Sermon Transcript
Community still matters. Do you agree with that? Community still matters.
Perhaps now more than ever. Have you. Have you ever felt alone in a crowded room? You ever felt you ever just kind of scrolled through social media? And you’re like.
You see all these experiences people are having and kind of felt left by, behind, or left left aside? You see all these highlight reels? You ever wonder why you still feel disconnected? The irony of our day is, if you have felt that way, is that you’re not alone. Studies have actually shown that now is one of the loneliest times ever, especially the younger you are.
The younger people are Gen Z. Millennials are some of the loneliest people in the world. And yet we have all of this technology that’s supposed to connect us, right? We have all this social media that’s supposed to make us social, and yet we live in the loneliest time ever. The paradox of connection without community is something that we need to address in our culture.
And it’s not just about technology. That’s not the point of today. But I’m still hopeful that we can have a conversation where we realize that the more connected we are on devices, the less connected we are as people. But I’m hopeful also for these generations coming up. This past week, I joined Jeremy and our students at CIY Mix in Michigan, and I saw students who had a hunger for connection, for community.
I was reminded of a few things this week. One, I’m not as young as I used to be. Dorm beds are not comfortable and never have been. But also that connection matters. Community is essential to our lives as christians, especially for young christians.
So what is community? What is connection? We’re going to use those terms interchangeably today. Gareth Eichenogel defines it as the movement between persons to experience common life. When we share interests, successes, struggles, pain, even with one another, we live life together.
That’s community. Community still matters, and people need it. Young people need community. They seek it naturally. However, our connections are easily tarnished, especially as we rely more and more on ourselves and on technology to fulfill our daily needs.
As we rely on, on our cells and technology to flourish, we lose connection. Now, thankfully, mix was a week long glimpse of how good community can be. Students had fun together. That’s important, too. But they also had the gospel presented to them in a way that they can easily grasp, so they can apply to their lives.
They heard the gospel in a way that their generation understands, and they connected with Jesus on a personal level, many of them. For the first time giving their lives to Christ. And perhaps most importantly, especially for the group of students that we took, because for them, most of them, when they left here, they were already. They would have already told you that they were christians. They would have told you that they followed Jesus.
But perhaps most importantly for them, they were pointed back to the community and the families at home that were going to help them grow in their faith. It was this beautiful microcosm, and it always is. That’s why I love going on these trips with our youth, with our students, with my own children, because it’s this beautiful microcosm of what the church should look like. I would even dare to say it was a little bit of a glimpse of heaven here on earth as we started singing together. As I was standing, I was standing up on the balcony because I’m trying to make sure all of our students are in the right place, because herding junior hires is like herding cats.
And just after I made sure everybody’s in the right spot and you’re just never enough adults right when you’re dealing with junior highs, but everybody’s in the right spot and worship begins and you have a thousand junior high kids just praising Jesus together and their differences, their disunity, their dysfunction. All of that goes out the window. It’s a beautiful glimpse of what the church should look like. We’re going to explore today how God designed us to live in community through shared experiences. We’ll see how the early church lived out this connection, this form of community in the book of acts.
And we’re going to learn how we can apply those principles to our lives today. So let’s dive in. Let’s discover what the Bible has to say, has to teach us about community and how we can connect and put these principles into practice together in our own lives. Because you were made for community. We start by asking why?
Why do we need community? And what’s the foundation of our community that makes real connection between God and between us and each other as followers of Jesus makes it real and biblical. Did you know that community and connection has its foundation in God himself? That’s because God exists in eternal community. When we look into the Bible, God’s word teaches us everything that we need to know in order to have a relationship with God.
And we first see that God exists in eternal community in Genesis. From the very beginning, in the book of Genesis, we read in chapter one, verse one of the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep.
And the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Now, you may read that and be like, what does that have to do with community? From the very first two verses of the Bible, God is presented in a way that he is shown as two persons. The Bible begins by telling the story of God creating the world, including humanity. But before we get through the first paragraph, we see something interesting, that the God of the Bible is presented immediately in verse one as God who is creating, and in verse two, as God, the spirit, spirit of God.
And so from the start, we understand that God is more than we see. And then a few verses, just one verse later, if we move on to verse three, we read the words, and God said, now, you don’t need a theology degree to understand that God spoke creation into existence. And so he reveals himself in the first three words of the three sentences of the Bible, three verses of the Bible, as creator God, as the spirit of God, and as word, the word of God speaking. John clarifies this in his gospel. In John chapter one, verse one we read in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.
He was with God in the beginning. Through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. John goes on to make a compelling case throughout his gospel for the divinity of Jesus Christ, who he identifies in these first verses as the word. And the word is God, but the word is also with God.
There’s more than it seems. And so the reality is that God has been presented since around the second century, since in the early church. The word that we use to understand this three in one nature of God is trinity. God in reality is triune. And even though that word never appears in the scriptures, that’s the word that was used to first describe the three in one nature of God from the very beginning, almost.
So God exists in community. He’s one God in three persons, and he always has been. But how can God be three in one?
What do we mean by one God in three persons? That can be confusing. Can it? You could literally try your whole life to wrap your mind around the complexities of the Trinity, right? You don’t have to be a new Christian for this to be confusing.
And so we could try and try and try and never fully understand this, but there are things that we can wrap our minds around that will help clear up some of that confusion. Probably the simplest way that I found to explain the existence of the Trinity is something called the Trinity shield. And it looks like this, now, this doesn’t go in depth into all of the nature of God. This isn’t some sort of diagram of how God works, is just an explanation of the three persons and the threeness of God and the oneness of God, so to speak, that God is father, son and spirit, and they are not all the same as each other, but they are united in purpose and in will. And the central theme that we need to understand with the Trinity is unity, that God is Father, Son, and spirit, and all three are united in that purpose, that will, that goodness, that greatness.
Simply, we don’t have time to go any deeper than this right now into every facet of the Trinity. That’s a whole other series in and of itself. But to summarize the relationship between the three persons, we could look at it this way. That the Father is God, but the Father is not the Son, and the Father is not the Holy Spirit. The Son, Jesus Christ, is God, but the Son is not the Father, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is God, but the Holy Spirit is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is not the Son.
Maybe clarifying more, we could read the words of Jesus in John 14. When Jesus was about to be arrested and tried and crucified on the cross for our sins, he said this to his disciples, anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own.
They belong to the Father who sent me. All this I’ve spoken while still with you. But the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I’ve said to you. So from our understanding of God’s eternal existence in the community of the Trinity, we can then move on to a proper understanding of our own community as the people of God. We also learn from scriptures, from the scriptures, that God made us to live together in community with him.
Now, there’s two concepts we need to unpack there, that God made us individually to live with him in community. God made us to live in community with him and have a relationship that is a redeeming relationship between us and God through Jesus Christ, through the cross. And so you personally must have a relationship with Jesus, but that’s not where it stops. Our relationship with God is then carried into our relationships with one another and vice versa. And you really can’t separate the two biblically speaking, we can’t separate the idea of loving God from the idea of loving others.
Our relationship with God is played out in our relationship with others and vice versa. That’s because people are made in the image of Goddesse. And so, looking back again in Genesis chapter one, we see this from the beginning, that God said, let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God, he created them.
Male and female, he created them. Now, we’ve talked before about how God created us in his image. In fact, earlier this year, we did a whole series called identity redeemed. And you can watch that. You can study through that on our website.
If you go to our website under the tab sermons, there’s a place where you can study through that series and unpack some of these ideas of our identity being found in the image of God. And so I won’t unpack all those things here today, but that’s a great place for you to study those ideas. What we see, though, is that the image of God is the context in which we find our identity individually, and how through a redeemed identity, through Christ, we can have redeemed relationships with one another. Once we seek that identity in Christ, that identity then plays out as we begin to see the image of God in others. And so what we need to remember is what we said in part one of that series, that our identity matters because it answers the question, the two foundational questions of who am I?
And why am I here? And those are things that we’re unpacking in this series called maid of why am I here? God creates us in his image and in his likeness, and everyone who has ever existed is created in the image of God, in the likeness of God, and they always will be. The image of God isn’t just a quality within human beings. It’s who we are.
It’s something we do as human beings. It’s a verb. We’re created as the image bearers of goddess, and that means that we’re his representatives here on earth. So God created us in his image to live in relationship, in connection and community with him, just as he lives in eternal community in the Trinity. And so, because God exists eternally in community, and because we are created in his image, it also logically follows that he created all of humanity to be in community as well to live with one another in connection.
In fact, the creation account goes on to tell us that in Genesis one and two, the first thing that God calls not good is man being alone. That should teach us something. In fact, it says that in Genesis 218, the Lord God said, God says it is not good for the man to be alone. God says, I will make a suitable helper for him. So what did God do?
He first brings all the animals to Adam. We’re told Adam names them and gives them a purpose, and God has given him authority over them. But still God observes that the man needs a companion. And God wasn’t satisfied until the creation of Eve. From Adam’s side, two theologians, Gordon, Wenham and far before that, Matthew Henry, in their commentaries highlight that biblical marriage is a God centered community.
It’s a place where the husband and the wife complement each other. They reflect unity, they support one another mutually. Biblical marriage is the first human community which God ordained. Now that’s not to say that everyone should be married, but we could say that we were made for it. Just to be clear, that doesn’t mean that you must be married or that you should just hurry up and get married.
That’s not the point here. God doesn’t call everyone to a lifetime of marriage. In fact, he calls some people to a lifetime of celibacy. And there are plenty of biblical examples of that. But either way, Paul says, the apostle Paul says to the Corinthian Church, either way, whether you marry or not, that’s not the point.
The point is that in a Christ centered marriage, we have an example, a glimpse of what godly community should be. He summarizes this in ephesians five. He says, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. And then Paul begins to unpack this submission, this love, within every step, every level of the household in the roman world. He goes to unpack what that submission and that love looks like.
And he starts with marriage. He says, wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body of which he is the savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church, for we are members of his body. Paul goes on to say that the husband wife relationship in a biblical marriage is a mirror for the Christ church relationship. It helps us understand what our community should look like.
And there’s two words that should frame that community for us as christians. And they are submission and love. We submit to one another and we love one another. And even though in the creation account we go on to see that Adam and Eve sinned and they were broken in their relationship, the fall brought that brokenness. But today, despite all of our attempts, we also experience that brokenness, don’t we?
But we can also experience the redemption of Christ. As we said earlier, we don’t have to struggle through this disconnection. We don’t have to wonder what new piece of technology or social media might lead us to get away from this isolation. And yet it still persists. God has a plan to redeem this brokenness in our relationships through the cross, and his plan is to do that through his church.
Part of the redemptive story of Jesus is the initiation of the church. So what does that mean for us in the church today as we come to looking at our community together? Well, it means that the church is the redeemed community God made to reconnect people with himself. The church is called the body of Christ because we are supposed to live out the will of Jesus. We’re called the body of Christ because as we live our lives, we’re to act as his hands and feet in the world.
We don’t just come up with our own will. We don’t just make up our own minds about what we’re going to do. We submit to the will of God that we see in Jesus, that we come to understand through the scriptures, through the Holy Spirit, as the advocate teaches us all things that Jesus taught and reminds us of everything that he said to us. We’re the children of God. And so we proclaim that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God.
We live for Jesus, and we live with Jesus our hearts as we go about living for Christ. We make disciples of Jesus. We’re commissioned to do that under the authority of Jesus, who has all authority in heaven and on earth. Jesus commands us to do this in the great commission. He said to his disciples before he ascended, he said, therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.
Baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. But then he gives us a promise. He says, surely I am with you always. To the very end of the age, when Jesus gave that commandment, that commission to his disciples, he had already gone to the cross. He had already given his life to set us free from sin, to set us free from the sting of death.
He’d already been risen from the grave to overcome death itself. And Jesus would ascend to heaven and he would send his people, he would send his church to accomplish the goal of his ministry. Jesus accomplished everything that the Father had sent him to do here on earth. And then he sends us with the Holy Spirit, his power and his presence within us, dwelling within us to accomplish the rest of the mission. The manner in which God calls disciples to Christ to do his will is to make more disciples of Jesus, to invite them into the family of God, bring them into the fold of the good shepherd, so that they can also experience freedom from sin and reconciliation with their relationship with God and with others.
And that’s exactly what they did. In the book of acts, we see this played out right before us, before our very eyes. We get this front row seat, beginning with Pentecost, to see the church in action. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles as like tongues of fire, and they spoke the gospel. They preached God’s word, and the spirit fell upon them.
And Peter started to preach the gospel boldly. The people of Jerusalem were cut to the heart, and they repented. They turned away from their sin, and they were called to be baptized in the name of Jesus. From there, that spirit led transformation in the lives of those new believers, led to spirit led growth in the church. And as we see this growth play out in the book of acts, we see that the church was built as a transformative community that constantly welcomed more and more believers into the fold, more and more people into the family of God.
And as they did so, they were unified in their movement between persons experiencing a common life. Remember, that’s the definition of community that we read earlier. And we read about this in the book of acts. In acts two, verse 42, it says, they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread into prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles.
All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day, they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And Luke concludes with this, and the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Luke describes for us the early church as a loving and caring and supportive community, teaching the words in life of Jesus voluntarily giving to those in need. Da Carson puts it this way that the early church viewed itself as a family, and healthy families take care of their own. And so in both real life examples of community, God’s view, his standard for marriage biblically, and in his initiation of the church, we have examples of how we should live our lives, of the attitude that’s central to transformative and redemption, redemptive community and connection. It’s the humility of Jesus. It’s submission and love.
As we are brought closer to Jesus ourselves by those who are closer to Jesus than we are, as we’re taught to follow him, to know him, to love him, we experience a difference in our lives that only love can make. The result then, is that we begin to put others over ourselves in practical ways every single day. We love as Christ loved. We serve as Christ served. We encourage as Christ encouraged.
We encourage others by drawing them closer to Jesus through the wisdom of God’s word. Because Jesus always spoke the word of God to those who are far from God. And it’s clear that we’re given these examples to live out for ourselves today in the church. So how do we do that? Well, first of all, we need to connect with people who connect us to Jesus.
And if you’re going to take anything away from today’s message, it should be that if you need to know anything today, it’s do this. Connect with people who connect you with Jesus. And we can do that in the church. We can connect with others in this way by building meaningful and fulfilling relationships within the church. It starts by connecting with those who connect us to the gospel in which we find through Christ.
Through the cross, we find forgiveness for our sins. It starts with a redeemed relationship with God so that our relationship is no longer we’re no longer separated from God, but we’re in community with him. As Paul says to Timothy in two Timothy two flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Second thing we need to do is join with those who call on the name of Jesus to be saved and find accountability, encouragement, support to follow Jesus in every area of our life. If you when you came in, if you grabbed one of our sermon handouts today, I put a list of ways, practical ways that you can do that.
If you want to grab a copy of these, they’re by the doors on the way out. But at the bottom of the first page, there’s just some practical applications and practical next steps that you can take. First of all, engage in discipleship in person with small group, with a small group, or online. What if we redeemed these relationships? What if we turned them into submitted and loving communities both online and in person?
What if we saw a transformation take place in the way that we communicate with one another? We could participate in events here at Central where we serve and engage in fellowship. There’s plenty of things that you can sign up to do in the months to come. Lifeline meal packing and global leadership summit rooted and first step coming up next week. We could share in meals together.
We could study God’s word together. You could find a mentor. You could be a mentor. Use your skills to serve in a ministry either inside or outside the walls of the church. We could pursue growth in our faith personally and encourage others to do the same.
And we could share our wins and our struggles with each other as we do life together. We can prioritize worship and fellowship with our brothers and sisters in Christ. And we can practice generosity of our time and talents and treasures both together and individually. And finally, we can invite others who aren’t a part of the family of God to become a part of the family of God, just simply inviting them to be here with us.
When we find community, with people who connect us to Jesus, we find a way to fulfill our purpose. We’re obeying God’s command to continue to meet together. We’re encouraging one another as we make disciples and teach them to follow Jesus. We avoid the isolation that the enemy of God will readily use to tear us apart. Authentic Christ centered community leads to a deeper relationship with Goddesse, with one another.
And you need community. You were made for it. Community is at the heart of God’s design for us. We were made to live in relationship with him and with each other. And that reflects the unity that we see and the love that we see within the trinity, within God himself.
Early church modeled this beautifully for us, and we’re called to do the same today. So I want to invite you. I want to challenge you. What would that look like? Imagine a church where everyone is connected, where everyone is being transformed by a redeemed community, where everyone’s growing in their faith.
That’s not just a dream. That’s something that we can build together. It’s a reality we can create. So take a step today. Take a first step today.
Like I said, the best ways that I think you can do that is to sign up for rooted, get connected with a small group, sign up for first step next Sunday after our 11:00 that’ll help you learn more about the church and get connected with what we’re doing here at Central. If you’re already in a small group, find someone that’s not and invite them in. Take a next step. These are all things that we can do to grow in this redeemed community because you were made for this. So let’s get to it.