewish. Everyone else was out there. They had the real God, they had the real law, they had the real thing. And the Lord basically said to them, You got a problem, guys. You go the world over looking for a disciple, and when you find him, you make him twice the son of hell that you are. Ouch. You whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones. What was the greatest difficulty that Paul had as an apostle? Often one of the greatest difficulties were the Judaizers. It was the Jewish church that wanted to make the Gentile church like Judaism. Always going backwards, always missing the revelation of that God said, I want a new community, I want it to be of every tribe and every tongue and every nation. I want men and women. I want black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. And then some. I want them all. They're my kids. I lost them. I want them back. My son came to get them back. The early church genetic. Why do we do this? Why do we go back to the early church? Because that's the genes. That's our genes. That's our genetic pool. That's what the DNA got going. Now there's a difference between a form and the substance, right? The form is so important. The actual lifeblood of something. The genetic code is something else. The way it looks outside is not is important, but not as important. Look at yourselves. You've got human genetics. Everyone in this room has got human genetics. Now look around. There's not a person here that looks like anybody else. So the the outside will look a little bit different. And that's true for churches. The genetic inside needs to be the same, but outside it needs to look a little bit different. The early church genetic was that it was birthed and born in the house. It was birthed in the home. Why? Because the home is where the family is. What did God create the church to be? The family. Where does the family do life? In the home, in the neighborhood with everyday people. And so what we see happening is that they had a genetic that you'll see all through the first two and a half hundred years of the church, is that they continued devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayer. Sounds like a little formula. It kind of is actually. It was what the family did when it got together. Apostles' teaching, very simply, was Jesus, the Son of God, walked on the earth, and when he went to heaven, He was not dead. He kept talking. And it says in Acts 1, what Jesus began to do and say, and then he writes 28, Luke writes 28 chapters on what Jesus kept doing and saying. He wasn't dead, he was still alive. And while he was directing things from the throne room of heaven, he was passing it on to some rascals named apostles and prophets. And they became the ones that received this new mystery of salvation. And they began to lay that as a foundation in the church. So the very early church, what they were passing on were the stories of Jesus. And as time went by, they began getting revelation. And adding to the stories and the life of Jesus, they actually began to understand how the household of faith was to live A together and B in the culture. Okay, so I want to unpack that just a little bit for you. Church life was in the home. Did you know there was not a Sunday gathering? For 300 years there was no gathering in the church. How can that be? So when Paul's writing to, let's say, the church in Ephesus, who is he writing to? When he's writing to Corinth or Galatia, who is he writing to? He's writing to a network of churches that were meeting in the homes. And those network of churches were house churches who were led by elders who created a cluster of house churches, a family of families. And then the apostles and the prophets would kind of come and go. They were translocal, they were helping to equip the local leaders. And it's a totally different framework than what we're used to. What do we do about it? We're very Sunday centric these days, aren't we? Have been for 500 years since the Reformation. Very centered on the gathering. Is there something intrinsically wrong with gathering? No, that's what I mean. The form is not what's important, it's the genetic underneath the form. Let me explain to you. We'll keep going. Next slide, please. So in this apostles' teaching, let me just break this down for you. The apostles' teaching is the word that you'll see in the New Testament faith, instruction, teaching, the deposit, all the same word, Didoscalos. And it simply means what Jesus passed on to the apostles and prophets to lay that foundation into the church. What we have so often is people just teaching topics. Right? If you've ever been a teacher like this up front, you kind of you're always praying and ask the Lord, what topics do we give our people? People don't need topics. People need bread from heaven so that we are deconstructing people's goofy ideas, all of us, about what we're supposed to be as the family of God. And quit idolizing leaders and go straight to Jesus. And then you honor leaders without idolizing them. You got honor. Got honor everybody. We need an honor culture. That's just been a beautiful Danny Silk, just done a beautiful job, and how we can understand all that. But what they were passing on was, first of all, the charigma. Kerygma just means the proclamation. I want you to proclaim the gospel. I want you to get it out of your mouth and proclaim it. The simple gospel is that Jesus, the Son of God, was sent by the Father. He lived on this earth. He lived a life that you could not live to prove to you that if you loved him and came into his kingdom, he would give you his life. Man. We don't copy Jesus. Right? What would Jesus do? Well, he would be this way. No, that doesn't work. Have you ever tried to emulate Jesus? Right? It's a disaster. Paul said, the thing I try to do, I can't do the thing that I don't want to do, I do do. Who will deliver me from this? Well, Jesus did. He didn't come to improve you, he came to kill you. And out of death comes resurrection, and now it's no longer I but Christ. Whoa! Now this is getting serious stuff. This punctures every religious spirit. This punctures all the machinations of what church should be, all of the activity and the, may I say, religious crap. It's just nonsense. I have suffered the loss of all things that I might be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, but that which is by faith in Christ Jesus alone. I had young guys, older ones say to me, So where do you want to be? I believe God has given me an apostolic call. Wow, that's fantastic. How is that gonna happen? Well, we're gonna get power from on high. We're gonna move in the signs and wonders. And I'm thinking, good luck, pal. That's not the definition of the apostolic, that's not the definition of godly leadership. Paul said, I'm the worst guy God could find. So that through me his unlimited patience might be made manifest to all those who believe afterwards. What's he saying? If God can get me, God can get you. The mark of leadership in the church is brokenness. He says, What is it with us, apostles? We float in boats, they sink. Snakes jump out of the fire and bite us in the arm. We go into a city to preach the gospel, we leave the city, and stones are flying at us. You got you get desire to be some kind of great leader in the family of God? Get ready to be stoned. It's called the cross. It is the prerequisite for God the leader. And the premier example is Jesus. He suffered all these things that his life might go past the darkness of Adam's humanity that he had embraced and broke the chains of that thing and said, If I can make you free, you're free indeed. So the karygma was the gospel. He was born, he lived, he died, he resurrected, he sent it, and he's still living, and he's going to have an eternal reign, and we get to be there with him. Sounds like pie in the sky. So one of the things that God's doing in the church these days, he's disconnecting us from our cynicism about the reality of Christ. He's disconnecting us from all the language we get from culture. Right? We're being taught new things about sexuality. There's now 220 options, by the way, for you to pick from when you decide what kind of sexuality you're going to have. I mean, we could go on and on with social issues. I don't want to go there. But I just want to say to you, we get to love those that disagree with us. We get to live in a culture. Here's what we're told. If you don't agree, then you're racist. If you don't agree, you're sexist. You're my synagogue. Wait a minute. I get to disagree with you because I am judging you. I'm not condemning you, but I do judge. Because the spiritual man discerns all things. He himself is a discerner judge of no man. And then what I get to do is love you no matter what you're like. Right? We saw the high priest of Satan come to Jesus. How did he do that? Because we loved him. Did I agree with him? Not one bit. I was completely taken over by demonic power. And the Lord set him free. Because someone, my guys, my team, loved this man into the kingdom of God. You can disagree with people. This is why holding up a moral flag in a culture doesn't work. You know what? Sinners sinned. People do stupid stuff. People disagree with God all the time. If you're trying to conform them to your religious thing, you're going to be really disappointed. Leave them be. Let them do what they do. I don't care who they have sex with. We're going to love them. Just love them. I had a pair of neighbors that were gay. And they were confused by us. Why are you meeting with us? I said, I love you guys. But you can't love us. You're a church pastor for Pete's sake. I said, who cares? I just love you. Oh, we had wine together. We did the deal together. They were wild guys. They were fun. Right? We get to love the unlovable. We get to love the culturally blighted person. Isn't that great? Why? Because that's why Jesus got us. We're the worst guys he could find. So if God can get me, God can get anybody. Hey, bring them on, baby. I don't care who you are, bring it on. The love of God is greater. So we learn in Ephesians, the first three chapters of Ephesians, we learn something very cool. That, and my good old brother Luke here, right? Six blessings out of the book of Ephesians, chapters 1, verses 3 to 14. Was that good? Oh. See, that's what we're talking about here. Is that the Krigma tells us how to be like Jesus? And we begin to come into our gospel identity, right? I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for the power of God and his salvation, for in it is a come on, theologians. In it is a righteousness that has been revealed. What's our righteousness in God? See, the gospel's got power, but that power is to give us right standing with God. What is that right standing? Father made us sons. Spirit, Jesus makes us servants, and the Spirit makes us ambassadors. We're covered. We get with the Father, how to be in His presence. The Son teaches us how to live on earth together as servants to one another and to the culture. Spirit of the Lord comes along and says, Let me show you God's plan for your neighborhood. Let me show you God's plan for the city. Let me show you God's plan for America. I hope you're not taking political sides these days. You have a dual citizenship.

unknown 33:19

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 33:19

You're a citizen of heaven and a citizen of earth. If the citizen of earth part gets in the way, then you're going to be an impotent servant of the kingdom of God. Have your opinions politically. That's fine. Don't let it separate you from brothers and sisters of the faith. It's in our unity that we hear the king. Okay? No matter what you think of President Trump, don't believe any of what you believe until you've gone to the throne and asked Father what he thinks. Those of you that were anti-Obama, now you're thrilled with Trump, vice versa. We can't get into that political wrangling. Or would he be involved in politics? Absolutely. But it's kingdom emissaries. And make sure that we hear what the throne is saying about Earth's affairs. All right. It's a real different paradigm, guys. Okay, so then God gives us this amazing little word dedicae. So the apostles' teaching was both the proclamation. Peter gave five sermons in the book of Acts. They were pretty much charygma. And then they came along as the church began to grow. God was downloading his plan for them, and he began to show them what the teaching was, the dedicate. This teaching, again, came from the throne of heaven. Jesus was orchestrating his church and saying, This is my framework for the household of God. And he taught us how to do like Jesus. Krigma, it's how to be like Jesus. Here, it's how to do like Jesus. In the house, we love one another. In the culture, we love our neighbors ourselves. We learn to love in all directions. I have a lot to say about culture, being benefactors, doing good works. We won't go into that this morning. To get here, for this to be real to us, we have to be intentional about understanding where we've been as a church in the last 1700 years and where we're going. Why do I say 1700 years? So all the stuff we described about the early church went for about two, two and a half, up to about 300 years. And all of a sudden, the center of the church moved from Antioch and moved to Alexandria and Carthage. Roman and Greek thought begin to come in. When the thinking of the world comes into the kingdom churches radar, and we embrace that stuff, then it begins to alter everything. And that's what happened in the second, third century. We began to see leaders create a hierarchy. The hierarchy began to decide we need to have control over these people. So we'll gather them together in basilicas. We'll outlaw the meeting in homes. They were called love feasts. They outlawed the love feasts, and they were told they can no longer meet that way. They had to come to the basilica. They were then decided to show that we are God's emissaries. We'll put robes on. And when we put robes on, we'll show them just what authority. And then because they're so stupid, we'll make sure that we get between them and God and we become their mediators. And they come to us for confession. And by the way, we don't know this singing to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs in the house. It just seems a little risky to us. So I think what we'll do is we'll start a school of worship leaders, they call them singers, and they had professional people standing on stages singing to the people, out of which we got Gregorian chants and all that stuff down the road. When the Reformation came along, not much changed. The clothing changed, but the framework inside was still the same. We had leaders leading a pyramid and people not equipping the saints for the work of ministry, but calling them to do church work. Very different. Leaving the roots, no love feasts, basilicas. Oh yeah, I gotta speak Latin. And then there was a hierarchy. Let's go to the next one. So what? If this is how we've been built, even in this day, we're using this framework, we're putting new clothes on it, but we still got some of the same framework. What's the Lord up to? What's the journey back to Jesus' design for his family? As I said earlier, it starts by taking us apart. Have you wondered why you got through such hard times in the church? Do you know God's completely, completely involved? There's a lot of humanity that gets involved too, right? Stuff. Humans doing human-e stuff. God's bigger than you. If God birthed vine life, God's going to stay with vine life. Our part is to align with his plan and his strategy and let him take us apart. Right? Have you ever dealt with people that have had a divorce? They need to begin to take responsibility for their own part in it. They need to go in and begin to get conviction from God. It's no different in the church of God. And so I just want to give you great comfort and say your brothers and sisters around the world are going through the same thing. I have the privilege of overseeing with a group of phenomenal friends of mine. These are not just associates, these are friends. We know each other inside and out. There's about seven of us here and twelve of us overseas. We oversee a network of church plants. We both plant new churches and we help try to help to reform the existing church. And these are my the best friends in the world. We know each other inside out. We laugh together. We drink adult beverages together. We uh have been all over the world together. We're all gathering in Belfast in October. We're gonna we just do life together. It's absolutely fantastic. But we've learned something really phenomenal. That building everything on a church structure doesn't work. It's not about the church, it's about the kingdom of God. The church are the kingdom people, but we've we've built churches. We go to church, we give tithes to the church, we send our kids to the church program. It's church, this church, that, church, this church that. And it's all very centered, usually in a gathering place. God is deconstructing that, and he's beginning to teach us. Every one of your homes is sacred. Some of your homes need to be a place where others are gathered to learn about Jesus and multiply his life around. Not all of you, but many of you. Every home should be consecrated to God as your piece of the church in that neighborhood. Amen? We have been eaten alive by church centrism. There's nothing wrong with gatherings like this, right? There's a body part. This is my forearm. This forearm, if all it was was a forearm and wasn't made up of cells, it wouldn't be a forearm. It could look like one, try to sound like one, but it'd be a dead one. Because you got to have cell life to create a body part. So we are members of one another, and we're divided not only just in parts, but in the cellular level is where the life is. And cells multiply and divide and spread and grow. And so gatherings that are a reflection and a celebration of a multiplicity of homes that are actively doing Acts 242. Steadfast Apostles' Doctrine, Breaking Refellship Prayer. These are the ones that we will begin to see have great life on them. Right? There's not a pastor alive who doesn't count numbers on Sunday. We're a little low today. I'm meeting with a particular pastor in Colorado Springs that has 2,500 people in his church. And we have this conversation. He says, Well, last week we had, you know, we were down a little bit because of the summer. I said, Who cares? Who cares? All I want to know is, are the 2,499 actually doing life in their homes and at work and in the neighborhood? That's what I want to know. I don't care what you do on Sunday, you can be a total fraud, and no one would know. Smile and do hallelujah, thank you, jays. And then you walk out the door and you go watch pornography. How would I know that you're doing that or not unless I'm connected to you? I know your heart. And I can call you on it. You can call me on it. John, how's your thought life going? It's been a rough week. That's what friends do. Amen? That's the level of fellowship. The word fellowship just doesn't mean having a fellowship hall and eating crumpets and drinking tea. It's a beautiful word that means sharing in a family enterprise. Sharing in the family enterprise. God has given us a global enterprise, and we share in that enterprise by sharing Christ, sharing food, sharing the Kansas City Chiefs. I had to get that one in. Yeah, baby. Let's go back just a second. I want to make sure I cover that. Um I think you hear what I'm saying about a network of families. And it find lives to be healthy. Uh you guys have been working on discipleship and the cohorts right direction. That's the stuff. You ever have do you guys have Mr. Potato Head in your house? Oh, Mr. Potato Head, fantastic fellow. Yeah, so the problem with Mr. Potato Head is he comes in parts. And even when When you put his nose on and get those big stupid lips on him, and the glasses and the big old nasty ears that poke out, he's still not a potato. Because he is the life in him. A potato is a potato genetically, and it will reproduce potatoes. Mr. Potato Head is an amalgamation of good ideas. It's a replica. An avatar of the real thing. And that's what we've done in church. Well, you know, Jesus said we should be. Okay, plug-in discipleship. Whoop! Plug-in training. Plug-in evangelism.

unknown 44:40

Whoop!

SPEAKER_02 44:41

And then Peter's out. We wonder what happened. It's Mr. Potato Head. Genetic life comes from a change from inside. Comes from the cross, comes from resurrection, comes from ascension, outpouring of the Spirit, and we begin to move forward and we create a real potato. The church is never built on a pastor. There's not one biblical example of a person leading a local church. Not one. And yet we want we want the man, you know, with the anointing and the glory. Please. That's a recipe to get zapped. God wants leadership to be co-shared. There will almost always be a leader amongst leaders. Almost always. Even in a plurality of eldership, there is a leader amongst leaders. But it's not that leader's role to go to the mountain and get the word of God and come down and tell everybody. The days of Moses are over. This is the time for that body of men and women to hear God together. That's what makes a difference. Plurality is we're equal in value, we're different in gifting, and we we're given authority because we're servants. You don't wave authority at people. Well, the elders said. So what's our goal? We gotta invite Jesus to be the head of the church again. I say this to all my guys. We are headless without Him. He's the only head. Next slide. And then we'll land the plane here. Man, you guys have been patient. Thank you. Appreciate it. God's deconstructing us so He can put us back together. So every thought, where do you get your ideas? Where did you get the idea that church should be this way? Where did you get your idea that you're in an upward trajectory to be a really cool person? And by the time you're 30 years old, you'll really be like Jesus. I thought 30 is great. Jesus was entered his ministry at 30, he'll be really anointed, and I thought, me too. Okay, by the time I was 30, I had been kicked out of four ministries in three years. I'd been told I had no measurable spiritual gifts. No measurable spiritual gifts. None. Zero. I was still struggling with depression. I was no Jesus on the ground, believe me. And God has redeemed all that. He just redeems it. And I look back, it's like a badge of honor. I was rejected four times by three ministries because God had better plans for me. You cannot figure out what your future is. And so God is calling us to take every thought captive of the obedience of Christ. Let God have at it. And the entry to the change is repentance. It's just simply agreeing with God that we're going to do it his way and we're going to change our way. And sometimes the word repentance has such a heavy feel to it. Doesn't need to. It's a beautiful thing. It's like surgery that comes in to cut something out that's actually hurting you. That's all it is. What are some of the things that I believe God's calling us to repent from these days? Idolizing the past. Well, you know. We used to be the cat's meow in the Boulder Valley, you know. We were, you know, the place, whatever. I get so dramatic, I'm sorry. Your past is past. When the old boys came out of captivity and they went to Ezra's temple and they looked at it, they start to weep. They said, Oh my gosh, it's a horrible thing compared to what it used to be like. And what did the Lord say? The prophet. The glory of the latter should be greater than the glory of the former. Always. If we repent, we come into his presence, we let him begin to reshape us into his image, then we can say, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, that was nothing. Our destiny is going to be a lot greater because we won't be so aware of ourselves. We're going to be in love with Jesus all over again. Amen? How about idolizing or comparing leaders or movements? How many of you love Bill Johnson? Oh! What a gift to the church of God! How about Jesus culture? Pretty cool, right? Hill song. I mean, you can just go down the different leaders have had kind of different decades where they kind of shone and their churches became saddled back back 10, 20 years ago. You know, we've always had those 70s, Calvary Chapel, Cal Smith, you know. Where are they now? The church moves on. Bill and his guys are gonna someday move on too. Even old Peterson here is just gonna fade from the scene. Praise God. Right? Do not idolize God's men and women. You do not want to be like Bethel. You're not Bethel. Right? Same genetic, different package, and even the emphasis of the genetics will be different. The gifts will be different. You'll have a different flavor than any other church around. How about factions in the church? The Corinthians had a problem. I'm of Paul, I'm of Peter, I'm of this guy, I'm of Apollos. If there's factions in this church and you want the Lord to get a hold of those, just invite him. And then duck. Just duck, woo! Because he'll go after it. If there's things unsaid over 10 to 15 years, you need to go to each other and say it. And you need to say it in the spirit of humility and to be willing to receive something back from that person. Amen? Young and old, there's a division between the old and young sometimes. There's a division between male and female. We have even gone so far as to shape the church in our own image. Well, you know, the way my dad did it, he was a pastor for 35 years. Who cares? We have these opinions about how it should be. And the Lord just wants to say to us, please let me shape my church in my image. And relinquish these ideas. Right? I know as a pastor, I used to get notes. Well, you know, that thing you said was just full of crap. Whatever. Probably true. If it was true, own it. You know you're right, sister. Thank God you're praying for me. I wasn't really praying for you. That was just criticizing you. Oh, well, get that right. Right? And so what we've done is we've got this idea of, I'm going to ask you a question. Where did you get your idea about what the church should be? We get to get it from scripture. We get to get it from the Spirit of the Lord. When the Spirit and the Word come together, we get the life and the plan of Jesus. Amen? I want to ask you as my life to ask the Father for that. Ask him to reset the bones, to reshape you in the way that He's got intended for you as a local community, a family of families on mission. And to go on that journey together. You've lost some people here. We'll let God figure that out. And I want to say, as part of that process, make sure that you're in right standing with those that have left. If there's any part of that that you need to get right. Sometimes it's just a matter of saying some things. Sometimes the Lord will say, Not yet, they're not ready. Don't make it a law. Well, we gotta go talk. You know, it's not that. Hear the Lord and be willing just to reconcile where you need to be reconciled. And the goal is not to get people to come back, the goal is to get in right standing with the Father. That's it. You can't grow this church. Neither should you be discouraged if things seem to be kind of diminishing because He is tearing you apart to put you back together. To make you a transforming people again. Last scripture. What's the goal here? Until we all reach unity in the faith. That's the dedicated. And in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Don't you love that language? So, Father, thank you that you love us. Thank you that you're the head of this church. Thank you that you're reshaping. Thank you that you're tearing down. We want you to shake everything that can be shaken. We want you to rebuild everything that needs to be rebuilt. And we want to fall in love with you. We want Jesus to be the center of all that we do. And everybody said. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 54:57

That's a hard one to recap. Hey, let's sand, let's sand together across this place. Um, I'm guessing that there's uh