Kelly Kinder: So today, I want us to take a look and begin it in Genesis, chapter 3, and if you want to get your Bible ready, or watch up here, we're going to pray and we'll get right into it.
Kelly Kinder: So, father, we're just grateful to be here together, all together in one place, and so we don't discount that.
Kelly Kinder: Lord for what you want to do, lord today in each of our hearts, lord for what you want to do, lord today in each of our hearts, we ask you, holy Spirit, even now, lord, that you'd be glorified, the Holy Spirit, you would glorify Jesus.
Kelly Kinder: Lord, you'd open up your word and teach us.
Kelly Kinder: That's what you say.
Kelly Kinder: You will do so.
Kelly Kinder: Open our minds and our hearts and our understanding to receive your word, and may it transform us for your glory, in Jesus' name, amen.
Kelly Kinder: Well, let's look in Genesis, chapter 3, and we're going to look at verses 6 through 13 and begin right there.
Kelly Kinder: It says so.
Kelly Kinder: When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
Kelly Kinder: Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
Kelly Kinder: And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
Kelly Kinder: But the Lord called to the man and said to him where are you?
Kelly Kinder: And he said I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.
Kelly Kinder: He said who told you that you were naked?
Kelly Kinder: Have you eaten of the tree of which I command you not to eat?
Kelly Kinder: The man said the woman, whom you gave to be with me.
Kelly Kinder: She gave me fruit of the tree and I ate.
Kelly Kinder: Then the Lord God said to the woman what is this that you have done?
Kelly Kinder: The woman said the serpent deceived me and I ate.
Kelly Kinder: And one of the greatest challenges that we face as Christians and in the life of the church, I believe, is how to deal with our desires.
Kelly Kinder: This passage is about the desires of the man and woman at the beginning and if you look at that passage, there's nothing inherently wrong with food and beauty and wisdom.
Kelly Kinder: But as St Augustine said, he said sin comes when we takea perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God.
Kelly Kinder: Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in us.
Kelly Kinder: All these good things and all our security are rightly found only and completely in Him.
Kelly Kinder: And you see, as we go through this, we consider Adam and Eve's story.
Kelly Kinder: As John last week told us that we were created for community, we're made for it.
Kelly Kinder: There came the fall and then God comes along and he's going to do something significant to change all that.
Kelly Kinder: You see, on our own, we're relentlessly self-focused people and we tend to be that way simply because of our fallen condition.
Kelly Kinder: And we don't really want to be, if we're honest.
Kelly Kinder: We don't want to be discovered for who we really are, and so we hide, just like Adam and Eve.
Kelly Kinder: But thankfully, god doesn't leave us where we are.
Kelly Kinder: God uses community to do some things in our lives.
Kelly Kinder: He uses community to expose our sin, to invite us to believe the gospel which Tyler clearly presented to us today, and he uses it to allow us to work change gospel which Tyler clearly presented to us today, and he uses it to allow, to work change in our lives, and that doesn't come in any other way.
Kelly Kinder: It brings change more deeply to our attitudes, our values, our words, our actions.
Kelly Kinder: And what is he doing?
Kelly Kinder: He's calling us out of hiding into the light of his glory, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.
Kelly Kinder: So today we're going to talk about how the gospel shapes us in community.
Kelly Kinder: That's the title of the message this morning.
Kelly Kinder: So think about it.
Kelly Kinder: Desire is a really it's a very powerful force in our lives, and I think it's the core of why we sometimes act like we do in church and in our society, in our workplaces, in our marriages, and our desire sometimes gets the best of us, and the reason we get into trouble is because our desires simply are not aligned with the desires of God, and the enemy deceives us in that way.
Kelly Kinder: So let's look at it.
Kelly Kinder: There are three things I want to focus on, three big ways of looking at this this morning.
Kelly Kinder: The first one is this our desires distort reality.
Kelly Kinder: Our desires distort reality Looking back at Genesis 3, what happened?
Kelly Kinder: Satan appealed to their desires, and that's how he still operates to deceive us today, even though we have the gospel.
Kelly Kinder: The enemy still works in our desires and through our desires to deceive us and to cause us to miss what God has for us.
Kelly Kinder: You know, this past Friday I went with some friends out to a restaurant and after we got finished with the meal I went up and got ready to pay the bill and talked to the man paid my bill and I was looking as he was getting the register and getting it finished, there was on the wall a $20 bill taped up on the wall.
Kelly Kinder: It was just taped right there and I looked a little closer and it said on the bill not good.
Kelly Kinder: And I thought hmm.
Kelly Kinder: And so I asked the man.
Kelly Kinder: I said is that a counterfeit?
Kelly Kinder: He said yeah, it is.
Kelly Kinder: So I got up closer because it looked just like the real thing.
Kelly Kinder: I mean, I was like I couldn't tell the difference.
Kelly Kinder: And so I got up a little closer, saw the words more clearly not good.
Kelly Kinder: And I couldn't tell at all.
Kelly Kinder: I don't know how they picked it up.
Kelly Kinder: So I asked the guy.
Kelly Kinder: I said how did you know?
Kelly Kinder: He said fill the paper.
Kelly Kinder: And I began I put my fingers up there and felt it.
Kelly Kinder: And I began I put my fingers up there and felt it and I thought that's different.
Kelly Kinder: But boy is it subtle.
Kelly Kinder: Boy is it subtle and in the same way.
Kelly Kinder: That's the way the enemy works with us to make us think we have something that has value in it, and yet it's a deception.
Kelly Kinder: It causes us to miss the reality and sometimes what we do is substitute counterfeits for the real thing, which is God.
Kelly Kinder: It's important to note, as we look at this, by the way, that the image of God following the fall was not destroyed, but it was distorted.
Kelly Kinder: We didn't lose it, it was marred by sin.
Kelly Kinder: And so there is that opportunity.
Kelly Kinder: As God takes note of what Adam and Eve did, he pursues them and their pursuit sort of opened up a Pandora's box, if you will, that they couldn't close on their own, and yet God wouldn't leave them as they were.
Kelly Kinder: And so he calls out to Adam and he says where are you?
Kelly Kinder: Of course, adam didn't know really where he was, but God knew where he was.
Kelly Kinder: He's God, right, but Adam didn't know where he was in relation to God.
Kelly Kinder: He had hidden among the trees.
Kelly Kinder: And God says where are you, adam?
Kelly Kinder: And he asked that question of us how far sometimes we get away from the presence of God and we don't even realize where we are.
Kelly Kinder: Where are you?
Kelly Kinder: Where are you today in relation to God?
Kelly Kinder: Well, there's three significantly terrible things that come out of what happened, what occurred in the fall when they pursued their desires without God.
Kelly Kinder: The first one is this that the man and woman felt shame for their nakedness.
Kelly Kinder: That's what it says.
Kelly Kinder: They were naked and they felt shame.
Kelly Kinder: They weren't safe with each other anymore, and so we've all experienced that.
Kelly Kinder: You know, we think about people who might see us when we're most vulnerable and we don't want to share the things that are close to us, and we're afraid of what might happen if we did share, and they might say something that was really devastating and would make this wound never really get healed in this relationship.
Kelly Kinder: Go on in this way.
Kelly Kinder: That makes it terrible.
Kelly Kinder: So they felt shame for their nakedness.
Kelly Kinder: Second thing happened is that the man and the woman feel fear for their vulnerability Fear for their vulnerability.
Kelly Kinder: So what do they do?
Kelly Kinder: They hide themselves from one another and they use what do they say fig leaves to cover.
Kelly Kinder: Have you ever seen a fig leaf?
Kelly Kinder: It's really small, deceptively small, and what we use to cover ourselves in our sin sometimes is just a facade, it really doesn't do the job, and though we think it will make things better, we hide just like they hid.
Kelly Kinder: They hid in the trees.
Kelly Kinder: And, notably, this is the very first mention of fear in the Bible.
Kelly Kinder: Don't miss that.
Kelly Kinder: Where fear begins is out of the presence of God.
Kelly Kinder: So the third thing we see not only shame and fear, but the man and woman blame God and others for their sin.
Kelly Kinder: Boy, this is a big one, isn't it?
Kelly Kinder: Walt Brueggemann, in his commentary on Genesis, says this the speech of the indicted couple is revealing, for it is all I.
Kelly Kinder: Therein lies the primal offense.
Kelly Kinder: I heard.
Kelly Kinder: I was afraid I was naked, I hid, I ate, and the woman says I ate.
Kelly Kinder: Their own speech indicts them.
Kelly Kinder: He says so.
Kelly Kinder: It's a clear focus.
Kelly Kinder: It's clear that their focus has moved away from the God who called them to a paradise, to a focus on themselves, a preoccupation with themselves.
Kelly Kinder: And so I want us to sort of apply this idea of community into the church today, and I want us to begin with a couple of key distinctions here.
Kelly Kinder: This is in your book, if you've read it, but how we often view community, if you will, and it's between two words, between what is called functional and formative community.
Kelly Kinder: I put a couple of diagrams up here and the first one is about functional.
Kelly Kinder: What is functional community?
Kelly Kinder: Functional community you look at the diagram, you see the man who is at the center of the circle and you've got people waiting on him serving him.
Kelly Kinder: And functional community is our view of ourselves, with ourselves at the center, and we value relationships, knowingly or unknowingly, for how well they function to serve and fulfill our needs.
Kelly Kinder: And we come to church for that.
Kelly Kinder: What do they do for me?
Kelly Kinder: And if they don't function well or they aren't meeting my needs, I really have no need for them.
Kelly Kinder: And that's the dominant worldview in our culture, isn't it?
Kelly Kinder: It's all about me, it's all about me and my values.
Kelly Kinder: So the driving force that sometimes we capture in our own thinking is that we are looking for meaning and purpose and significance and we'll do just about anything to get it, including go outside of God's will.
Kelly Kinder: Problems and struggles and relationships result in what?
Kelly Kinder: And I've seen this and you've seen it in fighting or fleeing.
Kelly Kinder: How many people that I've seen come into churches I've served, who are here for a moment and the least little thing and they're gone.
Kelly Kinder: They're hurt, get hurt, feeling someone says something and they're gone.
Kelly Kinder: Someone didn't pay attention to them or didn't meet their needs because it was all about them.
Kelly Kinder: We're going to find that this is an important thing to consider.
Kelly Kinder: All of that reflects unbelief on my part in the power of Christ in me to stay and let God do a work that he couldn't do outside of community.
Kelly Kinder: Now let's contrast that with another way we can view community, and this is the way God desires us to think, and it's called formative community.
Kelly Kinder: This is about spiritual formation.
Kelly Kinder: And so now, instead of man being at the center, what do we see?
Kelly Kinder: Formative community?
Kelly Kinder: Let me bring that one up.
Kelly Kinder: Who is at the center?
Kelly Kinder: Christ is at the center, and so I value relationships in my life as part of what God's will is for me, what it means to change me and remake me to reflect His image.
Kelly Kinder: It's spiritual formation.
Kelly Kinder: So problems and struggles in relationships what are they seen as?
Kelly Kinder: They're not something to run away from or fight against.
Kelly Kinder: They're seen as an opportunity to change me, and so we come with that in mind to believe the promises of the gospel more than the problems that I struggle with, and to let the Holy Spirit begin to work and make changes and adjustments in our life that actually make me look just like Christ.
Kelly Kinder: By and by, to look just like Christ, you say well, wait a minute.
Kelly Kinder: I thought.
Kelly Kinder: I thought the hospital and I've heard it before it's a hospital for sinners.
Kelly Kinder: Yeah, it is, but you don't want to stay in the hospital forever, do you?
Kelly Kinder: None of us wants to be in the hospital forever.
Kelly Kinder: Maybe a day or two, but if we stay there a long time, we wish we were out of there.
Kelly Kinder: And so sometimes we can live in that state that I am being served and my needs are being met, I'm getting people to work on me and it's all about me.
Kelly Kinder: And I'm in the hospital, and I will grant you that there are times when we've been so hurt by places we've been that we need some time just to heal.
Kelly Kinder: But you don't stay there forever.
Kelly Kinder: You don't stay there forever.
Kelly Kinder: And the problem is and the Bible talks about it like this the problem calls it the flesh.
Kelly Kinder: Now, he's not talking about your skin and bones, he's talking about the self-life.
Kelly Kinder: And Paul, in Romans 5, describes it Romans 8, verses 5 through 8, he describes it as a mindset.
Kelly Kinder: A mindset the mindset on the flesh, he says, is death, but the mindset on the spirit is life and peace in Christ Jesus, and so our desires often distort reality because we're typically focused on ourselves.
Kelly Kinder: Now I want to kind of give you an illustration of this.
Kelly Kinder: I love one of this movie.
Kelly Kinder: Maybe you've seen it.
Kelly Kinder: It's called called what about Bob.
Kelly Kinder: And what about Bob is a movie about a guy who is dreadfully fearful of just about everything, and so he stays inside alone to himself.
Kelly Kinder: He never gets out because his fears have so co-opted his ability to be in community, and he comes to see the doctor to get the things resolved.
Kelly Kinder: And so watch this clip and then we'll talk about it here in a moment.
Kelly Kinder: Bob is a lot like us at times.
Kelly Kinder: I need, I need right, because it's all about us.
Kelly Kinder: You know, it's interesting as you go.
Kelly Kinder: Later in this movie Bob has gone to the seraphs because he's fearful and he's needy and he's a little crazy.
Kelly Kinder: But by and by, by, a little bit further into the movie, bob slowly steps away and out of his problems, out of his darkness, and at one point in the movie Bob has gotten to be a little bit better and he's began.
Kelly Kinder: He goes to this place to get healed, a facility, and it shows this scene where all the doctors and nurses are surrounding him and he is telling jokes.
Kelly Kinder: He's holding them in the palm of his hand and he says Roses are red, violets are blue.
Kelly Kinder: I'm a schizophrenic, and so am I.
Kelly Kinder: By the end of the movie, though, bob is healed of his social anxiety and he sort of makes his therapist crazy, or at least reveals that he's got an anger problem.
Kelly Kinder: But this is the way that the Holy Spirit wants to use the church.
Kelly Kinder: You see, our biggest problem, folks, is ourselves.
Kelly Kinder: Our desires distort reality, and so we ask them what is the real source of our problems?
Kelly Kinder: The Bible teaches us and this is our second point our desires are rooted in the heart.
Kelly Kinder: In other words, it all begins from within.
Kelly Kinder: So James 1, let's look at that.
Kelly Kinder: James 1, 14 and 15 says but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.
Kelly Kinder: Then desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.
Kelly Kinder: And notice, james says four things about desire here that I think will help us as we consider how we need to live in community together.
Kelly Kinder: The first thing he says is desire is personal.
Kelly Kinder: Each person is tempted by his own desire.
Kelly Kinder: See, temptations are tailor-made.
Kelly Kinder: What is tempting for me might not be tempting for you, and what that person struggles with might not be what you struggle with.
Kelly Kinder: And so what do we have to do?
Kelly Kinder: We have to give each other grace.
Kelly Kinder: Because we're not struggling with it Doesn't mean someone else isn't, and so our desires often lead us into temptation.
Kelly Kinder: And but from there it's because of the deception.
Kelly Kinder: And so these inner longings that we have and we all have them tend to pull us away from the Lord, and that's what happens, not only does our personal.
Kelly Kinder: He says a second thing that desire is powerful.
Kelly Kinder: It's powerful.
Kelly Kinder: He is lured and enticed.
Kelly Kinder: You say, how does that happen?
Kelly Kinder: He uses two metaphors here, from fishing and hunting.
Kelly Kinder: Fishing is like you know, you have a lure that is dangled out there for the fish, and Satan puts out there in front of you that what he knows is going to get you, what is going to get your attention.
Kelly Kinder: And I believe, as we've said before, I think Satan must study us.
Kelly Kinder: He knows what our Achilles heel is and he knows how to get our attention.
Kelly Kinder: And so there is that idea, that metaphor of a lure, and he also talks about a fishing.
Kelly Kinder: It's almost like he's saying that Satan not only lures us, but he traps us and we get caught up in it.
Kelly Kinder: And the cycle of our sin doesn't just stop with one little thing.
Kelly Kinder: It goes over and over and over till we're caught up in it.
Kelly Kinder: So what begins as a casual glance turns into an affair.
Kelly Kinder: What is said to us as a slight becomes a root of bitterness that grows up in us and we need to forgive.
Kelly Kinder: So desire is personal, it's powerful.
Kelly Kinder: And then he says a third thing that desire is progressive.
Kelly Kinder: Look at it.
Kelly Kinder: He says then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.
Kelly Kinder: So the metaphor.
Kelly Kinder: He moves it to the imagery of the reproductive process and by it he reveals to us the cycle of sin.
Kelly Kinder: Notice, it's a secret of events, sequence of events that follows one after another.
Kelly Kinder: So we have inner cravings.
Kelly Kinder: Those inner cravings turn into some sinful action.
Kelly Kinder: As I said, it doesn't often end with that one thing.
Kelly Kinder: He wants to get us and trap us in it.
Kelly Kinder: It goes where we are caught up in that sinful action and becomes a sinful habit.
Kelly Kinder: And then that habit turns into a lifestyle if we're not careful.
Kelly Kinder: And so that inner craving turns to sinful action, and then he says it ends in death.
Kelly Kinder: Undesire can wreak havoc in your spiritual life.
Kelly Kinder: Desire is personal, it's powerful, it's progressive.
Kelly Kinder: Then he says a fourth thing desire is perilous.
Kelly Kinder: He says it brings forth death, and I think this can occur in both the physical and spiritual sense.
Kelly Kinder: You might say well, that can't be as a Christian.
Kelly Kinder: Well, james is talking to Christians here, and so, in some fashion, sin kills spiritual life.
Kelly Kinder: What is going on with us is shut down, and it doesn't mean that we're spiritually dead or that we can lose our salvation.
Kelly Kinder: What it means is that there is a loss of life in the spirit, and in some cases, sin can even result in physical death, and I can give you a number of scriptures that speak of that in the New Testament.
Kelly Kinder: Let's look at this idea, though, of desire.
Kelly Kinder: What does desire mean?
Kelly Kinder: The word desire refers to any intense longing for an improper object, that is, anything that gets in the way of our pursuit of God.
Kelly Kinder: An intense longing for an improper object.
Kelly Kinder: Do you have any longings today that you know hinder your pursuit of God?
Kelly Kinder: Think about that, and I would imagine all of us do, and the Holy Spirit will pinpoint those and say let's work on that.
Kelly Kinder: Let's work on that want.
Kelly Kinder: You know, judy had a scripture this morning that talks about the Lord is my shepherd.
Kelly Kinder: I shall not want, we're going to get there.
Kelly Kinder: But we have to understand the problem right that our desires can cause, can wreak havoc in our spiritual life.
Kelly Kinder: So what does that mean?
Kelly Kinder: The desires?
Kelly Kinder: Then?
Kelly Kinder: There's good news, because we're not trapped by our desires.
Kelly Kinder: The gospel brings us hope.
Kelly Kinder: There's good news in the gospel that Christians' desires are shaped by and for God.
Kelly Kinder: See, when you come to Christ, the Lord doesn't just reform you.
Kelly Kinder: You're not like Plato and he's going to shape you like a piece of Plato.
Kelly Kinder: Guess what he replaces you?
Kelly Kinder: He brings new life to you, he makes you a new creation, and so he's not just reforming the old you, he's creating a brand new you.
Kelly Kinder: That means that you are no longer subject to the power of sin and you're not defined by your past.
Kelly Kinder: So those people who say, well, that's just the way I am?
Kelly Kinder: No, not anymore if you're in Christ.
Kelly Kinder: Christ invites us out of that darkness and those things that we need to be pulled away from, and he brings us into fellowship with him, out of hiding, out of fear, and he brings us into a relationship with himself and with others who struggle just like we do.
Kelly Kinder: That's what the church is.
Kelly Kinder: When I talk about community, I'm not just talking about the Lions Club.
Kelly Kinder: You can go to a number of places and find fellowship, but there's no place like the church.
Kelly Kinder: When we're together, something special and spiritual happens.
Kelly Kinder: Folks, there's grace in this place and God is moving.
Kelly Kinder: And so when we come into the light of the community, he begins to change our desires.
Kelly Kinder: He gives us his desire and it says he gives us both the desire and the begins to change our desires.
Kelly Kinder: He gives us his desire and it says he gives us both the desire and the ability to do his will.
Kelly Kinder: Philippians 2.13,.
Kelly Kinder: So that the Christian life is really about becoming who we are in Christ.
Kelly Kinder: So he declares us righteous.
Kelly Kinder: That's justification.
Kelly Kinder: But you know what sanctification is, which is what we're talking about.
Kelly Kinder: It's actually him making you righteous.
Kelly Kinder: So he declares that that's judicial.
Kelly Kinder: That's the way he sees you.
Kelly Kinder: When he looks at you, he sees Christ.
Kelly Kinder: But guess what?
Kelly Kinder: We all struggle in many ways.
Kelly Kinder: The Scripture says and so sanctification requires the Holy Spirit to work on us, to change us and to make us into the image of Jesus, and of course, that doesn't mean that we won't struggle, does it?
Kelly Kinder: And a true saying goes like this you've heard it you do what you want to do, isn't that true?
Kelly Kinder: You do what you want to do, and so what we should do is ask God to teach us and change us and give us his wants.
Kelly Kinder: We should ask him to give us the desires that are Christ's desires.
Kelly Kinder: That's a great prayer.
Kelly Kinder: God, would you make my desires line up with your desires?
Kelly Kinder: And I'll tell you when we make that prayer, we can't just say, well, give it to me God, zap me and make me like Jesus.
Kelly Kinder: No, we'll have to go to war with our desires to fight for that, to make it happen, we surrender ourselves and we cooperate with the Holy Spirit.
Kelly Kinder: Because why?
Kelly Kinder: Because it remains in our body, that old, unredeemed self called the flesh, as I talked about.
Kelly Kinder: It's still out there trying to pull us back into the old life, that's the dead life.
Kelly Kinder: And he calls us out of death into the kingdom of his beloved son.
Kelly Kinder: And we do that.
Kelly Kinder: When we receive Christ by faith, the Holy Spirit moves in and he begins to work to change us.
Kelly Kinder: John Piper tells a humorous story.
Kelly Kinder: He makes it up, but it's a story about celebrating his wife's 45th anniversary.
Kelly Kinder: And he fronts the story with a question he asked what should motivate a guy to bring flowers to his wife on their anniversary.
Kelly Kinder: So he says I bring my wife a bunch of a big bundle of daisies and I ring the doorbell, go to the door, ring the doorbell and my wife comes to the door and she says, oh, he whips out the daisies.
Kelly Kinder: Oh honey, why did you do that?
Kelly Kinder: Why did you do that?
Kelly Kinder: And I say it's my duty, it's my duty.
Kelly Kinder: Well, you kind of get the idea that that's the wrong motivation.
Kelly Kinder: And so he goes on, piper, he changes the story a bit.
Kelly Kinder: He has the same idea.
Kelly Kinder: By this time he rings the doorbell Happy anniversary.
Kelly Kinder: He pulls out the flowers.
Kelly Kinder: Why did you, john, why did you do that?
Kelly Kinder: Well, I couldn't help myself.
Kelly Kinder: Bringing flowers makes me happy, bringing you flowers makes me happy.
Kelly Kinder: And of course, again, it's the wrong motivation.
Kelly Kinder: But then Piper flips it to the last version.
Kelly Kinder: He has the same idea, but this time he rings the doorbell Happy anniversary.
Kelly Kinder: There's nothing.
Kelly Kinder: He says I would rather do than to be with you Makes all the difference, doesn't it?
Kelly Kinder: When you come to church every Sunday, is that your heart and mind God.
Kelly Kinder: There's nothing I'd rather do today than be with you.
Kelly Kinder: Brooke talked about our worship.
Kelly Kinder: That's what worship is all about, and here's the real thing.
Kelly Kinder: Get this thought If you change your desires, that changes your actions and ultimately it will change your life.
Kelly Kinder: If you change your desires, it will change your actions and ultimately it will change your actions and ultimately it will change your life.
Kelly Kinder: And the way that happens is that God changes our hearts and he does so in large measure, in community.
Kelly Kinder: So listen, church is not an option.
Kelly Kinder: For us who are Christians, it's essential, and we're not coming with a laissez-faire attitude saying what am I going to get today?
Kelly Kinder: Who's going to minister to me today?
Kelly Kinder: In fact, we don't go even.
Kelly Kinder: It's like who can I serve today?
Kelly Kinder: We go with Lord.
Kelly Kinder: I'm just here for you Doesn't mean we don't serve.
Kelly Kinder: It doesn't mean we don't love, but our primary focus is God.
Kelly Kinder: I'm so glad I can be with you today and that's why God asked Adam in the garden.
Kelly Kinder: He says because of Adam's being alone where are you?
Kelly Kinder: Where are you?
Kelly Kinder: And why is this needed?
Kelly Kinder: Because alone, you can't see yourself as you really are.
Kelly Kinder: I can't tell you how many times that I've been in community, in church, and you have too when someone kind of tells me the honest truth and I might not want to hear it, but if they do it in love, as the Scripture says, it makes me think about it and makes me evaluate is this really what I need to be working on?
Kelly Kinder: And so I brought today a block of wood and a piece of sandpaper, because sometimes we come to church and people that we come and get around are like spiritual sandpaper.
Kelly Kinder: But you know what God does Instead of us being.
Kelly Kinder: You know we feel it's abrasive to us what people say and sometimes it hurts and it doesn't feel good, but you know how God thinks of community and about the church.
Kelly Kinder: It's like I've got a rough edge and someone speaks to me and says something I don't like to hear and what happens?
Kelly Kinder: It's a little bit smoother In another sense.
Kelly Kinder: Someone says something encouraging to me and when I felt rejection or feel like I'm not enough or I lack hope, somebody says something to me and things get a little bit smoother, little bit smoother.
Kelly Kinder: Someone tells me something that is encouraging to me or really hard to hear and I don't want to do it, but he tells me anyway, and pretty soon all my rough edges are smooth and I begin to look more and more like Jesus Christ.
Kelly Kinder: That's what happens in community.
Kelly Kinder: Folks so important.
Kelly Kinder: All the stuff that God wants to heal can only be on the surface in relationship until you get into community.
Kelly Kinder: Christ's very own desires entice us to live as Paul describes it in Galatians 2, verse 20.
Kelly Kinder: He says I have been crucified with Christ.
Kelly Kinder: It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh.
Kelly Kinder: I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
Kelly Kinder: So it's no longer me who lives.
Kelly Kinder: Think of that.
Kelly Kinder: Christ literally lives in me and he lives in you.
Kelly Kinder: If you're a believer, and because Christ lives in me and he lives in you, it means in a very real sense I dare not waste Christ's life because he's living it through me.
Kelly Kinder: How is this possible?
Kelly Kinder: How do you experience Christ living through you?
Kelly Kinder: Well, he tells us later in Galatians 5,.
Kelly Kinder: He says but I say walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh, you'll not be that old self that no one wants to get along with, for the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit and the desires of the Spirit are against the Spirit and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other.
Kelly Kinder: They're in war with each other.
Kelly Kinder: Your old self is at war with your new self to keep you from doing the things you want to do, but if you are led by the Spirit, you're not under law.
Kelly Kinder: In other words, there's no rules and regulations.
Kelly Kinder: All there is, it summarized.
Kelly Kinder: Paul Jesus summarized the law and he says love God, love people.
Kelly Kinder: How do you know, then, if you're driven by your desires?
Kelly Kinder: Well, I would say one thing is listen to how you talk.
Kelly Kinder: Is it all about I, me, my and mine, what I want and what I need?
Kelly Kinder: Well, here's what he says later in Galatians 5.
Kelly Kinder: Now, the works of the flesh are evident.
Kelly Kinder: In other words, when you're living that way and your desires are running your life, your own selfish desires are running your life, it's obvious to everybody around you.
Kelly Kinder: It might not be obvious to you, but he says they're evident.
Kelly Kinder: The works of the flesh are evident.
Kelly Kinder: Note, underline the word or circle it works, works, it's effort to live like this.
Kelly Kinder: They're evident.
Kelly Kinder: Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like these.
Kelly Kinder: He's given a representative list of all these things that look like the self-life when our desires take over.
Kelly Kinder: I warn you, he says, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Kelly Kinder: And then he presents this contrast.
Kelly Kinder: But the fruit of the Spirit, it's not works anymore, it's fruit.
Kelly Kinder: And so you don't have to groan and strain to let the Spirit do His work in you.
Kelly Kinder: You, just you cooperate.
Kelly Kinder: The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
Kelly Kinder: And he says against that there is no law, because you're free to live in love.
Kelly Kinder: Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
Kelly Kinder: If we live by the spirit and I love this let us keep in step with the spirit.
Kelly Kinder: Baby steps, baby steps.
Kelly Kinder: Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
Kelly Kinder: Folks he's talking to the church here, and how often our own self can get in the way of what the Holy Spirit wants to do.
Kelly Kinder: We talk about revival.
Kelly Kinder: You know, revival comes in large measure when we repent of the things that are displeasing to God.
Kelly Kinder: I don't have any problems with me myself and I, I love myself.
Kelly Kinder: I can spend time with myself.
Kelly Kinder: We get along so well together.
Kelly Kinder: But put me with someone who rubs me the wrong way or says something I don't want to hear, or with whom I disagree, and guess what?
Kelly Kinder: Myself rises up.
Kelly Kinder: I might not say things, but boy, it's in there.
Kelly Kinder: And so you know.
Kelly Kinder: My grandmother used to say well, when someone was doing something that they shouldn't be doing, well, he's just showing out, we act out, we work out the flesh, we work out the flesh.
Kelly Kinder: But when we let the Holy Spirit control us, we surrender ourselves, we cooperate with the Spirit, say yes to God, and he begins to take over, even to the point of agreeing with a thing that we don't see but everybody else does.
Kelly Kinder: And sometimes that is so hidden.
Kelly Kinder: We don't want anybody else to see that we're living in unforgiveness or bitterness or hatred or disagreement.
Kelly Kinder: I don't like what's going on there.
Kelly Kinder: Well, I is the word that starts that very sentence.
Kelly Kinder: Right, here's the truth.
Kelly Kinder: I must be in community for my self-life to be healed.
Kelly Kinder: You want to be healed, you want to be healed.
Kelly Kinder: Invest yourself in the life of the church.
Kelly Kinder: And yeah, the church isn't perfect.
Kelly Kinder: Find me a perfect church and I'll leave Trinity and go join it.
Kelly Kinder: There's not one.
Kelly Kinder: Every one of us are flawed and fallen, and only because and through Christ Jesus have we the capacity to be conformed to the image of Christ.
Kelly Kinder: But you can't do that outside of community, and I'm not talking about just sitting and watching what goes on on Sunday.
Kelly Kinder: I'm talking about investing your gifts and your ministry that God has given you to serve the body and find out, you know what, if you do that, he's going to bring someone to you, that he's going to let work on you.
Kelly Kinder: Get ready if you do that.
Kelly Kinder: Speaking let me give you some examples Speaking against one another is a primary example of how we can act on selfish ambition.
Kelly Kinder: Here's what James 4 says what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?
Kelly Kinder: Is it not this that your passions, desires, are at war with you within you?
Kelly Kinder: You desire and do not have, so you murder.
Kelly Kinder: You tell me there's murder in the church and Jesus said if you look at someone or you think in your heart, you call that person out of hatred, a name you have murdered in your heart.
Kelly Kinder: You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.
Kelly Kinder: You do not have because you do not ask.
Kelly Kinder: You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions.
Kelly Kinder: Do you ever think that your prayers might not get answered is because you haven't dealt with the dark desires that you want to hold on to that word.
Kelly Kinder: War.
Kelly Kinder: There is the word that he's used in James 3 when he's talking about our tongue.
Kelly Kinder: And you know what we can do.
Kelly Kinder: We can slice up people with our tongue.
Kelly Kinder: We can use slander, we can falsely judge one another.
Kelly Kinder: We don't really know the facts, it's just the way we see it.
Kelly Kinder: But guess what?
Kelly Kinder: It might not be accurate.
Kelly Kinder: Well, the antithesis of that is Ephesians 4.
Kelly Kinder: Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouth, but only such as good as is good for building up as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.
Kelly Kinder: Are you spreading grief or grace by the way you talk about people in the community, to others in the body of Christ?
Kelly Kinder: Let me give you one other example.
Kelly Kinder: And you think of these words of jealousy, power, hungry, a desire for being first to be seen.
Kelly Kinder: What if your name was put in the Bible for one of those?
Kelly Kinder: And it was the only reference in the Bible.
Kelly Kinder: There's a man that that happened to His name was Diotrephes.
Kelly Kinder: And here's Diotrephes.
Kelly Kinder: This is what John says about Diotrephes in 3 John 1.
Kelly Kinder: He says I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will not welcome us.
Kelly Kinder: So when I come I will call attention to what he's doing, spreading malicious nonsense about us.
Kelly Kinder: Not satisfied with that, he even refuses to welcome other believers.
Kelly Kinder: He also stops those who want to do so and puts them out of the church.
Kelly Kinder: Here's a leader who was full of himself and he's remembered for being a self-seeking troublemaker, who's ambitious, who's proud.
Kelly Kinder: He's disrespectful of apostolic authority, he's rebellious, he's inhospitable, and his name is in the Bible simply because of that.
Kelly Kinder: So God sees all this he does.
Kelly Kinder: Romans 8, 13,.
Kelly Kinder: If you live according to the flesh, you will die, paul says, but if, by the Spirit, you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
Kelly Kinder: So what am I talking about?
Kelly Kinder: The Christian community is a training ground to help us all make war on sin in our life.
Kelly Kinder: Spiritual formation can't occur when you fail to participate in the community.
Kelly Kinder: Is that getting through?
Kelly Kinder: So what does it do?
Kelly Kinder: Christian community shapes our dark desires in several ways.
Kelly Kinder: Let me just run through these real quick in a short list.
Kelly Kinder: What does it do?
Kelly Kinder: It provides us accountability.
Kelly Kinder: It confronts us with biblical truth and tough love.
Kelly Kinder: It causes us to pray and intercede for one another's needs.
Kelly Kinder: It challenges us towards spiritual growth.
Kelly Kinder: You see somebody who's really going after it for God.
Kelly Kinder: Doesn't that motivate you?
Kelly Kinder: It offers role models and mentors and it gives us a sense of fellowship and community that we can't find anywhere else.
Kelly Kinder: There is no place like the church, even with all its flaws, and so as we walk with God, our desires get conformed more and more and aligned with his purposes.
Kelly Kinder: It leads for us to a life of joy, peace and fulfillment that can't be known any other way.
Kelly Kinder: So we focused this morning on our desires.
Kelly Kinder: What did we say?
Kelly Kinder: We said our human desires distorted by the fall distort reality.
Kelly Kinder: We said that those human desires are rooted in our human hearts.
Kelly Kinder: And we've said it's God who transforms our dark desires to make us have the desires of Christ, and he does that in great measure in the Christian community.
Kelly Kinder: So by engaging there, in the church specifically, what are we doing?
Kelly Kinder: We're coming out of the darkness into the light, out of the darkness into the light.
Kelly Kinder: And I say that because I have to intentionally do that.
Kelly Kinder: I intentionally come into the light so that my sin is exposed, so I can be healed by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Kelly Kinder: And let me say something about that word exposed, because that may frighten you.
Kelly Kinder: I don't mean that we're here to tell all your deep, dark secrets, and God doesn't want to do that.
Kelly Kinder: What is he saying?
Kelly Kinder: He's saying that God will let you see yourself as you really are, in light of who he is, and that only happens when we are humble enough to say God, show me.
Kelly Kinder: And we land this message by one other scripture and I'll be done.
Kelly Kinder: Looking at how this can happen.
Kelly Kinder: This is a great scripture.
Kelly Kinder: Just to meditate on this week 2 Corinthians 3.18.
Kelly Kinder: Paul says and we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord.
Kelly Kinder: Philip Hughes says Mankind is allowed to see not only the radiance, the image of God which was marred through the fall of man.
Kelly Kinder: Mankind is allowed to see not only the radiance of God's glory, but also the true image of man.
Kelly Kinder: And so what happens in community?
Kelly Kinder: You and I get repaired.
Kelly Kinder: We're broken, we're broken, and only Christ can put us back together again.
Kelly Kinder: You believe that.
Kelly Kinder: So this is our challenge let's all come out of the darkness and into the light this week and begin to let God do what he wants to do in us.
Kelly Kinder: Let's pray so, father, we're thankful that you don't leave us on our own, you don't leave us to hide and to be in places that are separated from you, that were ended up out of fellowship with you, and so I pray for every person here this morning, including myself, that, holy Spirit, you'd begin to pinpoint those places in our lives where we hide and try to keep things undercover, we wear masks and we hold on to things that are really, to be honest, dark.
Kelly Kinder: But, lord, we pray that you'd bring him into the light of your presence and that you would show us, as we work to live with one another in community, the truth that we can be healed In Jesus' name, amen.