The Jesus Family - 4/19/2026

Join us each week as we learn more about Jesus and how to Follow Jesus Together at Alderwood Community Church. Our hope is that these messages can help guide and teach you in your walk with Jesus. To learn more, visit alderwood.cc or join us on a Sunday morning!

Transcript

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It's great to be with you this morning. We're in the middle of a mini-series called Never Alone. We're looking at the way that God created us as relational creatures, the way that that's just how we're hardwired, and the reality that it is not good for us to be isolated, for us to be lonely. And if you were with us last week, Pastor Curtis did a great job of really honing on that, of the problem of loneliness and isolation. We looked at Genesis 2 and God looking at Adam by himself in the Garden of Eden, the perfect Garden of Eden, before sin has entered the world, and God saying, it is not good for man to be alone. And that is every bit as true today as it was then. And the thing is, like, that's just true. You can take God's word for it if you want, or you can look around at the world and discover that it's true for yourself. You know, there's a lot of uh of folks in our secular world that are pointing out the problem of loneliness today, you know, public health experts and scientists, sociologists. And, you know, one of the things that we're discovering is that there's just a physical toll on us as human beings when we're isolated. The health outcomes of people who say that they're lonely can be compared to those who smoke 15 cigarettes a day or drink six alcoholic beverages a day. The one that I learned uh just this last week I'd never seen before was that there was this meta study of all these different loneliness studies done in 2024 that showed that people who are lonely uh have a 31% greater chance of developing dementia as they age, once you control for all the other factors. I mean, it's just it's just not good for us to be alone. And what we're gonna look at this morning is this reality that Jesus knows that, that Jesus has a solution, in fact, that he wants to invite us into a new reality. And that new reality is the family of God. What we're gonna see today is that Jesus invites us to a new family that restores the connection that we were made for. And so let's dive into that together. I I love where we see this in Jesus. Some of the kind of the funniest stories and the most surprising stories in the Gospels are when Jesus is trying to get our attention to show us how serious he is about what he believes about the family of God. And he says some wild things. We're gonna look at one of those stories in Mark 3 this morning. And where this is, this is early in Jesus' ministry. Uh, he has started teaching, and he's really amazed people with how he's teaching about the kingdom of God. And so people want to hear more, and crowds are starting to form around Jesus when he travels. He's done some miracles, and so the rumors of those have spread, and people want to come see the power that he has. And at this point, he also has begun to get on the bad side of the religious leaders of the day. The Pharisees, those in the synagogue. Uh, Jesus hasn't been following the rules. There's been some arguments. He hasn't really been submitting to their authority. Uh recently, they've they've been having a back and forth about the Sabbath laws and all of that. And Jesus and his followers, they're not doing what the religious leaders think they should be doing. And so that uh that problem, that tension, it's actually made its way back home. Jesus' mother and his siblings, apparently, they're starting to kind of feel the heat. You know, they're getting the side eye at the synagogue when they show up because they're related to Jesus, and they're sick of it. They they're upstanding people. They don't want to, you know, be looked at bad by the religious leaders. And so they decide that it's time to go shut this thing down. Basically, like they decide it's time to go to Jesus and say, look, man, like we get it. You had a dream, you know, you wanted to be this religious teacher or whatever. Like, it's time to give up. Come be a carpenter and make some money, for goodness sakes. You know, uh, you're embarrassing us. That's basically what's about to happen here. And here's what it says in Mark 3 when his family tries to go and bring Jesus home with them. His mother and his brothers came, and standing outside, they sent word to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him and told him, Look, your mother, your brothers, and your sisters are outside asking for you. So can you kind of picture the scene? Jesus is there, he's teaching a crowd, he's in a home, and because of how popular he is, because of how many people want to hear him, the home is packed out. Every square inch of room is taken up by people, and in fact, the crowd is too big for the home to be able to hold them. So people are at the doorway, they're leaning in, they're at the windows, they're just trying to hear what Jesus is saying. And his mother and his brothers and his sisters, they show up to that, and they they can't physically get close to Jesus because it's it's too crowded to push through. And so they kind of have to send a note to the front. You know, they get people to tap on so on shoulders and they they give the message that, like, Jesus, your family's here, they want to talk to you. Now, when we read a story like this today, we're pretty sympathetic to Jesus, I think. And it's probably because like he's Jesus, you know, and we know that he should be allowed to teach. Uh, but it's also because culturally, your mom interrupting you during your job is not really a thing. Like, we don't we don't accept that here. I mean, can you imagine this morning that my mom came out on stage and was like, you gotta go, and like you took me out. Like, we're gonna look at her, like, what is wrong with that woman? I had no idea how hard White had it growing up. You know, like uh we would not have any sympathy for the mom. But in that day, it wasn't like that. See, in our culture now, we think that someone's public life, that their professional life, is actually more important than their family life. Now, you might be saying, no, no, no, we don't think that. We think family is most important. I I don't think that's true. Like, let's just think about how our society values people. Okay, if you have two people and one of them has found a tremendous amount of professional public success, right? They've gotten promoted a bunch, they have a great career, they make a bunch of money, they drive a nice car, they have a second home, you know, like they're able to do whatever they want, they're well respected in the community, but their relationship with their family of origin is bad. Like they don't like their parents, they don't, they're not really on speaking terms with their siblings, they haven't seen their parents in forever. Like, that's one person. And then the other person uh has a great relationship with their family of origin. Their family is all the holidays together, still, even as adults, they have game night every Friday, it's awesome, you know. Like they love hanging out with their siblings, but that person is 40 years old, they don't really have a career, they live at home still. Like, which one of those people gets more honor in our society? Is it even close? It's not, right? Like, we give more honor to the person with public success. In that, in that day, though, it wasn't it wasn't like that. Your family life was the most important thing about you. The honor that you brought home to your parents, to your siblings, like that's what mattered. And so when Jesus' mom shows up, the crowd isn't really looking at her like she's the problem. The crowd expects Jesus to stop what he's doing and tend to his mother because those are the more important relationships. But that's not what happens. It's really interesting. Keep reading, verse 33. He replied to them, Who are my mother and my brothers? Looking at those sitting in a circle around him, he said, Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. That was a shocking thing to say in that day. I mean, uh you read it like this, it almost comes off as a little rude. I don't think Jesus is being rude, but I mean, you know, they they tell him, like, hey, your mom is here, and he's like, Who's that? You know? Uh, and but the reason why he's saying it in this shocking way is because he wants to get our attention. He wants to shake you, he wants to get you to see that there is a more important reality when it comes to your relational world than what you think. He's taking the paradigm of the day and he's turning it upside down. Jesus is saying, I'm starting a new family. It's the family of God. I'm inviting anyone who follows me to be a part of it. And it is going to be the relationships, the community that supersedes all other communities. It's going to be even more important than your biological family. And he's serious, he says some wild things. I mean, later on, Jesus will say, if anyone doesn't hate their mother and father, they can't be my disciple. And, you know, we read that, it's shocking, it is shocking. He doesn't literally mean you have to despise your family, but he's saying there's something more important about the family that I'm starting, that when you even compare it to your relationship with your own biological parents, it's got to be more important. Now, if you're hearing this, especially if you're hearing this for the first time this morning, I mean, man, if you're not a follower of Jesus and you're here, so glad you're here. This probably sounds very culty to you. You know, like I and I I don't totally know how to get around that. I mean, that's what Jesus says. It isn't culty. He isn't actually trying to divide everybody from their biological family, but he does know something about who we are and how we're made and what we're made for. And Jesus' vision of the family of God is that it is the only thing that can actually meet the needs that God created within us, even more so than any community you can find on this earth. Now, if you're here this morning and you are a follower of Jesus, ask yourself this do you see it that way? Like, do you see the family of God the way that Jesus sees the family of God? My guess is no. My guess is that you don't actually see your brothers and sisters in Christ who you go to church with as the most important relationships in your life. And so my question this morning is why not? What does Jesus see about the family of God that we don't see? What are we missing that Jesus wants us to have? I want to look at you this morning with two realities about the family of God, two reasons why it can meet the relational needs in us in a way that nothing else can. The first reality is this: that Jesus' family restores connection based on grace, not performance. You were created to have relational connection that was based on grace, not your performance. And in this world, really almost every relationship actually has a performance-based aspect to it. Now, sometimes that relationship based on performance is just obvious and we don't even hide it, right? So, like if you think about your professional life, your relational world at work, it's obviously based on performance. You had to have an interview to become a part of that community. You probably have a performance review every quarter, every year. Like how you perform is connected to whether you or not you even get to be a part of that community. We're not trying to hide that. When you're younger, when you're a kid, like sports are that way. You know, uh, you have to try out for sports teams. You have to be good enough to even make it onto the team. Do you do you remember trying out for sports and how nerve-wracking that was? You know, I tried out for a lot of sports teams as a kid. I made some, I didn't make others. Or like the worst day of my sports life was when I didn't make the seventh grade basketball team. Uh, it was just cruel how they did it. I don't know if it's still this way. I'm assuming it's not, that it's on an app now or something. But back then, uh, you found out because they taped a sheet of paper to the wall, and everybody in the entire school could go figure out who made the team and who didn't. And not only that, but the first day of practice was the day that everyone found out whether or not you made the team. And what that means is that you had to show up to school with your stuff ready to go to practice, whether or not you made the team. Now, I carpooled that year to school with my best friend. We both tried out. He made the team and I didn't, which meant that I had to take my gym bag back to his mom's car without him and drive home alone because I didn't make the basketball team. Like, cruel, you know? Uh sometimes in life we just are we're open about the fact that relationships are based on performance. The problem, though, is that actually that performance-based thing, it leaks into really all of our other relationships as well. Like in your friend group, the way that might look is that question in your mind of like, Am I likable enough? Am I funny enough? Do these people really want to be around me? Am I earning my place in this group? Is really the question that you're asking. Sadly, for many of us, we we grew up and our relationship with our parents was such that the question we were always asking was, have I been good enough to make my parents proud of me? For some of us, that was with school, for some of us that was with sports, for some of us, that was just morality, and you know, but like, am I earning this? Uh every relationship we have, we we have that performance thing in our mind of like, do I deserve to be here? But the thing is, that was never how it was supposed to be. God created you to receive relationship by his grace. And what Jesus is doing is he's starting a new family where that can be true once again. This is Ephesians chapter 2, verses 4 and 5. It says, But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ, even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace. That word grace, it means undeserved favor. It means that God looks at you and he loves you, not because you're good enough to be loved or because you've deserved it or you're better than somebody else, but just because he's your father in heaven, he loves you. He showers you with his blessings, he invites you in. You don't have to earn it. And that's how it was supposed to be in the very beginning, in the Garden of Eden, right? When God created Adam and Eve, he didn't create them and then send them to tryouts, right? He just created them. They'd never done anything before. And he just loved them and invited them in. And because of Jesus' death on the cross and his resurrection, he's saying that that's back on the table. You can have family just based on God's grace. That meets a need in us we all have in a way that things in this world, that community in this world just cannot meet. That's the first way that Jesus' family is different, is that it's based on grace and not performance. The second way that I want you to see is this that Jesus' family restores connection based on identity, not similarity. Identity, not similarity. So here's the other thing about how human relationships work in this world. Uh we get connected to other people based on how much we have in common, how similar we are with each other. This is one of the strongest findings in all of social science research. If you look at how friend groups work across cultures, different nations, different languages, what you see across the board is that in general, people come together when they are of the same age and life stage, the same education level, the same socioeconomic status, the same race and ethnicity, the same beliefs and values, the same interests and hobbies. Like our similarity is what unites us together. What's crazy about that research is how early that starts to happen. There's been studies of four and five-year-olds. We're talking preschool here, okay? And they put people in a room, these little kids, and they watch the way that they make friends and how the groups form. And you you may not be surprised to learn that, you know, people who look similar, different you know, same ethnicity, they they kind of stick together. What's really crazy though is what happens is kids will congregate who are with other kids whose parents make a similar amount of money as their parents. Like, how? How do they even do that? You know, it's like it's not like they know how much money their parents make. And they recognize the brand name of the clothes that they're wearing. Like somehow we're just really, really good at figuring out who is most like us, and we want to be around people who are like us. And look, I'm I'm not totally bashing that this morning, okay? I I get it. I I also am a human being. I know that it it's good to be around people who are like you. It's nice to have things in common. It's good to have friends who who seize things the same way as you, where you can do things together that you both enjoy. Like, similarity is not the enemy. But there is a huge dark side when our connections are based on similarity. Okay. And I mean, uh quite a bit worse actually than just that there's clicks in high school and that kind of stuff. Like when you look at the way the world is, uh, some of our greatest problems are actually fueled by this reality that we want to be around people who we think are like us. Connection based on similarity, it is what is behind sexism and racism and nationalism and classism. Like, every war, every genocide, every oppression has been fueled by this idea that me and the people who are like me are going to advance our cause at the expense of you and people who are like you. There's a huge dark side to the way the world is. And that dark side it can really show itself in church as well. Like when we as the people of God congregate around people who just look like us and think like us and have the same amount of money as us and all of that, we actually can ruin the whole mission of what God called us to. Rather than being a community that shows the world that Jesus came to save the world, we can actually end up delivering the message that Jesus came to save people who are like us. That's not how it was supposed to be. Right? In the Garden of Eden, the idea was that humanity was the family of God, not based on what they had in common, but based on who God declared them to be, their identity. When God said, You are made in my image, and you have the same mission, be fruitful, multiply, take dominion over creation. Like it was what God declared that united us. It wasn't until sin came in that we started saying, okay, but who do we really want to be with? And once again, Jesus is inviting us to a new reality, to a new family, where that connection based on our identity can be true once again as well. This is Galatians chapter 3, starting at verse 27. For those of you who are baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ. There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, since you are all one in Christ Jesus, and if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise. I want to slow down for a second with you, make sure we really understand what this is saying. So what baptism is, it is that public declaration that you've placed your faith in Jesus. When you're dunked in the water, when you're raised out of it, you're saying, I've been buried with Christ, and his death has applied to me to forgive my sins. When you're taken out of the water, you're saying, just like Jesus was raised to life, I've been given new life. So that baptism is saying, when you've been brought into the family of God, what happens is that you have been clothed with Christ. That's kind of a weird metaphor. We wouldn't really talk like that today. What does it mean that you've been clothed with Christ? Well, it's identity language. It's saying you've put on a new identity, and now who you are is shaped by who Jesus is and what Jesus has done for you. That idea of like kind of changing who you are based on the clothes you wear. You can almost think of it like Clark Kent becoming Superman, right? Like when he puts on the outfit and it's got the S on it, like he's a different person than he was before. Same thing. Like when you put on Jesus, you are taking on a new identity. And what he says here is that that identity, it supersedes everything else, right? It supersedes your ethnicity, your nationality. There's no Jew or Greek anymore. It supersedes your socioeconomic status. There's no slave and free anymore. It supersedes even your gender identity. You're there's no male and female. And what this isn't saying is that those other categories that they literally don't exist anymore. Of course they do. It's just saying there's a new identity that's above all those other things. And that is what is primary in the family of God. Jesus is creating this family. He wants us to experience a kind of relationship with each other that can meet the deepest needs that we were made for. So what does that mean for us here at Alderick Community Church today? You know, one, we have to recognize like we are not the family of God. The family of God is much bigger than us. It's every church, it's every nation, every nationality, every language, it's all of God's people. But we are a family, we are a community where our desire and our hope is to live out that reality. We want Alderwood and this people to be the place and the people and the relationships where we can experience what Jesus has done for us by calling us family together. And so, what does that look like? What is church community all about? Uh I want you to see this morning that I think there's a really high bar for what we're called to. And in some ways, we might actually have to lower the bar a little bit together. Let me try to explain what I mean. Uh, when we talk about following Jesus together here, that's our mission. We talk about three words: connect, grow, and go. We think Jesus is calling us to be people who are connected together in the family of God, who are growing to become more like Jesus and who go to do what Jesus has called us to do together. And we're talking about that first word to connect. You actually heard Jack say this earlier. When we talk about what it means to be people who connect, we say this that we follow Jesus by connecting together in Jesus-centered relationships. And here's the high bar and the low bar thing. Like this is a really high bar relationally when it comes to intentionality. Like when we're saying, okay, we're gonna make this family, we're gonna make these relationships about Jesus and about following Jesus together. Super high bar. But it actually is a little bit of a low bar in the sense that sometimes we think the ideal Christian community is one where we're all best friends. Have you ever felt that need? Like pastors even like kind of preach that vision. Like we should all just be hanging out constantly and laughing together and like all that stuff. I remember when I came here uh 15 years ago, our life group ministry, the motto was doing life together. And there was a little bit of that flavor to how we pitched it. It was kind of about like finding your best friends. The idea was like you need people, you need people to do life with, you need friends. Like sign up for a life group, you'll have it all. And uh and obviously there's a lot of good in that. We do need friends, and and and we and people find friends and you know, close relationships all the time here. I'm not against that at all. I don't, I don't, don't want this to be misconstrued. But when we were pitching life groups, it was almost like you know, we had this super high bar for how close these relationships were always gonna be that just wasn't always realistic. You know, we would find the groups where the magic had really happened, where like they went camping together every summer, and like they would be in the videos and we would like pitch that as the ideal. We'd say, like, you know, sign up for a life group, and like you're gonna be each other at each other's kids' sports games, and you're gonna be at dinner at each other's house every weekend, like you're gonna love these people, and like you're probably gonna fall asleep at night, like texting them about your day. I mean, uh we didn't really say that last part, but you uh but you get it, you know, like sign up for a life group, find your best friends. And I I I never really connected with that vision for a few different reasons. Partly because it's just so unrealistic. I mean, uh people are just more complicated than that. Chemistry is more complicated than that. You can't really sign up for best friends. That's not how it works. Uh and so we were setting these expectations that were just, I mean, making people so prime to be disappointed. I mean, you know, can you imagine like signing up for a life group and showing up on night one and then looking around and going, like, I don't want to go camping with these people, you know? Like I it was just so hard. And then the other problem was like when it actually worked, and sometimes it did, you know, those those groups where they really were camping together, uh, they became closed off and exclusionary because once you've found the magic, you can't let anybody else in. They might ruin it, you know? And so, like, I it was just an issue. And it turns out that when you read the Bible and you see what God actually says about Christian community, it doesn't really describe it as like us all being best friends. You know, Christian community isn't about us all loving the same things and like hanging out on the weekends and being the same fantasy football team league and you know, all like all that stuff. Like, that's great. I hope you find that. That's awesome when it happens. But you read the Bible, and in Christian community is actually defined by its intentionality, by its purpose. Saying we're the people who spur one another on to love and good deeds. We pray for one another, we encourage one another, we equip one another. And the thing that's beautiful about how God uses the family is that he does that not just through the super close relationships, he actually does that every bit as much, sometimes more so through the brothers and sisters in Christ who probably would never go camping together. Like it's through the people who think super differently than you, who honestly you're a little bit annoyed with, but God uses them and how he made them to challenge the assumptions that you actually need to challenge in yourself. It's through walking with other people through suffering. And God using even the suffering of others to call you to have the heart of Jesus that's full of compassion, that that recognizes what really matters in this world and what doesn't. You know, it's using the people that you wouldn't choose to hang out with, but who you just show up to a service team with. I mean, you're just you have the job of discipling students with these people, and that mission is what brings you together to be more like Jesus with one another, not just your affinity. He uses all the different kinds of relationships that we have here. And the way you judge Christian community is by is it pointing one another to Jesus? And so let's get practical for a second this morning. How can we live this out together? The first thing I want to encourage you to is how how can you take the relationships that you already have with other brothers and sisters in Christ and make them more centered on Jesus? See, just the reality of human relationships is that they drift towards the superficial. That's true, even of your closest relationships, your closest friends, even your spouse, if you're married, without intentionality, those relationships just drift towards superficial things. It drifts towards just kind of the everyday life stuff. You know, what groceries do we need to buy? How's work going? Who are you mad at? What's funny? Uh, what Netflix show has you have you watched recently? Where are you going on vacation? All good stuff. It's not the problem, it's not a bad thing. But if you want relationships that are more than that, it takes intentionality. It takes deciding we need to pursue Jesus together. Like, what if you were the friends who became known for actually asking with intentionality in a genuine way, how can I be praying for you right now? I want to be praying for you. I will pray for you. What's going on in your life? What if your go-to questions when you gathered were not like what Netflix show are you watching right now? It's fine. You can ask that. But what if it was like, what's Jesus teaching you right now? How is God growing you? What if you were the one who took those relationships you've had for a long time that have not been uh spiritual much at all for years? And you were the one who said, Man, I would love for this to be more. Can we meet together and pray? Can we do a Bible study together? Like, how can you make the relationships you already have more centered on Jesus? But then, secondly, what I want you to ask is, where are you investing in the family of Jesus where where that's what it's all about? Where you're saying, I'm gonna surround myself with people, not because we all see things the same way, but because we all want to follow Jesus and we're going to do it together. Those relationships, they don't just happen. You'll never fall into that. You'll never like just wake up one day and go, man, how did I find so many people who are just like-minded about following Jesus with me? Like I didn't ever want that. It just happened. That doesn't, that doesn't happen. It takes intentionality. And if you don't have that, we would love for you to find it here at Alderwood. That's what our life groups are about. That's what Midweek is about. That's what our service teams are about. It's about surrounding yourself with brothers and sisters in Christ and saying, we are going to follow Jesus together. It's not easy. We certainly don't do it perfectly. There are there are those of you here this morning who've been hurt by the church and by church relationships. And I am genuinely sorry about that, especially when that's happened here at Alderwood. But despite the mess of it, and despite how much pain actually can happen even in those relationships, it is still true that how Jesus invites us to experience him and the work that he's doing in the world and the work that he's doing with us is through the church. One of the crazy things is that even church hurt, usually the way Jesus heals church hurt is through the church. And when we get hurt, the enemy wants us to believe that we're better off isolated, that we're better off if we just don't go back. But it's not true. Jesus is saying, You were made for this kind of connection. You were made for this kind of relationship. I'm building a new family. I want you to be part of it. Will you respond and receive that reality from him right now? As you think about where Jesus is calling you this morning, um, I want to just meditate with you on a verse. It's the same verse I put up on Easter a couple weeks ago. Uh, but as we get ready to sing together as we respond in worship this morning, would you just sit and listen and let the truth of the scriptures soak into your soul this morning? This is 1 John chapter 3, verse 1, to see what great love the Father has given us. That we should be called God's children. And we are. And so this morning, would you just close your eyes? And would you have a moment with our Father in heaven? And would you just think about this truth that he is speaking over you right now? And first, can we just focus on that very first truth? That our Father in heaven loves us. That he's in heaven even right now, and he's looking at you. And he's looking at you in love. He delights in you. That we have been declared the children of God. That we have this great Father in heaven that he delights in giving us good gifts because we're his kids. That we can run in and embrace him, that nothing separates us from him because he's our father and we are his children. And lastly, let's think about that exclamation at the end. And we are that this is true. That nothing can take it away from you, that it isn't dependent on how you feel, uh, on your shame, on what anybody has told you, that nothing can change the truth, that you're his kids, and you will be forever. Father, we come before you in the name of Jesus this morning, and we want to receive what you've done for us, not what we've earned by performance, but what you've given us by our grace. We want to receive the family that isn't just based on what we have in common, but that's based on who we are because of Jesus. And so we ask that you would help us to live that out in a real and tangible way, that we would love one another like you've loved us. And that we would build a community here that is a light in the world, that shows the truth, that there's something beyond what can be seen with the eye, that there is a connection, there's a reality that can only be true because of Jesus. We want that, and we want the world to see that and to respond to Jesus together. And so, Lord, use our lives in whatever way you will. We commit ourselves to you. In Jesus' name. Amen.