Speaker 1: Good morning.
Speaker 1: My name is Heath.
Speaker 1: Uh, I'm one of your elders.
Speaker 1: I get the honor to read the scriptures.
Speaker 1: So if you could take your Bibles, electronic advices, turn to Mark 12.
Speaker 1: We'll be reading Mark 1228 through 34
Speaker 2: [inaudible]
Speaker 1: and it says, one of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating, noticing that Jesus had given a good answer.
Speaker 1: He asked him of all the commandments, which is most important, the most important one answered, Jesus.
Speaker 1: Is this here?
Speaker 1: Oh Israel, the Lord our God.
Speaker 1: The Lord is one.
Speaker 1: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.
Speaker 1: And second is this, love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker 1: There is no, no commandment greater than these will said teacher.
Speaker 1: The man replied, you are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him to love him with your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.
Speaker 1: When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God.
Speaker 1: And from then no one dared to ask him more questions.
Speaker 3: Good morning.
Speaker 3: Uh, I wanna thank Jay again for his comments earlier.
Speaker 3: I really do believe it was a prophetic word.
Speaker 3: Uh, I hope you heard what he said, that as you love God and you love each other and you love the lost the best days of central our head.
Speaker 3: You know, I had no idea that God was going to lay that on his heart this morning.
Speaker 3: And I don't think Jay had any idea of what I was going to be preaching on this morning.
Speaker 3: But think about our text.
Speaker 3: What just he just read what we spent last weekend and we're spending this weekend and next week in Mark chapter 12 verses 28 through 34, the greatest commandment and the second greatest commandment.
Speaker 3: That is exactly what it is.
Speaker 3: Love God.
Speaker 3: Love your neighbor, your neighbor, each other, your neighbor, those beyond the confines of this building, those who are not yet brought in to the fold.
Speaker 3: And so I greatly appreciate that and just want to acknowledge, I think that was from the Lord for us today.
Speaker 3: We are spending three weeks in this.
Speaker 3: This is kind of the combination of my, my Mark series.
Speaker 3: Um, in a couple of weeks we'll have our candidating weekend and after that we're going to do a, an advent series.
Speaker 3: So I don't think there's any better place to kind of finish Mark than on the greatest in the second greatest commandment here.
Speaker 3: And just to set the scene, if you weren't here last week, this comes in Jesus his final week from a question.
Speaker 3: I don't really think it was a challenge.
Speaker 3: I think it was a question may be asked with a little bit of openness and heart and mind by a scribe.
Speaker 3: One of the experts of the old Testament law in those days.
Speaker 3: And it's articulated in Mark 1228, one of the scribes asked Jesus, which commandment is the greatest commandment of all?
Speaker 3: They a, as I noted last week, they, they had basically codified all the old Testament law, what was in the old Testament, but as well the Jewish interpretations.
Speaker 3: And applications of it into 613 commands.
Speaker 3: 248 were positive.
Speaker 3: Do this to please God, but 365 were negative prohibitions.
Speaker 3: Don't do this if you want to please God.
Speaker 3: And so can you imagine that wrestling with how do I keep all of these?
Speaker 3: Isn't there some way to boil it down?
Speaker 3: And last week I kind of went through a longer explanation of really how we view it.
Speaker 3: I want to give you just a little different illustration this week.
Speaker 3: If you think of a funnel a, if you think at the top of that funnel is all of those 613 commands, which I couldn't begin to list all of those commands.
Speaker 3: How do we get some kind of handle on that?
Speaker 3: Well, as we move down the funnel, we get to, what was it that God articulated when he first gave the law?
Speaker 3: And Exodus 20 the 10 commandments, and this is in a sermon on the 10 commandments, but if we did a sermon series on the 10 commandments, you would see that all of those 613 commands come out of their roots and the 10 commandments.
Speaker 3: But now Jesus brings it down to one really two but two that are combined together into one and what it's called, the greatest commandment.
Speaker 3: You may think of it as the first and the second greatest commandment, but really there one unity.
Speaker 3: And we looked at the first half, the first greatest commandment last week in verses 29 and 30 Jesus begins to answer to the scribe by, by quoting from the old Testament, Deuteronomy six four and five and that was called the Shamar shamaz.
Speaker 3: The Hebrew word for here, and that's exactly what were Deuteronomy six starts and where Jesus quotes hero Israel, the Lord our God.
Speaker 3: The Lord is one and here it is and he's quoting Deuteronomy six four and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.
Speaker 3: We are dug into that last week.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to cover that ground again.
Speaker 3: I would invite you to watch that online if you want to catch up with that, but Jesus doesn't end here even though the scribe asks him for the one greatest commandment.
Speaker 3: Jesus goes beyond the limits of his question to add a second commandment and again, he reaches back into the old Testament this time to live.
Speaker 3: Atticus chapter 19 verse 18 and he quotes that in the first half of verse 31 the second is this.
Speaker 3: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker 3: That's a quote from Leviticus 1918 and then what Jesus does is he brings these two together, love God and love your neighbor.
Speaker 3: He brings them together into one in dissoluble unity with his statement, there is no other commandment greater than these.
Speaker 3: What is he saying there you, you can't have one without the other.
Speaker 3: It's saying there are two sides of of the same coin.
Speaker 3: He's saying, if you really love God and you will love your neighbor, if you can't love your neighbor, you really don't love God and you can love your neighbor unless you first love God.
Speaker 3: He links these together and we know this.
Speaker 3: We know that it is impossible if we don't know God through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ to truly love people, to love people with the kind of heart that we're called to.
Speaker 3: We know that it is impossible to say that we love God if we know love other people.
Speaker 3: John the apostle says in first John four 20 if anyone says, I love God but hates his brother, he's a liar.
Speaker 3: For the person who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.
Speaker 3: Jesus links these two together.
Speaker 3: So if we want to know what God's primary will for us is Jesus boils it down to this, love God and love your neighbor who is our neighbor.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's really the next question and what I want to look at today and even into next week in one sense, who our neighbor is, comes from where Jesus quotes in Leviticus 1918 if you look at the fuller verse, you see the context.
Speaker 3: Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker 3: Leviticus 19 is written to the Jewish people and in the middle of the wilderness and God is establishing how do you, how do you treat each other?
Speaker 3: How do you get along with each other?
Speaker 3: So when he says one of your own people, he's talking about people of your community, of faith, people who are are in the kingdom so to speak.
Speaker 3: And certainly the application is there, which I'll get to in a minute.
Speaker 3: Jesus later expands this.
Speaker 3: And if you read through the gospel of Luke, you know this in Luke chapter 10 where the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus expands that definition of neighbor beyond those who are of your community of faith, those of who are of your people, he expands it even to people who are very different than us, people who we might even consider our enemies or people who consider us their enemies.
Speaker 3: Jesus expands the definition of neighbor even to those who do not know God, who rejects God, who are, who are not Christians, but for the sake of today, I want to focus it down because it doesn't dilute or erase the application to those who are of your own people.
Speaker 3: I want to focus down to the application there on loving your neighbor, your brothers and sisters, those who are of the same covenant community.
Speaker 3: Paul captures it in this idea when he speaks in Galatians six 10 he says, therefore as you have opportunity, do good to all people, especially those to those who are of the family, of believers, of the household of faith.
Speaker 3: So your neighbor, I would say begins with those who are a part of your church body.
Speaker 3: Those of your covenant community and expands out from there and and my burden today, my, my pastoral burden.
Speaker 3: Looking at the upcoming transition and as I had been thinking and praying about central and and Central's future, my burden is to focus this week and next week down on loving your neighbor within the body that does not eliminate the need to love your neighbors outside your body.
Speaker 3: That's another sermon at another time, but I want to focus us for this week and next week in preparation for communion, the Lord's supper the following week.
Speaker 3: What does it mean to love your neighbor within the body, within central church if you consider yourself part of this community?
Speaker 3: Let me ask it this way and I hope this question pricks you.
Speaker 3: I hope it steps on your toes just a little bit.
Speaker 3: When you think about becoming, becoming and becoming part of the central church community, who are your neighbors under that definition?
Speaker 3: Who are your neighbors here at central that you find most challenging to love?
Speaker 3: I want to give to you.
Speaker 3: What I think are are the two foremost challenges and they're not unique to central.
Speaker 3: These are challenges that I've seen in every church I've ever been part of.
Speaker 3: These are challenges that I've been embroiled in at at various times and in various places, but these are challenges over the two years that I've been here at central that I've seen at central very clearly and have their unique workings out and the life of central and the first challenge is this.
Speaker 3: The challenge that we're going to focus on today, the challenge of generational differences, what it means to love your neighbor in the covenant community of central church that is of a different generational group than you.
Speaker 3: And then next week I want to look at the second challenge, the challenge of conflicted relationships.
Speaker 3: What does it mean to love your neighbor, that brother or sister who you have some degree of unresolved anxiety or conflict with?
Speaker 3: I think these are the two challenges that that as you think about the days of head and where the Lord wants to move the church.
Speaker 3: To me, these are what are on my heart as, as burdens that, um, that I want to see God move significantly in.
Speaker 3: So let me do, I'm just going to do the first one this morning and let me phrase it this way.
Speaker 3: In order for central to increasingly become a place where we love each other, love our neighbors as ourselves, we must address the challenge of generational differences.
Speaker 3: Now what do I mean by that statement?
Speaker 3: Generational differences.
Speaker 3: What is a generation we had, um, um, in my first year, I think overlapping into my second year here, we had a task force, a number of people from various generations and various parts of the church who met together many, many meetings studying this very subject.
Speaker 3: What does the Bible have to say about generations and when generations come together.
Speaker 3: And we came up with some, some my definitions and I'm kind of focus that down and summarized it for you this morning.
Speaker 3: But let me define for you based upon what the work, our task force did, what a generation is.
Speaker 3: A generation is a group of people who were born and raised in the same era, the same time period and as a result of being born and raised in that same time period, they tend to share common, the same common values and beliefs and behaviors.
Speaker 3: So you think of when you were born, and I'm going to delineate the groups in just a minute here.
Speaker 3: You think of when you were born, you meet somebody else, whether it's at central or somewhere else and you know in in our our world around us, you meet someone else who was born during that same time period.
Speaker 3: Even if you've never met them before, you have a certain commonality with them just based upon the fact that you are born and your formative years were growing up in that same generational group.
Speaker 3: And not only that but the era that you grew up in your formative years that has shaped more than you know, your attitudes, your attitudes about family life, your attitudes about gender roles, your attitudes about institutions like the church, your attitudes about politics, about religion, about lifestyle choices, your attitudes and your tastes in music.
Speaker 3: And dress and many other things.
Speaker 3: But here's the thing.
Speaker 3: Everywhere we go in the world, including when we walk through the doors of central, we're surrounded by people from other generational groups, and that brings in the next statement.
Speaker 3: Although different generations live in the same world, or I could add to that, although different generations come to the same church, they do not experience the world.
Speaker 3: They do not even experience church in the same way.
Speaker 3: The beliefs and the values and the behaviors that you share with other people from the era that you grew up with, they are different from people who grew up in another era, another time period.
Speaker 3: So when you come in the doors of central, you bring, whether you are consciously acknowledging this or not, you bring your generational values and beliefs and behaviors in with you, you, you, you carry them really as a set of assumptions.
Speaker 3: And yet God has created the church.
Speaker 3: Christ church is to be a melting pot of all different generational groups.
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 3: Because that leads to my next point there.
Speaker 3: The themes and values of each generation that it shapes them both with spiritual strengths but also with spiritual vulnerabilities.
Speaker 3: Every generation that comes here to central bring spiritual strengths to central strengths in the way they view God's strengths in their unique way.
Speaker 3: They think about culture strengths in their approach to how you love God and and what it means to know Christ strengths and even how you they share faiths strengths in even, even facing the many things that are involved in following Jesus.
Speaker 3: But each generational group, whether they recognize it or not, brings with them unique vulnerabilities are as well spiritual vulnerabilities.
Speaker 3: Each generation has blind spots.
Speaker 3: Each generation has areas of cultural blindness as they look at the world around them.
Speaker 3: Each generation because of what they experienced growing up is subject to unique temptations or at least unique variations of temptations.
Speaker 3: Well, what does that mean?
Speaker 3: Well, think of what happens on a Sunday morning here in central for the first time in history because of of people living increasingly longer.
Speaker 3: We have a church.
Speaker 3: This is true of any church these days.
Speaker 3: We have a church that on a Sunday morning can have five different generational groups all coming under the same roof to worship and fellowship together.
Speaker 3: That's the first time in history.
Speaker 3: People used to not live long and so you would only have three, maybe four generational groups at a time in the church, but now there are five different generational groups bringing all of their different values and beliefs and behaviors when they come with them on a Sunday morning.
Speaker 3: Now I want to give you a brief overview of these generational groups based on our study and, and I need to give a disclaimer right up front.
Speaker 3: You may not like the titles for these groups, okay?
Speaker 3: You know, you may hear some of these titles as derogatory.
Speaker 3: They're not biblical titles.
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 3: I'm just using cultures, titles for these generational groups.
Speaker 3: The second is, I cover the group that you may be part of by the years you are born in your, you may think, well, that's not me.
Speaker 3: You know, or I don't match up with that.
Speaker 3: These are generalizations.
Speaker 3: All right, so look, I would say in your group, look for what you can identify with, but even more importantly, look at the other groups.
Speaker 3: Look at what you should learn about the other groups.
Speaker 3: The last thing I would say before I go into the groups is don't be too concerned about the age boundaries.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of blurry lines on each side of these generational groups.
Speaker 3: So you know, for instance, I think the cutoff of one group is, is 1964 I'm born before that, but I kind of think I fit into the next group cause I'm born just a few years after that.
Speaker 3: So don't worry too much about the boundaries.
Speaker 3: Let me go into the first one.
Speaker 3: Those people who were born between 1,919 45 the culture calls these traditional lists or they've sometimes been called the silent generation.
Speaker 3: Think of what their values and their beliefs and their behavior was shaped by.
Speaker 3: They grew up, many of them during the depression or the years following the depression.
Speaker 3: They grew up, most of them either during world war two or in the years that immediately followed world war two that shaped the way they think about all areas of life.
Speaker 3: I could go on, there's many more factors that we could look at if you grew up in that time period, but what does that produce?
Speaker 3: Well, positively.
Speaker 3: A strength they bring is these are people who generally have faithfully served and supported their church laboring loyalty to the church community.
Speaker 3: Maybe a balance of positive and negative.
Speaker 3: These are people who like order and structure, but they're not real excited about change.
Speaker 3: Is that a nice way of saying it?
Speaker 3: The, these are people who they look back and they remember significant spiritual events in their life when God touched them deeply and they remember the forms, the forms of maybe of music or worship or or other church forms that surrounded that significant event and they want to go back to that.
Speaker 3: Many of them, they want to hang on to that many of them.
Speaker 3: These are people who again, an overgeneralization maybe, but these are people who can be technology challenged.
Speaker 3: You know some, some more than others, some less than others.
Speaker 3: What does it mean if you are not part of this generational group to love these people as your neighbor?
Speaker 3: Well, think of their needs.
Speaker 3: These people desire relationships with younger people, but most of them, and they're unsure how to connect with younger people.
Speaker 3: Many of them feel often overlooked or bypassed by younger people.
Speaker 3: Can you see how if you are in a younger generational group, that opens up an opportunity to love them as your neighbor?
Speaker 3: Another need.
Speaker 3: These, these people, as they approach nearing the end of their life being really anxious about the end of their life, these people need to feel like they still matter.
Speaker 3: They still matter in life, they still matter in the church.
Speaker 3: These people need to feel that God still has a purpose for them and this phase of life.
Speaker 3: That of course has implications for how we in different generational groups love these people as ourselves.
Speaker 3: The second group, those born between 1946 and 1964 culture calls them baby boomers.
Speaker 3: Boom comes from there was a surge and the growth and the birth rate following world war II when all the service men returned and the economy began to expand and there was a baby boom.
Speaker 3: It's the largest population group moving through this cycle here.
Speaker 3: Think of what they were shaped by.
Speaker 3: These people lived through the civil rights movement.
Speaker 3: These people live through the Vietnam war.
Speaker 3: These people experienced Watergate and the cold war and the expansion of the economy and how it changed our culture moved people from rural areas into the cities following world war II.
Speaker 3: Think of how that shaped how they think about things, how their values are positively.
Speaker 3: These are people who by and large, they have help the church experience God more relationally.
Speaker 3: They have brought to the church with them a greater emphasis on experiencing a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: It's not that that didn't exist before this group, but maybe they've just brought it up to the surface and a new way of seeing it.
Speaker 3: These people like generally like worship that is celebrity and expressive, so they've had a positive effect on changing worship forms negatively or as at least a vulnerability these people contend to be because again, of what they've lived through and what they've experienced.
Speaker 3: More cynical and less trusting of authority, including even church authority.
Speaker 3: What does it mean for people of other generational to love people in this group to love baby boomers, think of their needs.
Speaker 3: These are people generally who favor people, relationships, in other words, over programs and they tend to struggle with structure that inhibits relationships and so loving them may mean, you know, opening our hands, not holding onto structure quite so tightly and honored if ordered to foster relationships.
Speaker 3: These are people who need to find God's purpose beyond retirement as they move to the end of their working careers and they realize, you know, it's not very satisfying just to sit on the beach in a lawn chair.
Speaker 3: God has to have more for me than that and that is a way that the church can love them by creating opportunities for them to do that.
Speaker 3: Third, these born 1965 to 1980 and even though I was born a few years before this, this is kind of the group I think I feel fit into.
Speaker 3: This is generation X.
Speaker 3: This is the the busters.
Speaker 3: This is the group that grew up in the 1970s when state after state was enacting no fault divorce rules our laws, and so what happened there was this great rise in the divorce rate and so many of these people grew up in single parent family, single parent homes.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine what that did to them and impacted them?
Speaker 3: This is the generation that grew up as AIDS became a thing and increased an increase.
Speaker 3: This is the generation that grew up during times of recession and so it's no wonder is it that that when when they balance work and success and work against a stable family and quality life, they're going to choose generally, I want a stable family.
Speaker 3: I want to stable well, I want to stable real life even if it means I have to sacrifice at work.
Speaker 3: These are people again based upon what has shaped them growing up, who oftentimes again a generalization tend to seek emotional security and meaning and direction in their lives.
Speaker 3: These people, because of what they've experienced, they can tend to be more cynical and mistrusting of institutions.
Speaker 3: I wrestle hard against being cynical in life.
Speaker 3: They can be mistrusting even of institutions like the church.
Speaker 3: What does it mean to love people who come from this generational group?
Speaker 3: If you're not from this generation, we'll look at their needs.
Speaker 3: They desire strong and stable community to love them means that in the architecture of the church, in our programming of the church, how do we foster the kind of community that loves these people?
Speaker 3: These people need open communication and dialogue.
Speaker 3: They need to be made to feel that they are a part of the process, not left out of the process and to love them is to recognize that and make avenues for them to be involved in the process.
Speaker 3: The fourth group, those born in 1981 and 2000 through 2001 and many of you fall into this group and you've heard this title used in a derogatory way, but it's cultures to a title.
Speaker 3: The millennials, you are shaped by the rise of the internet.
Speaker 3: 1994 and afterwards, these people have been shaped by Columbine and the rise of school shootings.
Speaker 3: These people have been shaped by the Oklahoma city bombings and nine 11 again, imagine if you're not part of this generational group, what growing up having your childhood in those years, how experiencing those events has shaped these people.
Speaker 3: These people grew up surrounded by technology.
Speaker 3: They were the first generation that grew up from, from infancy to to where they are now in the midst of technology.
Speaker 3: These people, as a generalization, can tend to struggle with emotional security and stress.
Speaker 3: Again, an overgeneralization, but it's, it's characteristic and so these people seek spirituality and faith experiences, even if it means they have to push away from tradition a little bit.
Speaker 3: Doesn't mean they reject tradition, but, but that they seek that real meaningful spirituality rather than tradition that can feel oftentimes to them as dead.
Speaker 3: What does it mean if you're not in this generational group to love millennials?
Speaker 3: We'll look at their needs.
Speaker 3: They desire authenticity and emotional openness.
Speaker 3: Someone connecting with them.
Speaker 3: There are real ways that you can love them just in the way that you are authentic and real and, and want to connect with them on that level.
Speaker 3: These are people who need significant mentoring experiences, that they want to be paired women with older women and men with older men who can pour in spiritual wisdom to them.
Speaker 3: These are people who desire to have significant service opportunities.
Speaker 3: Who, who want to see that there is a path into leadership in the church.
Speaker 3: And if that's not there, they're going to leave.
Speaker 3: So what does it mean to love them if we're not of that generational group thinking of their needs for the fifth group, those born after 2001 they've been called generationZ or I like the title o f the iGeneration.
Speaker 3: These, this generation of, u h, right now they're in their teens.
Speaker 3: Mostly.
Speaker 3: They have been shaped by terrorism.
Speaker 3: They've been shaped by a world that there's always a war going on somewhere.
Speaker 3: They've been shaped by the recession of the early two thousands.
Speaker 3: They've been shaped by the prevalence of social media.
Speaker 3: This is a generation that has grown up constantly connected online.
Speaker 3: This is a generation that has, is used to instant.
Speaker 3: They are digital natives.
Speaker 3: They've grown up knowing technology from the earliest age.
Speaker 3: But the drawback of that, again in generalization, this generation can tend to be more lonely.
Speaker 3: This generation can tend to be less hopeful about their future.
Speaker 3: This generation, because they're growing up in a culture that is increasingly more and more secular, this generation contend to be less spiritual and less religious.
Speaker 3: There are fewer in this generation who think about God, who believe in God than any other generational group that has come up through the cycle.
Speaker 3: So what does it mean if you are not part of this generational group to love this group as your neighbors?
Speaker 3: We'll look at their needs.
Speaker 3: They desire community that where they will be encouraged.
Speaker 3: They desire community where real, they at least they feel like real spiritual transformation is happening.
Speaker 3: How do we listen to that and provide that to them?
Speaker 3: This generation needs reasons to believe in the Christian faith.
Speaker 3: That is not enough to tell someone from this generation.
Speaker 3: God says it so you just believe it.
Speaker 3: That doesn't cut it.
Speaker 3: When they go out and talk to their friends they need, they need apologetics.
Speaker 3: They need someone to help them work through the faith even intellectually so that they can believe it and they can go out and they can share it with their friends.
Speaker 3: And maybe some of you are thinking at this moment, well, you know, that's an interesting sociological lesson.
Speaker 3: Um, you know, what does it have to do with us?
Speaker 3: What does it have to do with scripture?
Speaker 3: Let me give you what I believe are some scriptural principles of how the understanding of our different generational groups, how it is absolutely crucial to the future of central church.
Speaker 3: Let me give you this first truth.
Speaker 3: Your neighbors includes those of different generational groups.
Speaker 3: Now, you've probably already intuited that, but let me say it even in a more blunt fashion.
Speaker 3: The people that Jesus calls you to love as your neighbors includes the people in this church who dress in ways that annoy you, who would like a style of music that you may struggle with, who parent their children differently from you and who believe and behave and many other ways that you don't understand.
Speaker 3: Those are your neighbors.
Speaker 3: Those are the people in this church that Christ calls you to love and that's no accident that is part of his creation of the church as creation of his kingdom on this side of glory.
Speaker 3: If you know Christ as savior and Lord, he has grafted you into his church and he has created that church to include all the generations.
Speaker 3: That's the next point.
Speaker 3: Christ intends for all generations, all of these generations in the ones that will follow to be valued and included in his church.
Speaker 3: We see this in his word through first Corinthians 12 this image of a human body, the human body.
Speaker 3: Paul writes as many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body and so it is with the body of Christ, the church.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine any human body, if we take away a few parts, even parts that you may not think are real significant, it is not a full functioning body.
Speaker 3: Try cutting off your big toe and see what it does to your functioning and walking and your functioning.
Speaker 3: Therefore, and your whole body.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine if some people gathered together and they said, you know we're going to create a new church, but you know it's, it's going to be a church where you have to be above a certain socioeconomic level to be able to attend or it's a church or you have to be within a certain racial groups to attend or it's going to be a church that's just for all women or a church that's for all men.
Speaker 3: How would Jesus look at that as a very, very dysfunctional body.
Speaker 3: And even though oftentimes we don't intentionally do that, sometimes we unintentionally do that sometimes in our forms of worship, sometimes in our choices of programmings, we create a, we create a church that ministers only to certain parts of the body.
Speaker 3: And so this recognition that Christ intends for all generations to be included and valued in his church means that we need to have a generational con, uh, a generational consciousness, uh, in addition to all the other things that we need to be conscious of in the body.
Speaker 3: Third, God's model for passing on the Christian faith is an inner generational church.
Speaker 3: It is a church where there are multiple generations and they are mixing together, passing on, encouraging the faith in each other.
Speaker 3: Listen to Psalm 78 the things that we have heard and known and that our fathers have passed down to us.
Speaker 3: We must not hide them from our children, but must tell a future generation the praises of the Lord.
Speaker 3: Who are the fathers?
Speaker 3: Older generations, who are the future generations, younger generations.
Speaker 3: What's God's call?
Speaker 3: The older generations passing on, telling, proclaiming to the younger generations the praises of the Lord, the things that he has done and at the apex of that, of the praises of the Lord is the gospel.
Speaker 3: What he's done for us in Christ.
Speaker 3: And I bet if you think about those of you who know Christ and have walked in in our maturing in Christ, if you think through your spiritual history, I bet there are people of different generations who you're not related to by blood, who God has used significantly like the fathers in this passage to encourage you in mature you in the faith forth.
Speaker 3: Churches grow in maturity through the different generations, encouraging greater faith in each other.
Speaker 3: That's the model of Titus two, those first eight verses of title two.
Speaker 3: It presents this model of a healthy functioning church where there is ongoing training and modeling and mutual encouragement between older men and younger men and between older women and younger women, and that only happens when they're engaged.
Speaker 3: When the generations are engaged in, they're interacting with each other.
Speaker 3: That only happens when there's intentionality, both ways of different generations saying, I want to be with that older person or that younger person.
Speaker 3: Those have all been positive.
Speaker 3: Let me give you a negative number five, the risk of apathy.
Speaker 3: The risk of of writing this off, the risk of saying, I didn't really care about generational differences.
Speaker 3: I just want what I want.
Speaker 3: I want a service.
Speaker 3: I want programs that fit me and my needs and my preferences.
Speaker 3: The risk of not caring about this is future generations abandoning the faith.
Speaker 3: We see examples of that in scripture, like in judges two after that generation died, another generation grew up who did not acknowledge the Lord or remember the mighty things that he had done for Israel wide in that younger generation and judges remember the mighty things the Lord had done for Israel because that older generation or those older generations had failed to live out.
Speaker 3: Psalm 78 the fathers weren't telling the future generations the praises of the Lord and what was the consequence of that apostasy.
Speaker 3: We're told right there a generation growing up into adulthood who did not acknowledge the Lord.
Speaker 3: Some of you may remember that before Ronald Reagan was the president, he was the governor of California and when he was first inaugurated as the governor of California in his inaugural speech, he made this statement.
Speaker 3: Maybe you've heard it.
Speaker 3: Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction in one sense, but for God's grace and Providence and sovereignty, you could say the same thing about the church.
Speaker 3: The church has never more than one generation away from extinction.
Speaker 3: That is the risk of not caring of apathy six.
Speaker 3: The future of central church depends upon all the different generations intentionally loving each other, and that is the specific application of Jesus's command to love your neighbor as yourself, that I am burdened with for central and what that means in the words of first Corinthians 13 verse seven is that in loving other generations, you will have to bear all things.
Speaker 3: You will have to be forbearing to those who are different from you.
Speaker 3: You will have to believe all things.
Speaker 3: You will have to look at other different generations in their differences and believe the best.
Speaker 3: Assume the best motives behind them.
Speaker 3: You will have to hope for all things.
Speaker 3: You will have to hope for that vision of an intergenerational church of church of generations being involved with each other and impacting each other as the future of the church.
Speaker 3: And finally, you will have to endure all things.
Speaker 3: You will even have to at times and Durer, the preferences of other generations that are not your preferences.
Speaker 3: And that leads to my last point.
Speaker 3: Love requires all of us to recognize our generational preferences.
Speaker 3: And by preferences I mean the way that we like worship, the way that we like to fellowship, the way we like classes in our programs, anything that we prefer, that is not something that is laid out black and white and scripture.
Speaker 3: We need to recognize our preferences.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying we have to cast our preferences to the wind, but we have to hold them very, very loosely.
Speaker 3: We have to hold them with open hands.
Speaker 3: I think of what Paul says to us in Romans 14 we're not to pass judgment on disputable matters.
Speaker 3: And you know what?
Speaker 3: Anything were.
Speaker 3: Jesus is not absolutely black and white.
Speaker 3: Clear in scripture.
Speaker 3: It's a disputable matter.
Speaker 3: The style of worship music is a disputable matter.
Speaker 3: It's not absolutely clear.
Speaker 3: We can differ on that.
Speaker 3: The style of how we come to church dressed is, is not a black and white matter.
Speaker 3: It's, it's a disputable matter.
Speaker 3: We can differ on that and so Paul says, do what the spirit has convicted you to do.
Speaker 3: Don't pass judgment.
Speaker 3: Don't look down on those who don't.
Speaker 3: You know my, the spirit has convicted me of the way that I dress.
Speaker 3: I don't dress to please anyone other than my Lord, but neither do I assume that the spirit has convicted everybody else to dress the way that I do when I come to church and that is the same whether you dress up or you dress down.
Speaker 3: It is to be a matter of conscious between you and the Lord.
Speaker 3: And when it comes to our preferences, I think of Philippians two prior, perhaps there's no greater verse about our preferences.
Speaker 3: Each of you should be concerned not only about your own interests but also about the interests of others.
Speaker 3: Let me make the specific application of this.
Speaker 3: Verse two, what is usually the flashpoint in churches, the style of worship music?
Speaker 3: I'll just make this very, very personal.
Speaker 3: I remember times in my spiritual life where you could say, God showed up or I was significantly impacted by God's movement in my life, the work of the spirit in my life.
Speaker 3: And I remember the forms of music that surrounded that, the service I was sitting at or, or whatever it was, and the songs that were sung.
Speaker 3: And you know what?
Speaker 3: I associate those songs and those stat style of music with what God was doing in my life.
Speaker 3: And so if I am not careful, I can, I can add that together.
Speaker 3: And I can say, if you want to see God move powerfully, this is the kind of music or these are the songs that you should use.
Speaker 3: And I can bring that thinking into the church and I can look down on any other forms of music that somehow fall outside of my experience.
Speaker 3: So to hold on to my preferences loosely is I think God for how he's used certain styles of music and certain songs in my life.
Speaker 3: But I hold them loosely and I recognize that God may have impacted you differently with different forms of music and different songs and so in, in, in the the melting pot that makes up a healthy church.
Speaker 3: All of those are to somehow be acknowledged.
Speaker 3: I read about one church that uses the 75% rule that says if you're sitting in the service and and you like more than 75% of the music, we're not doing it right.
Speaker 3: You know, because we're leaning too much towards one generational group.
Speaker 3: You know, what is that?
Speaker 3: That's an intentional effort to say we want to recognize all preferences.
Speaker 3: Let me close with this.
Speaker 3: My desire for central, which is now a multigenerational church, five different generations, but generations that are oftentimes not connected and not interacting, at least not much, is that central would go from being a multigenerational church to an intergenerational church where the generations are engaged and the generations are encouraging each other and helping each other to grow.
Speaker 3: It's no easy thing.
Speaker 3: It's not like just the easy solution is let's just all have one service.
Speaker 3: That's just, that's just one symptom of the fact that we are a multigenerational church where generational differences that we have different styles of services.
Speaker 3: We have to go deeper than that.
Speaker 3: We have to go to the heart of what this all is and what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker 3: I want to read you a, as I close a paraphrase of a section out of first Corinthians 12 and by paraphrase, this is not a translation.
Speaker 3: This is a very loose paraphrase and I didn't write it, but I wish I did.
Speaker 3: All right and I will tell you who wrote it at the end of it.
Speaker 3: Listen to this paraphrase of first Corinthians chapter 12 when you think about what it means to love other people who are in different generational groups for just as the body is one and has multiple generations and all generations of the body though many are one body, so it is with Christ.
Speaker 3: For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body, traditionalist boomers, gen X or millennials and generation Z.
Speaker 3: These and we are all made to drink of one spirit for the body.
Speaker 3: Does not consist of one generation, but many if the millennials should say, because we are not traditionalist, we do not belong to the body.
Speaker 3: That would not make them any less a part of the body.
Speaker 3: And if the boomers should say, because we are not gen Xers, we do not belong to the body, that would not make them any less part of the body.
Speaker 3: If the whole body were millennials, where would be the wise and mature?
Speaker 3: And if the whole body were traditionalists, where would be the future of the body?
Speaker 3: But as it is, God arranged the generations of the body, each one of them as he chose.
Speaker 3: If all were one generation, where would the body be as it is, there are multiple generations, yet one body, the traditionalist cannot say to the millennials, we have no need of you, nor again the gen Zs to the boomers.
Speaker 3: We have no need of you.
Speaker 3: On the contrary, the generations of the body that seem to be weaker are the indispensable ones.
Speaker 3: And on those generations that we think less honorable, we bestow the greater honor.
Speaker 3: And on our, on our unrespectable generations, we treat with greater respect while our respectable generations need no special treatment, but God has so composed the body giving greater honor to generations that lacked it, that there be no divisions in the body, but that the generations may have the same care for one another.
Speaker 3: If any one generation suffers, all generations suffer together.
Speaker 3: If one generation is honored, all rejoice together.
Speaker 3: Now you are the body of Christ and individually generational members of it.
Speaker 3: And that was written by pastor Jean SOLs.
Speaker 3: So, and if you heard him say it, he can rap it.
Speaker 3: So ask him to do that sometime.
Speaker 3: I again, I wish, I wish I had written that.
Speaker 3: Let's close with prayer and I'm going to dismiss you after prayer just because of the hour, but I close with that statement.
Speaker 3: You are part of the body of Christ.
Speaker 3: You are different generational members of that body.
Speaker 3: Let's pray.
Speaker 3: Father, we thank you for your word, Lord Jesus.
Speaker 3: We thank you that around your throne one day will be gathered.
Speaker 3: People from all races, all tongues, all ethnic groups, all nationalities, both genders, and every generation.
Speaker 3: We thank you for that mosaic that, that diversity, that picture of warship around the cross, and that's what we want to be now, Lord and in the body of Christ on earth, waiting for your return.
Speaker 3: And so do your work.
Speaker 3: Lord, have transforming us individually and as a corporate body to people and a church who love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength and love our neighbors as ourselves.
Speaker 3: We pray this Lord Jesus in your name.
Speaker 3: Amen.